Let us stop the bloodletting of the Goblins. I don't think Dwarves are gone forever. Perhaps someday we'll have a Dwavern Ringleader to go with Dwarven Rectuirer, but right now that is the only dwarf that truly needs to see print IMO. Here are some reasons why Dwarves are not as common as they used to be:
1. We've haven't been to much of a Dwarf-World since Odyssey-Onslaught (Otaria). Afterwards, Magic went to Far-East Land, metal world, the big city, a post-Apocalypse chaos Dominaria, Baby Looney Tunes world, Scary Baby Looney Tunes world, the Three-Color-Cartel dominated world(s), holy **** the sky is falling world, back to metal world, horror trope world based on themes from a millennium later, back to the big city, and now to Mediterranean themed world based a millennium prior. We are lucky to have ANY Dwarfs at all.
2. Magic has greater creative control over Goblins. It's been said that you can put Goblins anywhere, but not only that, Magic: the Gathering does Goblins better than just about any fantasy-themed product. Goblins are a third-wing to Dwarves and Orcs in Warcraft and Lord of the Rings, while they are the primary focus of Magic. Where else are Goblins as fully developed as in Magic, Labyrinth? Yu Gi Oh has Goblins, but that game sucks, Magic NEEDS to own their Goblins, so Goblins are a Magic-Thing(R).
3. The word 'dwarf' can be offensive to 'dwarfism'. The word Dwarf has been used throughout history to imply that people bellow a certain height are of a different species entirely from humans. The P.C. Police are working overtime in Magic, which is why we have statues in a same-sex relationship and why I have to play a human girl in my Goblin deck. I doubt that is the primary reason why Dwarves are not as common as they used to be, but I'm sure somewhere along the line, the people of R&D had the discussion.
4. Dwarves hate non-basic lands...but they love them. Dwarves would have to develop and entirely new identity going forward, as a majority of them function more like Goblins destroying their Dwarvern creations.
Should I be afraid of pressing them down? I have some cards I really wouldn't want to ruin
Your cards will be OK. The air tend to come back after you squeeze it out the first time. It gradually comes back less and less until it finally stabilizes.
As for the slipping, once the air bump is gone, it will get much better. Still, as with most sleeves, they will be inconveniently slippery until you filthy them up with your sticky, greasy hands and scratch the glossy window of the sleeves. Clean, pristine sleeves tend not to work very well.
I'd recommend wiping them down with a microfiber cloth before putting them in the perfect fits; you don't want to trap any oils in there with the card. Clearly this should be done carefully, but Magic cards can typically handle slight bending and pressure.
Above all else, my favorite archetype is Goblins, so in turn I have a logically disorganized order of preference.
1. Control - I'm guilty of enjoying the long game. I really enjoyed playing Psychatog casually and a bunch of draw spells and counters (perhaps my casual exploits are blame for the dumbing down of U). I got a kick out of playing Capsize on Nevinyrral's Disk. There's no mirror better than a control mirror.
2. Aggro - You'd think I'd prefer this, but I've always considered pure aggro to feature a linear gameplan with a limited decision tree. There are times when a limited decision tree is what I wanted though: sometimes I'd rather play Goblins RDW-style rather than Vial Goblins, as I don't have to think as much to play the deck. It's just Goblins-smash rather than Goblin-attrition-war (controlish)...but deep down the complexity of the Goblin-attrition-war keeps me thinking about Magic longer than I should, really.
3. Combo - I like playing combo, but I've found that most people don't like Goblin Recruiter as much as I do. I don't like playing against combo all that much...the game devolves into something less-complex than it usually is and becomes more like Poker. That's fine for people who think they are too cool for Magic but not something edgy like mob-associated Poker, but it seems that a majority of people who care about the 'flavor' and 'magic' of Magic couldn't care less about combo decks, which is why Wizards nerfs combo in new-player formats. For me, Aggro v Aggro, Control v Aggro, and Control v Control each offer more interesting match-ups than anything involving a combo deck.
I think his feeling on the matter are acceptable. He was stating what his level of demand was, but his figures are off and he value's uncommons incorrectly.
Historically, if the uncommon is marginally casually appealing, it should be worth 25-50 cents.
