The title of this thread may have been intentionally exaggerated to grab your attention; there's no guarantee that Wizards will actually ever implement the much-discussed "Eternal" (i.e. "No Reserved List Legacy") format, and they have indicated that they have no such plans to do so at this time.
Buuuuut... there are a number of good reasons why they might (and many strongly believe that they SHOULD) do so in the future.
The Reserve List has created an untenable situation with regards to Legacy and Vintage, but particularly with regards to Legacy. A whole lot of ink has been spilled regarding whether or not we should even keep the Reserved List to begin with (I personally think it's time to do away with it, or at least REVISE it, personally), but this thread isn't really about that, and in any event it appears that for the time being the Reserved List isn't going anywhere.
We all know the score; there is a finite and ever-decreasing supply of expensive Reserved List staple cards that need to satisfy an ever-growing demand for those cards, which has been further exacerbated by the recent phenomenon of panic and profit-driven buyouts. The logical economic consequence is that the price of those staple cards is going to continue to rise, and eventually those staples (especially the original Dual Lands) are going to be too expensive to sustain the Legacy format as it currently exists.
Let's not mince words: Legacy as it currently exists is already dying; sooner rather than later it's essentially going to be Vintage--an esoteric and financially unattainable format for pretty much all but the most established of players. An Unlimited Underground Sea now costs as much as an Unlimited Mox Sapphire or Mox Jet did just a few years ago. Wizards knows all of this, which is why they effectively no longer support the format (hell, a few years ago there was a Legacy PRO TOUR; now it's a rare day where there's even a Legacy Grand Prix.)
This is going to be a major problem for a lot of players, because once Legacy is no longer supported, effectively speaking every card printed before 8th Edition is going to be completely irrelevant unless your plan is to play the non-supported Legacy or Vintage format. That is going to make a ton of people unhappy; make no mistake, this is different than not being able to play Vintage because you weren't able to snag a singleton set of the Power 9; Legacy has a far broader appeal than Vintage.
Many would like to see Wizards do something about all of this, but here's the issue: Wizards ISN'T about to do away with the Reserved List. A discussion about the merits of the Reserved List is not the premise of this thread.
What IS the premise othen? It's this: When it comes time for Wizards to replace Legacy with a viable "Eternal" format that keeps the general premise of Legacy intact--minus the Reserved List, which, again, isn't going anywhere--HOW are they going to do it?
Admittedly, there isn't any particularly elegant solution.
The most obvious and oft-discussed means of creating the format would be to just add the "Reserved List" to the existing Legacy Banned and Restricted list; there are two pretty significant issues with this:
(1) This makes the B&R list completely unwieldy; it would either be hundreds of cards long with significant portions of certain sets--particularly any pre-Tempest set--not legal in the format by virtue of being on the Reserved List; the alternative would be to simply include a clause on the B&R list referencing the Reserved List, which is equally unhelpful.
(2) It doesn't create a particularly good B&R list anyway, because the removal of Reserved List cards from the format (Dual Lands, Lion's Eye Diamond, Gaea's Cradle, etc.) will necessarily make "Eternal" a different, slightly less busted format than Legacy. There would have to be a series of subsequent bannings and unbannings to remedy this issue.
To me (and this is just my opinion) the best way to created "Eternal" would be to just build the format from the ground up.
The first and obvious step would be to make Mercadian Masques, Invasion, Odyssey, and Onslaught Blocks, as well as Sixth and Seventh Editions, format-legal in "Eternal". None of these sets have any Reserved List cards, and all of them are somewhat in line with Wizards' current set design principles.
From there the question is how to get the other format-relevant and viably playable cards from the pre-Masques sets into the format. Certainly part of it should be a function of a more liberal reprint policy (something Wizards should be doing anyway), but many of the older cards would be far too powerful for Standard and/or Modern.
A more streamlined approach might be to continue the Eternal Masters series--to my knowledge Wizards has been mum about whether Eternal Masters was intended as a one-off or if they would be alternating it biennially with the Modern Masters series--and to make Eternal Masters and its sequels "Eternal"-legal, as these sets would not contain any Reserved List cards.
An added benefit: Wizards can keep the "Eternal" B&R list short with this approach by picking and choosing which cards to reprint; as far as I can tell the only cards reprinted in Eternal Masters that are not currently Legacy-legal were Balance, Mystical Tutor, Necropotence, Vampiric Tutor, and Mana Crypt. All of those cards would ostensibly be banned in "Eternal", perhaps with the exception of Mystical Tutor, which was a controversial banning in Legacy to begin with, and future iterations of Eternal Masters would not include banned cards. While this would mean Wizards wouldn't be reprinting Mana Drain, Demonic Tutor, and a handful of other expensive EDH/Vintage staples, they could accomplish these reprints through other avenues such as promotional cards.
I think Wizards could more or less reprint all of the format-relevant, Pre-Masques cards, and thereby introduce them into the "Eternal" format, within one or two 249-card sets, provided that those sets don't include too much junky draft filler. No conspicuous omissions from the original Eternal Masters come to mind off the top of my head, even with the amount of chaff that they printed in that set's common slots. Looking over the spoiler lists from the Pre-Masques sets, there are only a handful of cards in each that see so much as fringe Legacy play anyway.
Anyways, I'm just spitballing, and I feel like I've been rambling long enough. The tl;dr version of what I'm suggesting:
(1) The Reserved List has made Legacy an untenable format in the long run, and Wizards will eventually stop supporting it entirely, just as they have Vintage;
(2) Wizards should replace Legacy with "Eternal", a.k.a. "No Reserved List Legacy";
(3) Simply adding the Reserved List to the existing Legacy banned list is an unwieldy and inelegant way of going about this;
(4) All expansions starting with Mercadian Masques, and all core sets starting with Sixth Edition, should be "Eternal" legal by virtue of having zero Reserved List cards;
(5) The remaining format-relevant cards should be introduced via a series of biennial Eternal Masters reprint sets, starting with Eternal Masters, which should be made format-legal as its own set.
This is basically taking a lot of what makes Legacy "Legacy" and removing it. It's not so much the loss of the duals, the format could move on without that, but the loss of a handful of other cards needed for Legacy's most prominent archetypes to exist. No more Cradle. This makes Elves much worse. Goodbye Tabernacle. Lands needs this card to be a deck. Goodbye LED and with it most Storm based decks get a serious powerdown to the point where even if they could continue existing, unimpacted decks would just crush them into the ground. For example, Death and Taxes would be mostly unaffected by this. Actually, D&T might get MORE expensive due to the fact that it basically won't get any powerdown from this proposal, and instead be positioned as one of the top contenders; it's already very good and wouldn't take any power hit whatsoever. Even fringe decks would take major hits, Enchantress would have to make do without Serra's Sanctum, for example. High Tide would lose candlesticks and Time Spiral. MUD loses Grim Monolith, Metalworker, and City of Traitors, which Show and Tell decks also lose.
You would seriously wreck many major pillars of the format, while barely touching others, which would cause their prices to explode. Basically, you would HAVE to rebuild Legacy from the ground up with the B&R list ever expanding over the course of the next several years, so you'd see even more players getting their decks banned.
What you're left with, even after a rebuild, would be Modern with some cards like Stoneforge that will probably end up getting banned until the format looks so close to Modern, why even have it?
