I just came back to MTG on the Kaladesh block. My plan was to stick with standard and EDH. I put 2 standard decks together. Mardu Vehicles and a Bant Midrange list. Copters got banned out of the vehicles list and reflector mage got banned out of the bant midrange list. Now I am halfway scared to spend money on standard. I don't want to replace the copters with heart of kiran just to see it get banned in 4 or 5 weeks. I get that you want a healthy meta, but I would have to think there are people that are just not willing to spend money on the game in fear that their deck will get banned out. I almost wanna just stick with EDH or hope frontier takes off.
Heart of Kiran won't get banned. It's a good card, but it's not every deck good the way Smuggler's Copter was. Free, colorless looting was just too good. It went too easily into every deck.
Although, I'm not sure why Reflector Mage was banned. It's a strong card, it's not a broken card. So what do I know lol.
Standard isn't that great right now I agree, but I don't think they will resort to banning anything else. Especially not Heart of Kiran. If anything the Saheeli combo because that deck is one of the reasons Mardu Vehicles was too dominant at the Pro Tour (it has a great saheeli matchup)
If temur battlerage and become immense weren't in the Faroe I'd be shocked if the saheeli combo was. There is an incredible amount of hate in almost every color for it.
Copter was really about as pushed as you could make a card for standard, imo. Heart is no where near that level of utility. Is it powerful? Sure. Is it broken? No. Swinging 4-5 T3 in the air isn't really that bad when you have stuff like fatal push or clip wings in the format.
I'd wager you're safe for now. Imho most of these archetypes won't gain much of anything from amonkhet, because the curves are just so well developed for what you want to be doing on turns 1-3 in mardu or bg. This may cause some kind of awkward arms race with new set gimmicks? I dunno.
I will say this though, the competitive decks outside of saheeli are incredibly rare/mythic heavy. By runs gearhulk, rishkar, ballista, nissa, siphoner, mikdwrack and more. I don't like that the decks have moved in that direction since ktk.
You picked a bad time to come back because the game and community are in the worst states I've seen them in since 7th edition.
Why do you say that? Lack of variety? I recently came back too and I am in the process of researching building a deck. I noticed there is only 3 or 4 major "net decks" out there now-a-days. Usually when I looked through cards and championed decks. There were more than that to help find cards a bit easier to customize my own.
You picked a bad time to come back because the game and community are in the worst states I've seen them in since 7th edition.
Why do you say that? Lack of variety? I recently came back too and I am in the process of researching building a deck. I noticed there is only 3 or 4 major "net decks" out there now-a-days. Usually when I looked through cards and championed decks. There were more than that to help find cards a bit easier to customize my own.
Standard has been ruled by some really, really pushed cards for some time now. This has in turn made the gulf in power level between the Best decks and "playable" decks the largest I've seen in some time. While differentials always exist, it seems that the difference has widened significantly in recent years and the recent banning reflect that.
I can see why you'd be worried but kiran won't get banned not nearly as good the only thing likely to get banned out is the cat combo as far as reasonable bans go, but wizards wont even do that probably because they don't want to incite the exact fear you are voicing right now i mean we already have people theororizing that wizards is going to start regularly banning out the top decks in order to push the new set a cat ban would serve to confirm that so ironically enought the deck that needs a ban the most probably won't recieve one they'll probably just print better ways to combat the combo
I know this thread is a little stale, but I would be curious why you say this. I haven't played consistently since Apocalypse, so I am pretty out of it.
Matt: Standard is just not in a good place right now. There are three decks that are remotely competitive, and they by in large are more or less have the same format: a coin flip in the mirror, a 90-10 favorite against one of the other two decks, and a 10-90 underdog against the last one. Actually playing out the match us often academic once you both know what deck the other is on, because it's so incredibly hard to win your bad matchup - you have to draw perfectly AND your opponent has to brick AND you have to be able to do that twice in a 3-game match.