If the card is playable in standard it should be worth $1 to $3 if it is heavily played.
Then you have the King's-tier of Modern bordered uncommons that are playable in non-rotating formats that go for ~$10, followed by the God-tier of Legacy uncommons where the sky is the limit.
All of that is relevant to the value of any uncommon, so he probably just didn't understand the value and rarity of uncommons.
Trading used to be ALL ABOUT putting your own value on cards, unless someone had a up-to-date copy Scry nearby thus the news about what cards were 'good' or 'bad' traveled much more slowly. What you experienced was more of a blast to the past than a modern trend, since nowadays everyone either trades via smartphone, just doesn't care, or is extremely up to date on card prices/trends to begin with.
I hate trading. I never liked trading for cards that my friends could use so their collections would be good too and they would be able to build decks that were worthy adversaries for the great and powerful Goblins. I would just trade crap like Stifle, Path to Exile and Bridge from Bellow and other non-Goblin junk for more Goblins. If I were to trade, I'd rather trade with a total shark who just uses his collection as a bartering chip than someone whom I could possibly deplete his resources for a another deck at a later time. Or just buy it with money.
It mostly has to do with powercreep, but also with changing tendencies of tournament goers (improvement of the playerbase, centralization of tournaments), as well as a greater saturation of 'goodstuff' decs based around individually powerful cards rather than synergy.
Merfolk has had a hard time adjusting to Stoneforge Mystic decks and decks with abundant creature removal and it hasn't gotten much better for them since. They need a combo heavy meta to be tier one, and the weakening of many combo decks by new cards like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and grave hate compounded with the high power of Show and Tell combo decks have decreased Merfolk's good matchups significantly. It's not that it is bad, like the others, but it just isn't played as much by people who want to win every tournament they enter.
Legacy Goodstuff Inc. received a tremendous gift of power creep in the form of Deathrite Shaman, also benefiting Elves who got Craterhoof Behemoth shortly afterwards, enabling an entirely creature based single-turn kill at the end of the combo. The deck also solidified the Natural Order backup plan and x4 Gaea's Cradle as core components. Honestly, all it took was for LSV to play an Elves deck after Deathrite Shaman came out and people realized it was tier 1.
Goblins has actually received powercreep in the form of Cavern of Souls in the nick of time because it was about to be rendered extinct by the arrival of Goodstuff Delver of Secrets as well as Terminus. Legacy has gotten more powerful and Goblins are not tier one, but I believe the deck has multiple major tournament wins in the US in the past year and top 8's every once and a while. The deck isn't played very much, likely owing to it's casual appeal rather than something fit for a GP grinder since you have to luck-sack your way through a majority of match-ups, but it has a reasonably defensible game-plan and can and will win on a good day.
D&T got a lot better with Thalia and the general fanboyism of it's players. D&T has really become the 'people's champion' in the format, whereas decks like Goblins are detestable villains.
Zoo turned into Maverick which then couldn't handle Terminus. Zoo had to turn into Maverick, because Batterskull wrecked it. Maverick still exists, but being a Goodstuff deck itself, is having an identity crisis with the arrival of Deathrite Shaman...how much of a BG deck can it become without ceasing to be Maverick? Nonetheless, Wizards has just given a giant middle finger to Wild Nacatl in all formats, and that's really sad, because Zoo was an incredibly popular deck (Maybe too popular and that's why it was killed and replaced with Delvers).
It's important to remember that Wizards R&D spends a reasonable amount of time studying the psychology of their players...just as they will not print more gold bordered cards in the fear that people accept the use of proxys en mass, they don't seem to want to reprint the good stuff in Legacy for a variety of reasons.
1. They wish to protect the collectable status of the game, something which just about every single reproducible collectable has failed to achieve (unless you happen to have the Princess Dianna Beanie Baby. that one is the Black Lotus of Ty's Bean Bags). Whether people like to admit it or not, Magic is a collectable as well as a 100% pure skill, 50% OMG crap mulligan in my 19 land deck game.
