I've been looking at old articles regarding Magic and from what I can tell, Extended was once a popular format. However, by the time Modern got introduced, it was lagging on popularity so much that they just threw it under a bus and replaced it with Modern.
I've seen a lot of people blame the shortening of Extended (when they reduced it from 7 years to 4 years) as why it lost popularity. Thing is, it seems the format had already lost a lot of popularity even before that, and the change was an attempt to bring it back to popularity: "Wizards R&D member Erik Lauer explained that people were just not playing the format in any significant numbers unless it was dictated that they had to for a Pro Tour Qualifier season. The combination of so many years of catch-up and a dauntingly large card pool to build with spurred the need for a more accessible version of Extended that would allow players to get more mileage out of their Standard favorites." Source
Maybe the reduction actually did hurt the format rather than help it, but apparently even before that reduction the format was lagging in popularity. Anyone know exactly what factors led to the loss of popularity of what once seemed to be a popular format?
It was harder to obtain cards back then as the internet market wasn't really a thing yet and a lot of shops didn't sell singles either . Most shops would only run Standard or draft tourneys. If you were lucky your lgs might run 1 or 2 Extended tourneys a year. So, I guess you could say Local Game Stores killed extended.
It was harder to obtain cards back then as the internet market wasn't really a thing yet and a lot of shops didn't sell singles either . Most shops would only run Standard or draft tourneys. If you were lucky your lgs might run 1 or 2 Extended tourneys a year. So, I guess you could say Local Game Stores killed extended.
But that doesn't make sense. How could it lose popularity due to it being harder to get cards, when as time went on it became easier and easier to get cards, with more stores selling them and the Internet making it easier to purchase them?
Store's would rarely run extended tourneys because it was more profitable for them to run Standard and draft since players would buy packs. There still isn't a lot of Modern Support in my area, I believe for the same reason.
It mostly had to do with people having cards for 2 sets of rotations, Standard and Extended (then everything becoming Legacy/Vintage) and trying to maintain it. The reasoning behind the large card pool is really interesting coming from an R&D member, considering soon Modern will have more cards in its pool than Extended would have at any rotation. Extended was lots of fun though, I was disappointed it got cancelled to make way for Modern. I think the thing that made me upset the most about the switch was thinking to myself I'd probably never play a FTK competitively again.
not short story: extended was like the combination of 4 last standards with a few month support from WOTC, so who want to play that format? vintage/leacy people is already a niche, t2 too, and extended and modern compete, the non rotation part of modern made it win.
Later on however, it simply turned into standard again, as simply the best decks of the blocks battled it out, which is no fun at all.
Extended got its big shake up with mirrodin again and then it just died as they shifted the format and without urza block extended was simply dead and bad.
The same problem Modern has. Eventually all the fun cards to play with werent in the format anymore. Extended was popular when it still had old cards in it. Then they rotated out and it became Standard 2.0.
The majority of tournaments are Standard. Other formats are popular when they offer alternative playstyles that arent available in Standard. When formats become too similar to Standard, Standard becomes obviously preferable due to its availability.
This is the issue that will always define the popularity or unpopularity of "the middle format", no matter how many times they rebrand it.
I remember when 1.x Extended had revised dual lands in it. I miss that format. The duals were phased out in 2002-2003 time frame if I recall and the format turned for the worst in my opinion. They then shortened the seven year to four year and the problems got worse.
As a paper player, it was almost impossible to find an Extended event outside of PTQs or GP qualifiers. It was a format people played because it gave them more chances to qualify then a format they actually liked.
There were players that loved the 7 year format, others really enjoyed the 4 year format. The problem was playing the format outside of its 'season'.
As far as I know, Modern doesn't "rotate" like Extended did. There are just new sets that come in; the newest sets that are released. (To reiterate what others were saying.)
