Sorry, not sure if this is the right subforum to post in or not. Figured it would be better than the Legacy subforum since that seems more for deck and meta discussion than what my question is about.
I'm a big fan of the Legacy format, and am getting into it with a fun deck. What I've been seeing when I go to other forums that discuss the format (like reddit's /r/mtglegacy) is a fair bit of disdain (and in some cases outright hatred) of new players who don't have the money to drop on physical copies of pricey staples. A lot of, "if you're poor then you shouldn't play Legacy", "come back when you get a real job", and "the high price keeps out the whiny kids".
I mean, I'm sure there are people like that. I'm just curious if it's a widespread belief in the Legacy community, or if it's just a couple of ********s.
I think it's great when people are interested in the format! I have a few good friends and they all play Magic, but none of them play Legacy.
I wish the price didn't keep people away quite as much as it does because I think new players are a great way to keep the format alive. For me, Legacy is the perfect balance between old and new cards without the Vintage mana ramp, and therefore without as many turn 1 combos. Legacy has been a very rewarding format to play as I have been learning so much and seeing my practice pay off as I learn the best ways to play my decks in the diverse metagame.
What kind of deck are you making? I'd be happy to discuss the Legacy meta, important skills to have for the format, and even deck specifics, if you'd like. Just send me message!
Sorry, not sure if this is the right subforum to post in or not. Figured it would be better than the Legacy subforum since that seems more for deck and meta discussion than what my question is about.
I'm a big fan of the Legacy format, and am getting into it with a fun deck. What I've been seeing when I go to other forums that discuss the format (like reddit's /r/mtglegacy) is a fair bit of disdain (and in some cases outright hatred) of new players who don't have the money to drop on physical copies of pricey staples. A lot of, "if you're poor then you shouldn't play Legacy", "come back when you get a real job", and "the high price keeps out the whiny kids".
I mean, I'm sure there are people like that. I'm just curious if it's a widespread belief in the Legacy community, or if it's just a couple of ********s.
Thoughts?
In my experience, this is only happens online. Slap together a deck that isn't tier 1 or 2? Receive disdain. Then someone with a tier 1/2 deck loses they'll blame the budget players/unformed meta.
In real life, if you're not a known thief, legacy players will bend backwards to lend you cards so that you can play. Hell, if you're well known you'll be lent entire decks. Attend a tournament, see 3/4ths of the deck as homebrews and obvious budget choices, often being played by people who attend one or two tournemants a year so it's quite likely they're not up to date with trends. It's all good.
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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
Legacy is cheaper on MTGO. For comparison, Underground Sea is $30 there vs $350 in paper. Have you looked into that option? Of course, if you use MTGO you have to put up with all the failings of the program itself - it's not exactly the most bug-free program out there.
As for the disdain bit, I'll just leave you with this quote from a real Legacy player (name withheld, but if you want to confirm that I'm not making this up, you can PM me and I'll send you a link):
Legacy players may have disposable income, but there is more money to be extracted from the unrequited desires and poor judgment of the PTQ grinder crowd. One group is more likely to sardine themselves dozens at a time in living rooms on Saturday mornings, lying on vomit-soaked floors or sleeping on bug-infested chairs in rural Butt****istan to take advantage of a "softer" event. To nourish themselves off exclusively microwavable food, stale Cheetos, and Ramen noodles warmed by salty tears. To pay $40 to play in a *****ty sealed format for a chance to win a ******* box of BFZ. And then to drive to Podunkville the next morning for the same opportunity. This is the audience of players that will jump through hoops to play in events, and it's the target that [tournament organizer] is trying to appeal to.
There are probably new casual players more than new Legacy players. I've met people who say they play legacy, but they really just mean they play casually without any sort of format ban list in place. If anyone reads my own postings elsewhere I tend to have a... somewhat negative opinion on paper magic formats outside of EDH and casual. Largely because the pricing structure on the secondary market and the release model wizards uses heavily favors collectors over players. MTGO is a step in the right direction, just they need to seriously put more effort into making the client up to date with better sound work, graphics, animation, and interface design.
Not saying Legacy is doomed or anything, just the costs of many legacy staples in paper are pretty high for a single card, making "legacy" EDH more a thing for newcomers than the traditional 60 card staple format of the bygone years.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
a lot of legacy players I know seem to be friendly and welcoming to new players in the format, as they like to see the format grow and enjoy playing with cards from the entire games history
Sorry, not sure if this is the right subforum to post in or not. Figured it would be better than the Legacy subforum since that seems more for deck and meta discussion than what my question is about.