If WoTC stops supporting Legacy (like the haven't already), Legacy will not go quietly into the night like Vintage, there's far more players who have far more decks comprised of many more cards that exist than people who have the Power Vintage requires as a prerequisite. You can play Legacy without duals (MUD, Burn, High Tide, D&T), you can play Legacy without LED (decks that are #notstorm), you can play Legacy without a lot of things. But you don't have the luxury to not have a Lotus in Vintage, or some Moxen, or Ancestral Recall in the vast majority of cases. No, Legacy going the same way as vintage is not a good comparison, think about the number of staples that you can choose to go after that exist compared to the print run of Lotus, or other ABU vintage staples that nearly every deck plays. Now think about the number of players Legacy has compared to the number Vintage has and realize how many people would have to part with their cards for the numbers to get that low. Legacy might be in danger of losing formal support from WoTC but again, it's not like that support existed anyway. You'd still have plenty of the Legacy events that the players that exist already enjoy, even if they are spread out and not as common as standard.....but just try and find a Vintage tournament.
The format isn't in danger of collapsing or dying overnight or anything, it's just in danger of not growing anymore. While this is a problem, it's not the same thing as Legacy being on the verge of extinction or anything. Realistically, what will happen is absolutely nothing. The players who play Legacy will continue to do so, the players who don't will have a large barrier to entry and that will be that.
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Legacy: TES
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
I'm not at all against this format, but this needs to be said: this format will be NOTHING like Legacy, and people need to accept that from the start. This is a totally different format, and an alternative to the doomed fate of any format in which the reserved list exists. So yes, the loss of certain RL staples from Legacy is unfortunate, but the way I see it is that they're just a sunk cost. There's nothing we can do about it.
Support for this format has to come without any tie to Legacy whatsoever. Eternal won't be touted as "new Legacy" and it won't be a "Legacy Lite" format. It's just an eventuality caused by the RL bubble that benefits any players joining the format immediately (since "Eternal" is not necessarily needed right now, but will be later on). All that said, and in case it's not obvious, I'm in for the ride.
I suggest you go on reddit, /r/mtgeternal, and read about the format you're proposing.
The subreddit went from birth to death of the format rather quickly. You'll see why ''Eternal'' is not a good plan and how/why the project was a failure and should never live. Go read everything.
And before you answer that it isn't, take a look a the earliest discussions for modern. It was meant to be the "eternal format without the reserve list, sixth/masques ed upwards, with it's own banned list."
Wizards took the format the community was brewing, said "nope" then moved the entire thing upward to 8th rather than 6th.
I disagree with the above assessments, to the extent that "Eternal" would essentially be Modern or the originally proposed "Overextended" that went back to Masques/Sixth, because that's not what I was proposing--I'm proposing ultimately reprinting every Legacy-relevant card going back to Alpha that isn't on the Reserved List--and therefore the card pool would be much deeper and far more robust, with many of the format-defining cards of Legacy that would not be included in either of those formats--Brainstorm, Swords to Plowshares, Force of Will, Wasteland, etc.-- not to mention numerous cards that underpin or at least make viable entire strategies that aren't currently viable in Modern--Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Stoneforge Mystic, Dark Depths, Entomb, Sneak Attack, Show and Tell, Natural Order, Karakas, suddenly present in the format.
Sure--it's not going to be the SAME format as current Legacy; I acknowledged as much in my original post. Some very powerful cards will be removed from the format; there will be less fast mana and no-strings-attached Dual Lands will not be a thing. Those are significant changes. But some of the fundamental things you can do in Legacy, indeed the three defining and arguably format-warping features of the format: Stone Raining somebody for free (Wasteland), "drawing three" cards for one blue mana (Brainstorm + Fetchland), and counterspelling while tapped out (Force of Will) are still intact. Also, Counterspell proper will be a thing in this format; Modern does not have a way to say "no" with no strings attached as early as turn 2.
That having been said, all of the above-mentioned decks that supposedly get nerfed by the omission of one critical card (Elves, Lands, Enchantress, High Tide, MUD--pretty much every deck mentioned not called Storm) are (a) tier 2 or 3 in Legacy at best, and (b) are not necessarily "dead". I think this is especially true with Storm, which will still have a litany of fast mana and cantrips at its disposal.
The format on the whole will probably be a bit slower, but speed isn't really the hallmark of Legacy anyway--it's the interactive nature of the format and the completely busted things you can do with a massive card pool that stands out.
Modern is a non-interactive format where all that really matters at the end of the day is matchups and sideboard cards, and most of the decks don't particularly care about what the other deck is doing; the split is 40/40/20 Aggro/Control/Combo in Legacy; it's 60/20/20 in Modern; the two formats are fundamentally different and simply removing Dual Lands, Gaea's Cradle, Lion's Eye Diamond, and a few other cards isn't going to make the one exactly like the other.
The two biggest beneficiaries that I can identify in the "Eternal" landscape are Burn and Death and Taxes, which lose absolutely nothing and arguably gain in an environment where the next-best Dual Land analogues are the Shocklands. Both decks are mono-colored and not particularly hard to hate out. Miracles won't be quite as good without honest-to-god Dual Lands, but the general strategy will be intact. Ditto Infect, Delver, and Stoneblade variants--basically the top tier Legacy strategies at the moment.
I'm just curious... the /r/MTGEternal started with a lot of the same assumptions that you have. They playtested the format. They did the math, they spent the time, they theorized but also went for actual practices and testing. Yet their response was, for the vast majority, a failure.
What have you actually played/tested, and why/what exactly are you disagreeing (on) interpretations/results different from those present on /r/MTGEternal, who I assume at least had the same time investment as you did toward Eternal format?
I'm not at all against this format, but this needs to be said: this format will be NOTHING like Legacy, and people need to accept that from the start. This is a totally different format, and an alternative to the doomed fate of any format in which the reserved list exists. So yes, the loss of certain RL staples from Legacy is unfortunate, but the way I see it is that they're just a sunk cost. There's nothing we can do about it.
Support for this format has to come without any tie to Legacy whatsoever. Eternal won't be touted as "new Legacy" and it won't be a "Legacy Lite" format. It's just an eventuality caused by the RL bubble that benefits any players joining the format immediately (since "Eternal" is not necessarily needed right now, but will be later on). All that said, and in case it's not obvious, I'm in for the ride.
I agree with this post, because I wasn't suggesting otherwise to begin with. Nobody is insinuating it's going to be the same format, but it still solves a huge problem, which is that outside of one exorbitantly expensive format that nobody can afford to play--Vintage--and another soon-to-be exorbitantly expensive format that nobody can afford to play--Vintage--there is no way to play with a large number of relatively cheap but nonetheless super fun and powerful cards printed before 8th Edition that are still widely in circulation and could continue to be in circulation because they're not on the Reserved List.
I'm just curious... the /r/MTGEternal started with a lot of the same assumptions that you have. They playtested the format. They did the math, they spent the time, they theorized but also went for actual practices and testing. Yet their response was, for the vast majority, a failure.
What have you actually played/tested, and why/what exactly are you disagreeing (on) interpretations/results different from those present on /r/MTGEternal, who I assume at least had the same time investment as you did toward Eternal format?
Why am I disagreeing with the experts at Reddit? Probably because a few dudes spittballing on Reddit does not a format make? And also, because I don't actually read Reddit, and don't particularly care what a few people on Reddit have to say.
But browsing at the SubReddit you linked, it does not look particularly well-trafficked or representative of anything. To the extent that it is, the complaints generally don't seem to have anything to do with playability, but rather with cost and "branding". In the former respect, "cost" will always necessarily be an issue with ACTUAL Legacy; branding is another thing entirely--nothing will ever live up to Legacy, which many people believe is the greatest format of all time--but Modern is divisive and if when Legacy becomes unobtainable to pretty much all players because of the exorbitant cost, a format where you can play with a bunch of old, powerful cards except for the ones that didn't get reprinted due to an arbitrary list based on collection value is going to be wildly popular.
