Standard sucks by definition: It's an expensive carousel of whatever R&D felt like foisting upon us this year. Screw that.
Legacy and Vintage are degenerate unfun places full of land-destruction, combos, and free counters.
Modern, where I had really pinned my hopes, is full of un-fun un-interactive decks like Tron, Scapeshift, Twin, and Burn. Everybody plays nearly identical lists; interaction is at a minimum, and it's really just who can goldfish first.
I love MTG, but it seems there is no actual format I enjoy playing. Is there salvation anywhere?
You might like dratft and EDH a lot. No rotations, lots of room for creativity, and the combo/LD/permision strategies tend to be less devistating than in the eternal formats.
Otherwise, maybe MTG is just not the game for you? There is a world of hobby games out there!
You might like dratft and EDH a lot. No rotations, lots of room for creativity, and the combo/LD/permision strategies tend to be less devistating than in the eternal formats.
YMMV on that last bit.
Honestly, it sounds like you enjoy casual non-competitive magic. Which is fine. Just play casual. If someone looks down at you for it, screw em, it's a card game. Play it how you like to play it, end of story.
Standard sucks by definition: It's an expensive carousel of whatever R&D felt like foisting upon us this year. Screw that.
Legacy and Vintage are degenerate unfun places full of land-destruction, combos, and free counters.
Modern, where I had really pinned my hopes, is full of un-fun un-interactive decks like Tron, Scapeshift, Twin, and Burn. Everybody plays nearly identical lists; interaction is at a minimum, and it's really just who can goldfish first.
I love MTG, but it seems there is no actual format I enjoy playing. Is there salvation anywhere?
(I play on MTGO only.)
You can tell that this person doesn't play much standard, legacy, or modern.
Standard sucks by definition: It's an expensive carousel of whatever R&D felt like foisting upon us this year. Screw that.
Legacy and Vintage are degenerate unfun places full of land-destruction, combos, and free counters.
Modern, where I had really pinned my hopes, is full of un-fun un-interactive decks like Tron, Scapeshift, Twin, and Burn.
So you don't like control, burn, or combo decks. Okay, that doesn't leave much else. Basically aggro and midrange. I think the majority of players would find a format that consisted only of aggro and midrange decks to be far more boring than any of the formats you mention.
Everybody plays nearly identical lists
This will eventually happen no matter what card pool you define for a format. There will always be certain selections of cards that are undeniably better than other selections of cards. Competitive players will eventually narrow down the options to several decks, and over time those decks will be further refined with much testing until all of the "pros" are nearly in agreement on a specific deck list that works best for a given archetype.
I'll add that this is not a unique trait of this game. Any card game that allows people to define the contents of their decks will, with a competitive community similar to the kind that M:tG has, result in succinct lists of competitive decks.
You say you love the game, but I struggle to understand which parts of it you like. I also struggle to understand your complaint about lack of interaction. What is your definition of interaction? Burn decks play spells to kill creatures when they need to. Land-destruction decks play spells to destroy land. Control decks play spells to remove or restrict nearly every dangerous card the opponent plays. Combo decks are less interactive, but in order to defeat them you must disrupt what they are doing, which implies playing spells that interact with their cards, and the successful combo decks must also run spells to try to prevent you from disrupting their combos.
and it's really just who can goldfish first.
If this were true there would be no pattern to who placed top8 or top16 at major events, when in fact there are many players that routinely place in the top.
The other formats are boring because everyone plays the same decks and a few people dares to innovate and create new interactions or decks. Almost every player wants to play safe.
Limited is the answer. Limited tests every skill of a player and it is the most righteous form of play in mtg
At some point a "What is interaction?" yielded no consensus or answer to the question after ~27 pages of arguing, name calling, trolling, infractions, heated debate and name calling.
Tchntm43's post is accurate about the nature of competitive play in most games/any game. As far as the nature of older formats, I disagree about Vintage and Legacy, simply because the homogeneity of their card pool can be as simple as region, card availability or cost.