I'm a big fan of the Legacy format, and am getting into it with a fun deck. What I've been seeing when I go to other forums that discuss the format (like reddit's /r/mtglegacy) is a fair bit of disdain (and in some cases outright hatred) of new players who don't have the money to drop on physical copies of pricey staples. A lot of, "if you're poor then you shouldn't play Legacy", "come back when you get a real job", and "the high price keeps out the whiny kids".
I mean, I'm sure there are people like that. I'm just curious if it's a widespread belief in the Legacy community, or if it's just a couple of ********s.
Thoughts?
I think you are misrepresenting the communities. Strongly, even. /r/rmtglegacy for example will only have one or two people among hundreds that will tell you what you said. Maybe you should read properly what is being said in these situations because it seems you are failing to grasp the point of the statements entirely.
This is not a widespread belief anywhere, not even in the community you mentioned, so, no.
Which is why I was asking if it was a widespread belief or an isolated event.
There's no need to be so rude.
In fact, looking through your comment history it seems you are one of the very people I was talking about.
Regardless, thank you for your input.
Eretoryi, I'll definitely take you up on your offer and PM you some time. I greatly appreciate that.
mondu_the_fat, izzetmage, STsung, Colt47, motleyslayer - thank you all for sharing your thoughts on the community and the format. That seems more in line with what I've been told the community it like.
Legacy players are few and far between and aren't idiots about the barriers to entering the format. They probably don't want to play against casual decks, but they definitely want more folks to play the format and so are often the nicest Magic players I've come in contact with.
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One of these day I have to get myself organizized.
Make a cheap legacy deck, 1 10th as costly, but 80 percent as good, and beat the ones who pay top price at fnm/lgs/etc - that is great fun. Fun because they whine so much when you beat them.
I don't know anyone whiny like that. We don't want to give the impression that Legacy players are all whiny, or that underpowered decks will beat tier decks, because usually they won't.
I don't know anyone whiny like that. We don't want to give the impression that Legacy players are all whiny, or that underpowered decks will beat tier decks, because usually they won't.
You must live in serenity land, I dont think Ive ever experienced more than two minutes without hearing whining in a mtg environment wherever.
Legacy players tend to have been playing longer than many folks, that's how many of them have access to all the old cards. They've seen the ups and downs throughout Magic's history and are somewhat jaded to them and have suffered through some absolute torturoues errors like Academy decks, Trix, Necropotence, and later on Affinity. They are used to and accepting of strategies that WoTC does not make viable today because it would make standard "unfun"; like low-cost Land Destruction, Stax, fast combo, low cost hard countermagic, heavy hand destrcution, and similar stuff. Due to their experience playing in a format with a huge number of different decks at any given time and access to some very powerful cards and interactions, they tend to have a more technical understanding of the rules than the average standard player. As an end result, they tend to be highly competitive players. This can create a perceived issues with people who are new to magic not really grasping what "legacy" is. I'll tell a story from an experience I had a few years back at a pre-release. Might have been New Phyrexia, I dunno. Anyway:
I'm between rounds and doing pretty well, so I'm chatting with some of the new faces that have shown up at the store, looking to see if anyone wants to trade, blah blah blah. And I end up talking to this dude who asks me what formats I play and I mention Legacy. He's instantly like "OH MAN, I LOVE legacy!" So I ask him if he's got a deck and wants to throw down real quick, I'm pretty excited to meet another Legacy player! Dude is like "sure!" and pulls out a doublesleeved deck, and I'm thinking "oh man, double sleeved, bet I'm gonna get to see some dope stuff, cool!"
So we sit down to play our game, and I'm playing TES, which, for those of you unfamiliar, is basically the faster cousin of ANT, a storm based combo deck that is fairly complex to the uninitiated. And I open up my 7, and it's a pretty strong 7, the kind that goes T1 make you discard your countermagic, T2 kill you. You basically need a handful of countermagic to not die on T2.
He gets to go first, and throws down a basic 4th edition Island, which I find a little strange. What decks runs a basic island out T1? Fish I guess? Is he one of those guys with a foiled out Fish deck and playing beat up 4th edition islands because they think it's funny? He taps it and throws down a Merfolk of the Pearl Trident. Ok, so I guess it is Fish, but why is he playing Pearl Trident? Budget version and maybe Merfolk of the Pearl is his 4th Cursecatcher he hasn't picked up yet? No matter, I stop trying to think too much about it, I'll know all my answers will come when I fire off the Duress.
I start my turn and draw a Cabal Therapy, the perfect card to followup my Duress with on my combo turn! I play a Polluted Delta and think a little about breaking it into Underground Sea and walking into Wasteland, but I decide even if I do, it's not going to stop me from going off, and if he does have wasteland to drop, that means he can't cast Spell Pierce if he happens to have multiple countermagic, so I'm actually OK with this. Plus I want to know what he's playing. I crack the Delta into the Sea, and fire off the Duress.