There's a couple of reasons for why standard is like it is. One of the simplest things is that the format is so quickly solved - and that's partially due to wizards' unwillingness to print much in the way of complex cards to keep the game "newbie friendly". Interactions are very blatant and overt for everyone to see, and it takes minimal testing to determine which of the interactions is the most favorable compared to the others, especially when this testing is crowdsourced over millions of players. Another reason standard is so boring is that answers are generally much MUCH weaker than threats. We see a 4/5 for two mana and go "okay that's decent-ish I guess", we see a 8/8 trampler for 5 and it's just a solid creature but hardly extraordinary. Meanwhile we get a reprint of shock and that becomes a big deal because it's the best burn spell in the format - mostly a relic of Sam Stoddard's design philosophy that removal should never cost less than the threat it removes. While wizards HAS said they recognize that it's a problem and that they're working on it, we won't be able to see any of the effects for at least another 2 years. Finally, the rise of Investment Magic and rampant speculationism makes it really difficult to build a deck before it becomes a pricey affair. When it's clear what cards are the best and most important, and what decks will use those cards, it becomes easy for people (collectively or not) to just treat magic like a stock market and constantly buy and sell cards not to build, but as investment vehicles. Because of this a deck can cost $300, $400 or even $500 just to see if you like it, and there's virtually no way for the average player to buy in and not get screwed by these kind of pump&dump schemes. While I can appreciate wizards not wanting to enter the secondary market themselves, I feel that they need to establish some sort of expectations for the stores and retailers to follow.
These are things that can be fixed, and really SHOULD be fixed if wizards wants to keep Organized Play a big part of a its attractiveness. But there's also talk of them abandoning the physical entirely and transitioning to an online only product to compete directly with Hearthstone and Shadowverse which seems like a losing battle. Only time will tell.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Top 16 - 2012 Indiana State Championships Currently Playing: GBStandard - Golgari Safari MidrangeBG RBWModern - Mardu PyromancerWBR RLegacy - Good Old Fashioned BurnR
Thanks! That was definitely some good info. I didn't play Standard a ton back in the day, even at the time we mostly played Vintage. But it is good to understand what the concerns are going forward. I'm considering getting back into it, if I end up having any free time, but knowing these kinds of issues certainly helps.
I was looking at the list of Top 30 finishers at Grand Prix New Jersey and you are right, there isn't a lot of variety.
Legacy and Vintage are probably the most wide-open formats, because the super fast and broken combo decks that have to be banned from modern are fair in legacy because of the free counters that keep them from just instantly winning turn 0. The threat of Force of Will and/or Daze means the uber-fast combos either have to push all in (and risk falt-out losing if their opponent has the counterspell) or to devote resources to protect the combo (which dilutes the deck and makes the odds of a win before the opponent can do anything less likely). There is a lot of variety available in these formats, even if there are three or four "top" decks I'd wager there's closer to 10 to 15 that have the ability to win a tournament.
The biggest issue, again, is cost that's been driven overwhelmingly crazy by Investment Magic. A lot of the cards that make legacy and vintage go are on the Reserved List, so they're seen as "blue chip" investments for the speculators as their price will never crash. Most of the Dual Lands from ABU are over $100, the blue ones in the $200-250 range. Moxen go for $3000 on the low end. And these prices continue to grow as time goes on because these pump&dump schemes keep happening unchecked. It won't be long before you can buy one of these black lotuses for cheaper than you could this one
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Top 16 - 2012 Indiana State Championships Currently Playing: GBStandard - Golgari Safari MidrangeBG RBWModern - Mardu PyromancerWBR RLegacy - Good Old Fashioned BurnR
Trust me, I know where the speculation is going. I sold all my Power to pay for my wedding a couple years ago.
I told my wife I didn't have any good cards any longer and the first thing she grabbed out of my box was my playset of Serendib Efreet which were selling for $150 each on ebay. I probably paid $10 for each when I bought them years ago. I haven't even looked at what some of the other ones are going for, but I could probably sell a lot of Mountain and make a killing, but I don't want to get rid of any of the older stuff I have.
I probably won't ever make the reinvestment into the game like I had before, and by the time you spend the money buying cards for each new Standard Cycle, you could just buy the cards you need for Vintage anyhow. So does that make more sense to focus on? Anyways, just good to understand what issues people are seeing these days in case I did decide to get back into it.
YMMV but I know plenty of people that like to play Vintage. I think it just all depends on your area and the people you play with.
Certainly in your town it seems that things didn't work out so well, but I've seen otherwise.
- Matt
You can check the dead legacy and vintage mtgsalvation forums. There is no great interest outside. There are sites like manadrain and mtgthesource for vintage and legacy communities, but they are small.
There are millions of people playing mtg worldwide. How many are playing vintage and legacy - several thousands?