I WOULD ALSO IMPLORE EVERYONE TO GET BACK ON TOPIC; THE ISSUE ISN'T WHETHER ***IF*** THIS FORMAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN, OR WHY IT SHOULD/SHOULDN'T HAPPEN, BUT RATHER, ASSUMING IT ***IS*** GOING TO HAPPEN, ***HOW*** WIZARDS GOES ABOUT MAKING IT HAPPEN.
You probably would have to ban wasteland and price of progress in this format. When you tack a bolt onto your waste, that gets free wins,especially in a grindy format.
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Legacy
Death and Taxes Pauper
UB Teachings
Tortured Existence
Murasa Tron Modern
Pod (RIP)
Bloom(RIP)
Merfolk
You probably would have to ban wasteland and price of progress in this format. When you tack a bolt onto your waste, that gets free wins,especially in a grindy format.
Until we completely write this format off, could we at least reach a consensus re: whether it's a "grindy" format, or just a different iteration of Modern--aka the least grindy format ever?
And I don't necessarily think they'd need to ban Wasteland or PoP. I think most of the 3-color decks with heavy non-basic lands will be base-blue (unlike in Modern) with base-black or heavily black (Jund(k)) as the other popular option; both of those colors can deal with PoP. As for Wasteland, it will be format defining but not format warping; adversity breeds innovation and while Wasteland will be incredibly powerful, I see the mana bases adapting enough that it's a borderline ban case at worst.
The whole idea of this format seems completely superfluous. Depending on your viewpoint, it's either neutered Legacy or slightly upgraded Modern. Personally, I'm just not interested.
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Can you name all of the creature types with at least 20 cards? Try my Sporcle Quiz! Last Updated: 6/29/20 (Core Set 2021).
You want to talk about HOW this would be done IF conceived?
1) After the creation of this format, whether it's born from a torn-down Legacy, or is a new format in addition TO legacy, I imagine more than a few people will probably just take their Modern decks and go try out the format with a couple of swaps (hey, we can play Stoneforge Mystic and Deathrite Shaman!). We'll see some of Legacy's traditional decks go extinct, or lose unacceptable levels of power while others are unaffected, or Modern decks gain access to more powerful tools. A new banlist will need to be enacted and examined. Stoneforge is probably one of the best legal cards in this format, as is Deathrite Shaman- these are Reserved list caliber cards (well, the GOOD part of the RL anyway), with power levels approaching, or even equaling cards like Cradle and Tabernacle. People will be looking to play decks that utilize these card.
2) I would expect that we'd see several periods of banlist adjustments, similar to what Modern went through. This is what turned a lot of people off of Modern initially, including myself. "Why do I want to make a new deck when every time I do they ban cards from it, when I could be sinking my money into Legacy, for a few dollars, not run the risk of a deck getting banned to unplayability, and on top of that, the cards I'm buying are guaranteed to never be reprinted? A lot of players thought like I did and GP Richmond marked the end of "reasonably priced" duals. If you look at every dual land, they all take the same sharp price hike at GP Richmond as Modern finally began to really take off- Modern staples were in demand enough that they were worth as much as duals. Players realized that at GP Richmond, the market corrected, and duals shot up.
3) While RL cards would drop (yay, EDH players!) the price of other cards would increase without additional supply being injected. Now Modern, NonRL eternal, and traditional Legacy all want Snapcaster Mage, or Thoughtseize or Tarmogoyf for example. These are the new "RL" priced cards, at least until further supply is injected. We've learned that WoTC wants to walk a line between being able to reprint cards without completely tanking their value, and that's a fine goal, but it also means the best we can hope for is that a given card goes up for reprint once a year in an MMA type set.
4) This is all assuming that despite the fact many players experienced frustration as the decks they built kept getting banned, they stuck with the format and didn't just switch back to playing Modern or traditional Legacy. Most of the traditional Legacy players are either going to stick with the format where they can play duals, or play Modern additionally, but I can't see them choosing to play Legacy, an unstable version of Legacy without the best stuff, AND Modern (which is at least stable and has its own distinct meta). I can see them playing Legacy, or Legacy and Modern, but I think there would be a much smaller number that would choose to add "non RL Legacy" to their decklists. And I assume traditional Legacy would not be dropped from the roster because this proposal is meant to drive down the demand/price of RL cards and "save" Legacy to begin with. Otherwise, you're killing off Legacy to do what, make cheap duals for EDH players and kithen table players, a good chunk of which use proxies anyway? Besides, this gets back into the "you shouldn't kill one format to benefit another" argument. So now you'd have Legacy, non-RL Legacy, Modern, and Standard. Three non-rotating formats is a little overkill and I think all three would suffer as a result. But anyway, if you wanted to do it- you'd have to get a stable format, you'd have to figure out how to cope with the increased cost of certain cards placed on them by being needed for ANOTHER format, and you'd have to figure out how to not make this format come across as "broken modern" OR "underpowered Legacy". It would need a distinct metagame that wasn't dominated exclusively by being able to play a handful of broken, but not RL cards that you can't access in Modern.
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Legacy: TES
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
(1) The Reserved List has made Legacy an untenable format in the long run, and Wizards will eventually stop supporting it entirely, just as they have Vintage;
(2) Wizards should replace Legacy with "Eternal", a.k.a. "No Reserved List Legacy";
(3) Simply adding the Reserved List to the existing Legacy banned list is an unwieldy and inelegant way of going about this;
(4) All expansions starting with Mercadian Masques, and all core sets starting with Sixth Edition, should be "Eternal" legal by virtue of having zero Reserved List cards;
WotC have not cut support for Vintage. WTF ever gave you that idea? WotC still sanction the format and actively manage the B&R list.
See above. Type 1.5 (later named Legacy) was created because type 1 (later named Vintage) was becoming inaccessible. But WotC didn't senselessly replace type 1! They just made an alternate format.
This much is true
This idea as actually being toyed with. Instead WotC gave us Modern.
I get that you want WotC to support a new format, but why do also want them to eliminate another format that I'm guessing you don't even play? I have only two guesses:
Sour grapes. If you can't play Legacy, nobody can! Almost as if your enjoyment of the format hinges on there not being any other format that uses older, more powerful, and more expensive cards.
You want to force Legacy players to play a this format, as if you're afraid it will not take off unless WotC forces it down our throats.
I do hope I'm wrong, because (1) is pathetic and petty, while (2) doesn't project any confidence that your new format will actually be good.
I WOULD ALSO IMPLORE EVERYONE TO GET BACK ON TOPIC; THE ISSUE ISN'T WHETHER ***IF*** THIS FORMAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN, OR WHY IT SHOULD/SHOULDN'T HAPPEN, BUT RATHER, ASSUMING IT ***IS*** GOING TO HAPPEN, ***HOW*** WIZARDS GOES ABOUT MAKING IT HAPPEN.
If you had presented this as a pure hypothetical, sure. But you are presenting arguments why this should happen, and it's only fair that such arguments should be open to scrutiny.
Assuming this will happen, it will not happen the way you think - aka, by transforming Legacy. Just as Legacy did not replace Vintage, and Modern did not replace Legacy, Eternal would be a brand new format independent of existing formats.
I get that. What I'm saying is that WotC have looked at this idea and rejected it. Obviously that doesn't preclude them from revisiting such an idea, but it's not very encouraging.
Think is, expecting WotC to create this format is not how it's going to happen. What's needed is a "grassroots" movement to establish the format. And there will be growing pains too.