2. They want to please the Legacy playerbase, but they do not want to to grow as large as it wants to. Legacy players are spoiled brats. The nature of the format breaks so many rules that piss off player but make Magic profitable. Cards never rotate, archetypes are not often killed off but more often revived, and the format is remarkably balanced and far more appealing to someone over the age of 20 who can deal with a turn 1 loss, a crap mulligan, and pay for a $2,000 deck. Its not very scary for someone that age to pay for such an expensive deck because they know that it will not likely decrease in value, thanks to the reserved list. So the game is enhanced as a collectable while pleasing a generation of Magic players, many of whom fled from the game in the early part of this century, but came back thanks to the nostalgia and novelty of Legacy.
3. It's hard enough to make FNM a real social 'thing'. They are afraid of doing things that might make fewer people play standard. I'm not saying that standard is bad and people who play Legacy can't possibly enjoy standard, it's just that in order for wizards to thrive as a business in a period of time where half the world owes the other half money so everyone's broke, they have to do what they do in the most profitable way possible. It might seem cruel to do this to the unfortunate young souls who have to grow up in this brave new world to buy $300-$4,000 decks, but if they don't they will likely cease to operate.
4. As long as Legacy is limited, Legacy players are forced to contribute to the playerbase in other ways, or else they'll have very few opportunities to play and even fewer Magic friends. I've drafted at my brand-new baby LGS more than I've played Legacy in the past year. I was being a good little foot-soldier 'sycophant' (thanks Aslan^) Magic player and other Legacy players should do the same. Wizards current policies encourage this.
Trading cards are approaching a point of being obsolete technology. Maro himself has suggesting on his blog that the future of Magic involves 3D holograms with no physical cards...While paper is cheap, like most big companies they have a bunch of rich guys on top siphoning off a ton of profits so they can afford to achieve Human-AI singularity in 2029 then wait for 90% of the population to succumb to war/natural disasters/climate change and live in harmony without 'mediocre people', SO, Wizards and the Magic Economy must work together to eek as many dollars out of the playerbase as they can.
I'm glad that Legacy has been made into an amazing format and to this point they have catered to my desires. I'm OK with paper Legacy being what it is, because it is an experience about the past, about our Magic lives.
As long as Magic survives in the long haul, SCG can still afford to run Legacy opens, the few LGS with thriving Legacy scenes will STILL have 'thriving' Legacy scenes, and Wizards won't have to fall on their own sword in order to cater to a people who encourage new players not to buy packs to buy singles and not to draft because its mean and unfair to noobs. I'm just hoping that Legacy survives, and grateful that what we have is as high-quality as it is.
If all else fails, in a few years Legacy will probably be played by hundreds of thousands online, perhaps even millions if the game grows in this way in the developing world. The people who demand more Legacy because it is the most fun, highest skilled format will have such a mental exercise available to them online. The people who enjoy Legacy for nostalgia reasons have to hope to maintain and possibly repair relationships with past Legacy buddies in order to whoop them at Magic cards, which is a far more noble cause than playing the game itself.
Okay, you are correct. Towards the end old extended was pretty fast. Hence the bannings towad the end of the format. I had forgotten about turn 1 hypergen decks and turn 2 dredge decks, turn 2 DDT decks.
Chiming in rather pointlessly just to say that you've forgotten about the Tinker/Belcher/Food Chain Goblins/Oath of Druids era in old Extended, or perhaps old-old Extended. That era was more broken than Legacy is now because of the saturation of combo decks.
It took a metric ton of bans to correct that format and it was still broken. The slowest the format has ever been was when Ravager Affinity was a top deck, and once stuff like Shatterstorm and H. Recall entered the format, so did the latter run of degenerate decks.
Although Wizards has successfully brought combo to an interactive level for three mana answers and the like, I think Modern is in a really tough position where it's power level is just too high to be influenced by enough new cards as to be a fresh 'modern' format. Modern should be closer to standard in power level than it is Legacy, for the sake of the poor new players, but it seems as though a vast majority of current Modern players want a more powerful Modern.
Unless Wizards continues reprinting more and more of the valuable cards in Modern, the format will stagnate and become a format like legacy where you really need 'legacy buddies' to keep playing for a long time. The fact that Modern is desperate for reprints and unbans and not hungry for new printings is problematic in my opinion.
