I jumped into MTG about 8 months ago, and I feel like my journey is one worth sharing for perspective for others players.
I played when I was in High School, but never in a competitive way. I knew the rules and would play casual games with friends made up of booster packs from random sets. Our decks rarely had much of a strategy, maybe one big bomb that if we got out we’d win and other cards with random unrelated effects. Went to college, and 10 years later I cross paths with one of my old buddies I used to play with, and we set a date to get together, buy something, and play again. We started with a Duel Deck: Blessed V. Cursed. It was awesome! I forgot how cool Magic was, and how much more fun it was now that I had some decent reasoning skills. We went on to get Merfolk V. Goblins, and Mind V. Might. All of them were fun in their own different ways.
Eventually I started having so much fun with it that I decided to head to my LGS and do some research into playing more competitive games. The owner told me Standard was pretty dead and their FNMs were almost exclusively Modern with some Commander games firing as well. I decided to buy into Modern and try out the competitive scene. WIth my Merfolk V. Goblins Decks and a few other things I had lying around I found that I was already pretty close to having all of a pretty competitive Goblins deck: 8-Whack. Watched some Youtube Videos and decided to go with it. I was lucky to trade out of a random Horizon Canopy I had for a playset of Goblin Guides, and Legion Loyalists. I was all set. First FNM, 4-0. Beat out a loaded Jund Deck, a Tron Deck, a Zoo Deck and a Mill Deck. It was super exciting. I remember thinking ‘I’m hooked’ as I walked out of the door of the store after the event. I got MTGO after that because FNM once a week didn’t seem like enough.
MTGO was a bit of a wake-up call. At one point I went on a 11 game win streak over the course of a few days, but the majority of the time that wasn’t the case. I could win about 50% of the time.The games started to feel like a race to turn 4. Much seemed determined by who won the coin flip. Also many of the decks felt very un-interactive. What I enjoyed about the Duel Decks was the semi-balanced give and take of the game. There were multiple meaningful decisions made in a game and power swings. Modern felt like me doing my thing and most of my opponents doing their thing and whoever “went off” first won. I envied the interactive decks, Humans, Jund, Grixis Death Shadow, but financially they were unreachable. I went on to win another FNM 4-0, and go 3-1 another time, 5-0ed a Friendly League, but overall the feeling of saying and hearing Turn 4: “Now I play X, and I win” got really old, combined with financially not being able to play what I would’ve liked to play, made me start to look other places after about 3 months.
First stop, Standard. I had won a couple Carnage Tyrants from some packs at an FNM, so the thought had entered my mind at one point to make a Dino Deck, but until Modern fizzled out I never really pursued it. I had heard that Standard was much more interactive, the Turn 4 clock was less extreme, infinite janky combos less prevalent, plus it was a bit more budget friendly in the short term. With Modern the way it was, Standard seemed like an easy answer. I put my deck together on MTGO, sleeved up for FNM, and...played the same 4 decks over and over and over again. WIth the same cards seemingly winning every game: Hazoret, Approach of the 2nd Sun, Scarab God, Winding Constrictor, maybe Ballista. All of it got old very quickly. The idea of brewing went out the window once I found that the top had clearly been defined. Many of the Meta Game may be going by different names, but it was same stuff over and over and over again. The solution: jump on the bandwagon and play one of the net-decks or look somewhere else. I considered the bandwagon approach, but for two major issues - finances and rotation. I could pay $150-$300 and have one of the big 4 to duke it out in Standard and actually have a shot, but I’d be doing so knowing that I’d be paying for maybe 3 months of game-play. Blah! With the exception to all the losing, playing with a pretty upgraded RG Dino Deck, the game play style felt better than modern, but it was the repetition of matches and card interactions along with the looming financial cliff that drove me out of Standard. It also didn’t help that at 3 of the LGS’s in my city, none had a vibrant Standard scene. Next stop? Pauper.
