Serious competitive play is generally slanted towards standard, simply because that is what Wizards wants to push most because it is the most directly profitable to them.
That said, and while there is some overlap as to be expected, I respect serious legacy players far more than I do standard and, though to a lesser extent, modern. It's the difference between someone racing big wheels to someone racing motorcycles.
Do competitive players (not EDH crowd) generally go limited, standard, modern, legacy, and then vintage?
No. People who play legacy are usually those who started playing years ago. Either they have cards from that era, or are now working and so can afford the cards. It's usually standard->limited, and stops there.
Sanctioned competitive Vintage is almost non-existent.
What prompts a modern player to eventually trade their modern staples for legacy staples?
Lots of reason, but I'd proimarily ay it's because legacy card prices are far more stable than modern card prices.
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"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
What prompts a modern player to eventually trade their modern staples for legacy staples?
The reverse applied to me. Sold all of my revised duals, and then migrated to Modern -- because in Modern I have more people to play with.
It's a much more popular format and it helps that the buy in prices are much cheaper.
I will say that my 2 favorite formats ARE Modern and Legacy. I've gone back and forth on which format I like better, but right now, I'm a bit more of a Legacy fan.
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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)
When I came back to the game, having stopped around Alliances, I just jumped right into Modern. I did some research and the thought of 'rotation' seemed like a pretty stupid way to throw away money.
I havent played any other format (Standard, or Limited) in any serious way, but if Legacy was cheaper, I would have tried it.
What prompts a modern player to eventually trade their modern staples for legacy staples?
Stability in both price and value is a huge part. Modern staples are far more open to getting reprinted, which means you can buy in at a few hundred dollars and have that be worth a few dozen in a year or two. And this isn't even a "Magic finance" thing, but something players of non-rotating formats seriously have to consider for if/when it comes time to sell out of the game.
Also, Legacy is the far more diverse and interesting format, so it's got that going for it too.
Modern is cheaper then Legacy in paper but often more expensive onlime. RUG Delver is 4K in paper but $500 online, Jund is 2K paper and $700 online.
That is because of the lands, basically. Legacy's none-land cards are so overshadowed in price by their reserve list lands that they don't got bought up as much, while Modern's cheaper lands and larver player base leads to more expensive creatures and spells.
Online where lands are very cheap Legacy becomes more affordable, like 12 Post costing 5K in paper or $100 online.
I started Magic 12 years ago, playing Limited, but eventually moved to block constructed and then casual constructed. After some time, I got into Commander, and then one day, I accidentally built a Legacy deck. I cannibalized most of my Commander stuff for Legacy, and haven’t looked back since then. I try to keep one casual constructed deck around at all times for the hell of it, and I still try to make a weekly-to-monthly jaunt out of Commander, but I’ve definitely been playing more Legacy, lately. I’ve played in maybe 2 Standard events out of curiosity, but overall find the format to be unappealing. I thought about building a Modern deck, just to have one, but...I played some Modern online with a few different lists to see what I might enjoy, and it feels like bad Legacy. Or worse, competitive casual.
Anyway, I just like Legacy better than the other competitive formats - it feels like there’s a richly diverse meta with option for brews to perform well, and the way the decks play feels sleek and efficient - and Commander, because of the epic lines of play you can pursue with it.
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Another major difference between Legacy and Modern is that Legacy is less susceptible to combo decks. The best deck is almost always a FoW deck because combo in legacy is so sleek, and combo can be allowed to be so powerful because FoW decks keep it from taking over.
Right now the best deck is Grixis Control, then Death's Shadow and Sneak and Show. Three totally different decks that all share Force.
There seems to be an influx of player that play modern that slowly crawl to legacy.
anecdote with an important moral, that i've seen replicated many times in different locales:
1) thriving modern community at a small LGS. weekly modern FNMs, around 20+ players every single week, lots of testing and brewing.
2) one person, lured by expensive cards and exciting anecdotes, decides they'd like to try Legacy. They trade out of Modern entirely and sit on a single, shiny new Legacy deck, encouraging their friends to do the same. It'll be great, right?