It would take an $800 ban for me to appreciate Modern...of course I would only 'suffer' ~$100. I can understand how few people would appreciate the brilliance of a Modern format truly detached from the degeneracy provided by fetchland synergy, so one drops produce mana while hosing archetypes and two drops may be killed by bolt, and so other lands can have a chance to be good outside of standard.
As is, the format comes of as Legacy missing a number of important metagame cards rather than Standard bolstered by years of older, not degenerate cards.
Ultimately I assume Wizards will just have to give the people what they want and reprint fetchlands, but I feel at that point Standard will take a huge hit once more people spend money on Legacy cards to play in Modern and make fun of the next cycle of duals like they did the Temples.
That's pretty interesting. I never though of why there are so few plainswalkers, I just assumed it was a random slice taken out of the color pie on principal.
There's some guy in Legends who Plainswalks. I'm sure you're aware of Graceful Antelope. It has the advantage of gracefully prancing through the fields unnoticed to knaw on an actual Planeswalker and conquer their fields...it really should be 'haul-ass antelope' though, since people hunt those things.
For the most part I think white has the best fortifications, being the most orderly, defensive color, they are seldom unable to defend themselves for whatever reason. Of course, any universal landwalk enabler can superior tech against their D.
Aside, I think the game is sorely missing a pushed Landwalk creature where you have to choose a type when it CITP. It plays interestingly around decks with both dual lands and and regular non-basics.
That said, I think the overall count of rares was still much lower than it is today (remember Madness/Threshold decks?).
I don't think this is very accurate. If my memory serves me correctly, None of those cards touched $30 and probably only a couple reached the mid twenties in their peak (Akroma, Nantuko Shade).
Goblin Piledriver in particular has been a $15-$20 for years and years after the printing of uncommonGoblin Warcheif. It was never much more than $20 during it's Standard/Extended lifetime and didn't really reach $25 until well after the initial Legacy price explosion. I've been keeping track of this card in particular, but there is a massive black hole of my attention from Fifth Dawn to Shadowmoor, so I may be wrong. I would have been super stoked to have a $120 playset at the time, but it wasn't, it was $80.
Point being, very few non-Alpha -> Antiquities RARES ever surpassed the $30 mark until Tarmogoyf, while the era of Mythics have made $30 standard-legal cards commonplace.
Swords is better against little things early, while Path is good against big things late.
Swords us much better most of the time because Path is card disadvantage. Many a times I enjoyed being handed a Mox in exchange for a goblin, while the lifegain from Swords doesn't do much for me. Against a Reanimator deck on the other hand, gaining 7-8 life means one can play another Reanimate without killing themselves, or activate Griselbrand once again.
The biggest disadvantage of Path in the greater Magic meta is that Emrakul, the Aeons Torn has protection from it. Ideally, Path would be the proper answer for the biggest, baddest creature in the game, but it isn't (isn't so great against Griselbrand either).
This might be obvious to some, but ZEN fetchlands are too big to ban in Modern. I would be more interested in Modern if there the fetchlands were banned, they are the best cards in the format and arguably better than ABUR duals and severely limit the design space and thought processes of manabases in Modern, but I digress....
People are allowed to take their degenerate manabases for granted since they spent so much money on them. DRS, Brainstorm, Jace, Tarmogoyf, etc, etc, would be NOTHING without cracking a fetch to achieve their greatest potential.
I've made some silly posts in the limited forum in my time. I tend to do pretty darn well at limited, but I understand that I do get lucky and I've never played a tournament with more than four official rounds. Nonetheless, while my random strategic ramblings (such as play Jund control every time in DGR draft) might not mean much to someone who is grinding day and night on MTGO or flying from Europe to the US to win major tournaments, I think it serves a purpose for people who are looking for different playstyles in a format where people tend to focus on a unified set of correct strategies.
In my first posts to the forum, I was ignorant to the nature of the community. It seemed like a forum that lacked activity. People would go there to brag, but rarely would anyone share any information of substance, as if they are withholding some next-level info to protect their chances of winning.
Personally, I have no hard feelings. For my purposes, my ideas about limited are good enough for me, but I've definitely learned that there is quality strategy information in the forum if you stick around and read a lot of different threads.
edit - Did that come of as harsh? Sorry. That was my perception of things. Death & Taxes alone seemed to get more activity than the limited forums, but I never saw anything substantial in the limited forums behind all the 'group drafts', which I always find difficult to read.