Pauper made a lot of sense to me. Cheap decks = financial issues resolved. Wide-open Meta means lots of different and unique decks. Potential for brewing is open as the format is presented as “unsolved.” Decent scene at the LGS. Lower power level means that games are more interactive. Everything seemed to fit. Until I started to play lots of Pauper and discovered that the wide open meta, brewing potential, and interactive games all have a little asterisk by them that says “...if you like playing Blue.” Now, there are good non-blue decks, but I played many of them: Heroic, Boros, Burn, Green Stompy, Elves, Goblins, Zombies. It all just felt very subpar compared to the decks that utilized Blue. You could win often, but at the end of the day, Blue is the undisputed king - Gush, Daze, Snap, Counterspell, Brainstorm, Ponder. The meta seemed to me to be: play Blue, play something that hates on Blue, Lose to Blue. I don’t mind playing a Control player every once in a while, but the frequency of how much I felt like I was playing against Counter Magic, and Bounces was just too much for me. If you love Blue, you’ll love Pauper. If you love playing and playing against Control you’ll love Pauper. The fact that it is an eternal format though means that, short of bannings, it will always be a Blue players paradise. FInancially it’s a slam-dunk, but just not for me. With the exception of Boros, the top 5 decks in the format are heavily blue control based.
I wasn’t sure where to go next. I thought about Commander, but MTGO Commander is weird to me, and the scene at our LGS is all spikes that have crazy expensive decks. You’ll notice I never mentioned Vintage or Legacy - $$$. Draft? Same thing. So, for a bit I just hung it up and went back to Duel Decks, gave up MTGO. Then I started making this goofy Giant deck. I noticed a Goblin that made Giants cost 2 less while I was trying to make a casual Commander deck on Scryfall. All of sudden I started putting this deck together and I saw that all of the cards were .01 TIX. I made the whole deck for around .60 TIX. I originally made it for Pauper, but I knew it’d get crushed by all but the most casual decks, and then I remembered this thing I saw once about a format that uses only cards that cost .01, Penny Dreadful. I did some research and found out how to find matches and pretty soon I was playing a game against another guy with a .60 cent deck and it was awesome! I lost, but I was actually in the game a little bit. I played the deck another 3-4 or games, tweaking it and identifying issues. I switched out whole play-sets of cards without even blinking financially because it costs 4 cents. Eventually I actually won a match with the thing (the guy did get mana screwed game 2, but game 1 was legit). After playing in the scene for 3 weeks now I have concluded that this is where I belong. I hope others come to the same conclusion.
Finances are not an issue at all. A 10-year old kid can have a “top-tier” deck here. This is absolutely no “Pay To Win.” Pauper is even starting to edge out of that realm a little with it’s rising popularity.
Gameplay is interactive and unique. I very rarely see a duplicate deck in PD. Almost everything is unique. This means that every game is a new challenge. You regularly have to read cards because there is so much variance in what people are doing. Also there are very few overpowered low CMC cards (all of them are worth more than 1 cent.). This means that you can actually think up strategies that may take 5, 6, 7 turns to come around. There still are infinite combos, but you have to work much harder to get them, so you don’t really feel cheated when they happen to you, or that you’re playing something broken when yours’ goes off. You have to earn it.
Brewing actually is Wide-Open. The format is not eternal. It rotates every 6 months. Every card valued at 1 cent at the start of each standard set are what the card-pool consists of. I love this rotation because it means that the top decks cannot be the top decks anymore, because the individual cards become too popular, thus worth more than .01 and they rotate out. It’s like the invisible hand of rotation.
Also PD isn’t big enough that there is a Pro-Tour playtesting every deck and combo, or even a hyper dedicated player base.This means that the “top-tier” decks aren’t necessarily the end-all-be-all. I just beat a “top-tier” deck with a janky brew that I thought up while mowing my lawn.
You actually can brew and be successful, and there is no financial harm in doing so! Got a crazy idea of using Okk as Fling fodder or Defender Creatures or a Tribal or whatever, you can put it together for two quarters try it out, and maybe it might actually catch. If not, you’re out 50 cents.
You really have to think. I feel like playing PD is the most I’ve actively been engaged in MTG in the 8 months I’ve been playing. The cards I play with won’t just win me the game. I have to out-play my opponent as a player, and commonly as a deck-builder. There is no Tron Land, Tron Land, Tron Land, Turn 3 Karn, I win. 2nd Sun, literally, I win.