It is as Duress resolves I realize what a horrible misunderstanding has transpired here and what an awkward position I'm now in.
The Duress shows me 4 more islands like the first, a Flight, and two other highly forgettable blue cards. It then dawns on me as I look as his hand that his cards aren't doublesleeved, this is just a 100+ card deck. Oh. Crap.
My new Legacy player has confused "Legacy- the Competitive Format" with "Legacy-the Kitchen Table Format Where Anything Goes and You Can Play All Your Old Cards"
My choices now get super awkward. I have a turn to think about my options which are as follows:
1) I can go ahead and fire off a complex combo involving rules this guy probably does not understand, like holding priority as I cast Infernal Tutor and crack Lion's Eye Diamond in response, while I dig up Ad Nauseum and fire off Burning Wish and retrieve the kill card (Tendrils of Agony) from outside the frikking game (well, sideboard anyway). This would straight up would look like flat out cheating to someone who's never been exposed to Magic on this level and has no clue what's going on and is now dead.
2) I can throw the game and let him win. Trouble here is that TES doesn't really do much aside from the handful of discard spells until it just flat out kills you. And at the rate this guy's deck is moving, it's going to become pretty obvious I'm throwing the game, which is super patronizing. That Merfolk of the Pearl is gonna take a while to get there. If he becomes aware, this might be a worse option and the longer the game goes the more likely he is to realize I'm punting it. There's not a real good way for me to look like I'm putting up a fight.
There's not a real good way of handling this without coming off as condescending and I didn't want to be a negative experience at this guy's prerelease. As he passed turn back to me (island, cast flight on Merfolk, attack for 1), I figured I owed the guy the respect to die the same way I'd kill anyone else with that hand. So I took a deep breath and preface my turn with an apology, and an explanation that there had been a misunderstanding, that there is a format called Legacy, that it was highly competitive, and that I was going to proceed through a combo turn and kill him this turn, but I figured he'd rather I do that then let him win or something. He agreed and I walked him through the combo slowly enough. He was still confused at the end of it, but at least didn't think I was cheating. I helped him tweak his sealed pool a little and gave him some general tips, which he seemed to appreciate, and that was the last I ever saw of the guy.
The moral of the story is that while I'm pretty sure I handled this encounter the best I possibly could, this is not always true of every encounter a new player has when they meet a Legacy player for the first time. And I've had other encounters where I could have probably chosen to put more effort into it than I did. It's an intimidating format with an intimidating barrier to entry. Not every Legacy player exercises the same amount of caution in situations similar to mine, and some are downright jerks, though they tend to be few and far between. However, Legacy's pool of players is smaller, and as a result, jerks tend to be more noticeable, particularly when they play into perceived stereotypes of Legacy players being elitest. Overall though, most of us aer always excited to see new players that have the skill and desire to break through a very tough entry barrier to play.
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Legacy: TES
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
I completely agree with the general sentiment in this thread. Most legacy players I've run into are much more interested in getting new blood and more players than being snobs about the format. I've got plenty of legacy cards I'm not using on any given night, and as long as I know the person and have enough warning to actually bring them along I'm happy to loan them out. Legacy players are generally very willing to talk new players through the format and help out where they can, at least in my experience.
Two addenda to the above. First, I've been in a similar situation to Ebonclaw before, though this was in a tournament and I didn't feel quite as bad about it. I was playing Spanish Inquisition, which is a turn 1 kill storm deck, against someone playing some kind of Boros aggro list. He was pretty good natured about it and actually got a game off of me by Lightning Helixing my face at one point, but was pretty clearly confused by what I was doing. There really wasn't a good way for me to act in that situation (but again, tournament setting is still a very different animal). The best thing I can do is try and make sure he's following my plays, but it's still a weird thing to watch if you've never seen a similar deck.
Second, I'm guessing that the attitude described in the OP isn't taking an issue with people not buying the cards, but with people not buying the cards who feel that it's their god-given right to play legacy. I'll admit that the sense of entitlement from some people does rub me the wrong way at times. I understand that legacy decks are expensive, but there are still ways into the format if you're really interested. Plenty of legacy players have large collections and can loan out cards, there are decks that use smaller numbers of expensive cards, and it's possible to save up for the cards (though I admit that this is becoming less true of some of them, particularly the reserved list ones that have gone through the roof in the last couple years). I think it would be great if everyone interested in the format could play it and would welcome steps in that direction (reserved list is stupid, don't mind playing against proxies, will help with budget considerations and the like where I can) but that's not the reality of the game right now. I love working with new players or potential new players who understand that legacy is an expensive format full of old cards and are willing to work with that. I have no patience for the people who want to own a tier 1 deck for the price of a standard deck and are unwilling to take smaller steps to get into the format.