Legacy is a good example. While type 1.5 was officially sanctioned, it had nothing in the way of real support. In particular, the banned list was completely arbitrary, determined entirely by which cards were banned or restricted in Vintage. Legacy players soldiered on despite the format being imbalanced and warped. Despite the problems, Legacy grew in popularity and demand for WotC's support viia an independent banned list (not demand to screw with the Vintage banned list) grew louder and louder untill Wizards finally annswered.
This is how "Eternal" will need to establish itself. Waiting for Wizards to invent the format is probably not gonna do it - WotC would rather people play Modern anyway, so why spend the human resources to develop yet another non-rotating format?
The only way this happens is if players make it happen. That means one of two approaches:
Suffer through an arbitrary an imbalanced banned list (specifically banning all RL cards Lu's all other cards banned in Legacy) just like type 1.5 players did. Hopefully WotC will eventually take notice. Or...
Start this up with an independent committee which manages a more sensible list (like EDH or Magic '94).
Basically this here to be a strong community initiative. Even then, patience and perseverance is required (it took some time for WotC to support Legacy & EDH; '94 players are still waiting.
Personally I'm not sure the demand is sufficient for a grassroots initiative. People are not likely to be interested if:
They are already playing Legacy, or are buying into it and have the means. Or...
They like Modern just fine as is and do not desire the more "broken" strategies associated with eternal formats. Or...
They would love to play Legacy, but feel that without cards like LED, Mox, Cradle, City of Traitors, Tabernacle, etc, they can never achieve the Legacy experience they desire
I think mostly this leaves players who prefer a format more like Modern but with a wider card pool, and players who genuinely want to play Legacy and don't get that this format will not even resemble Legacy.
Are there enough such players who are also willing to invest time and money into establishing this format to the point where WotC takes notice? I'm not sure. But if you want this format this is what needs to e done. Fantasising about what Hasbro can do to get the ball rolling is only productive to the extent that it creates player interest which could lead to an independent"Eternal" community.
Real proxies, not counterfeits that try to fool people, but nice looking cards that are very playable but don't fool anyone.
Some nerfed version of Legacy without the Reserved List just seems way too similar to Modern for anyone to give a damn about.
This is it really.
No one will play a format where reserved list cards are banned. They will either play modern or legacy.
Making proxys legal is the one true way to support players where WotC won't.
No one will play a format where reserved list cards are banned. They will either play modern or legacy.
Legacy was born of a format where P9 and other restricted cards where banned - pretty much for the same reason people are now looking for a format where RL is banned.
It took time for this format to pick up a player base. Dual la carte rotating out of Extended was a major catalyst, but it was no small factor that Vintage Staples where becoming increasingly scarce and costly, and as the player base grew, the percentage of players who owned P9 became smaller and smaller.
Legacy is at that point - decks and staples are almost as prohibitively expensive as Vintage ~15 years ago.
What would really help is a massively unpopular banning in Modern - Shockland scale! People flocked to Legacy because they could no longer play duals in Extended, but also because Ponder, Brainstorm, and other popular goodies (Gush & Merchant Scroll) were restricted in Vintage. Without these mass exodi from other formats, Legacy growth would have been much, much, slower.
No one will play a format where reserved list cards are banned. They will either play modern or legacy.
Legacy was born of a format where P9 and other restricted cards where banned - pretty much for the same reason people are now looking for a format where RL is banned.
It took time for this format to pick up a player base. Dual la carte rotating out of Extended was a major catalyst, but it was no small factor that Vintage Staples where becoming increasingly scarce and costly, and as the player base grew, the percentage of players who owned P9 became smaller and smaller.
Legacy is at that point - decks and staples are almost as prohibitively expensive as Vintage ~15 years ago.
What would really help is a massively unpopular banning in Modern - Shockland scale! People flocked to Legacy because they could no longer play duals in Extended, but also because Ponder, Brainstorm, and other popular goodies (Gush & Merchant Scroll) were restricted in Vintage. Without these mass exodi from other formats, Legacy growth would have been much, much, slower.
1.5 wasn't formed because the banned/restricted cards in Type 1 were too scarce/expensive. It was formed because those cards were too powerful and WotC/DCI wanted to have a format that had access to the greatest number of cards possible without being dominated by the broken/powerful cards form the earliest days of the game.
I'd like to see a format with the rule "decks that contain a card printed before date X cannot contain cards printed after date Y". With clever choices of X and Y, there'd be two groups of decks, old ones and new ones, and the new ones would have their prices aided by reprints.
(1) The Reserved List has made Legacy an untenable format in the long run, and Wizards will eventually stop supporting it entirely, just as they have Vintage;
(2) Wizards should replace Legacy with "Eternal", a.k.a. "No Reserved List Legacy";
(3) Simply adding the Reserved List to the existing Legacy banned list is an unwieldy and inelegant way of going about this;
(4) All expansions starting with Mercadian Masques, and all core sets starting with Sixth Edition, should be "Eternal" legal by virtue of having zero Reserved List cards;
WotC have not cut support for Vintage. WTF ever gave you that idea? WotC still sanction the format and actively manage the B&R list.
See above. Type 1.5 (later named Legacy) was created because type 1 (later named Vintage) was becoming inaccessible. But WotC didn't senselessly replace type 1! They just made an alternate format.
This much is true
This idea as actually being toyed with. Instead WotC gave us Modern.
If you had presented this as a pure hypothetical, sure. But you are presenting arguments why this should happen, and it's only fair that such arguments should be open to scrutiny.
I did present this as a hypothetical--before this thread got hijacked by the "A FEW PEOPLE ON REDDIT DETERMINED OVER SIX WEEKS THAT THIS FORMAT WOULD NEVER WORK BECAUSE IT'S NOT REAL LEGACY AND THEREFORE NOBODY EVER WANTS TO PLAY IT EVER EVER EVER" crowd--and I laid out my reasons why I THINK it WILL happen EVENTUALLY; I was originally more or less silent on whether or not I think it SHOULD happen (disclosure: I do think it should happen, and no, it's not necessarily out of pure personal interest or "sour grapes", as you put it; I've been playing on and off since Exodus and have almost all of the relevant RL cards--including some of the original duals--and the finaancial wherewithal to acquire those that I need, so no, it's not a personal issue. My collection is worth approximately 20 stacks. Price is not an issue.)
Here's my bigger gripe: the format is dying, or at the very least becoming relatively untenable in the long run, in the grand scheme of things. It's certainly not GROWING, as some people have suggested; at this point you're either pretty much in or you're out. Wizards may be supporting the B&R list (for now) but they aren't really sanctioning tournaments, at least not at the highest levels of play and not particularly at the lower levels of play either--it's all Limited, Modern, and Standard. Even SCG, et al. are abandoning the Legacy opens to host more Standard and Modern format events.
An ever-shrinking pool of essential RL cards is expected to sustain an ever-growing player base that wants to play Legacy or Vintage; this situation is mathematically untenable. A shrinking number of people will be playing this format by sheer attrition. At the end of the day, I want to be able to play with people--lots of people--and I don't particularly like Standard or Modern. I want to play a format that at least approximates Legacy, and I personally believe that NRL Legacy ("Eternal") is the absolute best that we're going to get in the long run. I believe down that there are a similar number of like-minded non-enfranchised players that share my interest in playing with old cards that aren't currently in the Modern card pool, that they won't have the chance to play with those cards as long as Modern is the only "accessible" eternal format, and that that is a god damn shame.