There are drawbacks. It is only on MTGO. The scene is small so you might have to wait a bit to get a game, and you can’t find games at all hours of the day or night, but to me - now this is entirely one person’s opinion - PD has answered all my concerns with MTG. Finances, interactive game play, realistic brewing potential, interesting and unique meta, plus even though the community is small it is very competitive at the top end. Regular tournaments with prize support from MTGOTraders. One person’s journey. Take it for what it is. If you are an established player who already has his playsets of fetches and shocks, and has bought into a strong deck, and you enjoy fast, explosive gameplay, play Modern. If you are willing to play the financial rotation chase and hope to one day play high level tournament Magic, enjoy the new card rush, play Standard. If you love Blue or winning in spite of odds against you, play Pauper. If you don’t want to spend much money, are ok with computer MTG, like playing against unique decks you’ve never seen, enjoy a more thoughtful and interactive game play, and want to have nearly financially unlimited trial and error attempts at deck building, play Penny Dreadful.
I like this concept. I think it could also be done with paper MtG if you use a tool like Mtggoldfish to create a decklist, but assure the secondary market value is under perhaps $15 for the deck. But it would also be critical that entire deck lists don't find their way online, since the appeal in this format is in the deck building aspect.
Formats that define themselves about the value of cards suffer the moment they become popular, as the cards no longer are cheap then.
----
In general, Limited solves most issues.
You get boosters, you get cards to play with and its never the same. You have to draft better, play better and understand the format better to prevail in the long run.
And if you play 1 time a week FNM drafts, its not expensive at all, especially if you win (if you win boosters, sell them, or collect them to draft with some friends an additional time, if its store credit you can just draft for free).
Modern is fine as long as the people you're playing against aren't all playing tier decks. I don't actually consider modern a legitimate competitive format: The fact is that in it's purest form, there is too much of a race to finish the game and too many ways to bring that race down to ignoring your opponent. The only reason it exists as a competitive format is due to popularity and marketing / financial reasons.
The way I look at it is that the market for MtG is like an ocean simulation that has to be kept constantly in motion in order to keep consumers buying product. Standard is the point where someone drops the ball in the water and starts the wave. The most violent ripples come off of the drop and prices go up and down all over the place, but they stay within a somewhat low margin. Modern is where that ripple turns into a wave and bounces off rocks, flowing back into the point where the ball was originally dropped and potentially raising or lowering prices there as well. However, wizards keeps the prices suppressed for standard on purpose so the wave usually doesn't impact things as hard there as it does elsewhere.
Those big waves are what keep the game alive when the company screws up. Even if they drop something absolutely horrific like A25, it's still going to produce at least some motion and keep the market going.
Guess what I'm saying is don't be afraid to build a deck that seems completely unorthodox and always try to find friends to game with that are of an open mind set. What makes Magic the Gathering fun is the journey of building out an idea and watching it play out.
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!
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I played when I was in High School, but never in a competitive way. I knew the rules and would play casual games with friends made up of booster packs from random sets. Our decks rarely had much of a strategy, maybe one big bomb that if we got out we’d win and other cards with random unrelated effects. Went to college, and 10 years later I cross paths with one of my old buddies I used to play with, and we set a date to get together, buy something, and play again. We started with a Duel Deck: Blessed V. Cursed. It was awesome! I forgot how cool Magic was, and how much more fun it was now that I had some decent reasoning skills. We went on to get Merfolk V. Goblins, and Mind V. Might. All of them were fun in their own different ways.
Eventually I started having so much fun with it that I decided to head to my LGS and do some research into playing more competitive games. The owner told me Standard was pretty dead and their FNMs were almost exclusively Modern with some Commander games firing as well. I decided to buy into Modern and try out the competitive scene. WIth my Merfolk V. Goblins Decks and a few other things I had lying around I found that I was already pretty close to having all of a pretty competitive Goblins deck: 8-Whack. Watched some Youtube Videos and decided to go with it. I was lucky to trade out of a random Horizon Canopy I had for a playset of Goblin Guides, and Legion Loyalists. I was all set. First FNM, 4-0. Beat out a loaded Jund Deck, a Tron Deck, a Zoo Deck and a Mill Deck. It was super exciting. I remember thinking ‘I’m hooked’ as I walked out of the door of the store after the event. I got MTGO after that because FNM once a week didn’t seem like enough.
