I think we are all really stuck on fetch lands and have put too much stock in always having access to them in non rotating formats. Banning of the allied fetch lands in Pioneer all but confirms we are done getting true fetch lands (land types not basics) in standard ever. Not a bad decision on their part. They have always been problematic there. Not just shuffling times but they also homogenize deck diversity and also thin decks too efficiently in the numbers cycled fetches are played in. Fabled Passage as a standard playable Evolving Wilds is not problematic for standard because it only finds basics and has a real cost in a technical way and not just a managing resources way like Prismatic Vista. It's not a really good land in the pioneer format for 3 color + decks though. It pulls lands tapped early on and doesn't line up well with decks with heavy color requirements. In Modern fetch lands can pull multiple colors out of your deck to diversify your Mana base extremely quickly. They allow you to pull heavy color requirements. You can for example pull GGB, UUU, UUB, and UBG in just 3 fetches in Modern. Fabled Passage and Prismatic Vista both don't do anything close to this powerful. There are exceptions to this. Prismatic Vista would help DRS if it found a way into pioneer. Fabled Passage won't help Deathrite Shaman accelerate early but it can help enable revolt and shuffle an unwanted card away from say Courser of Crufix. Which is I believe the idea in a non rotating format without true fetches (land types not just basics.) You should play Fabled Passage when your build dictates it and not just an obligatory include. There are some other good lands throughout this era of cards beyond just Fabled Passage and Shocks to take advantage of. Cycling lands can be powerful in control decks to help mitigate higher land counts. Cards like Courser of Crufix would be able to take advantage of scry lands. Obviously the Fast land cycle and Pain lands will fair well in Aggro decks. The dual Man lands will probably find niche rolls in many types of decks also. In fact this format could make the lesser land cycles more relevant and give them a source of value when they literally can't compete at all with Modern/Legacy Mana bases.
Additional note, anyone who is complaining about price hikes for Pioneer really have things pretty good. The price hikes on Modern were waaaaay worse for a long time. $50 moderately played shock lands, $10 Remand, $50 Cryptic Command, $10 spell Snare $80 Noble Hierarch and $200 Tarmogyfes were rampant, just to name a few. Heck the most expensive card in the format is only about $50 a couple weeks in! Formats create a supply and demand economy, nothing can change that. Looking to do MTG on the cheap? MTGA is the only realistic option. I am now really loving my decision not to sell off all my stuff post rotating. And people called me crazy!
(Pioneer and Modern are Non-rotating formats, not eternal ones. There is a difference!)
I think many will be surprised at what ultimately does get banned honestly. A lot of the more problematic cards from certain areas bcoming in have some amount of answers in sets outside of the standard they belong. Thoughtseize is a good deterrent to the more expensive combos and field of ruin will punish greedy mana bases. White has a couple of flash O-ring effects that seem suitable in addition to the black removal sweets. Red seems underpowered in the burn department though. It's hard to tell where things will wind up as we have never had a format this wide without fetch/shock mana base. That dynamic is what I am interested in. The biggest factor is that decks won't concentrate themselves as games go long. In modern and legacy the more you fetch typically the more relevant your draw step becomes. Your land count in Pioneer is a real factor. One too many you flood more often, one too little you starve! 5 and 6 drops that outright win games will be more valuable, at least in small quantities. All this to say anything broken will rise to the top early and get banned soon enough. Once the format firms up it will be a decent format for players in between formats!
I don't see Modern, Legacy, and Vintage going anywhere, ever! The reason Legacy and Vintage are having trouble with hosted events has absolutely nothing to do with lack of support. The support is lacking because the patrons of those formats are declining and new blood is not really replacing them. It's getting harder and harder to justify regular and frequent large events because the turn out is dwindling. It's not hard to understand, these formats are rediculasly expensive! Modern is the new legacy only in that it is an expensive format with a high amount of long time players. Modern decks today are comparable in price now to roughly what legacy decks were when Modern was a new format that was never going catch on. (ABUR lands were about $50-$100 and a lot of the important Staples were $50-$200). Pioneer is a stepping stone for new players (last 6 years) looking to go beyond standard but not quite ready for Modern. Much like Modern is a great stepping stone for players looking to go beyond where Pioneer is now but not quite ready for Legacy. I don't see this as a conspiracy sized excuse for a "cash grab" or pandering to those of us on a budget. I also don't see it as a way to avoid reprinting to demand either. Cards like Tarmogyfe were reprinted into oblivion in the Masters series and the only thing that really put a dent in it's price tag was simply WOTC printing better threats. Tarmogyfe is a lot cheaper now because it's just not clearly the best creature anymore, simple as that. Will they be making another non rotating format 10 years from now? Possibly, probably. Will this format succeed? With the support they plan on putting into it, you bet ya! It's just another format where different cards get a chance to shine.
There are definitely some take aways I took from the announcement that I found interesting though!
- Fetch lands will NOT be returning to standard any time soon. By banning the allied ones it would seem silly to print the enemy ones I'm standard without also banning them as well. "No fetch lands" appear to be a defining feature of pioneer.
- Obviously bannings will happen when apparent need arises. They seem to have learned their lesson when they created Modern. They want to make sure only problematic are removed.
- They didn't put any restrictions yet on what will define the format. Modern was billed as a turn 4 format and WOTC has been dancing that devil ever since! This statement has made quite a few headaches for them over the years. Hopefully they will be leaving this criteria up to the players. We have proven to be a quiet a vocal constiuancy!