Y'all have a nice day, and you have my word that I won't pursue my reign of fervor on this forum with my novice advice.
I've been to several different locations for FNM drafts and other tournaments spaced out long enough that I'm pretty much always an outsider whether I'm returning or not. I've never ever had a problem with any person in particular in a draft...sometimes I feel frustrated because it is very difficult for me to connect with other people personally, but that's my problem.
Hopefully, the worst you have to worry about is people like me who say controversial things about magic cards and are know-it-all-ish about the game, but treat you respectfully as a human being. I tend to keep my attitude inside the lines, but for some reason I have a hard time being a perfect person when I go to a tournament to compete. When I go to magic tournaments, I unintentionally role-play as the tragic anti-hero character I've created for myself in the game (crazy, I know). Don't be set off by people who are competitive; that is the fun part for many players of the game.
In Bludgeon Brawl's case, it's more of a top-down design. I think they started with the concept of a card where creatures can pick up random artifacts and clobber with them, and it was complicated as a result of the flavor. It seems the most complicated effects are so in order to capture a specific flavorful effect which is what the card is supposed to do. Ex Opalescence or Humility are designed to do create a specific flavor, not to confuse judges.
1. We've haven't been to much of a Dwarf-World since Odyssey-Onslaught (Otaria). Afterwards, Magic went to Far-East Land, metal world, the big city, a post-Apocalypse chaos Dominaria, Baby Looney Tunes world, Scary Baby Looney Tunes world, the Three-Color-Cartel dominated world(s), holy **** the sky is falling world, back to metal world, horror trope world based on themes from a millennium later, back to the big city, and now to Mediterranean themed world based a millennium prior. We are lucky to have ANY Dwarfs at all.
2. Magic has greater creative control over Goblins. It's been said that you can put Goblins anywhere, but not only that, Magic: the Gathering does Goblins better than just about any fantasy-themed product. Goblins are a third-wing to Dwarves and Orcs in Warcraft and Lord of the Rings, while they are the primary focus of Magic. Where else are Goblins as fully developed as in Magic, Labyrinth? Yu Gi Oh has Goblins, but that game sucks, Magic NEEDS to own their Goblins, so Goblins are a Magic-Thing(R).
3. The word 'dwarf' can be offensive to 'dwarfism'. The word Dwarf has been used throughout history to imply that people bellow a certain height are of a different species entirely from humans. The P.C. Police are working overtime in Magic, which is why we have statues in a same-sex relationship and why I have to play a human girl in my Goblin deck. I doubt that is the primary reason why Dwarves are not as common as they used to be, but I'm sure somewhere along the line, the people of R&D had the discussion.
4. Dwarves hate non-basic lands...but they love them. Dwarves would have to develop and entirely new identity going forward, as a majority of them function more like Goblins destroying their Dwarvern creations.
Your cards will be OK. The air tend to come back after you squeeze it out the first time. It gradually comes back less and less until it finally stabilizes.
As for the slipping, once the air bump is gone, it will get much better. Still, as with most sleeves, they will be inconveniently slippery until you filthy them up with your sticky, greasy hands and scratch the glossy window of the sleeves. Clean, pristine sleeves tend not to work very well.
I'd recommend wiping them down with a microfiber cloth before putting them in the perfect fits; you don't want to trap any oils in there with the card. Clearly this should be done carefully, but Magic cards can typically handle slight bending and pressure.
1. Control - I'm guilty of enjoying the long game. I really enjoyed playing Psychatog casually and a bunch of draw spells and counters (perhaps my casual exploits are blame for the dumbing down of U). I got a kick out of playing Capsize on Nevinyrral's Disk. There's no mirror better than a control mirror.
2. Aggro - You'd think I'd prefer this, but I've always considered pure aggro to feature a linear gameplan with a limited decision tree. There are times when a limited decision tree is what I wanted though: sometimes I'd rather play Goblins RDW-style rather than Vial Goblins, as I don't have to think as much to play the deck. It's just Goblins-smash rather than Goblin-attrition-war (controlish)...but deep down the complexity of the Goblin-attrition-war keeps me thinking about Magic longer than I should, really.