Modern and standard on the other hand, have different more narrow issues relating to card pool size, artificial restrictions on power level in format design etc.
[quote from="tchntm43 »" url="http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-general/564673-all-formats-appear-to-suck?comment=8"]I think the majority of players would find a format that consisted only of aggro and midrange decks to be far more boring than any of the formats you mention.[quote]
Unlikely. Standard is the most popular competitive format and it's full of midrange. Modern is pretty popular too, and it has almost no control at all. Of course, the biggest groups of players plays only casually and casual play is absolutely dominated by midrange (and tribal).
There are players that love combo, tempo and control. They are in the minority. The great thing about them is that they have successfully carved out a place for themselves in Legacy and Vintage. The ridiculous thing about them is that in their homogeneous isolation they have succumbed to groupthink and convinced themselves that their shared opinions actually represent the majority of MtG players.
Play irl with friends and establish your own formats that emphasize fun and excitement. Modify the formats that exist or play different game types for large groups IE: Emperor. Good luck, I do think stepping away from the online version and going to your local shop is usually a great place to start.
Legacy has literally only 2 land destruction cards that are played much at all (Stifle and Wasteland) and 3 that are extreme fringe (Sinkhole, Armageddon, Vindicate).
Of all the things someone might complain about in Legacy, land destruction is one of the least relevant.
Have you actually played Legacy? You sound like me before I got my hands on the format, cause I had the same concerns. But once I started playing it I found that it was a fantastic format, with a ton of room for interaction and different strategies. Yes, some games are dominated by a fast combo or a couple of cheap LD effects, but in my experience those games are in the minority, especially once you get a little practice under your belt.
Legacy has literally only 2 land destruction cards that are played much at all (Stifle and Wasteland) and 3 that are extreme fringe (Sinkhole, Armageddon, Vindicate).
Of all the things someone might complain about in Legacy, land destruction is one of the least relevant.
You missed off pox and more relevantly, smallpox. And smokestack and lilly's ultimate.
Land destruction is not really land destruction though. Its about mana restriction- port, tanglewire, trinisphere etc. And there is enough of it to make it viable, but not mainstream. Which is the sign of a healthy format.....
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People with belligerent signatures are trying to compensate for something....
The other formats are boring because everyone plays the same decks and a few people dares to innovate and create new interactions or decks. Almost every player wants to play safe.
Limited is the answer. Limited tests every skill of a player and it is the most righteous form of play in mtg
I would kinda disagree with that, as Limited is also the most luck-based format by design. (My main chagrin is that opening bomby Sealed pools tends to overweigh strong deckbuilding skills.)
Constructed formats do see a fair amount of variance in what decks are viable and can exist in the format, although there are people who gravitate to decks that do well. (Which is to be expected) The fun is had by either enjoying the style of Magic those decks provide, or by playing a style of Magic you enjoy.
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Eternal Masters 2015 Legacy Champion. Has an unnatural love towards perfectly reasonable respect for Lightning Bolt.
The best bet for you would be to start breaking down some of these conceptions.
Standard sucks? Think about what would make the experience fun, and build a deck that does it.
Everyone plays the same decks in Modern? That is massive information advantage. Build decks that do the unexpected; a lot of those tuned lists are weak to the unfamiliar. I have won 4 out of 6 matches against absurdly expensive Pod decks with my $10, no-rares concoction.
Or just move into the EDH realm, where awesome is almost always the goal.
I have never played a deck that I didn't design and build myself. You will find that if you embrace the creative side of things that the game is a lot more enjoyable.
Then you'll find out that doesn't solve your problems at all. Given ANY constructed format, there will be optimal builds, and people will start to play similar tier 1 decks. Even the "uninteractive" complaint (which is a nebulous complaint) will not be solved, because ALL decks want to get away with their strategy with as little interaction as possible with the opponent (the only deck that I can think of that requires an opponent to be doing something is the old oath of druids deck pre-undiscovered paradise).