3) a handful of their close friends follow suit in a wave of excitement and promise of greener pastures, and trade up, hunkering down on individual Legacy decks compared to their three or four (or more) Modern decks.
4) small LGS tries to fire a Legacy FNM and for a couple of weeks at least, there's a tiny 8-person Legacy FNM with a fixed, stale metagame. The Modern guys still play but their numbers are reduced from regularly 20-ish down to about 12 players.
5) newly-minted Legacy players realise their mistake of putting all their eggs into the basket of a dying format that almost nobody plays and give up, either selling out of Magic entirely or dumping their cards so that they can trade at a huge loss back into Modern, Standard or EDH.
6) At this point, the Modern FNM has suffered a pretty big blow, and remaining players' friends have wrecked their collections or forced themselves out of the game entirely. The Modern FNM's playerbase and numbers dwindle to around 8-10 players and events stop regularly firing. People drift away as the buzz and community has been ripped from their weekly event.
I've seen this happen in small communities all over the place. Same story (or a close analogue) every time.
Magic players: Don't trade out of other formats into Legacy in an all-or-nothing gambit. Repeat after me: Nobody plays Legacy
Value your local community and don't abandon them for some perceived exclusivity. Legacy events are now some of the worst-attended globally (Brawl/Frontier notwithstanding).
Literally every single time an acquaintance or friend of mine has traded up into Legacy, they begin blinded by the glamour and price, the rarity and extravagance. One guy (who was an avid Modern enthusiast) got bitten by temptation and traded everything into Legacy Reanimator, and then got frustrated when we all just carried on playing Modern and Draft while their expensive trophy-deck sat rotting in a deckbox, unused. That was nearly six years ago and he never managed to properly get back into Modern again. He'd lost too many staples to rebuild what he had, so trading out in that way was the death-knell for him competitively. Now he doesn't really play much at all, despite wanting to. And guess what, I can name at least 10 other people just in my small magic community who made the same mistake. It's not like they didn't enjoy Modern either, they loved it - it's just that Legacy was some sort of enticing jewel, and the increasing prices of Modern staples allowed them to satisfy an urge to trade into more exclusive, valuable decks/cards. I've never seen it work out, honestly. It's a trap.
(worth noting of course, that if you can just afford to outright buy legacy staples and have the disposable income to chuck thousands of £$£$£$ at older cards, power to you - go for it. It's a great investment and the format is fun, when you can actually find an opponent)
(and of course, i'm explicitly talking about Legacy in PAPER. Online it doesn't really mean much of course. The formats are basically all the same on MTGO in terms of cost).
Legacy exists where there there are people to promote it and access to cards, but it also requires luck, and the LGS to be pointing the right way.
I will give you my anecdotes.
I have basically helped build two scenes in my area. In about 2009 I sold out of standard. I was fed up of it, the cost, the formats, the design paradigm. When Modern came along I jumped in, and bought tons of fetches plus old sealed stock. I had the old shocks (expensive at the time), and taking my local TO with me I started to build, he started to promote. I got to 30 odd decks for free loan, mainly financed by selling out of standard and the mass increase in EDH prices. I played the markets a fair bit, and by buying in to Modern at the very start I could build five decks for the cost of one standard deck, and I could sell my draft pulls without fear of needing cards, which then started to make draft break even. The time upkeep on the decks I build was huge, spending hours every month keeping lists up to date, but the scene grew and grew as people could borrow almost any deck and that encouraged them to buy their own. Our city became the Modern city for miles.