1. This is part of the problem. The meta can change quite a bit when sets rotate out.
2. The 2nd problem is that Extended was not supported like Modern is online and now played at FNMs.
3. The sets were more recent, so it was like playing like yesteryear's Standard.
Online buying was not the problem. It was nearly as available as it is today. I have been buying and selling Magic online since the days of Tempest. I would say if anything, it's tougher nowadays in the sense that the prices are slightly more inflated.
There are people who may say that the lack of a big banlist was a problem, but I don't buy it. Others may see this just the opposite (that a small banlist is better).
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Later on however, it simply turned into standard again, as simply the best decks of the blocks battled it out, which is no fun at all.
Extended got its big shake up with mirrodin again and then it just died as they shifted the format and without urza block extended was simply dead and bad.
This. When extended went back to Tempest and Saga, it was a good chunk of the game's history. It was like half way between playing eternal and playing Standard. As time went on, two things happened.
As the cool, old cards rotetaed out, many extended players moved into the newly branded Legacy format.
Extended became a much smaller percent of the games history. Rather than half way between Standard and Eternal, it was just Standard plus a little. Not the idea that made it popular. To make a new format half way between Standard and Eternal, we now need a card pool going back roughly ten years. Enter Modern.
The issue is that there's Standard which is the easy and quick format to get into, which benefits from you drafting, and then there's Legacy and Vintage which are both awesome formats where you get unlimited cards to tinker with. Extended always had those moments where a deck was cool but eventually became just another rotating format that required more investment but wasn't as fun as eternal formats, Modern has a lot of the same issues.
I remember watching some PT or GP where they were playing Sins of the Past, Mind's Desire, and the random eggs/sac lands to get to that mana and thinking it was awesome, but when I looked up where I could play Extended it didn't seem like it was a format people cared about outside of a niche group, and at that point I'd rather play Legacy Welder-Survival if I really wanted to go out of my way. A couple years later someone was showing me their Dredge deck during a big event, and how they got their cards signed so they could have a pimp deck for Extended, and I simply didn't care, and that's what I feel towards Modern.
Maybe I'm wrong, but really, why bother with the less interesting format if you're buying cards that are expensive and can't be used all that well anywhere else? At least if Modern had more cross over with Legacy you could get into it and then transition into Legacy, but as it stands now you're just dumping money into a less stable market :/.
Plus, bring back Hatred, that was a fun Extended deck
So we get the enemy colored painlands and not the allied color ones? Well that's reverse of the norm, but I thought Wizards was planning to do full 10 land cycles from now on.
Enemy pains could indicate allied Fetches in the next set, to offset the colour imbalance. It would also make sense since it would allow Modern to have access to all 10 Fetches as opposed to only 5.
Or you could read the article, and now that's not true.
Online buying was not the problem. It was nearly as available as it is today. I have been buying and selling Magic online since the days of Tempest. I would say if anything, it's tougher nowadays in the sense that the prices are slightly more inflated.
Yeah. Star City has been online for at least 15 years, and eBay auctions have been a thing for about that long as well. Not sure why anyone would think buying cards online was hard back then.
Modern has gotten to the point that it covers more sets than Extended. If it goes on much longer, it's going to cover like 15+ years, which is too many sets for what they're trying to accomplish. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually made another format that covered 5 sets or something to be the new inbetween that extended used to be.
I, for one, liked old extended. My first LGS rotated between standard and extended, which was tempest through kamigawa.
Modern has gotten to the point that it covers more sets than Extended. If it goes on much longer, it's going to cover like 15+ years, which is too many sets for what they're trying to accomplish. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually made another format that covered 5 sets or something to be the new inbetween that extended used to be.
I, for one, liked old extended. My first LGS rotated between standard and extended, which was tempest through kamigawa.
I'm not sure if I agree with this. The main reason for starting modern was to have an eternal format that wasn't plagued by the problem of Legacy/Vintage: The Reserve List.
Extended was immensely popular until they started changing how it rotated, and simultaneously several hugely popular sets rotated out. In 2008, Shards rotated in and Invasion/Odyssey/7th went out, stripping a ton of beloved cards from the format. Additionally, the format started rotating every year at that point, meaning that Onslaught was going out the following year. This one-two punch killed a lot of enthusiasm in the format. Wizards tried to salvage it by shortening the number of blocks, which honestly just exacerbated the problem.