I'd rather make it work than throw up my hands and play Modern or have to hunt around for a game of actual Legacy. But again, that's not what this thread was supposed to be about. What this thread was supposed to be about was this:
If Wizards was to pull the trigger and establish this format, what is the most logistically feasible way for them to do it?
I did present this as a hypothetical--before this thread got hijacked by the "A FEW PEOPLE ON REDDIT DETERMINED OVER SIX WEEKS THAT THIS FORMAT WOULD NEVER WORK BECAUSE IT'S NOT REAL LEGACY AND THEREFORE NOBODY EVER WANTS TO PLAY IT EVER EVER EVER" crowd--and I laid out my reasons why I THINK it WILL happen EVENTUALLY
Man, if you want to play that game, then let's do it.
Yes there's a difference between arguing if a format if going to exist, or if a format is going to be good. I understand that you want to discuss how things will be based on the premise that it will be. Fine.
But then, you basically admit you never tested the format yourself, and I along with others bring you experiments/reports/test results on the work you should have done, rectifying points you're trying to bring our of nowhere when some others tested it and proved your wrong. Then you say you don't want to take their experience and don't care about the people who shared the same ideas as you and actually put them in practice to see where it was leading. So I asked you what you were disagreeing/disliking with in their approach and you can't answer properly without a bunch of non sense. There are reasons why the format you're suggesting isn't ''logistically sustainable''.
You're calling that we're taking your thread and misdirecting it, but you refuse to see any logic and keep saying ''it wouldn't happen like that'' when it did, and moreover you can't even bring a glimpse of experiment or fact to support your ''it wouldn't happen like that'' hypothesis.
Not even counting your last message, you're spreading a bunch of false information around that is easily provable but refuse to see the numbers and facts because you seem blinded by some kind of idea. Legacy is dying, really?
I'll stop there, I would rather not be disrespectful. I'll try to answer your bold question:
''If Wizards was to pull the trigger and establish this format, what is the most logistically feasible way for them to do it?''
The most LOGISTICALLY FEASIBLE WAY? They would need to stop supporting Modern and just replace it with this format, just like they did with Extended.
I'm sure you see the problems it creates: they stop pushing a format they spent years to built, they lose their players' trust, and they create a format that pretty much no one would play in a matter of months. Even this part:
''...and I laid out my reasons why I THINK it WILL happen EVENTUALLY.''
No offense but I will take Wizard's words over yours in this case: they chose Modern and don't want to create the Eternal format. That you refuse to take their word, too, is just... I don't find the words for it. And yes, I'll also take the words of a few guys on reddit who posted their experience, experiments, testings and results over your non-based claim on this forum, especially since you avoid answering any questions and choose to take facts as attacks over what they are: the best base we can argue on.
That being said, I'm done with this. Best of luck in your quest!
I just want to point out that a shop in Southern California (the actual place is eluding my brain right now) already did a tournament like that recently. In the description of it, it was tough for me to figure out. I actually thought they were doing no ban list Modern until a friend clarified it for me, then I wasn't quite as interested. Not to mention, it would have been tough to get out of other stuff that day, but I would have done it for No Ban List Modern in a heartbeat.
Legacy - Sneak Show, BR Reanimator, Miracles, UW Stoneblade
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/ Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander - Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build) (dead format for me)
The issue with this seems like people are looking at it the wrong way. They take Legacy, then ban the RL. Of course that won't be as good as Legacy. I would rather take all cards ever printed, ban the RL, then go from there. For as long as we try to sell this format with the tag line "Just like legacy...Kinda" it will always be compared and found lacking. It needs to become it's own format. The biggest thing that separates legacy from modern is actually two cards not on the RL: Wasteland and FoW. This new format would likely look like modern but with a lot better answers.
Umm sorry... But nobody who has responded to this thread so far has actually laid out any actual numbers, explanations, or results explaining why this format is bad; the best anyone has mustered so far is a conclusive "we unanimously solved the format in six weeks, and it sucks; reference our subreddit--trust us. You're an idiot, this format will never work; you obviously never did the playtesting that we did, although we can't actually demonstrate any evidence of us actually ever having done any playtesting ourselves, but you'll have to take our word for it and you're wrong."
To the extent that I even believe that a small group of amateur players can "solve" a new, hypothetical metagame that contains a massive card pool within six to eight weeks, (which I don't; our group has for some time played and continues to more or less play this format by virtue of necessity--I'm the one of two players who even owns a dual land; most of us started playing well after Masques--and we're far from "solving"the meta) until anyone can show me actual results, or actually explains WHY this format is supposedly bad, I'm calling bull***** and assuming what's REALLY going on here--as was the case with the Reddit thread I got directed to which, by the way, I read in full--is that a bunch of butthurt legacy players are mad that their format is living on borrowed time and they don't want to admit it and are trying to silence anyone who dares to point the obvious out to them. The proof is in the pudding--I merely posited a hypothetical question--if (when) the NRL Legacy format or something like it comes around, what's the most elegant way to do it?--and a bunch of people instantly lost their ***** and felt the need to tell me what a moron I am.
The future of Magic--at least of the relevant, sanctioned variety--does not contain RL cards. Legacy is dead man walking: in two or three years Wizards won't sanction it anymore. It's a matter of simple numbers. I would have thought a bunch of fellow nerds would understand numbers.
Buuuuut... there are a number of good reasons why they might (and many strongly believe that they SHOULD) do so in the future.
The Reserve List has created an untenable situation with regards to Legacy and Vintage, but particularly with regards to Legacy. A whole lot of ink has been spilled regarding whether or not we should even keep the Reserved List to begin with (I personally think it's time to do away with it, or at least REVISE it, personally), but this thread isn't really about that, and in any event it appears that for the time being the Reserved List isn't going anywhere.
We all know the score; there is a finite and ever-decreasing supply of expensive Reserved List staple cards that need to satisfy an ever-growing demand for those cards, which has been further exacerbated by the recent phenomenon of panic and profit-driven buyouts. The logical economic consequence is that the price of those staple cards is going to continue to rise, and eventually those staples (especially the original Dual Lands) are going to be too expensive to sustain the Legacy format as it currently exists.
Let's not mince words: Legacy as it currently exists is already dying; sooner rather than later it's essentially going to be Vintage--an esoteric and financially unattainable format for pretty much all but the most established of players. An Unlimited Underground Sea now costs as much as an Unlimited Mox Sapphire or Mox Jet did just a few years ago. Wizards knows all of this, which is why they effectively no longer support the format (hell, a few years ago there was a Legacy PRO TOUR; now it's a rare day where there's even a Legacy Grand Prix.)
This is going to be a major problem for a lot of players, because once Legacy is no longer supported, effectively speaking every card printed before 8th Edition is going to be completely irrelevant unless your plan is to play the non-supported Legacy or Vintage format. That is going to make a ton of people unhappy; make no mistake, this is different than not being able to play Vintage because you weren't able to snag a singleton set of the Power 9; Legacy has a far broader appeal than Vintage.
Many would like to see Wizards do something about all of this, but here's the issue: Wizards ISN'T about to do away with the Reserved List. A discussion about the merits of the Reserved List is not the premise of this thread.
What IS the premise othen? It's this: When it comes time for Wizards to replace Legacy with a viable "Eternal" format that keeps the general premise of Legacy intact--minus the Reserved List, which, again, isn't going anywhere--HOW are they going to do it?
Admittedly, there isn't any particularly elegant solution.
The most obvious and oft-discussed means of creating the format would be to just add the "Reserved List" to the existing Legacy Banned and Restricted list; there are two pretty significant issues with this:
(1) This makes the B&R list completely unwieldy; it would either be hundreds of cards long with significant portions of certain sets--particularly any pre-Tempest set--not legal in the format by virtue of being on the Reserved List; the alternative would be to simply include a clause on the B&R list referencing the Reserved List, which is equally unhelpful.
(2) It doesn't create a particularly good B&R list anyway, because the removal of Reserved List cards from the format (Dual Lands, Lion's Eye Diamond, Gaea's Cradle, etc.) will necessarily make "Eternal" a different, slightly less busted format than Legacy. There would have to be a series of subsequent bannings and unbannings to remedy this issue.
To me (and this is just my opinion) the best way to created "Eternal" would be to just build the format from the ground up.
The first and obvious step would be to make Mercadian Masques, Invasion, Odyssey, and Onslaught Blocks, as well as Sixth and Seventh Editions, format-legal in "Eternal". None of these sets have any Reserved List cards, and all of them are somewhat in line with Wizards' current set design principles.
From there the question is how to get the other format-relevant and viably playable cards from the pre-Masques sets into the format. Certainly part of it should be a function of a more liberal reprint policy (something Wizards should be doing anyway), but many of the older cards would be far too powerful for Standard and/or Modern.
A more streamlined approach might be to continue the Eternal Masters series--to my knowledge Wizards has been mum about whether Eternal Masters was intended as a one-off or if they would be alternating it biennially with the Modern Masters series--and to make Eternal Masters and its sequels "Eternal"-legal, as these sets would not contain any Reserved List cards.
An added benefit: Wizards can keep the "Eternal" B&R list short with this approach by picking and choosing which cards to reprint; as far as I can tell the only cards reprinted in Eternal Masters that are not currently Legacy-legal were Balance, Mystical Tutor, Necropotence, Vampiric Tutor, and Mana Crypt. All of those cards would ostensibly be banned in "Eternal", perhaps with the exception of Mystical Tutor, which was a controversial banning in Legacy to begin with, and future iterations of Eternal Masters would not include banned cards. While this would mean Wizards wouldn't be reprinting Mana Drain, Demonic Tutor, and a handful of other expensive EDH/Vintage staples, they could accomplish these reprints through other avenues such as promotional cards.
I think Wizards could more or less reprint all of the format-relevant, Pre-Masques cards, and thereby introduce them into the "Eternal" format, within one or two 249-card sets, provided that those sets don't include too much junky draft filler. No conspicuous omissions from the original Eternal Masters come to mind off the top of my head, even with the amount of chaff that they printed in that set's common slots. Looking over the spoiler lists from the Pre-Masques sets, there are only a handful of cards in each that see so much as fringe Legacy play anyway.
Anyways, I'm just spitballing, and I feel like I've been rambling long enough. The tl;dr version of what I'm suggesting:
(1) The Reserved List has made Legacy an untenable format in the long run, and Wizards will eventually stop supporting it entirely, just as they have Vintage;
(2) Wizards should replace Legacy with "Eternal", a.k.a. "No Reserved List Legacy";
(3) Simply adding the Reserved List to the existing Legacy banned list is an unwieldy and inelegant way of going about this;
(4) All expansions starting with Mercadian Masques, and all core sets starting with Sixth Edition, should be "Eternal" legal by virtue of having zero Reserved List cards;
(5) The remaining format-relevant cards should be introduced via a series of biennial Eternal Masters reprint sets, starting with Eternal Masters, which should be made format-legal as its own set.
Let me know what you all think.
You would seriously wreck many major pillars of the format, while barely touching others, which would cause their prices to explode. Basically, you would HAVE to rebuild Legacy from the ground up with the B&R list ever expanding over the course of the next several years, so you'd see even more players getting their decks banned.
What you're left with, even after a rebuild, would be Modern with some cards like Stoneforge that will probably end up getting banned until the format looks so close to Modern, why even have it?
If WoTC stops supporting Legacy (like the haven't already), Legacy will not go quietly into the night like Vintage, there's far more players who have far more decks comprised of many more cards that exist than people who have the Power Vintage requires as a prerequisite. You can play Legacy without duals (MUD, Burn, High Tide, D&T), you can play Legacy without LED (decks that are #notstorm), you can play Legacy without a lot of things. But you don't have the luxury to not have a Lotus in Vintage, or some Moxen, or Ancestral Recall in the vast majority of cases. No, Legacy going the same way as vintage is not a good comparison, think about the number of staples that you can choose to go after that exist compared to the print run of Lotus, or other ABU vintage staples that nearly every deck plays. Now think about the number of players Legacy has compared to the number Vintage has and realize how many people would have to part with their cards for the numbers to get that low. Legacy might be in danger of losing formal support from WoTC but again, it's not like that support existed anyway. You'd still have plenty of the Legacy events that the players that exist already enjoy, even if they are spread out and not as common as standard.....but just try and find a Vintage tournament.
The format isn't in danger of collapsing or dying overnight or anything, it's just in danger of not growing anymore. While this is a problem, it's not the same thing as Legacy being on the verge of extinction or anything. Realistically, what will happen is absolutely nothing. The players who play Legacy will continue to do so, the players who don't will have a large barrier to entry and that will be that.
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
Support for this format has to come without any tie to Legacy whatsoever. Eternal won't be touted as "new Legacy" and it won't be a "Legacy Lite" format. It's just an eventuality caused by the RL bubble that benefits any players joining the format immediately (since "Eternal" is not necessarily needed right now, but will be later on). All that said, and in case it's not obvious, I'm in for the ride.
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The subreddit went from birth to death of the format rather quickly. You'll see why ''Eternal'' is not a good plan and how/why the project was a failure and should never live. Go read everything.
And before you answer that it isn't, take a look a the earliest discussions for modern. It was meant to be the "eternal format without the reserve list, sixth/masques ed upwards, with it's own banned list."
Wizards took the format the community was brewing, said "nope" then moved the entire thing upward to 8th rather than 6th.
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/latest-developments/modern-proposal-2011-05-26
(scroll down to see why the started in 8th, rather than marcadian)
You can also try looking up "overextended".
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/extended/21947_Flow_Of_Ideas_Show_Up_Or_Shut_Up_Overextended_Or_Bust.html
MTGOVEREXTENDED.com no longer exists (or can't be accessed right now), but here's the archive for it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110527201753/http://mtgoverextended.com/?page_id=74
Simply raising the suggestion again doesn't work.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
Sure--it's not going to be the SAME format as current Legacy; I acknowledged as much in my original post. Some very powerful cards will be removed from the format; there will be less fast mana and no-strings-attached Dual Lands will not be a thing. Those are significant changes. But some of the fundamental things you can do in Legacy, indeed the three defining and arguably format-warping features of the format: Stone Raining somebody for free (Wasteland), "drawing three" cards for one blue mana (Brainstorm + Fetchland), and counterspelling while tapped out (Force of Will) are still intact. Also, Counterspell proper will be a thing in this format; Modern does not have a way to say "no" with no strings attached as early as turn 2.
That having been said, all of the above-mentioned decks that supposedly get nerfed by the omission of one critical card (Elves, Lands, Enchantress, High Tide, MUD--pretty much every deck mentioned not called Storm) are (a) tier 2 or 3 in Legacy at best, and (b) are not necessarily "dead". I think this is especially true with Storm, which will still have a litany of fast mana and cantrips at its disposal.
The format on the whole will probably be a bit slower, but speed isn't really the hallmark of Legacy anyway--it's the interactive nature of the format and the completely busted things you can do with a massive card pool that stands out.
Modern is a non-interactive format where all that really matters at the end of the day is matchups and sideboard cards, and most of the decks don't particularly care about what the other deck is doing; the split is 40/40/20 Aggro/Control/Combo in Legacy; it's 60/20/20 in Modern; the two formats are fundamentally different and simply removing Dual Lands, Gaea's Cradle, Lion's Eye Diamond, and a few other cards isn't going to make the one exactly like the other.
The two biggest beneficiaries that I can identify in the "Eternal" landscape are Burn and Death and Taxes, which lose absolutely nothing and arguably gain in an environment where the next-best Dual Land analogues are the Shocklands. Both decks are mono-colored and not particularly hard to hate out. Miracles won't be quite as good without honest-to-god Dual Lands, but the general strategy will be intact. Ditto Infect, Delver, and Stoneblade variants--basically the top tier Legacy strategies at the moment.
What have you actually played/tested, and why/what exactly are you disagreeing (on) interpretations/results different from those present on /r/MTGEternal, who I assume at least had the same time investment as you did toward Eternal format?
I agree with this post, because I wasn't suggesting otherwise to begin with. Nobody is insinuating it's going to be the same format, but it still solves a huge problem, which is that outside of one exorbitantly expensive format that nobody can afford to play--Vintage--and another soon-to-be exorbitantly expensive format that nobody can afford to play--Vintage--there is no way to play with a large number of relatively cheap but nonetheless super fun and powerful cards printed before 8th Edition that are still widely in circulation and could continue to be in circulation because they're not on the Reserved List.
Why am I disagreeing with the experts at Reddit? Probably because a few dudes spittballing on Reddit does not a format make? And also, because I don't actually read Reddit, and don't particularly care what a few people on Reddit have to say.
But browsing at the SubReddit you linked, it does not look particularly well-trafficked or representative of anything. To the extent that it is, the complaints generally don't seem to have anything to do with playability, but rather with cost and "branding". In the former respect, "cost" will always necessarily be an issue with ACTUAL Legacy; branding is another thing entirely--nothing will ever live up to Legacy, which many people believe is the greatest format of all time--but Modern is divisive and
ifwhen Legacy becomes unobtainable to pretty much all players because of the exorbitant cost, a format where you can play with a bunch of old, powerful cards except for the ones that didn't get reprinted due to an arbitrary list based on collection value is going to be wildly popular.I WOULD ALSO IMPLORE EVERYONE TO GET BACK ON TOPIC; THE ISSUE ISN'T WHETHER ***IF*** THIS FORMAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN, OR WHY IT SHOULD/SHOULDN'T HAPPEN, BUT RATHER, ASSUMING IT ***IS*** GOING TO HAPPEN, ***HOW*** WIZARDS GOES ABOUT MAKING IT HAPPEN.
Real proxies, not counterfeits that try to fool people, but nice looking cards that are very playable but don't fool anyone.
Some nerfed version of Legacy without the Reserved List just seems way too similar to Modern for anyone to give a damn about.
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Until we completely write this format off, could we at least reach a consensus re: whether it's a "grindy" format, or just a different iteration of Modern--aka the least grindy format ever?
And I don't necessarily think they'd need to ban Wasteland or PoP. I think most of the 3-color decks with heavy non-basic lands will be base-blue (unlike in Modern) with base-black or heavily black (Jund(k)) as the other popular option; both of those colors can deal with PoP. As for Wasteland, it will be format defining but not format warping; adversity breeds innovation and while Wasteland will be incredibly powerful, I see the mana bases adapting enough that it's a borderline ban case at worst.
My 720 Peasant Cube
1) After the creation of this format, whether it's born from a torn-down Legacy, or is a new format in addition TO legacy, I imagine more than a few people will probably just take their Modern decks and go try out the format with a couple of swaps (hey, we can play Stoneforge Mystic and Deathrite Shaman!). We'll see some of Legacy's traditional decks go extinct, or lose unacceptable levels of power while others are unaffected, or Modern decks gain access to more powerful tools. A new banlist will need to be enacted and examined. Stoneforge is probably one of the best legal cards in this format, as is Deathrite Shaman- these are Reserved list caliber cards (well, the GOOD part of the RL anyway), with power levels approaching, or even equaling cards like Cradle and Tabernacle. People will be looking to play decks that utilize these card.
2) I would expect that we'd see several periods of banlist adjustments, similar to what Modern went through. This is what turned a lot of people off of Modern initially, including myself. "Why do I want to make a new deck when every time I do they ban cards from it, when I could be sinking my money into Legacy, for a few dollars, not run the risk of a deck getting banned to unplayability, and on top of that, the cards I'm buying are guaranteed to never be reprinted? A lot of players thought like I did and GP Richmond marked the end of "reasonably priced" duals. If you look at every dual land, they all take the same sharp price hike at GP Richmond as Modern finally began to really take off- Modern staples were in demand enough that they were worth as much as duals. Players realized that at GP Richmond, the market corrected, and duals shot up.
3) While RL cards would drop (yay, EDH players!) the price of other cards would increase without additional supply being injected. Now Modern, NonRL eternal, and traditional Legacy all want Snapcaster Mage, or Thoughtseize or Tarmogoyf for example. These are the new "RL" priced cards, at least until further supply is injected. We've learned that WoTC wants to walk a line between being able to reprint cards without completely tanking their value, and that's a fine goal, but it also means the best we can hope for is that a given card goes up for reprint once a year in an MMA type set.
4) This is all assuming that despite the fact many players experienced frustration as the decks they built kept getting banned, they stuck with the format and didn't just switch back to playing Modern or traditional Legacy. Most of the traditional Legacy players are either going to stick with the format where they can play duals, or play Modern additionally, but I can't see them choosing to play Legacy, an unstable version of Legacy without the best stuff, AND Modern (which is at least stable and has its own distinct meta). I can see them playing Legacy, or Legacy and Modern, but I think there would be a much smaller number that would choose to add "non RL Legacy" to their decklists. And I assume traditional Legacy would not be dropped from the roster because this proposal is meant to drive down the demand/price of RL cards and "save" Legacy to begin with. Otherwise, you're killing off Legacy to do what, make cheap duals for EDH players and kithen table players, a good chunk of which use proxies anyway? Besides, this gets back into the "you shouldn't kill one format to benefit another" argument. So now you'd have Legacy, non-RL Legacy, Modern, and Standard. Three non-rotating formats is a little overkill and I think all three would suffer as a result. But anyway, if you wanted to do it- you'd have to get a stable format, you'd have to figure out how to cope with the increased cost of certain cards placed on them by being needed for ANOTHER format, and you'd have to figure out how to not make this format come across as "broken modern" OR "underpowered Legacy". It would need a distinct metagame that wasn't dominated exclusively by being able to play a handful of broken, but not RL cards that you can't access in Modern.
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
If you had presented this as a pure hypothetical, sure. But you are presenting arguments why this should happen, and it's only fair that such arguments should be open to scrutiny.
Assuming this will happen, it will not happen the way you think - aka, by transforming Legacy. Just as Legacy did not replace Vintage, and Modern did not replace Legacy, Eternal would be a brand new format independent of existing formats.
https://fieldmarshalshandbook.wordpress.com/
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UBR EDH Artificer Prodigy
B EDH Relentless Rats
Think is, expecting WotC to create this format is not how it's going to happen. What's needed is a "grassroots" movement to establish the format. And there will be growing pains too.
Legacy is a good example. While type 1.5 was officially sanctioned, it had nothing in the way of real support. In particular, the banned list was completely arbitrary, determined entirely by which cards were banned or restricted in Vintage. Legacy players soldiered on despite the format being imbalanced and warped. Despite the problems, Legacy grew in popularity and demand for WotC's support viia an independent banned list (not demand to screw with the Vintage banned list) grew louder and louder untill Wizards finally annswered.
This is how "Eternal" will need to establish itself. Waiting for Wizards to invent the format is probably not gonna do it - WotC would rather people play Modern anyway, so why spend the human resources to develop yet another non-rotating format?
The only way this happens is if players make it happen. That means one of two approaches:
Personally I'm not sure the demand is sufficient for a grassroots initiative. People are not likely to be interested if:
Are there enough such players who are also willing to invest time and money into establishing this format to the point where WotC takes notice? I'm not sure. But if you want this format this is what needs to e done. Fantasising about what Hasbro can do to get the ball rolling is only productive to the extent that it creates player interest which could lead to an independent"Eternal" community.
And I wish you best of luck!
https://fieldmarshalshandbook.wordpress.com/
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This is it really.
No one will play a format where reserved list cards are banned. They will either play modern or legacy.
Making proxys legal is the one true way to support players where WotC won't.
It took time for this format to pick up a player base. Dual la carte rotating out of Extended was a major catalyst, but it was no small factor that Vintage Staples where becoming increasingly scarce and costly, and as the player base grew, the percentage of players who owned P9 became smaller and smaller.
Legacy is at that point - decks and staples are almost as prohibitively expensive as Vintage ~15 years ago.
What would really help is a massively unpopular banning in Modern - Shockland scale! People flocked to Legacy because they could no longer play duals in Extended, but also because Ponder, Brainstorm, and other popular goodies (Gush & Merchant Scroll) were restricted in Vintage. Without these mass exodi from other formats, Legacy growth would have been much, much, slower.
https://fieldmarshalshandbook.wordpress.com/
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B EDH Relentless Rats
1.5 wasn't formed because the banned/restricted cards in Type 1 were too scarce/expensive. It was formed because those cards were too powerful and WotC/DCI wanted to have a format that had access to the greatest number of cards possible without being dominated by the broken/powerful cards form the earliest days of the game.
I did present this as a hypothetical--before this thread got hijacked by the "A FEW PEOPLE ON REDDIT DETERMINED OVER SIX WEEKS THAT THIS FORMAT WOULD NEVER WORK BECAUSE IT'S NOT REAL LEGACY AND THEREFORE NOBODY EVER WANTS TO PLAY IT EVER EVER EVER" crowd--and I laid out my reasons why I THINK it WILL happen EVENTUALLY; I was originally more or less silent on whether or not I think it SHOULD happen (disclosure: I do think it should happen, and no, it's not necessarily out of pure personal interest or "sour grapes", as you put it; I've been playing on and off since Exodus and have almost all of the relevant RL cards--including some of the original duals--and the finaancial wherewithal to acquire those that I need, so no, it's not a personal issue. My collection is worth approximately 20 stacks. Price is not an issue.)
Here's my bigger gripe: the format is dying, or at the very least becoming relatively untenable in the long run, in the grand scheme of things. It's certainly not GROWING, as some people have suggested; at this point you're either pretty much in or you're out. Wizards may be supporting the B&R list (for now) but they aren't really sanctioning tournaments, at least not at the highest levels of play and not particularly at the lower levels of play either--it's all Limited, Modern, and Standard. Even SCG, et al. are abandoning the Legacy opens to host more Standard and Modern format events.
An ever-shrinking pool of essential RL cards is expected to sustain an ever-growing player base that wants to play Legacy or Vintage; this situation is mathematically untenable. A shrinking number of people will be playing this format by sheer attrition. At the end of the day, I want to be able to play with people--lots of people--and I don't particularly like Standard or Modern. I want to play a format that at least approximates Legacy, and I personally believe that NRL Legacy ("Eternal") is the absolute best that we're going to get in the long run. I believe down that there are a similar number of like-minded non-enfranchised players that share my interest in playing with old cards that aren't currently in the Modern card pool, that they won't have the chance to play with those cards as long as Modern is the only "accessible" eternal format, and that that is a god damn shame.
I'd rather make it work than throw up my hands and play Modern or have to hunt around for a game of actual Legacy. But again, that's not what this thread was supposed to be about. What this thread was supposed to be about was this:
If Wizards was to pull the trigger and establish this format, what is the most logistically feasible way for them to do it?
Man, if you want to play that game, then let's do it.
Yes there's a difference between arguing if a format if going to exist, or if a format is going to be good. I understand that you want to discuss how things will be based on the premise that it will be. Fine.
But then, you basically admit you never tested the format yourself, and I along with others bring you experiments/reports/test results on the work you should have done, rectifying points you're trying to bring our of nowhere when some others tested it and proved your wrong. Then you say you don't want to take their experience and don't care about the people who shared the same ideas as you and actually put them in practice to see where it was leading. So I asked you what you were disagreeing/disliking with in their approach and you can't answer properly without a bunch of non sense. There are reasons why the format you're suggesting isn't ''logistically sustainable''.
You're calling that we're taking your thread and misdirecting it, but you refuse to see any logic and keep saying ''it wouldn't happen like that'' when it did, and moreover you can't even bring a glimpse of experiment or fact to support your ''it wouldn't happen like that'' hypothesis.
Not even counting your last message, you're spreading a bunch of false information around that is easily provable but refuse to see the numbers and facts because you seem blinded by some kind of idea. Legacy is dying, really?
I'll stop there, I would rather not be disrespectful. I'll try to answer your bold question:
''If Wizards was to pull the trigger and establish this format, what is the most logistically feasible way for them to do it?''
The most LOGISTICALLY FEASIBLE WAY? They would need to stop supporting Modern and just replace it with this format, just like they did with Extended.
I'm sure you see the problems it creates: they stop pushing a format they spent years to built, they lose their players' trust, and they create a format that pretty much no one would play in a matter of months. Even this part:
''...and I laid out my reasons why I THINK it WILL happen EVENTUALLY.''
No offense but I will take Wizard's words over yours in this case: they chose Modern and don't want to create the Eternal format. That you refuse to take their word, too, is just... I don't find the words for it. And yes, I'll also take the words of a few guys on reddit who posted their experience, experiments, testings and results over your non-based claim on this forum, especially since you avoid answering any questions and choose to take facts as attacks over what they are: the best base we can argue on.
That being said, I'm done with this. Best of luck in your quest!
https://www.facebook.com/events/862649727196272/
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/
Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander -
Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)To the extent that I even believe that a small group of amateur players can "solve" a new, hypothetical metagame that contains a massive card pool within six to eight weeks, (which I don't; our group has for some time played and continues to more or less play this format by virtue of necessity--I'm the one of two players who even owns a dual land; most of us started playing well after Masques--and we're far from "solving"the meta) until anyone can show me actual results, or actually explains WHY this format is supposedly bad, I'm calling bull***** and assuming what's REALLY going on here--as was the case with the Reddit thread I got directed to which, by the way, I read in full--is that a bunch of butthurt legacy players are mad that their format is living on borrowed time and they don't want to admit it and are trying to silence anyone who dares to point the obvious out to them. The proof is in the pudding--I merely posited a hypothetical question--if (when) the NRL Legacy format or something like it comes around, what's the most elegant way to do it?--and a bunch of people instantly lost their ***** and felt the need to tell me what a moron I am.
The future of Magic--at least of the relevant, sanctioned variety--does not contain RL cards. Legacy is dead man walking: in two or three years Wizards won't sanction it anymore. It's a matter of simple numbers. I would have thought a bunch of fellow nerds would understand numbers.