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"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
Yerp... figure out what you like and make a format.
I think an important question is who do you play with?
If you have a good group of friends or like a cool game store, CUBE seems to excite everyone who is jaded with the game.
And by CUBE I dont mean a netdeck of power cards, all in foil. I mean whatever you want magic to be, like all Ravnica, all Kamigawa, all Clerics vs Wizards or whatever other crazy idea you come up with.
Limited: It doesn't matter what they say, it's largely luck based and the active community is easily the most arrogant.
Standard: Dumbed down quite a bit, constantly rotating, current one is the weakest/most boring in years
Modern: Costs an arm and a leg, liberal ban list
Legacy: Need to mortgage your house to play it
EDH (the real one, four person FFA): need to gather people, games can last hours, politics (especially when illogical) may ruin the game
Limited: It doesn't matter what they say, it's largely luck based and the active community is easily the most arrogant.
Standard: Dumbed down quite a bit, constantly rotating, current one is the weakest/most boring in years
Modern: Costs an arm and a leg, liberal ban list
Legacy: Need to mortgage your house to play it
EDH (the real one, four person FFA): need to gather people, games can last hours, politics (especially when illogical) may ruin the game
Limited: Can be fun. Luck is a factor, especially for sealed (which is why I dont play sealed events), but drafting is much more skill based
Standard: I first played during Zen Block. When there was a real triangle of aggro, control, and combo. It was sweet. Now? It blows.
Modern: Nothing overly interesting to me, and expensive
Legacy: I love Legacy, and OP's viewpoints are exactly what I would expect from someone who probably has never even played in a tourney
EDH: Complete and utter misery. Play something too powerful and people don't want to play with you. Play something not powerful enough and you wont have any fun.
Your perceptions of Legacy/Vintage are so far askew that I'm not going to even bother dissuading you from your misconceptions. You seem to hate Modern for the same reasons you hate Legacy/Vintage, and you don't want to buy cards for Standard.
Draft or switch games then. That's all I can tell you. I've been playing since '95-'96, and while there have been times during the game that I preferred to its current incarnation, I can't complain too much. Magic, outside of Standard, is in a great place right now.
I have no opinions on casual formats (EDH, Pauper, etc.) as I have little to no experience with those.
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Currently playing:
Standard: I, for one, welcome our new rhinoceros overlords
Modern: Pod's dead, Bob's back.
Legacy: Lands, Deathblade, Death and Taxes, Elves, MUD
Retired Legacy: Merfolk, Goblins, Jund, Delver, Reanimator
Standard sucks by definition: It's an expensive carousel of whatever R&D felt like foisting upon us this year. Screw that.
Legacy and Vintage are degenerate unfun places full of land-destruction, combos, and free counters.
Modern, where I had really pinned my hopes, is full of un-fun un-interactive decks like Tron, Scapeshift, Twin, and Burn. Everybody plays nearly identical lists; interaction is at a minimum, and it's really just who can goldfish first.
I love MTG, but it seems there is no actual format I enjoy playing. Is there salvation anywhere?
(I play on MTGO only.)
I don't understand how you say you love MtG, yet hate all the ways it's played.
If you want to try something different, EDH or Cube might be best, they both have heavily influence from whatever group of people plays them, although these two are both usually played in physical reality.
Mongers is also correct, in that you have no idea what decks are present in Legacy, and I thus doubt if you've ever played it.
I'd actually have to go a step further and say that you haven't played much of any of the formats you're criticizing. As well, what do you call interaction? Standard, Legacy, and Modern are all full of it.
STATISTICS.
All of these "Let's eliminate bad cards" crusades are simply ignorant. And when they start to devolve into "WotC is conspiring to give us crappy cards," they just become embarrassing. MATH is conspiring to give you crappy cards.
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Legacy and Vintage are degenerate unfun places full of land-destruction, combos, and free counters.