I'm trying really hard to keep this post from sounding like one of the people described in the OP, because that's not how I feel about it. I'm just trying to explain where some of that sentiment could be coming from.
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[Pr]Jaya | Estrid | A rotating cast of decks built out of my box.
Sorry, not sure if this is the right subforum to post in or not. Figured it would be better than the Legacy subforum since that seems more for deck and meta discussion than what my question is about.
I'm a big fan of the Legacy format, and am getting into it with a fun deck. What I've been seeing when I go to other forums that discuss the format (like reddit's /r/mtglegacy) is a fair bit of disdain (and in some cases outright hatred) of new players who don't have the money to drop on physical copies of pricey staples. A lot of, "if you're poor then you shouldn't play Legacy", "come back when you get a real job", and "the high price keeps out the whiny kids".
I mean, I'm sure there are people like that. I'm just curious if it's a widespread belief in the Legacy community, or if it's just a couple of ********s.
Thoughts?
In my experience, this is only happens online. Slap together a deck that isn't tier 1 or 2? Receive disdain. Then someone with a tier 1/2 deck loses they'll blame the budget players/unformed meta.
In real life, if you're not a known thief, legacy players will bend backwards to lend you cards so that you can play. Hell, if you're well known you'll be lent entire decks. Attend a tournament, see 3/4ths of the deck as homebrews and obvious budget choices, often being played by people who attend one or two tournemants a year so it's quite likely they're not up to date with trends. It's all good.
Exactly this.
I also think it's important to differentiate the responses you'll get. To clarify, in my local area, people (myself included) will give eachother ***** over running Theros basics in Death & Taxes or jokingly criticize some foiling choice in a pimped deck. But if you're just getting into the format? The goal is to welcome you and have you come back. If you're curious and don't have deck, you probably have your choice of a half dozen that people will gladly lend. If you're trying to find a cheap way to buy in, people will focus on helping you find that in a way that can be competitive (for example, I still tell people about a budget miracles player from the GPTs for SeaTac who was running 1 Hallowed Fountain, 2 Prairie Stream, and 4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy instead of Tundras and Jace the Mind Sculptor -- He was consistently doing well when I watched him play and Top 8'd trials without issue).
At the end of the day, Legacy is a format that has an older crowd who just wants to get along and enjoy their more limited free time. To do that, we need newer players to try the format and have a positive experience in doing so.
EDIT: On a related note, you (and anyone else interested in the format) should venture on down to our Legacy forum
Just got to say, you've definitely earned distinction as an MTGS hero
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Because he's the hero MTGS deserves, and the one it needs right now. So we'll global him. Because he can take it. Because he's not just our hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. An expired rascal.
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ExpiredRascals you sir are a god-like hero.
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ER is a masterful god who cannot be beaten in any endeavour.
What I'm seeing as someone who posts a decent amount on the source, is that my decks of choice (Nic Fit and Burn) have reputations as budget decks, and have had their threads overrun with new players lately. People who don't understand that Legacy cards need to be at a certain power level and that new set time isn't a time of frenzied brewing like in Standard, but really a time to ignore or to lament years gone by.
Eventually people will learn, or they'll lose a lot, or they'll go play casual. It will sort itself out with time, but I have to admit that I'm one of those people who gets really annoyed when people bring up cards like Galvanic Bombardment and ask how it will affect Burn going forward. I try to be patient with them though.
That said. I've never been overly tolerant of budget brews, I know what it's like to play on a budget but my opinion is that buying budget substitutes just puts you further away from owning the cards that make a deck competitive and different formats have different minimum buy ins. If you can't handle the mana bases of Legacy, then don't play it until you can, whether that's through buying real cards, buying fakes and passing them off as real, or through playing proxies.
The moral of the story is that while I'm pretty sure I handled this encounter the best I possibly could, this is not always true of every encounter a new player has when they meet a Legacy player for the first time. And I've had other encounters where I could have probably chosen to put more effort into it than I did. It's an intimidating format with an intimidating barrier to entry. Not every Legacy player exercises the same amount of caution in situations similar to mine, and some are downright jerks, though they tend to be few and far between. However, Legacy's pool of players is smaller, and as a result, jerks tend to be more noticeable, particularly when they play into perceived stereotypes of Legacy players being elitest. Overall though, most of us aer always excited to see new players that have the skill and desire to break through a very tough entry barrier to play.