MTGO was a bit of a wake-up call. At one point I went on a 11 game win streak over the course of a few days, but the majority of the time that wasn’t the case. I could win about 50% of the time.The games started to feel like a race to turn 4. Much seemed determined by who won the coin flip. Also many of the decks felt very un-interactive. What I enjoyed about the Duel Decks was the semi-balanced give and take of the game. There were multiple meaningful decisions made in a game and power swings. Modern felt like me doing my thing and most of my opponents doing their thing and whoever “went off” first won. I envied the interactive decks, Humans, Jund, Grixis Death Shadow, but financially they were unreachable. I went on to win another FNM 4-0, and go 3-1 another time, 5-0ed a Friendly League, but overall the feeling of saying and hearing Turn 4: “Now I play X, and I win” got really old, combined with financially not being able to play what I would’ve liked to play, made me start to look other places after about 3 months.
First stop, Standard. I had won a couple Carnage Tyrants from some packs at an FNM, so the thought had entered my mind at one point to make a Dino Deck, but until Modern fizzled out I never really pursued it. I had heard that Standard was much more interactive, the Turn 4 clock was less extreme, infinite janky combos less prevalent, plus it was a bit more budget friendly in the short term. With Modern the way it was, Standard seemed like an easy answer. I put my deck together on MTGO, sleeved up for FNM, and...played the same 4 decks over and over and over again. WIth the same cards seemingly winning every game: Hazoret, Approach of the 2nd Sun, Scarab God, Winding Constrictor, maybe Ballista. All of it got old very quickly. The idea of brewing went out the window once I found that the top had clearly been defined. Many of the Meta Game may be going by different names, but it was same stuff over and over and over again. The solution: jump on the bandwagon and play one of the net-decks or look somewhere else. I considered the bandwagon approach, but for two major issues - finances and rotation. I could pay $150-$300 and have one of the big 4 to duke it out in Standard and actually have a shot, but I’d be doing so knowing that I’d be paying for maybe 3 months of game-play. Blah! With the exception to all the losing, playing with a pretty upgraded RG Dino Deck, the game play style felt better than modern, but it was the repetition of matches and card interactions along with the looming financial cliff that drove me out of Standard. It also didn’t help that at 3 of the LGS’s in my city, none had a vibrant Standard scene. Next stop? Pauper.
Pauper made a lot of sense to me. Cheap decks = financial issues resolved. Wide-open Meta means lots of different and unique decks. Potential for brewing is open as the format is presented as “unsolved.” Decent scene at the LGS. Lower power level means that games are more interactive. Everything seemed to fit. Until I started to play lots of Pauper and discovered that the wide open meta, brewing potential, and interactive games all have a little asterisk by them that says “...if you like playing Blue.” Now, there are good non-blue decks, but I played many of them: Heroic, Boros, Burn, Green Stompy, Elves, Goblins, Zombies. It all just felt very subpar compared to the decks that utilized Blue. You could win often, but at the end of the day, Blue is the undisputed king - Gush, Daze, Snap, Counterspell, Brainstorm, Ponder. The meta seemed to me to be: play Blue, play something that hates on Blue, Lose to Blue. I don’t mind playing a Control player every once in a while, but the frequency of how much I felt like I was playing against Counter Magic, and Bounces was just too much for me. If you love Blue, you’ll love Pauper. If you love playing and playing against Control you’ll love Pauper. The fact that it is an eternal format though means that, short of bannings, it will always be a Blue players paradise. FInancially it’s a slam-dunk, but just not for me. With the exception of Boros, the top 5 decks in the format are heavily blue control based.
I wasn’t sure where to go next. I thought about Commander, but MTGO Commander is weird to me, and the scene at our LGS is all spikes that have crazy expensive decks. You’ll notice I never mentioned Vintage or Legacy - $$$. Draft? Same thing. So, for a bit I just hung it up and went back to Duel Decks, gave up MTGO. Then I started making this goofy Giant deck. I noticed a Goblin that made Giants cost 2 less while I was trying to make a casual Commander deck on Scryfall. All of sudden I started putting this deck together and I saw that all of the cards were .01 TIX. I made the whole deck for around .60 TIX. I originally made it for Pauper, but I knew it’d get crushed by all but the most casual decks, and then I remembered this thing I saw once about a format that uses only cards that cost .01, Penny Dreadful. I did some research and found out how to find matches and pretty soon I was playing a game against another guy with a .60 cent deck and it was awesome! I lost, but I was actually in the game a little bit. I played the deck another 3-4 or games, tweaking it and identifying issues. I switched out whole play-sets of cards without even blinking financially because it costs 4 cents. Eventually I actually won a match with the thing (the guy did get mana screwed game 2, but game 1 was legit). After playing in the scene for 3 weeks now I have concluded that this is where I belong. I hope others come to the same conclusion.