Modern, where I had really pinned my hopes, is full of un-fun un-interactive decks like Tron, Scapeshift, Twin, and Burn. Everybody plays nearly identical lists; interaction is at a minimum, and it's really just who can goldfish first.
I love MTG, but it seems there is no actual format I enjoy playing. Is there salvation anywhere?
(I play on MTGO only.)
Otherwise, maybe MTG is just not the game for you? There is a world of hobby games out there!
https://fieldmarshalshandbook.wordpress.com/
RUGLegacy Lands.dec
RUGBLegacy Lands.dec
RGLegacy Lands.dec
WUBRG EDH Lands.dec
UBR EDH Artificer Prodigy
B EDH Relentless Rats
YMMV on that last bit.
Honestly, it sounds like you enjoy casual non-competitive magic. Which is fine. Just play casual. If someone looks down at you for it, screw em, it's a card game. Play it how you like to play it, end of story.
Draft is casual?
But seriously, this entire game is horrible. Just quit now, set your cards on fire and play Hearthstone. It's what all the cool kids are doing.
You can tell that this person doesn't play much standard, legacy, or modern.
So you don't like control, burn, or combo decks. Okay, that doesn't leave much else. Basically aggro and midrange. I think the majority of players would find a format that consisted only of aggro and midrange decks to be far more boring than any of the formats you mention.
This will eventually happen no matter what card pool you define for a format. There will always be certain selections of cards that are undeniably better than other selections of cards. Competitive players will eventually narrow down the options to several decks, and over time those decks will be further refined with much testing until all of the "pros" are nearly in agreement on a specific deck list that works best for a given archetype.
I'll add that this is not a unique trait of this game. Any card game that allows people to define the contents of their decks will, with a competitive community similar to the kind that M:tG has, result in succinct lists of competitive decks.
You say you love the game, but I struggle to understand which parts of it you like. I also struggle to understand your complaint about lack of interaction. What is your definition of interaction? Burn decks play spells to kill creatures when they need to. Land-destruction decks play spells to destroy land. Control decks play spells to remove or restrict nearly every dangerous card the opponent plays. Combo decks are less interactive, but in order to defeat them you must disrupt what they are doing, which implies playing spells that interact with their cards, and the successful combo decks must also run spells to try to prevent you from disrupting their combos.
If this were true there would be no pattern to who placed top8 or top16 at major events, when in fact there are many players that routinely place in the top.
Limited is the answer. Limited tests every skill of a player and it is the most righteous form of play in mtg
At some point a "What is interaction?" yielded no consensus or answer to the question after ~27 pages of arguing, name calling, trolling, infractions, heated debate and name calling.
Tchntm43's post is accurate about the nature of competitive play in most games/any game. As far as the nature of older formats, I disagree about Vintage and Legacy, simply because the homogeneity of their card pool can be as simple as region, card availability or cost.
Modern and standard on the other hand, have different more narrow issues relating to card pool size, artificial restrictions on power level in format design etc.
Experience may be the best teachers here.
Big Thanks to Xeno for sig art <3.
Unlikely. Standard is the most popular competitive format and it's full of midrange. Modern is pretty popular too, and it has almost no control at all. Of course, the biggest groups of players plays only casually and casual play is absolutely dominated by midrange (and tribal).
There are players that love combo, tempo and control. They are in the minority. The great thing about them is that they have successfully carved out a place for themselves in Legacy and Vintage. The ridiculous thing about them is that in their homogeneous isolation they have succumbed to groupthink and convinced themselves that their shared opinions actually represent the majority of MtG players.
U Tron
GW Bogles
RG Loam
UR Blue Breach
RBU Grixis Goryo
BRU Grixis Delver
GBR Jund
GBW Junk
Active Legacy Decks
BR Reanimator
Of all the things someone might complain about in Legacy, land destruction is one of the least relevant.
You missed off pox and more relevantly, smallpox. And smokestack and lilly's ultimate.
Land destruction is not really land destruction though. Its about mana restriction- port, tanglewire, trinisphere etc. And there is enough of it to make it viable, but not mainstream. Which is the sign of a healthy format.....
Constructed formats do see a fair amount of variance in what decks are viable and can exist in the format, although there are people who gravitate to decks that do well. (Which is to be expected) The fun is had by either enjoying the style of Magic those decks provide, or by playing a style of Magic you enjoy.
an unnatural love towardsperfectly reasonable respect for Lightning Bolt.The Kiwi third of The Salt Mine Podcast: An Australian Legacy Podcast
Standard sucks? Think about what would make the experience fun, and build a deck that does it.
Everyone plays the same decks in Modern? That is massive information advantage. Build decks that do the unexpected; a lot of those tuned lists are weak to the unfamiliar. I have won 4 out of 6 matches against absurdly expensive Pod decks with my $10, no-rares concoction.
Or just move into the EDH realm, where awesome is almost always the goal.
I have never played a deck that I didn't design and build myself. You will find that if you embrace the creative side of things that the game is a lot more enjoyable.
Go try that game , after few games you will be bored to hell
EDH: Xenagos, God of Revels.
That's what pauper, peasant, and EDH players did.
Then you'll find out that doesn't solve your problems at all. Given ANY constructed format, there will be optimal builds, and people will start to play similar tier 1 decks. Even the "uninteractive" complaint (which is a nebulous complaint) will not be solved, because ALL decks want to get away with their strategy with as little interaction as possible with the opponent (the only deck that I can think of that requires an opponent to be doing something is the old oath of druids deck pre-undiscovered paradise).
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
I think an important question is who do you play with?
If you have a good group of friends or like a cool game store, CUBE seems to excite everyone who is jaded with the game.
And by CUBE I dont mean a netdeck of power cards, all in foil. I mean whatever you want magic to be, like all Ravnica, all Kamigawa, all Clerics vs Wizards or whatever other crazy idea you come up with.
www.theconnoisseurs.com
Standard: Dumbed down quite a bit, constantly rotating, current one is the weakest/most boring in years
Modern: Costs an arm and a leg, liberal ban list
Legacy: Need to mortgage your house to play it
EDH (the real one, four person FFA): need to gather people, games can last hours, politics (especially when illogical) may ruin the game
Limited: Can be fun. Luck is a factor, especially for sealed (which is why I dont play sealed events), but drafting is much more skill based
Standard: I first played during Zen Block. When there was a real triangle of aggro, control, and combo. It was sweet. Now? It blows.
Modern: Nothing overly interesting to me, and expensive
Legacy: I love Legacy, and OP's viewpoints are exactly what I would expect from someone who probably has never even played in a tourney
EDH: Complete and utter misery. Play something too powerful and people don't want to play with you. Play something not powerful enough and you wont have any fun.
Draft or switch games then. That's all I can tell you. I've been playing since '95-'96, and while there have been times during the game that I preferred to its current incarnation, I can't complain too much. Magic, outside of Standard, is in a great place right now.
I have no opinions on casual formats (EDH, Pauper, etc.) as I have little to no experience with those.
Standard: I, for one, welcome our new rhinoceros overlords
Modern: Pod's dead, Bob's back.
Legacy: Lands, Deathblade, Death and Taxes, Elves, MUD
Retired Legacy: Merfolk, Goblins, Jund, Delver, Reanimator
I don't understand how you say you love MtG, yet hate all the ways it's played.
If you want to try something different, EDH or Cube might be best, they both have heavily influence from whatever group of people plays them, although these two are both usually played in physical reality.
Mongers is also correct, in that you have no idea what decks are present in Legacy, and I thus doubt if you've ever played it.
I'd actually have to go a step further and say that you haven't played much of any of the formats you're criticizing. As well, what do you call interaction? Standard, Legacy, and Modern are all full of it.