The ironic part of all of this is that the replacement format, Modern, set its cutoff after the much-beloved blocks, which might explain why it's had some difficulty gaining traction.
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Extended was immensely popular until they started changing how it rotated, and simultaneously several hugely popular sets rotated out. In 2008, Shards rotated in and Invasion/Odyssey/7th went out, stripping a ton of beloved cards from the format. Additionally, the format started rotating every year at that point, meaning that Onslaught was going out the following year. This one-two punch killed a lot of enthusiasm in the format. Wizards tried to salvage it by shortening the number of blocks, which honestly just exacerbated the problem.
The ironic part of all of this is that the replacement format, Modern, set its cutoff after the much-beloved blocks, which might explain why it's had some difficulty gaining traction.
My guess was that was an intentional decision so Goblins wouldn't be apart of the Modern meta.
Though I don't think modern has any issues now with regarding to traction. It has become a very popular format.
My guess was that was an intentional decision so Goblins wouldn't be apart of the Modern meta.
Though I don't think modern has any issues now with regarding to traction. It has become a very popular format.
Goblins, Storm, and Dredge were the three biggest sufferers. Though this decision has also kept out decks like Slide. Storm would have likely required multiple bans (Tendrils, Desire, maybe Cabal Rit).
Modern's going well now, but the format was a bit slow to pick up starting out. I still think it doesn't have the popularity (proportionate to the userbase) of any Extended that included Invasion.
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My guess was that was an intentional decision so Goblins wouldn't be apart of the Modern meta.
Though I don't think modern has any issues now with regarding to traction. It has become a very popular format.
Goblins, Storm, and Dredge were the three biggest sufferers. Though this decision has also kept out decks like Slide. Storm would have likely required multiple bans (Tendrils, Desire, maybe Cabal Rit).
Modern's going well now, but the format was a bit slow to pick up starting out. I still think it doesn't have the popularity (proportionate to the userbase) of any Extended that included Invasion.
Fair enough. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that extended closer to "legacy" than current modern?
I suspect what truly did extended in was the rotation. People left in droves prior to Odyssey rotation.
Modern has gotten to the point that it covers more sets than Extended. If it goes on much longer, it's going to cover like 15+ years, which is too many sets for what they're trying to accomplish. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually made another format that covered 5 sets or something to be the new inbetween that extended used to be.
I, for one, liked old extended. My first LGS rotated between standard and extended, which was tempest through kamigawa.
I'm not sure if I agree with this. The main reason for starting modern was to have an eternal format that wasn't plagued by the problem of Legacy/Vintage: The Reserve List.
So how long is the format supposed to go on before it hits a breaking point? 20+ years worth of sets like legacy has? 30 years? Are they just going to reprint goyf, bob and fetchlands every five years to sate the demand? I wouldn't be surprised if they used the new border as an excuse 5 years from now to start anew, but sometime eventually there's going to have to be another intermediary format.
Modern has gotten to the point that it covers more sets than Extended. If it goes on much longer, it's going to cover like 15+ years, which is too many sets for what they're trying to accomplish. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually made another format that covered 5 sets or something to be the new inbetween that extended used to be.
I, for one, liked old extended. My first LGS rotated between standard and extended, which was tempest through kamigawa.
I'm not sure if I agree with this. The main reason for starting modern was to have an eternal format that wasn't plagued by the problem of Legacy/Vintage: The Reserve List.
So how long is the format supposed to go on before it hits a breaking point? 20+ years worth of sets like legacy has? 30 years? Are they just going to reprint goyf, bob and fetchlands every five years to sate the demand? I wouldn't be surprised if they used the new border as an excuse 5 years from now to start anew, but sometime eventually there's going to have to be another intermediary format.
I'd be surprised if we saw another intermittent format. I think the idea is just that: to reprint staples every 4-5 years.