This happened to me about 1.5 years ago. Our local shop put together a Legacy event and a few of us brought real decks, mine aren't the expensive decks but they're still real, I was playing Burn. I felt really bad and realized talking the store owner into this tournament was a bad idea when my T1 opponent was Goblins... but not the actual Goblins deck, just random Goblins topped off by Krenko. Needless to say, I felt pretty bad about the whole thing when a guy I know won the tournament with Reanimator, in most games for Iona locking people out of the game with their all basic manabases.
The biggest reason i'm playing legacy right now is that i've had three modern decks banned out from under me. I wish I could afford dual lands, but wizards has seen to that, so DnT forever it is.
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Legacy
Death and Taxes Pauper
UB Teachings
Tortured Existence
Murasa Tron Modern
Pod (RIP)
Bloom(RIP)
Merfolk
The biggest reason i'm playing legacy right now is that i've had three modern decks banned out from under me. I wish I could afford dual lands, but wizards has seen to that, so DnT forever it is.
Not a bad choice, DnT is a lot more fun than many decks with duals!
Every Legacy player I've personally met has been very friendly. I don't play much anymore, but years ago when I first got into the format I built some budget mono B decks to try out. My opponents had tier 1 decks but we still had good games and I learned a lot. Everyone was supportive and I got some advice but nothing overbearing. I got addicted to the format and quickly built some better decks but the awesomeness of my (now sadly defunct) Legacy community stuck with me.
I'd say 90% of my bad experiences in Magic have been with Standard, the other 10% Modern.
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Legacy W Death and Taxes W U Merfolk U GWR Enchantress GWR WUG BantWUG
The biggest reason i'm playing legacy right now is that i've had three modern decks banned out from under me. I wish I could afford dual lands, but wizards has seen to that, so DnT forever it is.
Not a bad choice, DnT is a lot more fun than many decks with duals!
Every Legacy player I've personally met has been very friendly. I don't play much anymore, but years ago when I first got into the format I built some budget mono B decks to try out. My opponents had tier 1 decks but we still had good games and I learned a lot. Everyone was supportive and I got some advice but nothing overbearing. I got addicted to the format and quickly built some better decks but the awesomeness of my (now sadly defunct) Legacy community stuck with me.
I'd say 90% of my bad experiences in Magic have been with Standard, the other 10% Modern.
Yeah, i've had the deck for about a year, and it's nice actually getting to have decent mana denial.
My horrible experiences with magic have been EDH or kitchen table magic.
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Legacy
Death and Taxes Pauper
UB Teachings
Tortured Existence
Murasa Tron Modern
Pod (RIP)
Bloom(RIP)
Merfolk
spidernova, DnT was one of the decks I was seriously interested in. Can you tell me a bit about your experiences with it?
Sure. You don't really have any horrible matchups aside from elves, elves is really really bad, if you lock out the combo, they just make a billion elves, and if you start going after their creatures,you get hoofed. Your mana denial plan is strong, and your fair game is decent. Jitte outright wins creature matchups if it connects once. Vial is my favorite magic card ever. Generally name Deathrite on a revoker, if you have to play it totally blind. Karakas is really really good, espcially with a thalia and vial. Flickerwisp is also really sweet. Deck plays like a control deck more than midrange, pass turn, eot vial. Get your vial activation priority right, and don't ever let someone cheat you out of something after they said vial activation resolved. Mulling is hard too, all of the hands you draw tend to look mediocre at absolute worst. You hardcast batterskull a lot more than you would think. The big goal is to keep your opponent from winning, after that, you kind of win incidentally. Take it slow, you are a control deck, not an aggro deck. Casting catacyslm against miracles or Jund feels super good.
Deck has a few weaknesses tho. You don't really auto-win anything, and you can't make mistakes ever, as you don't have brainstorm to dig you out of holes. You also can draw the wrong half of the deck sometimes. I don't want my mirran crusaders against storm, and my thalias aren't fantastic against Jund.
Deck is tier1 good, but you need to play it really tight, and sometimes you just lose particular games through no fault of your own.
Ideally the progression is
T1 vial
T2 waste+path/port/thalia, eot vial in mom
t3 two drop/mana denial, eot vial in revoker/sfm/thalia/serra
t4, keep up mana denial, start beating face
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Legacy
Death and Taxes Pauper
UB Teachings
Tortured Existence
Murasa Tron Modern
Pod (RIP)
Bloom(RIP)
Merfolk
Can confirm, D&T is a strong deck with the exception of Elves. Friend of mine has it built and plays it well. As a TES pilot, I have to outrun him or have the discard to answer Thalia. I don't like losing dice rolls against it. G1 is probably 60/40 my favor, with games 2 and 3 swinging the other direction; he gets some sideboarding action and my best course is to stay on the outrunning him plan. Overall, we probably go 50/50, but we've played so many times we don't practice the matchup much anymore. If you like modern Fish, you'll probably enjoy Legacy D&T. Ports have been on the rise lately, I'd make it as point to grab them first.