3. Combo - I like playing combo, but I've found that most people don't like Goblin Recruiter as much as I do. I don't like playing against combo all that much...the game devolves into something less-complex than it usually is and becomes more like Poker. That's fine for people who think they are too cool for Magic but not something edgy like mob-associated Poker, but it seems that a majority of people who care about the 'flavor' and 'magic' of Magic couldn't care less about combo decks, which is why Wizards nerfs combo in new-player formats. For me, Aggro v Aggro, Control v Aggro, and Control v Control each offer more interesting match-ups than anything involving a combo deck.
Historically, if the uncommon is marginally casually appealing, it should be worth 25-50 cents.
If the card is playable in standard it should be worth $1 to $3 if it is heavily played.
Then you have the King's-tier of Modern bordered uncommons that are playable in non-rotating formats that go for ~$10, followed by the God-tier of Legacy uncommons where the sky is the limit.
All of that is relevant to the value of any uncommon, so he probably just didn't understand the value and rarity of uncommons.
Trading used to be ALL ABOUT putting your own value on cards, unless someone had a up-to-date copy Scry nearby thus the news about what cards were 'good' or 'bad' traveled much more slowly. What you experienced was more of a blast to the past than a modern trend, since nowadays everyone either trades via smartphone, just doesn't care, or is extremely up to date on card prices/trends to begin with.
I hate trading. I never liked trading for cards that my friends could use so their collections would be good too and they would be able to build decks that were worthy adversaries for the great and powerful Goblins. I would just trade crap like Stifle, Path to Exile and Bridge from Bellow and other non-Goblin junk for more Goblins. If I were to trade, I'd rather trade with a total shark who just uses his collection as a bartering chip than someone whom I could possibly deplete his resources for a another deck at a later time. Or just buy it with money.
Merfolk has had a hard time adjusting to Stoneforge Mystic decks and decks with abundant creature removal and it hasn't gotten much better for them since. They need a combo heavy meta to be tier one, and the weakening of many combo decks by new cards like Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and grave hate compounded with the high power of Show and Tell combo decks have decreased Merfolk's good matchups significantly. It's not that it is bad, like the others, but it just isn't played as much by people who want to win every tournament they enter.
Legacy Goodstuff Inc. received a tremendous gift of power creep in the form of Deathrite Shaman, also benefiting Elves who got Craterhoof Behemoth shortly afterwards, enabling an entirely creature based single-turn kill at the end of the combo. The deck also solidified the Natural Order backup plan and x4 Gaea's Cradle as core components. Honestly, all it took was for LSV to play an Elves deck after Deathrite Shaman came out and people realized it was tier 1.
Goblins has actually received powercreep in the form of Cavern of Souls in the nick of time because it was about to be rendered extinct by the arrival of Goodstuff Delver of Secrets as well as Terminus. Legacy has gotten more powerful and Goblins are not tier one, but I believe the deck has multiple major tournament wins in the US in the past year and top 8's every once and a while. The deck isn't played very much, likely owing to it's casual appeal rather than something fit for a GP grinder since you have to luck-sack your way through a majority of match-ups, but it has a reasonably defensible game-plan and can and will win on a good day.
D&T got a lot better with Thalia and the general fanboyism of it's players. D&T has really become the 'people's champion' in the format, whereas decks like Goblins are detestable villains.
Zoo turned into Maverick which then couldn't handle Terminus. Zoo had to turn into Maverick, because Batterskull wrecked it. Maverick still exists, but being a Goodstuff deck itself, is having an identity crisis with the arrival of Deathrite Shaman...how much of a BG deck can it become without ceasing to be Maverick? Nonetheless, Wizards has just given a giant middle finger to Wild Nacatl in all formats, and that's really sad, because Zoo was an incredibly popular deck (Maybe too popular and that's why it was killed and replaced with Delvers).
1. They wish to protect the collectable status of the game, something which just about every single reproducible collectable has failed to achieve (unless you happen to have the Princess Dianna Beanie Baby. that one is the Black Lotus of Ty's Bean Bags). Whether people like to admit it or not, Magic is a collectable as well as a 100% pure skill, 50% OMG crap mulligan in my 19 land deck game.