I wish that was true I really do, unfortunatly the issues is their ARE alot of people who "want" to play Legacy otherwise the cards would drop in value like rocks. Someone needs to be buying in to the format to justify these prices. If their was only 1000's of people who wanted to play the demand would be so small that the price of the cards would drop to a much more managable level.
Unfortunately, the second hand market is pure speculation. There are individuals that hold thousands of cards and inflate the prices for profit.
Ah but here is where we can see the difference to a speculator it would not matter which reserve list card was bought or sold and if their was enough speculator better to have "easy to move low demonination that can spike easyer and higher) . After all they ALL have the same protection, Its playability and drive from outside sources for playable cards that drive so many RL prices through the roof. I feel that their are alot of people who "want" to play Legacy and are slowly buying up the stuff to play Legacy, however because their are so many of them the price of staples keeps going up as they all want a set of duels or need a city of traitors for their deck ect. They buy them up but the cost is too high to get ALL the deck so they slowly slug along but they all are sluging along,
Well, the problem is that the speculators are inflating the prices up without real demand.
I can understand that probably there are some young people that want to buy into legacy.
I've played this game for 15 years and (in my opinion of course) the legacy gameplay is very poor.
I will agree speculators are a problem I just don't think they are the only or largest problem. Also we will have to agree to disagree on the Legacy gameplay, I have played since Iceage and frankly think Legacy is the second best format in the game (second only to EDH)
You picked a bad time to come back because the game and community are in the worst states I've seen them in since 7th edition.
I know this post was from 2 months ago, but I have to ask. What was so bad about the time of 7th Edition? That was midway through the Invasion block, which was a massive hit and did a lot to bring back popularity to the game after Urza's Saga made a bunch of people leave. I don't remember any real issues with the game at the time.
You picked a bad time to come back because the game and community are in the worst states I've seen them in since 7th edition.
I know this post was from 2 months ago, but I have to ask. What was so bad about the time of 7th Edition? That was midway through the Invasion block, which was a massive hit and did a lot to bring back popularity to the game after Urza's Saga made a bunch of people leave. I don't remember any real issues with the game at the time.
I remember a lot of people were unhappy with 7th Edition because it was a generally weak set with terrible art. They replaced all of the classic art to avoid paying higher royalties and it was almost all just awful. I can't imagine anything else, I remember Invasion block being quite popular.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Although, I'm not sure why Reflector Mage was banned. It's a strong card, it's not a broken card. So what do I know lol.
My current trade binder.
"People most likely to cry "troll" are those who can't fathom holding a position for reasons unrelated to how they want to be perceived"
Copter was really about as pushed as you could make a card for standard, imo. Heart is no where near that level of utility. Is it powerful? Sure. Is it broken? No. Swinging 4-5 T3 in the air isn't really that bad when you have stuff like fatal push or clip wings in the format.
I'd wager you're safe for now. Imho most of these archetypes won't gain much of anything from amonkhet, because the curves are just so well developed for what you want to be doing on turns 1-3 in mardu or bg. This may cause some kind of awkward arms race with new set gimmicks? I dunno.
I will say this though, the competitive decks outside of saheeli are incredibly rare/mythic heavy. By runs gearhulk, rishkar, ballista, nissa, siphoner, mikdwrack and more. I don't like that the decks have moved in that direction since ktk.
Why do you say that? Lack of variety? I recently came back too and I am in the process of researching building a deck. I noticed there is only 3 or 4 major "net decks" out there now-a-days. Usually when I looked through cards and championed decks. There were more than that to help find cards a bit easier to customize my own.
Standard has been ruled by some really, really pushed cards for some time now. This has in turn made the gulf in power level between the Best decks and "playable" decks the largest I've seen in some time. While differentials always exist, it seems that the difference has widened significantly in recent years and the recent banning reflect that.
Don't play standard?