Eventually the upkeep on my time became way too much, times changed and an LGS opened. Commander grew and grew via the LGS, a local player did exactly as I had but for Commander rather than Modern, the local TO stopped running regular Saturday and Tuesday Modern events, and the format leveled and dwindled. As I played the market more I noticed the patterns better, as I dealt in more cards and could see a bit of writing on the wall. I sold out about 17 decks worth of Modern cards and staples, played the markets to sell at maximum price, gambled on reprints and spikes, largely correctly, and made a shed of cash, which funded an intro to Legacy and a fair bit in my personal life. I was ruthless, and would sell any deck no matter how competitive- I sold 3 tron decks, infect, affinity twice over, merfolk, living end, Co-Co, Storm, UW control and many more. I kept about 15, but they consist of a lot of fringe projects no one would want and I actually enjoy, and about seven of the cheapest decks from different middling tiers in the format, decks like eldrazi n taxes, burn, ad nauseam, martyr and skred. Believe me, had there been any money in them they would have gone too. The point was I saw what was coming, a rise of commander, a format in Modern that was getting gummed up, a fall in the serious events at the LGS. Had I stuck with all the big Modern decks I would have had no one to play with locally.
By coincidence at the time about fifty miles up the road the next city, far bigger, had a small Legacy scene, partially itself coming out of the Legacy scene another fifty miles up. I decided to promote it as best I could, bought deeper into Legacy (again before the huge RL spikes) and the only real help I could be was to repeat what I had done. It was a hell of a risk, at the time Chains were 90 euros, Tabernacles 150, so they were not cheap, but compared to the price of Snappies, Lilly we are only talking a multiplier of two to three times. I became a lending library for cards and decks once again. The difference was the time upkeep was far less, and I now own 20 odd Legacy decks, enough to warrant keeping them banked under lock and key. I have to travel a bit to play Legacy, but in my local city there is almost nobody about for either, so I figure it is the better deal. Financially it certainly has been, no question.
In both cases without the decks for loan both scenes would have had difficulty taking off, but one scene is still going, whilst the other has dwindled. All it takes is a few key personnel to go, a few new players to come in and play Standard, or the LGS or TO to aim elsewhere.
A lot of people are desperate to repeat these tricks-to be in as a format grows- they are those who keep pushing Frontier, PreModern etc. Frontier in particular is the one wannabe Modern players whoi could not afford to buy in seemed to think would work, and as many said at the time "I have all the cards for it". Of course, this is rather like people buying Star Wars figures hoping they will be like the old Palitoy ones financially, but it never works twice.
I've seen this happen in small communities all over the place. Same story (or a close analogue) every time.
Magic players: Don't trade out of other formats into Legacy in an all-or-nothing gambit. Repeat after me: Nobody plays Legacy
Value your local community and don't abandon them for some perceived exclusivity. Legacy events are now some of the worst-attended globally (Brawl/Frontier notwithstanding).
The last large Legacy tourney I attended was more than 5 years ago. Now, to look for legacy players here.. it's like looking for a needle in haystack. The most logical thing to do in such a situation is to sell all expensive legacy staples to EDH players. Use newly acquired funds to buy goyf and a few other modern staples to get in to Modern. After the dust settlled, there's still a little leftover money to put into the bank and I have many people to play with again. ^__^
There seems to be an influx of player that play modern that slowly crawl to legacy.
Do competitive players (not EDH crowd) generally go limited, standard, modern, legacy, and then vintage?
What prompts a modern player to eventually trade their modern staples for legacy staples?
That said, and while there is some overlap as to be expected, I respect serious legacy players far more than I do standard and, though to a lesser extent, modern. It's the difference between someone racing big wheels to someone racing motorcycles.
UBBreya's Toybox (Competitive, Combo)WR
RGodzilla, King of the MonstersG
-Retired Decks-
UBLazav, Dimir Mastermind (Competitive, UB Voltron/Control)UB
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No. People who play legacy are usually those who started playing years ago. Either they have cards from that era, or are now working and so can afford the cards. It's usually standard->limited, and stops there.
Sanctioned competitive Vintage is almost non-existent.
Lots of reason, but I'd proimarily ay it's because legacy card prices are far more stable than modern card prices.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
The reverse applied to me. Sold all of my revised duals, and then migrated to Modern -- because in Modern I have more people to play with.
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It's a much more popular format and it helps that the buy in prices are much cheaper.
I will say that my 2 favorite formats ARE Modern and Legacy. I've gone back and forth on which format I like better, but right now, I'm a bit more of a Legacy fan.