2. They want to please the Legacy playerbase, but they do not want to to grow as large as it wants to. Legacy players are spoiled brats. The nature of the format breaks so many rules that piss off player but make Magic profitable. Cards never rotate, archetypes are not often killed off but more often revived, and the format is remarkably balanced and far more appealing to someone over the age of 20 who can deal with a turn 1 loss, a crap mulligan, and pay for a $2,000 deck. Its not very scary for someone that age to pay for such an expensive deck because they know that it will not likely decrease in value, thanks to the reserved list. So the game is enhanced as a collectable while pleasing a generation of Magic players, many of whom fled from the game in the early part of this century, but came back thanks to the nostalgia and novelty of Legacy.
3. It's hard enough to make FNM a real social 'thing'. They are afraid of doing things that might make fewer people play standard. I'm not saying that standard is bad and people who play Legacy can't possibly enjoy standard, it's just that in order for wizards to thrive as a business in a period of time where half the world owes the other half money so everyone's broke, they have to do what they do in the most profitable way possible. It might seem cruel to do this to the unfortunate young souls who have to grow up in this brave new world to buy $300-$4,000 decks, but if they don't they will likely cease to operate.
4. As long as Legacy is limited, Legacy players are forced to contribute to the playerbase in other ways, or else they'll have very few opportunities to play and even fewer Magic friends. I've drafted at my brand-new baby LGS more than I've played Legacy in the past year. I was being a good little foot-soldier 'sycophant' (thanks Aslan^) Magic player and other Legacy players should do the same. Wizards current policies encourage this.
Trading cards are approaching a point of being obsolete technology. Maro himself has suggesting on his blog that the future of Magic involves 3D holograms with no physical cards...While paper is cheap, like most big companies they have a bunch of rich guys on top siphoning off a ton of profits so they can afford to achieve Human-AI singularity in 2029 then wait for 90% of the population to succumb to war/natural disasters/climate change and live in harmony without 'mediocre people', SO, Wizards and the Magic Economy must work together to eek as many dollars out of the playerbase as they can.
I'm glad that Legacy has been made into an amazing format and to this point they have catered to my desires. I'm OK with paper Legacy being what it is, because it is an experience about the past, about our Magic lives.
As long as Magic survives in the long haul, SCG can still afford to run Legacy opens, the few LGS with thriving Legacy scenes will STILL have 'thriving' Legacy scenes, and Wizards won't have to fall on their own sword in order to cater to a people who encourage new players not to buy packs to buy singles and not to draft because its mean and unfair to noobs. I'm just hoping that Legacy survives, and grateful that what we have is as high-quality as it is.
If all else fails, in a few years Legacy will probably be played by hundreds of thousands online, perhaps even millions if the game grows in this way in the developing world. The people who demand more Legacy because it is the most fun, highest skilled format will have such a mental exercise available to them online. The people who enjoy Legacy for nostalgia reasons have to hope to maintain and possibly repair relationships with past Legacy buddies in order to whoop them at Magic cards, which is a far more noble cause than playing the game itself.
That is all.
Chiming in rather pointlessly just to say that you've forgotten about the Tinker/Belcher/Food Chain Goblins/Oath of Druids era in old Extended, or perhaps old-old Extended. That era was more broken than Legacy is now because of the saturation of combo decks.
It took a metric ton of bans to correct that format and it was still broken. The slowest the format has ever been was when Ravager Affinity was a top deck, and once stuff like Shatterstorm and H. Recall entered the format, so did the latter run of degenerate decks.
Although Wizards has successfully brought combo to an interactive level for three mana answers and the like, I think Modern is in a really tough position where it's power level is just too high to be influenced by enough new cards as to be a fresh 'modern' format. Modern should be closer to standard in power level than it is Legacy, for the sake of the poor new players, but it seems as though a vast majority of current Modern players want a more powerful Modern.
Unless Wizards continues reprinting more and more of the valuable cards in Modern, the format will stagnate and become a format like legacy where you really need 'legacy buddies' to keep playing for a long time. The fact that Modern is desperate for reprints and unbans and not hungry for new printings is problematic in my opinion.