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Legacy: TES
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
I'm a big fan of the Legacy format, and am getting into it with a fun deck. What I've been seeing when I go to other forums that discuss the format (like reddit's /r/mtglegacy) is a fair bit of disdain (and in some cases outright hatred) of new players who don't have the money to drop on physical copies of pricey staples. A lot of, "if you're poor then you shouldn't play Legacy", "come back when you get a real job", and "the high price keeps out the whiny kids".
I mean, I'm sure there are people like that. I'm just curious if it's a widespread belief in the Legacy community, or if it's just a couple of ********s.
Thoughts?
I wish the price didn't keep people away quite as much as it does because I think new players are a great way to keep the format alive. For me, Legacy is the perfect balance between old and new cards without the Vintage mana ramp, and therefore without as many turn 1 combos. Legacy has been a very rewarding format to play as I have been learning so much and seeing my practice pay off as I learn the best ways to play my decks in the diverse metagame.
What kind of deck are you making? I'd be happy to discuss the Legacy meta, important skills to have for the format, and even deck specifics, if you'd like. Just send me message!
In my experience, this is only happens online. Slap together a deck that isn't tier 1 or 2? Receive disdain. Then someone with a tier 1/2 deck loses they'll blame the budget players/unformed meta.
In real life, if you're not a known thief, legacy players will bend backwards to lend you cards so that you can play. Hell, if you're well known you'll be lent entire decks. Attend a tournament, see 3/4ths of the deck as homebrews and obvious budget choices, often being played by people who attend one or two tournemants a year so it's quite likely they're not up to date with trends. It's all good.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
As for the disdain bit, I'll just leave you with this quote from a real Legacy player (name withheld, but if you want to confirm that I'm not making this up, you can PM me and I'll send you a link):
| Ad Nauseam
| Infect
Big Johnny.
Not saying Legacy is doomed or anything, just the costs of many legacy staples in paper are pretty high for a single card, making "legacy" EDH more a thing for newcomers than the traditional 60 card staple format of the bygone years.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Which is why I was asking if it was a widespread belief or an isolated event.
There's no need to be so rude.
In fact, looking through your comment history it seems you are one of the very people I was talking about.
Regardless, thank you for your input.
Eretoryi, I'll definitely take you up on your offer and PM you some time. I greatly appreciate that.
mondu_the_fat, izzetmage, STsung, Colt47, motleyslayer - thank you all for sharing your thoughts on the community and the format. That seems more in line with what I've been told the community it like.
I'm between rounds and doing pretty well, so I'm chatting with some of the new faces that have shown up at the store, looking to see if anyone wants to trade, blah blah blah. And I end up talking to this dude who asks me what formats I play and I mention Legacy. He's instantly like "OH MAN, I LOVE legacy!" So I ask him if he's got a deck and wants to throw down real quick, I'm pretty excited to meet another Legacy player! Dude is like "sure!" and pulls out a doublesleeved deck, and I'm thinking "oh man, double sleeved, bet I'm gonna get to see some dope stuff, cool!"
So we sit down to play our game, and I'm playing TES, which, for those of you unfamiliar, is basically the faster cousin of ANT, a storm based combo deck that is fairly complex to the uninitiated. And I open up my 7, and it's a pretty strong 7, the kind that goes T1 make you discard your countermagic, T2 kill you. You basically need a handful of countermagic to not die on T2.
He gets to go first, and throws down a basic 4th edition Island, which I find a little strange. What decks runs a basic island out T1? Fish I guess? Is he one of those guys with a foiled out Fish deck and playing beat up 4th edition islands because they think it's funny? He taps it and throws down a Merfolk of the Pearl Trident. Ok, so I guess it is Fish, but why is he playing Pearl Trident? Budget version and maybe Merfolk of the Pearl is his 4th Cursecatcher he hasn't picked up yet? No matter, I stop trying to think too much about it, I'll know all my answers will come when I fire off the Duress.
I start my turn and draw a Cabal Therapy, the perfect card to followup my Duress with on my combo turn! I play a Polluted Delta and think a little about breaking it into Underground Sea and walking into Wasteland, but I decide even if I do, it's not going to stop me from going off, and if he does have wasteland to drop, that means he can't cast Spell Pierce if he happens to have multiple countermagic, so I'm actually OK with this. Plus I want to know what he's playing. I crack the Delta into the Sea, and fire off the Duress.
It is as Duress resolves I realize what a horrible misunderstanding has transpired here and what an awkward position I'm now in.
The Duress shows me 4 more islands like the first, a Flight, and two other highly forgettable blue cards. It then dawns on me as I look as his hand that his cards aren't doublesleeved, this is just a 100+ card deck. Oh. Crap.