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)I havent played any other format (Standard, or Limited) in any serious way, but if Legacy was cheaper, I would have tried it.
Spirits
Stability in both price and value is a huge part. Modern staples are far more open to getting reprinted, which means you can buy in at a few hundred dollars and have that be worth a few dozen in a year or two. And this isn't even a "Magic finance" thing, but something players of non-rotating formats seriously have to consider for if/when it comes time to sell out of the game.
Also, Legacy is the far more diverse and interesting format, so it's got that going for it too.
That is because of the lands, basically. Legacy's none-land cards are so overshadowed in price by their reserve list lands that they don't got bought up as much, while Modern's cheaper lands and larver player base leads to more expensive creatures and spells.
Online where lands are very cheap Legacy becomes more affordable, like 12 Post costing 5K in paper or $100 online.
Anyway, I just like Legacy better than the other competitive formats - it feels like there’s a richly diverse meta with option for brews to perform well, and the way the decks play feels sleek and efficient - and Commander, because of the epic lines of play you can pursue with it.
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Right now the best deck is Grixis Control, then Death's Shadow and Sneak and Show. Three totally different decks that all share Force.
anecdote with an important moral, that i've seen replicated many times in different locales:
1) thriving modern community at a small LGS. weekly modern FNMs, around 20+ players every single week, lots of testing and brewing.
2) one person, lured by expensive cards and exciting anecdotes, decides they'd like to try Legacy. They trade out of Modern entirely and sit on a single, shiny new Legacy deck, encouraging their friends to do the same. It'll be great, right?
3) a handful of their close friends follow suit in a wave of excitement and promise of greener pastures, and trade up, hunkering down on individual Legacy decks compared to their three or four (or more) Modern decks.
4) small LGS tries to fire a Legacy FNM and for a couple of weeks at least, there's a tiny 8-person Legacy FNM with a fixed, stale metagame. The Modern guys still play but their numbers are reduced from regularly 20-ish down to about 12 players.
5) newly-minted Legacy players realise their mistake of putting all their eggs into the basket of a dying format that almost nobody plays and give up, either selling out of Magic entirely or dumping their cards so that they can trade at a huge loss back into Modern, Standard or EDH.
6) At this point, the Modern FNM has suffered a pretty big blow, and remaining players' friends have wrecked their collections or forced themselves out of the game entirely. The Modern FNM's playerbase and numbers dwindle to around 8-10 players and events stop regularly firing. People drift away as the buzz and community has been ripped from their weekly event.
I've seen this happen in small communities all over the place. Same story (or a close analogue) every time.
Magic players: Don't trade out of other formats into Legacy in an all-or-nothing gambit. Repeat after me: Nobody plays Legacy
Value your local community and don't abandon them for some perceived exclusivity. Legacy events are now some of the worst-attended globally (Brawl/Frontier notwithstanding).
Literally every single time an acquaintance or friend of mine has traded up into Legacy, they begin blinded by the glamour and price, the rarity and extravagance. One guy (who was an avid Modern enthusiast) got bitten by temptation and traded everything into Legacy Reanimator, and then got frustrated when we all just carried on playing Modern and Draft while their expensive trophy-deck sat rotting in a deckbox, unused. That was nearly six years ago and he never managed to properly get back into Modern again. He'd lost too many staples to rebuild what he had, so trading out in that way was the death-knell for him competitively. Now he doesn't really play much at all, despite wanting to. And guess what, I can name at least 10 other people just in my small magic community who made the same mistake. It's not like they didn't enjoy Modern either, they loved it - it's just that Legacy was some sort of enticing jewel, and the increasing prices of Modern staples allowed them to satisfy an urge to trade into more exclusive, valuable decks/cards. I've never seen it work out, honestly. It's a trap.
(worth noting of course, that if you can just afford to outright buy legacy staples and have the disposable income to chuck thousands of £$£$£$ at older cards, power to you - go for it. It's a great investment and the format is fun, when you can actually find an opponent)
(and of course, i'm explicitly talking about Legacy in PAPER. Online it doesn't really mean much of course. The formats are basically all the same on MTGO in terms of cost).