Finances are not an issue at all. A 10-year old kid can have a “top-tier” deck here. This is absolutely no “Pay To Win.” Pauper is even starting to edge out of that realm a little with it’s rising popularity.
Gameplay is interactive and unique. I very rarely see a duplicate deck in PD. Almost everything is unique. This means that every game is a new challenge. You regularly have to read cards because there is so much variance in what people are doing. Also there are very few overpowered low CMC cards (all of them are worth more than 1 cent.). This means that you can actually think up strategies that may take 5, 6, 7 turns to come around. There still are infinite combos, but you have to work much harder to get them, so you don’t really feel cheated when they happen to you, or that you’re playing something broken when yours’ goes off. You have to earn it.
Brewing actually is Wide-Open. The format is not eternal. It rotates every 6 months. Every card valued at 1 cent at the start of each standard set are what the card-pool consists of. I love this rotation because it means that the top decks cannot be the top decks anymore, because the individual cards become too popular, thus worth more than .01 and they rotate out. It’s like the invisible hand of rotation.
Also PD isn’t big enough that there is a Pro-Tour playtesting every deck and combo, or even a hyper dedicated player base.This means that the “top-tier” decks aren’t necessarily the end-all-be-all. I just beat a “top-tier” deck with a janky brew that I thought up while mowing my lawn.
You actually can brew and be successful, and there is no financial harm in doing so! Got a crazy idea of using Okk as Fling fodder or Defender Creatures or a Tribal or whatever, you can put it together for two quarters try it out, and maybe it might actually catch. If not, you’re out 50 cents.
You really have to think. I feel like playing PD is the most I’ve actively been engaged in MTG in the 8 months I’ve been playing. The cards I play with won’t just win me the game. I have to out-play my opponent as a player, and commonly as a deck-builder. There is no Tron Land, Tron Land, Tron Land, Turn 3 Karn, I win. 2nd Sun, literally, I win.
There are drawbacks. It is only on MTGO. The scene is small so you might have to wait a bit to get a game, and you can’t find games at all hours of the day or night, but to me - now this is entirely one person’s opinion - PD has answered all my concerns with MTG. Finances, interactive game play, realistic brewing potential, interesting and unique meta, plus even though the community is small it is very competitive at the top end. Regular tournaments with prize support from MTGOTraders. One person’s journey. Take it for what it is. If you are an established player who already has his playsets of fetches and shocks, and has bought into a strong deck, and you enjoy fast, explosive gameplay, play Modern. If you are willing to play the financial rotation chase and hope to one day play high level tournament Magic, enjoy the new card rush, play Standard. If you love Blue or winning in spite of odds against you, play Pauper. If you don’t want to spend much money, are ok with computer MTG, like playing against unique decks you’ve never seen, enjoy a more thoughtful and interactive game play, and want to have nearly financially unlimited trial and error attempts at deck building, play Penny Dreadful.
----
In general, Limited solves most issues.
You get boosters, you get cards to play with and its never the same. You have to draft better, play better and understand the format better to prevail in the long run.
And if you play 1 time a week FNM drafts, its not expensive at all, especially if you win (if you win boosters, sell them, or collect them to draft with some friends an additional time, if its store credit you can just draft for free).
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
The way I look at it is that the market for MtG is like an ocean simulation that has to be kept constantly in motion in order to keep consumers buying product. Standard is the point where someone drops the ball in the water and starts the wave. The most violent ripples come off of the drop and prices go up and down all over the place, but they stay within a somewhat low margin. Modern is where that ripple turns into a wave and bounces off rocks, flowing back into the point where the ball was originally dropped and potentially raising or lowering prices there as well. However, wizards keeps the prices suppressed for standard on purpose so the wave usually doesn't impact things as hard there as it does elsewhere.
Those big waves are what keep the game alive when the company screws up. Even if they drop something absolutely horrific like A25, it's still going to produce at least some motion and keep the market going.
Guess what I'm saying is don't be afraid to build a deck that seems completely unorthodox and always try to find friends to game with that are of an open mind set. What makes Magic the Gathering fun is the journey of building out an idea and watching it play out.
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!