Before the removal of DEs, I honestly felt the block format was in a pretty good place. THS constructed is about as interesting and diverse format as you could hope for in a single set format - the GR deck being perhaps slightly too good, but not without potential foils. The format was being played by prominent players/grinders like BBD and xMiMx and the number of people in events was good and relatively consistent - there hadn't been a huge drop off in interest. You could almost always find games in the TP room and 2-person queues with very short waits.
Once DEs were removed, things started to drop off drastically. I don't know if anyone's noticed, but it's been almost a week since a block 8-person queue has fired, and the number of games in the TP room has drastically fallen off. Frequently at my time slot you can wait 5-10 minutes to find an opponent and somtimes there's zero games in the "recent games" history in the beta client. It's also been getting harder and harder to find a 2-person queue that isn't just a rematch with the person you just played. Interest may have dropped off in the format naturally as it matured, but this seems far more than that.
And now DEs are back, but instead of being on near equal footing with standard for number of events, we have only two dailies per day, down from an average of 5 (three premier per week, on the other hand, is good) - calendar here. Will this lead to a continuing long term decline in interest in the format? I'd be sad if that's the case - I write articles because I'm interested in the format, not the other way around. I think it's a genuinely good entry point into constructed magic and should be a format WoTC has strong interest in supporting given that it sells their newest cards and shows off the block's mechanics in their purest form.
Getting people to play block in person IS rather difficult. I usually have to resort to building decks and saying try this. This block is nice because except for Mono B most of the block decks don't play like watered down standard offerings.
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Out of the blackness and stench of the engulfing swamp emerged a shimmering figure. Only the splattered armor and ichor-stained sword hinted at the unfathomable evil the knight had just laid waste.
The Modern PEs didn't fire either, but that's a weekday, maybe they'll fire today (weekend).
I know the momir one fired yesterday with the minimum 65 players.
Pauper is currently at 31/65 and there's 12 mins left for the start time, i'll update my post if it fires/doesn't.
edit pauper PE fired with 65 players
edit2, modern PE didn't fire, neither did the block PE
Looks like they posted a bunch of Pauper 8 man results. (RUG Tron is a deck?)
It looks like nothing but standard PE's have fired. Shameful WotC
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Out of the blackness and stench of the engulfing swamp emerged a shimmering figure. Only the splattered armor and ichor-stained sword hinted at the unfathomable evil the knight had just laid waste.
Maybe block having problems has something to do with one deck being over 50% of the meta. Or it might be that people don't want to build decks that have worse mana than Pauper decks.
Once DEs were removed, things started to drop off drastically. I don't know if anyone's noticed, but it's been almost a week since a block 8-person queue has fired, and the number of games in the TP room has drastically fallen off. Frequently at my time slot you can wait 5-10 minutes to find an opponent and somtimes there's zero games in the "recent games" history in the beta client. It's also been getting harder and harder to find a 2-person queue that isn't just a rematch with the person you just played. Interest may have dropped off in the format naturally as it matured, but this seems far more than that.
And now DEs are back, but instead of being on near equal footing with standard for number of events, we have only two dailies per day, down from an average of 5 (three premier per week, on the other hand, is good) - calendar here. Will this lead to a continuing long term decline in interest in the format? I'd be sad if that's the case - I write articles because I'm interested in the format, not the other way around. I think it's a genuinely good entry point into constructed magic and should be a format WoTC has strong interest in supporting given that it sells their newest cards and shows off the block's mechanics in their purest form.
Not looking good.
I know the momir one fired yesterday with the minimum 65 players.
Pauper is currently at 31/65 and there's 12 mins left for the start time, i'll update my post if it fires/doesn't.
edit pauper PE fired with 65 players
edit2, modern PE didn't fire, neither did the block PE
Looks like they posted a bunch of Pauper 8 man results. (RUG Tron is a deck?)
It looks like nothing but standard PE's have fired. Shameful WotC
Storm Crow is strictly worse than Seacoast Drake.