My new Legacy player has confused "Legacy- the Competitive Format" with "Legacy-the Kitchen Table Format Where Anything Goes and You Can Play All Your Old Cards"
My choices now get super awkward. I have a turn to think about my options which are as follows:
1) I can go ahead and fire off a complex combo involving rules this guy probably does not understand, like holding priority as I cast Infernal Tutor and crack Lion's Eye Diamond in response, while I dig up Ad Nauseum and fire off Burning Wish and retrieve the kill card (Tendrils of Agony) from outside the frikking game (well, sideboard anyway). This would straight up would look like flat out cheating to someone who's never been exposed to Magic on this level and has no clue what's going on and is now dead.
2) I can throw the game and let him win. Trouble here is that TES doesn't really do much aside from the handful of discard spells until it just flat out kills you. And at the rate this guy's deck is moving, it's going to become pretty obvious I'm throwing the game, which is super patronizing. That Merfolk of the Pearl is gonna take a while to get there. If he becomes aware, this might be a worse option and the longer the game goes the more likely he is to realize I'm punting it. There's not a real good way for me to look like I'm putting up a fight.
There's not a real good way of handling this without coming off as condescending and I didn't want to be a negative experience at this guy's prerelease. As he passed turn back to me (island, cast flight on Merfolk, attack for 1), I figured I owed the guy the respect to die the same way I'd kill anyone else with that hand. So I took a deep breath and preface my turn with an apology, and an explanation that there had been a misunderstanding, that there is a format called Legacy, that it was highly competitive, and that I was going to proceed through a combo turn and kill him this turn, but I figured he'd rather I do that then let him win or something. He agreed and I walked him through the combo slowly enough. He was still confused at the end of it, but at least didn't think I was cheating. I helped him tweak his sealed pool a little and gave him some general tips, which he seemed to appreciate, and that was the last I ever saw of the guy.
The moral of the story is that while I'm pretty sure I handled this encounter the best I possibly could, this is not always true of every encounter a new player has when they meet a Legacy player for the first time. And I've had other encounters where I could have probably chosen to put more effort into it than I did. It's an intimidating format with an intimidating barrier to entry. Not every Legacy player exercises the same amount of caution in situations similar to mine, and some are downright jerks, though they tend to be few and far between. However, Legacy's pool of players is smaller, and as a result, jerks tend to be more noticeable, particularly when they play into perceived stereotypes of Legacy players being elitest. Overall though, most of us aer always excited to see new players that have the skill and desire to break through a very tough entry barrier to play.
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
Two addenda to the above. First, I've been in a similar situation to Ebonclaw before, though this was in a tournament and I didn't feel quite as bad about it. I was playing Spanish Inquisition, which is a turn 1 kill storm deck, against someone playing some kind of Boros aggro list. He was pretty good natured about it and actually got a game off of me by Lightning Helixing my face at one point, but was pretty clearly confused by what I was doing. There really wasn't a good way for me to act in that situation (but again, tournament setting is still a very different animal). The best thing I can do is try and make sure he's following my plays, but it's still a weird thing to watch if you've never seen a similar deck.
Second, I'm guessing that the attitude described in the OP isn't taking an issue with people not buying the cards, but with people not buying the cards who feel that it's their god-given right to play legacy. I'll admit that the sense of entitlement from some people does rub me the wrong way at times. I understand that legacy decks are expensive, but there are still ways into the format if you're really interested. Plenty of legacy players have large collections and can loan out cards, there are decks that use smaller numbers of expensive cards, and it's possible to save up for the cards (though I admit that this is becoming less true of some of them, particularly the reserved list ones that have gone through the roof in the last couple years). I think it would be great if everyone interested in the format could play it and would welcome steps in that direction (reserved list is stupid, don't mind playing against proxies, will help with budget considerations and the like where I can) but that's not the reality of the game right now. I love working with new players or potential new players who understand that legacy is an expensive format full of old cards and are willing to work with that. I have no patience for the people who want to own a tier 1 deck for the price of a standard deck and are unwilling to take smaller steps to get into the format.
I'm trying really hard to keep this post from sounding like one of the people described in the OP, because that's not how I feel about it. I'm just trying to explain where some of that sentiment could be coming from.
I also think it's important to differentiate the responses you'll get. To clarify, in my local area, people (myself included) will give eachother ***** over running Theros basics in Death & Taxes or jokingly criticize some foiling choice in a pimped deck. But if you're just getting into the format? The goal is to welcome you and have you come back. If you're curious and don't have deck, you probably have your choice of a half dozen that people will gladly lend. If you're trying to find a cheap way to buy in, people will focus on helping you find that in a way that can be competitive (for example, I still tell people about a budget miracles player from the GPTs for SeaTac who was running 1 Hallowed Fountain, 2 Prairie Stream, and 4 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy instead of Tundras and Jace the Mind Sculptor -- He was consistently doing well when I watched him play and Top 8'd trials without issue).