It would take an $800 ban for me to appreciate Modern...of course I would only 'suffer' ~$100. I can understand how few people would appreciate the brilliance of a Modern format truly detached from the degeneracy provided by fetchland synergy, so one drops produce mana while hosing archetypes and two drops may be killed by bolt, and so other lands can have a chance to be good outside of standard.
As is, the format comes of as Legacy missing a number of important metagame cards rather than Standard bolstered by years of older, not degenerate cards.
Ultimately I assume Wizards will just have to give the people what they want and reprint fetchlands, but I feel at that point Standard will take a huge hit once more people spend money on Legacy cards to play in Modern and make fun of the next cycle of duals like they did the Temples.
There's some guy in Legends who Plainswalks. I'm sure you're aware of Graceful Antelope. It has the advantage of gracefully prancing through the fields unnoticed to knaw on an actual Planeswalker and conquer their fields...it really should be 'haul-ass antelope' though, since people hunt those things.
For the most part I think white has the best fortifications, being the most orderly, defensive color, they are seldom unable to defend themselves for whatever reason. Of course, any universal landwalk enabler can superior tech against their D.
Aside, I think the game is sorely missing a pushed Landwalk creature where you have to choose a type when it CITP. It plays interestingly around decks with both dual lands and and regular non-basics.
I don't think this is very accurate. If my memory serves me correctly, None of those cards touched $30 and probably only a couple reached the mid twenties in their peak (Akroma, Nantuko Shade).
Goblin Piledriver in particular has been a $15-$20 for years and years after the printing of uncommon Goblin Warcheif. It was never much more than $20 during it's Standard/Extended lifetime and didn't really reach $25 until well after the initial Legacy price explosion. I've been keeping track of this card in particular, but there is a massive black hole of my attention from Fifth Dawn to Shadowmoor, so I may be wrong. I would have been super stoked to have a $120 playset at the time, but it wasn't, it was $80.
Point being, very few non-Alpha -> Antiquities RARES ever surpassed the $30 mark until Tarmogoyf, while the era of Mythics have made $30 standard-legal cards commonplace.
Swords us much better most of the time because Path is card disadvantage. Many a times I enjoyed being handed a Mox in exchange for a goblin, while the lifegain from Swords doesn't do much for me. Against a Reanimator deck on the other hand, gaining 7-8 life means one can play another Reanimate without killing themselves, or activate Griselbrand once again.
The biggest disadvantage of Path in the greater Magic meta is that Emrakul, the Aeons Torn has protection from it. Ideally, Path would be the proper answer for the biggest, baddest creature in the game, but it isn't (isn't so great against Griselbrand either).
People are allowed to take their degenerate manabases for granted since they spent so much money on them. DRS, Brainstorm, Jace, Tarmogoyf, etc, etc, would be NOTHING without cracking a fetch to achieve their greatest potential.
In my first posts to the forum, I was ignorant to the nature of the community. It seemed like a forum that lacked activity. People would go there to brag, but rarely would anyone share any information of substance, as if they are withholding some next-level info to protect their chances of winning.
Personally, I have no hard feelings. For my purposes, my ideas about limited are good enough for me, but I've definitely learned that there is quality strategy information in the forum if you stick around and read a lot of different threads.
edit - Did that come of as harsh? Sorry. That was my perception of things. Death & Taxes alone seemed to get more activity than the limited forums, but I never saw anything substantial in the limited forums behind all the 'group drafts', which I always find difficult to read.
Y'all have a nice day, and you have my word that I won't pursue my reign of fervor on this forum with my novice advice.
Hopefully, the worst you have to worry about is people like me who say controversial things about magic cards and are know-it-all-ish about the game, but treat you respectfully as a human being. I tend to keep my attitude inside the lines, but for some reason I have a hard time being a perfect person when I go to a tournament to compete. When I go to magic tournaments, I unintentionally role-play as the tragic anti-hero character I've created for myself in the game (crazy, I know). Don't be set off by people who are competitive; that is the fun part for many players of the game.
Necrostorm
Necro BUG/Rock/Jund/Esper/Grixis/Dega
RUG that hates Nerco decks
:-(