- Matt
There's a couple of reasons for why standard is like it is. One of the simplest things is that the format is so quickly solved - and that's partially due to wizards' unwillingness to print much in the way of complex cards to keep the game "newbie friendly". Interactions are very blatant and overt for everyone to see, and it takes minimal testing to determine which of the interactions is the most favorable compared to the others, especially when this testing is crowdsourced over millions of players. Another reason standard is so boring is that answers are generally much MUCH weaker than threats. We see a 4/5 for two mana and go "okay that's decent-ish I guess", we see a 8/8 trampler for 5 and it's just a solid creature but hardly extraordinary. Meanwhile we get a reprint of shock and that becomes a big deal because it's the best burn spell in the format - mostly a relic of Sam Stoddard's design philosophy that removal should never cost less than the threat it removes. While wizards HAS said they recognize that it's a problem and that they're working on it, we won't be able to see any of the effects for at least another 2 years. Finally, the rise of Investment Magic and rampant speculationism makes it really difficult to build a deck before it becomes a pricey affair. When it's clear what cards are the best and most important, and what decks will use those cards, it becomes easy for people (collectively or not) to just treat magic like a stock market and constantly buy and sell cards not to build, but as investment vehicles. Because of this a deck can cost $300, $400 or even $500 just to see if you like it, and there's virtually no way for the average player to buy in and not get screwed by these kind of pump&dump schemes. While I can appreciate wizards not wanting to enter the secondary market themselves, I feel that they need to establish some sort of expectations for the stores and retailers to follow.
These are things that can be fixed, and really SHOULD be fixed if wizards wants to keep Organized Play a big part of a its attractiveness. But there's also talk of them abandoning the physical entirely and transitioning to an online only product to compete directly with Hearthstone and Shadowverse which seems like a losing battle. Only time will tell.
Currently Playing:
GBStandard - Golgari Safari MidrangeBG
RBWModern - Mardu PyromancerWBR
RLegacy - Good Old Fashioned BurnR
Clan Contest 3 Mafia - Mafia Co-MVP
I was looking at the list of Top 30 finishers at Grand Prix New Jersey and you are right, there isn't a lot of variety.
- Matt
The biggest issue, again, is cost that's been driven overwhelmingly crazy by Investment Magic. A lot of the cards that make legacy and vintage go are on the Reserved List, so they're seen as "blue chip" investments for the speculators as their price will never crash. Most of the Dual Lands from ABU are over $100, the blue ones in the $200-250 range. Moxen go for $3000 on the low end. And these prices continue to grow as time goes on because these pump&dump schemes keep happening unchecked. It won't be long before you can buy one of these black lotuses for cheaper than you could this one
Currently Playing:
GBStandard - Golgari Safari MidrangeBG
RBWModern - Mardu PyromancerWBR
RLegacy - Good Old Fashioned BurnR
Clan Contest 3 Mafia - Mafia Co-MVP
I told my wife I didn't have any good cards any longer and the first thing she grabbed out of my box was my playset of Serendib Efreet which were selling for $150 each on ebay. I probably paid $10 for each when I bought them years ago. I haven't even looked at what some of the other ones are going for, but I could probably sell a lot of Mountain and make a killing, but I don't want to get rid of any of the older stuff I have.
I probably won't ever make the reinvestment into the game like I had before, and by the time you spend the money buying cards for each new Standard Cycle, you could just buy the cards you need for Vintage anyhow. So does that make more sense to focus on? Anyways, just good to understand what issues people are seeing these days in case I did decide to get back into it.
- Matt
Certainly in your town it seems that things didn't work out so well, but I've seen otherwise.
- Matt
I wish that was true I really do, unfortunatly the issues is their ARE alot of people who "want" to play Legacy otherwise the cards would drop in value like rocks. Someone needs to be buying in to the format to justify these prices. If their was only 1000's of people who wanted to play the demand would be so small that the price of the cards would drop to a much more managable level.
Ah but here is where we can see the difference to a speculator it would not matter which reserve list card was bought or sold and if their was enough speculator better to have "easy to move low demonination that can spike easyer and higher) . After all they ALL have the same protection, Its playability and drive from outside sources for playable cards that drive so many RL prices through the roof. I feel that their are alot of people who "want" to play Legacy and are slowly buying up the stuff to play Legacy, however because their are so many of them the price of staples keeps going up as they all want a set of duels or need a city of traitors for their deck ect. They buy them up but the cost is too high to get ALL the deck so they slowly slug along but they all are sluging along,
I will agree speculators are a problem I just don't think they are the only or largest problem. Also we will have to agree to disagree on the Legacy gameplay, I have played since Iceage and frankly think Legacy is the second best format in the game (second only to EDH)
I remember a lot of people were unhappy with 7th Edition because it was a generally weak set with terrible art. They replaced all of the classic art to avoid paying higher royalties and it was almost all just awful. I can't imagine anything else, I remember Invasion block being quite popular.