I will give you my anecdotes.
I have basically helped build two scenes in my area. In about 2009 I sold out of standard. I was fed up of it, the cost, the formats, the design paradigm. When Modern came along I jumped in, and bought tons of fetches plus old sealed stock. I had the old shocks (expensive at the time), and taking my local TO with me I started to build, he started to promote. I got to 30 odd decks for free loan, mainly financed by selling out of standard and the mass increase in EDH prices. I played the markets a fair bit, and by buying in to Modern at the very start I could build five decks for the cost of one standard deck, and I could sell my draft pulls without fear of needing cards, which then started to make draft break even. The time upkeep on the decks I build was huge, spending hours every month keeping lists up to date, but the scene grew and grew as people could borrow almost any deck and that encouraged them to buy their own. Our city became the Modern city for miles.
Eventually the upkeep on my time became way too much, times changed and an LGS opened. Commander grew and grew via the LGS, a local player did exactly as I had but for Commander rather than Modern, the local TO stopped running regular Saturday and Tuesday Modern events, and the format leveled and dwindled. As I played the market more I noticed the patterns better, as I dealt in more cards and could see a bit of writing on the wall. I sold out about 17 decks worth of Modern cards and staples, played the markets to sell at maximum price, gambled on reprints and spikes, largely correctly, and made a shed of cash, which funded an intro to Legacy and a fair bit in my personal life. I was ruthless, and would sell any deck no matter how competitive- I sold 3 tron decks, infect, affinity twice over, merfolk, living end, Co-Co, Storm, UW control and many more. I kept about 15, but they consist of a lot of fringe projects no one would want and I actually enjoy, and about seven of the cheapest decks from different middling tiers in the format, decks like eldrazi n taxes, burn, ad nauseam, martyr and skred. Believe me, had there been any money in them they would have gone too. The point was I saw what was coming, a rise of commander, a format in Modern that was getting gummed up, a fall in the serious events at the LGS. Had I stuck with all the big Modern decks I would have had no one to play with locally.
By coincidence at the time about fifty miles up the road the next city, far bigger, had a small Legacy scene, partially itself coming out of the Legacy scene another fifty miles up. I decided to promote it as best I could, bought deeper into Legacy (again before the huge RL spikes) and the only real help I could be was to repeat what I had done. It was a hell of a risk, at the time Chains were 90 euros, Tabernacles 150, so they were not cheap, but compared to the price of Snappies, Lilly we are only talking a multiplier of two to three times. I became a lending library for cards and decks once again. The difference was the time upkeep was far less, and I now own 20 odd Legacy decks, enough to warrant keeping them banked under lock and key. I have to travel a bit to play Legacy, but in my local city there is almost nobody about for either, so I figure it is the better deal. Financially it certainly has been, no question.
In both cases without the decks for loan both scenes would have had difficulty taking off, but one scene is still going, whilst the other has dwindled. All it takes is a few key personnel to go, a few new players to come in and play Standard, or the LGS or TO to aim elsewhere.
A lot of people are desperate to repeat these tricks-to be in as a format grows- they are those who keep pushing Frontier, PreModern etc. Frontier in particular is the one wannabe Modern players whoi could not afford to buy in seemed to think would work, and as many said at the time "I have all the cards for it". Of course, this is rather like people buying Star Wars figures hoping they will be like the old Palitoy ones financially, but it never works twice.
The last large Legacy tourney I attended was more than 5 years ago. Now, to look for legacy players here.. it's like looking for a needle in haystack. The most logical thing to do in such a situation is to sell all expensive legacy staples to EDH players. Use newly acquired funds to buy goyf and a few other modern staples to get in to Modern. After the dust settlled, there's still a little leftover money to put into the bank and I have many people to play with again. ^__^
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Want to play a UW control deck in modern, but don't have jace or snaps?
Please come visit us at the Emeria Titan control thread