A four-set plus cores Extended would be pretty fun right now. Innistrad-RTR-Theros-Khans? Sign me up!
I can kind of see the justification for shrinking the card-pool with Modern around, though. I mean, even given that Modern has a lot more cards, seven sets at the moment would give:
Khans-Theros-RTR-Innistrad-Scars-Zendikar
That's a lot of power, admittedly concentrated in older sets, but still. With a couple modifications, you could basically play the UR Delver list running around Modern just now.
Modern has gotten to the point that it covers more sets than Extended. If it goes on much longer, it's going to cover like 15+ years, which is too many sets for what they're trying to accomplish.
You say too many sets for what they're trying to accomplish, but what do you think they're trying to accomplish that that is "too many sets"? The whole point of Modern, as laid out when it was introduced, was that they recognized Legacy was getting really popular. But they couldn't really do much to support Legacy because they were told by the higher-ups that they had to stick with the Reserved List, so their solution was to create a format with the appeal of Legacy (never rotating and having a huge card base) but without the problems of Legacy (the Reserved List). How is 15+ years too many sets for that? The whole point is that it doesn't rotate and keeps getting larger.
Anyway, so what I'm getting is that the reason Extended lost popularity was because the cards people who played the format really liked rotated out, so they all just moved to Legacy? This would make sense, especially because before Legacy became Legacy (i.e. split off from Type 1), the format wasn't considered very good. So Extended lost popularity because Legacy basically took its place in the eyes of its fans?
From my experience, it was a lack of interest, maybe just from places I've played at anyways.
I don't think I knew anyone who had an extended deck or had any motivation to build an extended deck. I don't think I've ever even seen any extended events being advertised.
I'm not gonna say whether Wizards reducing the amount of blocks covered by extended hurt it or not because nobody at stores I've been to was interested before or after the change
I think pretty much making it a "double standard" pretty much made it a place where old dominant standard decks would have another last chance
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I've seen a lot of people blame the shortening of Extended (when they reduced it from 7 years to 4 years) as why it lost popularity. Thing is, it seems the format had already lost a lot of popularity even before that, and the change was an attempt to bring it back to popularity:
"Wizards R&D member Erik Lauer explained that people were just not playing the format in any significant numbers unless it was dictated that they had to for a Pro Tour Qualifier season. The combination of so many years of catch-up and a dauntingly large card pool to build with spurred the need for a more accessible version of Extended that would allow players to get more mileage out of their Standard favorites."
Source
Maybe the reduction actually did hurt the format rather than help it, but apparently even before that reduction the format was lagging in popularity. Anyone know exactly what factors led to the loss of popularity of what once seemed to be a popular format?
not short story: extended was like the combination of 4 last standards with a few month support from WOTC, so who want to play that format? vintage/leacy people is already a niche, t2 too, and extended and modern compete, the non rotation part of modern made it win.
Later on however, it simply turned into standard again, as simply the best decks of the blocks battled it out, which is no fun at all.
Extended got its big shake up with mirrodin again and then it just died as they shifted the format and without urza block extended was simply dead and bad.
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The majority of tournaments are Standard. Other formats are popular when they offer alternative playstyles that arent available in Standard. When formats become too similar to Standard, Standard becomes obviously preferable due to its availability.
This is the issue that will always define the popularity or unpopularity of "the middle format", no matter how many times they rebrand it.
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There were players that loved the 7 year format, others really enjoyed the 4 year format. The problem was playing the format outside of its 'season'.
1. This is part of the problem. The meta can change quite a bit when sets rotate out.
2. The 2nd problem is that Extended was not supported like Modern is online and now played at FNMs.
3. The sets were more recent, so it was like playing like yesteryear's Standard.
Online buying was not the problem. It was nearly as available as it is today. I have been buying and selling Magic online since the days of Tempest. I would say if anything, it's tougher nowadays in the sense that the prices are slightly more inflated.
There are people who may say that the lack of a big banlist was a problem, but I don't buy it. Others may see this just the opposite (that a small banlist is better).