At the end of the day, Legacy is a format that has an older crowd who just wants to get along and enjoy their more limited free time. To do that, we need newer players to try the format and have a positive experience in doing so.
EDIT: On a related note, you (and anyone else interested in the format) should venture on down to our Legacy forum
Body Count: GRRRUUUUUUUUUUU
إن سرقت إسرق جمل
Level 1 Judge
My Cube for use with 6th ed. Rules
Eventually people will learn, or they'll lose a lot, or they'll go play casual. It will sort itself out with time, but I have to admit that I'm one of those people who gets really annoyed when people bring up cards like Galvanic Bombardment and ask how it will affect Burn going forward. I try to be patient with them though.
That said. I've never been overly tolerant of budget brews, I know what it's like to play on a budget but my opinion is that buying budget substitutes just puts you further away from owning the cards that make a deck competitive and different formats have different minimum buy ins. If you can't handle the mana bases of Legacy, then don't play it until you can, whether that's through buying real cards, buying fakes and passing them off as real, or through playing proxies.
This happened to me about 1.5 years ago. Our local shop put together a Legacy event and a few of us brought real decks, mine aren't the expensive decks but they're still real, I was playing Burn. I felt really bad and realized talking the store owner into this tournament was a bad idea when my T1 opponent was Goblins... but not the actual Goblins deck, just random Goblins topped off by Krenko. Needless to say, I felt pretty bad about the whole thing when a guy I know won the tournament with Reanimator, in most games for Iona locking people out of the game with their all basic manabases.
Death and Taxes
Pauper
UB Teachings
Tortured Existence
Murasa Tron
Modern
Pod (RIP)
Bloom(RIP)
Merfolk
Not a bad choice, DnT is a lot more fun than many decks with duals!
Every Legacy player I've personally met has been very friendly. I don't play much anymore, but years ago when I first got into the format I built some budget mono B decks to try out. My opponents had tier 1 decks but we still had good games and I learned a lot. Everyone was supportive and I got some advice but nothing overbearing. I got addicted to the format and quickly built some better decks but the awesomeness of my (now sadly defunct) Legacy community stuck with me.
I'd say 90% of my bad experiences in Magic have been with Standard, the other 10% Modern.
W Death and Taxes W
U Merfolk U
GWR Enchantress GWR
WUG BantWUG
Yeah, i've had the deck for about a year, and it's nice actually getting to have decent mana denial.
My horrible experiences with magic have been EDH or kitchen table magic.
Death and Taxes
Pauper
UB Teachings
Tortured Existence
Murasa Tron
Modern
Pod (RIP)
Bloom(RIP)
Merfolk
Sure. You don't really have any horrible matchups aside from elves, elves is really really bad, if you lock out the combo, they just make a billion elves, and if you start going after their creatures,you get hoofed. Your mana denial plan is strong, and your fair game is decent. Jitte outright wins creature matchups if it connects once. Vial is my favorite magic card ever. Generally name Deathrite on a revoker, if you have to play it totally blind. Karakas is really really good, espcially with a thalia and vial. Flickerwisp is also really sweet. Deck plays like a control deck more than midrange, pass turn, eot vial. Get your vial activation priority right, and don't ever let someone cheat you out of something after they said vial activation resolved. Mulling is hard too, all of the hands you draw tend to look mediocre at absolute worst. You hardcast batterskull a lot more than you would think. The big goal is to keep your opponent from winning, after that, you kind of win incidentally. Take it slow, you are a control deck, not an aggro deck. Casting catacyslm against miracles or Jund feels super good.
Deck has a few weaknesses tho. You don't really auto-win anything, and you can't make mistakes ever, as you don't have brainstorm to dig you out of holes. You also can draw the wrong half of the deck sometimes. I don't want my mirran crusaders against storm, and my thalias aren't fantastic against Jund.
Deck is tier1 good, but you need to play it really tight, and sometimes you just lose particular games through no fault of your own.
Ideally the progression is
T1 vial
T2 waste+path/port/thalia, eot vial in mom
t3 two drop/mana denial, eot vial in revoker/sfm/thalia/serra
t4, keep up mana denial, start beating face
Death and Taxes
Pauper
UB Teachings
Tortured Existence
Murasa Tron
Modern
Pod (RIP)
Bloom(RIP)
Merfolk
Thanks for sharing your experiences with the deck. I'll definitely keep what you said in mind when I consider what to start with.
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave