It's something I've been thinking about for a while as it's come up a lot lately with people that I introduce to the game, but it seems like people are increasingly getting the wrong message about magic in general with some formats. Recently I introduced someone to the modern format and things were going well until he went online and saw all the tournaments and tier decks. He basically came back and felt like there wasn't any point playing modern because the only decks that mattered are expensive and if he went to FNM with anything but a top deck he'd be wasting his time.
At that point I didn't really know how to answer him because he certainly isn't the only one with that impression. The LGS nearby was basically taken over by highly competitive players playing either T1 net decks or some form of combo / kills you out of no where deck like Infect and Ad-Nauseum.
Am I wrong to think that modern is just a set of cards and that it can be more than just the best cards smashed together into decks that, in the old days, would have been fun the first two times and then the third time most people would start refusing to play against?
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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!
Seriously, though, FNM really depends on your meta. Some places are more competitive than others. There are plenty of LGS where people bring tier 3 brews and do really well. That being said, aggro is king right now in Modern and can be one of the easiest archetypes to play, so it's easier to dump a few hundred bucks on a netdeck and play competitively without being particularly skilled.
If your friend wants to play a format with a playing field that's relatively level in proportion to money spent, you can always play draft. It's a great option for new players and it's pretty much ubiquitous as far as the LGS goes.
Side note: This post seems entirely Modern related, so maybe you'd like a mod to move it to that forum?
Huh? People who want to win will build the best decks they can. You can have your own opinions on what certain formats should be, but it won't make anybody behave differently.
Also, FNMs are supposed to be low-level competitive, not casual.
Actually Wizards have specifically aimed at appeasing the casual crowd in many ways, and have actually hurt the mid-level competitive game as a direct consequence of many of their decisions.
They have introduced "bricks and mortar" policies, taking the game away from independent TOs that run competitive MTG. Bricks and mortar stores are full of people who move from game to game, who are hard to build a competitive environment with.
They have put even more focus on the story (and specifically the planeswalkers). Competitive players don't give a toss about the poxy story, and never had, but here it is taking pride of place at the front of Wizard's marketing and thinking, aimed fairly and squarely at casual players with their "immersive experience".
They went away from the K ranking system that attempted to quantify how good players were (and did it roughly at best) and replaced it with a system that does not even try and instead measures consumption- they called it "planeswalker points". The new system, complete with the embarrassment of "levels", resets periodically, so you can drop in and out at will. Casual players don't really like to be ranked in order of how good they are, competitive players do. Casual players were at best excluded from the old ranking system, and ignored it, or they were actively given a ranking and told "you are worse than all these players above you".
They have jumped on the EDH bandwagon, the ultimate casual format.
They removed States from most parts of the world, and later PTQs and replaced them effectively with PPTQs and RPTQs. PPTQs attracted 50 players for the first one at my LGS. Now they get 8, whilst the commander tables are full.
They have gone after the casual market, and fragmented the serious market at the low to mid-level, whilst at the top end have backed the big time events so that to a large extent no one really notices, beyond those who turn up to the myriad of small non-firing FNMs and weekend events that used to be 20-30 players travelling from distances, and are now basically gone.
They removed Modern pro-tours to stop the pros "solving the format" and thus keeping it a bit more open for casual and serious players alike.
Do they "kill formats" for casual play?. Well, they did not kill EDH, they started designing cards for it. It is true they do not want more formats, and they do not want cheap, accessible eternal formats where people do not have spend much to keep up. They want eternal formats to be more expensive than Standard. But actually nearly every decision they have made in the past few years has been to the benefit of the casual player. The sort of player who turns up randomly in a store with bunch of decks of different formats, plays a couple of hours, likely Commander, but passes on FNM to go and get some food.
The more popular the format, the more competitive people play it.
Agree, and it is a pity that that means playing one of a quite few select decks in any format at any given time.
Sure, I am sure that there are decks that havent been invented and played that should have been invented and played at some points through the years, but the experienced and pro players dont look for them as much as they should do when experience+skills tell them that the chance for the deck to be out there is so small. Those players rather take the current decks and try tweak them.
Whole new levels of fun would be had in magic if players like LSV couldnt predict metas with 80 percent accuracy. It would demand that a much higher percentage of cards must be playable for constructed which in turn would ease up the demand for some select few cards, and when the demand for some select few cards lowers the sales of boosters also lowers. And when the sales of boosters lowers wotcs' profit lowers.
Of course some would say that the game would become more popular this way and that the profit for wotc would rise again as a result of more players/customers.
Hmpf. It's one thing to talk about a version of modern you would prefer and to proclaim, without evidence or support, that your vision would be more profitable/popular. Implementation, on the other hand, is something you never touch, and for obvious reasons, because a forcible diversification of the metagame would be met by a massive backlash.
It's something I've been thinking about for a while as it's come up a lot lately with people that I introduce to the game, but it seems like people are increasingly getting the wrong message about magic in general with some formats. Recently I introduced someone to the modern format and things were going well until he went online and saw all the tournaments and tier decks. He basically came back and felt like there wasn't any point playing modern because the only decks that mattered are expensive and if he went to FNM with anything but a top deck he'd be wasting his time.
At that point I didn't really know how to answer him because he certainly isn't the only one with that impression. The LGS nearby was basically taken over by highly competitive players playing either T1 net decks or some form of combo / kills you out of no where deck like Infect and Ad-Nauseum.
Am I wrong to think that modern is just a set of cards and that it can be more than just the best cards smashed together into decks that, in the old days, would have been fun the first two times and then the third time most people would start refusing to play against?
Try pauper. It's been called the jankiest format outside of EDH. Competitive decks are cheap, casual decks are cheap, the whole damn thing is cheap so you can easily suss a deck at the level of what your opponents are playing.
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EDH RRGrenzo plays your deck, GGYeva's mono green control, WW9-tails trys desperately for monowhite not to suck RWBUTymna and Kraum's saboteur tribal, UWG Kestia's Enchantress Aggro, RUB Jeleva casts big dumb spells, RGB Vaevictis' big critters can kill your critters hard
Randy Buehler, Sam Stoddard and etc would manage this if they wanted to/were allowed to because they have the skills and knowledge to do this.
I dont see any backlash danger regarding this except for in wotc meetings where directors and other wotcers are present, but I dont think that is what you meant ?
It would take far more than re-balancing current set design to do what you want to the Modern meta. By backlash, on the side of players, I meant that bannings are effectively off the table as tools, as is significant power creep. On the WOTC side, Wizards would be highly unlikely to risk the slaughter their twin golden geese, standard and limited, in order to change Modern.
To be fair, FNM is not a casual event. How can you expect people to play casual decks when you have entry fees and money prizes in these events?
Personally, I always want to play with my casual mill deck but I can't bring myself to pay 15 AUD (yup, it's a pretty expensive entry fee) and win nothing. Losing feels bad and losing because you wanted to play a casual deck feels even worse.
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Modern
Competitive: GW Hatebears - UG Infect - BGW Liege Rhino
Casual: GR Titan Ramp - BR Aggro
WIP: BUW Control Mill
In conclusion wizards should suggest some casual formats to play the game for those who dislike competitive. And give people an alternative. Like a new format based on sealed products with semi-random things.
Ideally is to make a product that has a limited random card pool and uses pre-constructed decks. They will have to be creative, but still, standard is not a format for most casual people. Neither commander or any other format. They could extend the deck builder toolkit into making a product with a lot of bulk that is actually good in a bulk new format. Still, the power level low is not preventing cards do crazy stuff. I think this is what casual player would want.
Spot on!
The whole "frontier" format people are tying to push isn't helping either. It's nothing more than a money grab by vendors who prey on us all. It's not a solution for the actual players of the game. It's sad that competitive formats inevitably doom themselves into diminishing player bases due to the constant pressure of money issues and the proposed "frontier" format is nothing new! It would be the same ***** over again.
WOTC needs to consider the value of a simultaneous effort to improve casual play along side of competitive play. A new competitive format shouldn't take priority over a new casual format, I think. WOTC needs to continue producing sealed products that target casual play (like they do with EDH) and they need to be released on a frequent basis, along with the typical products for competitive formats.
EDH has been endorsed by WOTC and that's great but maybe it's time to officially endorse Pauper, or come up with more casual formats.
WotC has been pushing casual play hard for several years. Commander, Archenemy, Planechase, and Conspiracy aren't aimed at the tournament crowd outside of occasional new cards. There are plenty of interesting cards in expert level sets with little to no chance of seeing regular tournament play. FNMs can be literally any format. What more do the people who want WotC to push casual play to do? Sit all of the tournament players down and give them a stern talking-to?
@Warangel, there has been a product with a limited random card pool using preconstructed decks. It's the precons that get released alongside every set. If you want to base a format around those, get some like minded people together and play it. If you can't find anyone who wants to play that, maybe there's not as much demand for it as you think. Waiting for WotC to hand down a very specific casual format from on high is ridiculous. We've been managing to play casual magic for two decades without a problem and WotC has repeatedly stated that casual players buy significantly more product than tournament players, so I don't see how casual players are suddenly getting the short end of the stick.
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[Pr]Jaya | Estrid | A rotating cast of decks built out of my box.
Casual play dying? Not even remotely. Just keep in mind one thing. Over 10 million people play MTG give or take a few million last I heard. The largest GP ever had under 10,000 people attend. 10K in the face of 10M is a tiny splash in the ocean. While every single competitive player didn't go to GP Vegas, I'd say at least 5% did. Hell let's take it farther and say just 1% of competitive players went to the largest GP ever/there was a million competitive players. 1 million competitive in the face of 9 million plus casuals is not that large a number in terms of playerbase. There are untold masses of people who play this game just for fun with cards like vizzerdrix/whatever they open from packs or occasionally buy from a store as singles. You never see them in some cases and in others you see them only come out of the woodwork for prereleases. They are out there though.
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"Yawgmoth," Freyalise whispered as she set the bomb, "now you will pay for your treachery."
This is stretching it a bit. Actually, it's just not correct.
As an EDH player your statement seems waaaay off.
No store I've been to all along the I-5 corridor thru WA & OR runs EDH FNM's. I don't get to play magic on fridays, I have to wait until saturday for casual play.
This is stretching it a bit. Actually, it's just not correct.
As an EDH player your statement seems waaaay off.
No store I've been to all along the I-5 corridor thru WA & OR runs EDH FNM's. I don't get to play magic on fridays, I have to wait until saturday for casual play.
It's a stretch in that many formats probably don't see play at FNM, but that is now the stores decision.
it used to be that FNM's could only run certain formats, now they are allowed to be any format, which doesn't mean that they are.
This is what is usual meant when people say FNM's can be any format. source
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"If you knew anything about the lore you'd see that they were clearly hinting that the madness on Innistrad was caused by Uncle Istvan wearing Urza's Power Armor ... tainted with Phrexyian Oil"
Graham from Loading Ready Run
This is stretching it a bit. Actually, it's just not correct.
As an EDH player your statement seems waaaay off.
No store I've been to all along the I-5 corridor thru WA & OR runs EDH FNM's. I don't get to play magic on fridays, I have to wait until saturday for casual play.
Just because the stores you've visited don't run anything but standard/modern/draft doesn't mean that they can't. See the link xecel posted or the WPN info page on FNM that explicitly says stores at at least the core level (anyone who can hold FNM to begin with) can run FNM as any format and distribute promos however they want. This has been the case for two years now. If you really want an EDH FNM, talk to the owner of your LGS and get it set up. If you feel that casual play isn't being supported in your area and you want it to be, do something about it. WotC isn't keeping you from doing any of that. If the LGS owner isn't going for it and you want to play on Friday nights, talk to the people you play with on Saturdays and propose that. You can play magic outside of scheduled times at stores. Complaining on an online forum about WotC not supporting casual magic is not at all helpful.
Yeah while I haven't attended an FNM for a long time, you can even have vintage FNM if you so choose as a store owner. If there's enough interest for EDH FNM at a store, the store will run it. Just talk to the store owner/tournament organizer about it. If they get the numbers/$$$ for it they will do it as long as they aren't a moron business owner.
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"Yawgmoth," Freyalise whispered as she set the bomb, "now you will pay for your treachery."
This is stretching it a bit. Actually, it's just not correct.
As an EDH player your statement seems waaaay off.
No store I've been to all along the I-5 corridor thru WA & OR runs EDH FNM's. I don't get to play magic on fridays, I have to wait until saturday for casual play.
Complaining on an online forum about WotC not supporting casual magic is not at all helpful.
how many of your near 7,000 posts have been complaining on an online forum I wonder? Certainly more than my own. Look in the mirror, we've all got something to complain about and right now you're complaining about other people's complaints. Pull the stick out a little bit eh?
FNM can organize casual play but I do not see the point of that. Players would just go in a bar and play with the people they met at FNM. This is what happens. In the start is really hard without friends to play but after a while is ok. Shops should change into bars and win by selling beer.
That solves your problem, doesn't it? You meet people to play casually with, the store presumably got whatever business it was going to because you met there. If you want more cards or whatever related product, you go back. That seems like a net win.
how many of your near 7,000 posts have been complaining on an online forum I wonder? Certainly more than my own. Look in the mirror, we've all got something to complain about and right now you're complaining about other people's complaints. Pull the stick out a little bit eh?
Sure, I'm almost positive I've spent more time complaining in 7 years than you have in 8 months. That doesn't change the fact that I'm trying to address your concerns in this thread. Based on the altered Guardian Beast, you're a long time player. I'd guess that you were playing before organized play was a thing and you could still find people to play with. What's changed so much that that's no longer the case?
WotC has spent a fair amount of money explicitly targeting casual players in the last few years and relaxed restrictions on their flagship event at local levels. They've introduced 2 casual formats (Planechase and Archenemy) and formally endorsed a third (Commander) since they last created a new competitive format (Modern). How does that translate to less support for casual players?
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[Pr]Jaya | Estrid | A rotating cast of decks built out of my box.
I do not think I can find any reason to return to shops. I get trading from social media which I hate so I hate the trading too. But I am counting on wizards sealed products right now.
Ahahaha
Warangel, you're the greatest.
Have you ever considered the possibility that maybe Magic isn't the game for you? You seem to hate every aspect of it and want Wizards to make wacky changes to the game even though there are plenty of options available for casual play.
I do not think I can find any reason to return to shops. I get trading from social media which I hate so I hate the trading too. But I am counting on wizards sealed products right now.
Have you ever considered the possibility that maybe Magic isn't the game for you? You seem to hate every aspect of it and want Wizards to make wacky changes to the game even though there are plenty of options available for casual play.
Maybe try Force of Will? Checkers? Fishing?
I read this in Val Kilmer's voice as Doc Holliday in Tombstone when he tells Ike that maybe poker isn't his game. 'I know, how about a spelling bee.'
Sorry I know I'm new to this forum I just had to say this cause I can't stop giggling.
I play magic and I comment on this forum on various magic themes because that is what I do.
I still think wizards had a way in pushing people into competitive magic and never understood why it is a bad thing (for the sales perspective). But I am here to help and I think I made them change their mind a little. I hope I can do more for casual players like me.
I can say with almost complete certainty that nothing you're posting on this forum is affecting WotC's policies. Even if they're reading it on a regular basis (which I seriously doubt) they're getting more input and more direct input from social media, surveys, and focus groups. Probably orders of magnitude more. In addition, they actually engage on those platforms, something you don't see on MTGS. There's nothing wrong with talking Magic on a forum but no one here should think that their posts here are influencing WotC.
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[Pr]Jaya | Estrid | A rotating cast of decks built out of my box.
I play magic and I comment on this forum on various magic themes because that is what I do.
I still think wizards had a way in pushing people into competitive magic and never understood why it is a bad thing (for the sales perspective). But I am here to help and I think I made them change their mind a little. I hope I can do more for casual players like me.
I can say with almost complete certainty that nothing you're posting on this forum is affecting WotC's policies. Even if they're reading it on a regular basis (which I seriously doubt) they're getting more input and more direct input from social media, surveys, and focus groups. Probably orders of magnitude more. In addition, they actually engage on those platforms, something you don't see on MTGS. There's nothing wrong with talking Magic on a forum but no one here should think that their posts here are influencing WotC.
This 1000% percent. They have said that those are the things they look at and probably at most Reddit. This forum/site is, if anything, a small blip on their radar.
BULL*****
Really are you so arrogant that you think everyone goes to the US? For a single weekend? Heck most people can't even go to the US, and I think the people from the US don't even fancy travelling from florida to there.
The world has 7.4 billion people - the us population is "334 million" that's about 4%. So considering a safety margin 5% of the playerbase is in the US. - Thus 0.5 million people. So 10000 people is 2% of the total US MTG playing population. So at least that part is competitive, and if (as you imply?) 5% of the competitive US people go to the GP; that means the competitive population is 0.2 million - nearly half the total population of players.
It's not really a stretch to say that there's a large portion of the magic playerbase in the US, given that the game started there and is more directly supported by the parent company there. A direct ratio of US population to world population to find the percentage of magic players in the US is ridiculous. India has a population of 1.3 billion. By your methods, 15% of magic players are in India, give or take a bit. Of the 53 GPs in 2017, 0 are being held in India and cards are not printed in any Indian language. 22 GPs are being held in the US. What's more likely: WotC is intentionally slighting India, despite it accounting for 15% of their playerbase, or that magic players are not uniformly distributed throughout the world's population?
I also have no idea where you're coming up with a number of 10 million for the total population of magic players. The last hard number I could find with brief internet searching is 12 million globally in 2013 according to Mark Purvis, the global brand director at WotC. There's a later figure of 20 million in 2015 which more or less fits with the 25% yearly revenue growth leading into 2012 mentioned in the NBC article, but is unsourced. Taking it into the percentage of competitive players, there were at least 417k people in the DCI rating database towards the end of 2011. There are probably some duplicates in there and they aren't all going to be competitive players (thanks to prereleases and the like), but those numbers suggest that roughly 5% of the magic playing population is at least invested enough to have a DCI number. If that's relatively constant, saying that there were 1 million competitive players at the time of GP Vegas is likely accurate or slightly underselling it. These numbers also fit with what you see from MaRo on social media, that the vast majority of magic players are casual players (no source on this one, but it shouldn't be too hard to find). I'm not going to comment on the number of US magic players, because I have nothing to base it on, aside from saying that 500k is heavily underestimating it.
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At that point I didn't really know how to answer him because he certainly isn't the only one with that impression. The LGS nearby was basically taken over by highly competitive players playing either T1 net decks or some form of combo / kills you out of no where deck like Infect and Ad-Nauseum.
Am I wrong to think that modern is just a set of cards and that it can be more than just the best cards smashed together into decks that, in the old days, would have been fun the first two times and then the third time most people would start refusing to play against?
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!
Seriously, though, FNM really depends on your meta. Some places are more competitive than others. There are plenty of LGS where people bring tier 3 brews and do really well. That being said, aggro is king right now in Modern and can be one of the easiest archetypes to play, so it's easier to dump a few hundred bucks on a netdeck and play competitively without being particularly skilled.
If your friend wants to play a format with a playing field that's relatively level in proportion to money spent, you can always play draft. It's a great option for new players and it's pretty much ubiquitous as far as the LGS goes.
Side note: This post seems entirely Modern related, so maybe you'd like a mod to move it to that forum?
Also, FNMs are supposed to be low-level competitive, not casual.
They have introduced "bricks and mortar" policies, taking the game away from independent TOs that run competitive MTG. Bricks and mortar stores are full of people who move from game to game, who are hard to build a competitive environment with.
They have put even more focus on the story (and specifically the planeswalkers). Competitive players don't give a toss about the poxy story, and never had, but here it is taking pride of place at the front of Wizard's marketing and thinking, aimed fairly and squarely at casual players with their "immersive experience".
They went away from the K ranking system that attempted to quantify how good players were (and did it roughly at best) and replaced it with a system that does not even try and instead measures consumption- they called it "planeswalker points". The new system, complete with the embarrassment of "levels", resets periodically, so you can drop in and out at will. Casual players don't really like to be ranked in order of how good they are, competitive players do. Casual players were at best excluded from the old ranking system, and ignored it, or they were actively given a ranking and told "you are worse than all these players above you".
They have jumped on the EDH bandwagon, the ultimate casual format.
They removed States from most parts of the world, and later PTQs and replaced them effectively with PPTQs and RPTQs. PPTQs attracted 50 players for the first one at my LGS. Now they get 8, whilst the commander tables are full.
They have gone after the casual market, and fragmented the serious market at the low to mid-level, whilst at the top end have backed the big time events so that to a large extent no one really notices, beyond those who turn up to the myriad of small non-firing FNMs and weekend events that used to be 20-30 players travelling from distances, and are now basically gone.
They removed Modern pro-tours to stop the pros "solving the format" and thus keeping it a bit more open for casual and serious players alike.
Do they "kill formats" for casual play?. Well, they did not kill EDH, they started designing cards for it. It is true they do not want more formats, and they do not want cheap, accessible eternal formats where people do not have spend much to keep up. They want eternal formats to be more expensive than Standard. But actually nearly every decision they have made in the past few years has been to the benefit of the casual player. The sort of player who turns up randomly in a store with bunch of decks of different formats, plays a couple of hours, likely Commander, but passes on FNM to go and get some food.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
Hmpf. It's one thing to talk about a version of modern you would prefer and to proclaim, without evidence or support, that your vision would be more profitable/popular. Implementation, on the other hand, is something you never touch, and for obvious reasons, because a forcible diversification of the metagame would be met by a massive backlash.
Try pauper. It's been called the jankiest format outside of EDH. Competitive decks are cheap, casual decks are cheap, the whole damn thing is cheap so you can easily suss a deck at the level of what your opponents are playing.
RRGrenzo plays your deck, GGYeva's mono green control, WW9-tails trys desperately for monowhite not to suck
RWBUTymna and Kraum's saboteur tribal, UWG Kestia's Enchantress Aggro, RUB Jeleva casts big dumb spells, RGB Vaevictis' big critters can kill your critters hard
Arena Standard
UUUU Tempo, since before it was cool
Various Wx decks running Fountain of Renewal and Day of Glory
Anything I can cram Chaos Wand in to
It would take far more than re-balancing current set design to do what you want to the Modern meta. By backlash, on the side of players, I meant that bannings are effectively off the table as tools, as is significant power creep. On the WOTC side, Wizards would be highly unlikely to risk the slaughter their twin golden geese, standard and limited, in order to change Modern.
I lol'd
To be fair, FNM is not a casual event. How can you expect people to play casual decks when you have entry fees and money prizes in these events?
Personally, I always want to play with my casual mill deck but I can't bring myself to pay 15 AUD (yup, it's a pretty expensive entry fee) and win nothing. Losing feels bad and losing because you wanted to play a casual deck feels even worse.
Competitive: GW Hatebears - UG Infect - BGW Liege Rhino
Casual: GR Titan Ramp - BR Aggro
WIP: BUW Control Mill
Spot on!
The whole "frontier" format people are tying to push isn't helping either. It's nothing more than a money grab by vendors who prey on us all. It's not a solution for the actual players of the game. It's sad that competitive formats inevitably doom themselves into diminishing player bases due to the constant pressure of money issues and the proposed "frontier" format is nothing new! It would be the same ***** over again.
WOTC needs to consider the value of a simultaneous effort to improve casual play along side of competitive play. A new competitive format shouldn't take priority over a new casual format, I think. WOTC needs to continue producing sealed products that target casual play (like they do with EDH) and they need to be released on a frequent basis, along with the typical products for competitive formats.
EDH has been endorsed by WOTC and that's great but maybe it's time to officially endorse Pauper, or come up with more casual formats.
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-general/334931-what-is-the-most-pimp-card-deck-youve-seen-or?comment=5361
Commander
RGOmnath, Locus of Rage Grenades! EDHGR
UWSygg's Defense, EDH - Voltron & ControlWU
BUGMimeoplasm EDH ft. Ifnir Cycling-discard comboBUG
WBTeysa, Connoisseur of CullingBW
BWSelenia & Recruiter of the Guard suicice combo EDHWB
UBRWGO-Kagachi - 5 Color Enchantments - EDHUBRWG
@Warangel, there has been a product with a limited random card pool using preconstructed decks. It's the precons that get released alongside every set. If you want to base a format around those, get some like minded people together and play it. If you can't find anyone who wants to play that, maybe there's not as much demand for it as you think. Waiting for WotC to hand down a very specific casual format from on high is ridiculous. We've been managing to play casual magic for two decades without a problem and WotC has repeatedly stated that casual players buy significantly more product than tournament players, so I don't see how casual players are suddenly getting the short end of the stick.
Currently Playing:
Retired
This is stretching it a bit. Actually, it's just not correct.
As an EDH player your statement seems waaaay off.
No store I've been to all along the I-5 corridor thru WA & OR runs EDH FNM's. I don't get to play magic on fridays, I have to wait until saturday for casual play.
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-general/334931-what-is-the-most-pimp-card-deck-youve-seen-or?comment=5361
Commander
RGOmnath, Locus of Rage Grenades! EDHGR
UWSygg's Defense, EDH - Voltron & ControlWU
BUGMimeoplasm EDH ft. Ifnir Cycling-discard comboBUG
WBTeysa, Connoisseur of CullingBW
BWSelenia & Recruiter of the Guard suicice combo EDHWB
UBRWGO-Kagachi - 5 Color Enchantments - EDHUBRWG
It's a stretch in that many formats probably don't see play at FNM, but that is now the stores decision.
it used to be that FNM's could only run certain formats, now they are allowed to be any format, which doesn't mean that they are.
This is what is usual meant when people say FNM's can be any format.
source
Graham from Loading Ready Run
Currently Playing:
Retired
how many of your near 7,000 posts have been complaining on an online forum I wonder? Certainly more than my own. Look in the mirror, we've all got something to complain about and right now you're complaining about other people's complaints. Pull the stick out a little bit eh?
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-general/334931-what-is-the-most-pimp-card-deck-youve-seen-or?comment=5361
Commander
RGOmnath, Locus of Rage Grenades! EDHGR
UWSygg's Defense, EDH - Voltron & ControlWU
BUGMimeoplasm EDH ft. Ifnir Cycling-discard comboBUG
WBTeysa, Connoisseur of CullingBW
BWSelenia & Recruiter of the Guard suicice combo EDHWB
UBRWGO-Kagachi - 5 Color Enchantments - EDHUBRWG
Sure, I'm almost positive I've spent more time complaining in 7 years than you have in 8 months. That doesn't change the fact that I'm trying to address your concerns in this thread. Based on the altered Guardian Beast, you're a long time player. I'd guess that you were playing before organized play was a thing and you could still find people to play with. What's changed so much that that's no longer the case?
WotC has spent a fair amount of money explicitly targeting casual players in the last few years and relaxed restrictions on their flagship event at local levels. They've introduced 2 casual formats (Planechase and Archenemy) and formally endorsed a third (Commander) since they last created a new competitive format (Modern). How does that translate to less support for casual players?
Ahahaha
Warangel, you're the greatest.
Have you ever considered the possibility that maybe Magic isn't the game for you? You seem to hate every aspect of it and want Wizards to make wacky changes to the game even though there are plenty of options available for casual play.
Maybe try Force of Will? Checkers? Fishing?
you seem quite the opposite lol
by the way back on topic
wotc supports casual play way more than anything else
URW PillowFort Stasis (costruction)
modern:
U Taking Turns combo
pauper:
UB Servitor Control
xenob8 : you know you are going to have a bad time when opponent starts with snow covered island
I read this in Val Kilmer's voice as Doc Holliday in Tombstone when he tells Ike that maybe poker isn't his game. 'I know, how about a spelling bee.'
Sorry I know I'm new to this forum I just had to say this cause I can't stop giggling.
This 1000% percent. They have said that those are the things they look at and probably at most Reddit. This forum/site is, if anything, a small blip on their radar.
I also have no idea where you're coming up with a number of 10 million for the total population of magic players. The last hard number I could find with brief internet searching is 12 million globally in 2013 according to Mark Purvis, the global brand director at WotC. There's a later figure of 20 million in 2015 which more or less fits with the 25% yearly revenue growth leading into 2012 mentioned in the NBC article, but is unsourced. Taking it into the percentage of competitive players, there were at least 417k people in the DCI rating database towards the end of 2011. There are probably some duplicates in there and they aren't all going to be competitive players (thanks to prereleases and the like), but those numbers suggest that roughly 5% of the magic playing population is at least invested enough to have a DCI number. If that's relatively constant, saying that there were 1 million competitive players at the time of GP Vegas is likely accurate or slightly underselling it. These numbers also fit with what you see from MaRo on social media, that the vast majority of magic players are casual players (no source on this one, but it shouldn't be too hard to find). I'm not going to comment on the number of US magic players, because I have nothing to base it on, aside from saying that 500k is heavily underestimating it.