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Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)This. When extended went back to Tempest and Saga, it was a good chunk of the game's history. It was like half way between playing eternal and playing Standard. As time went on, two things happened.
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I remember watching some PT or GP where they were playing Sins of the Past, Mind's Desire, and the random eggs/sac lands to get to that mana and thinking it was awesome, but when I looked up where I could play Extended it didn't seem like it was a format people cared about outside of a niche group, and at that point I'd rather play Legacy Welder-Survival if I really wanted to go out of my way. A couple years later someone was showing me their Dredge deck during a big event, and how they got their cards signed so they could have a pimp deck for Extended, and I simply didn't care, and that's what I feel towards Modern.
Maybe I'm wrong, but really, why bother with the less interesting format if you're buying cards that are expensive and can't be used all that well anywhere else? At least if Modern had more cross over with Legacy you could get into it and then transition into Legacy, but as it stands now you're just dumping money into a less stable market :/.
Plus, bring back Hatred, that was a fun Extended deck
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Yeah. Star City has been online for at least 15 years, and eBay auctions have been a thing for about that long as well. Not sure why anyone would think buying cards online was hard back then.
I, for one, liked old extended. My first LGS rotated between standard and extended, which was tempest through kamigawa.
I'm not sure if I agree with this. The main reason for starting modern was to have an eternal format that wasn't plagued by the problem of Legacy/Vintage: The Reserve List.
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The ironic part of all of this is that the replacement format, Modern, set its cutoff after the much-beloved blocks, which might explain why it's had some difficulty gaining traction.
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My guess was that was an intentional decision so Goblins wouldn't be apart of the Modern meta.
Though I don't think modern has any issues now with regarding to traction. It has become a very popular format.
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Goblins, Storm, and Dredge were the three biggest sufferers. Though this decision has also kept out decks like Slide. Storm would have likely required multiple bans (Tendrils, Desire, maybe Cabal Rit).
Modern's going well now, but the format was a bit slow to pick up starting out. I still think it doesn't have the popularity (proportionate to the userbase) of any Extended that included Invasion.
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Fair enough. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't that extended closer to "legacy" than current modern?
I suspect what truly did extended in was the rotation. People left in droves prior to Odyssey rotation.
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So how long is the format supposed to go on before it hits a breaking point? 20+ years worth of sets like legacy has? 30 years? Are they just going to reprint goyf, bob and fetchlands every five years to sate the demand? I wouldn't be surprised if they used the new border as an excuse 5 years from now to start anew, but sometime eventually there's going to have to be another intermediary format.
I'd be surprised if we saw another intermittent format. I think the idea is just that: to reprint staples every 4-5 years.
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Current Decks
Modern: Affinity
Standard: BW Control
Legacy: Death and Taxes :symw::symr:
Vintage: NA
A four-set plus cores Extended would be pretty fun right now. Innistrad-RTR-Theros-Khans? Sign me up!
I can kind of see the justification for shrinking the card-pool with Modern around, though. I mean, even given that Modern has a lot more cards, seven sets at the moment would give:
Khans-Theros-RTR-Innistrad-Scars-Zendikar
That's a lot of power, admittedly concentrated in older sets, but still. With a couple modifications, you could basically play the UR Delver list running around Modern just now.
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Anyway, so what I'm getting is that the reason Extended lost popularity was because the cards people who played the format really liked rotated out, so they all just moved to Legacy? This would make sense, especially because before Legacy became Legacy (i.e. split off from Type 1), the format wasn't considered very good. So Extended lost popularity because Legacy basically took its place in the eyes of its fans?
I don't think I knew anyone who had an extended deck or had any motivation to build an extended deck. I don't think I've ever even seen any extended events being advertised.
I'm not gonna say whether Wizards reducing the amount of blocks covered by extended hurt it or not because nobody at stores I've been to was interested before or after the change
I think pretty much making it a "double standard" pretty much made it a place where old dominant standard decks would have another last chance