- They have also not set any expectations of reprints as well. By billing Modern as a "reprint friendly" format it has given the modern player base a unrealistic expectation of card availability ever since it's inception. Often times we forget Magic is a rare card game that has been able to develop a SUCCESSFUL secondary market mostly because WOTC learned vary early on conservative reprint policies are healthy on some level.
- Hopefully these previous 2 statements remain unchanged. Like it or not both of those policies have hampered modern in general as a format!
All in all, this news is really exciting to me. I have been holding on to my standard staples for a while as they were perfectly reasonable cards with nowhere to be relevant. Hopefully many will find a home I'm this exciting new format!
I seriously don't understand why so many people want to see wizards kill off a huge swath of there most popular intellectual property. I can dig a few irrelevant characters getting killed off. It seems better to finish the Bolas plot line and diversify and fill out the characters they already have and flesh them out into something interesting. Maybe a main gatewatch character who doesn't have any meaningful story left could die. It's also most likely not going to be Jace. He is one of the only main gatewatch characters who's home plane we haven't visited yet and that's at least one story I feel we will see before he gets the axe. They went through the trouble of getting his memory back after all! Probably not going to kill off Bolas either. Good villains never get killed off for good. Pretty sure that might be considered bad story telling. Me personally I don't have a problem any current walker, I'd hate to see a bunch of them killed off at the moment. The forum community in general are incredibly cynical and would find a way to voice displeasure at any possible twist in War of the Spark. Looking forward to war of the spark though! Teaser looks great
Killing off inconsequential characters accomplishes nothing. It has no impact on the story or the consumer, making an attempt at shock value that lacks shock.
And most of the Gatewatch characters are boring as hell and haven’t gotten any more interesting over the years.
I just don't have a problem with the gatewatch personally, I think they are fine. I understand that a lot of players attention spans are short but the decision to focus on them had more to do with wizards breaking into Hollywood and bringing Magic to a new mainstream
audience. Obviously this experiment wasn't translated into the game well but Hollywood told them they needed recognizable characters. Killing the whole squad would completely undermine that work. Do you want a gatewatch rehash? I'm sure thier second best ideas are so much better than there first ones right? Better to leave them alive and focus elsewhere for a while.
That is what control decks are supposed to do JayJay. That is the trade-off for leaning control over midrange. You get an edge by going over the mid-range strategies by losing an edge against more aggressive strategies. That is a large part of why control isn't performing in the first place. It doesn't have a sufficient way to capitalize on turning the corner and stabilizing. If a mid-range deck hasn't put the game away in turns 8-12 against control it should dramatically lose the advantage going late. Jace should impact the format by bringing a piller archetype in line with the rest of the mainstay archetypes. It might turn into a problem in witch case we will know for a fact that yes JTMS is busted in modern. Plus side though if that is in fact the case. Then you can log onto MTGS and tell the world "I told you so!"
I personally don't think there's any reason to ban anything in lantern yet. I really don't think it would have been such a shoe in to win the PT had Pascal Vieren beat Gerry Thompson. Luis Salvatto just played a good decision on the day and was lucky and got reasonable matchups. It not a broken format, no corrections necessary.
The Wheel of Time version from GP Copenhagen is a pretty legit list. I've been playing around with it for a couple weeks now and it plays well. Sorry don't have a final list as I've been tinkering with it daily. One thing to note is that it isn't as dependent on As Fortold as it looks on paper. It's not uncommon to suspend Ancestral Vision or Wheel of fate in turn 1 or 2, especially if you are expecting hand disruption. Often times you can resolve an As Fortold as your looping through turns anyway without ever having to worry about an answer from your opponent as they likely won't have enough resources available to deploy them. Often once you achieve a turn loop you can actually take turns or exhaust your opponent untill your suspend spells resolve as well.
It was a mistake to reprint her alongside Thoughtseize my man. I hope you can understand them not doing it in M15. They did say here power level in certain environments was problematic but that she wasn't too powerful to do in standard. Also she wasn't a dominant card in standard. All that to say they could absolutely reprint her in a standard legal set!
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Additional note, anyone who is complaining about price hikes for Pioneer really have things pretty good. The price hikes on Modern were waaaaay worse for a long time. $50 moderately played shock lands, $10 Remand, $50 Cryptic Command, $10 spell Snare $80 Noble Hierarch and $200 Tarmogyfes were rampant, just to name a few. Heck the most expensive card in the format is only about $50 a couple weeks in! Formats create a supply and demand economy, nothing can change that. Looking to do MTG on the cheap? MTGA is the only realistic option. I am now really loving my decision not to sell off all my stuff post rotating. And people called me crazy!
(Pioneer and Modern are Non-rotating formats, not eternal ones. There is a difference!)
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There are definitely some take aways I took from the announcement that I found interesting though!
- Fetch lands will NOT be returning to standard any time soon. By banning the allied ones it would seem silly to print the enemy ones I'm standard without also banning them as well. "No fetch lands" appear to be a defining feature of pioneer.
- Obviously bannings will happen when apparent need arises. They seem to have learned their lesson when they created Modern. They want to make sure only problematic are removed.
- They didn't put any restrictions yet on what will define the format. Modern was billed as a turn 4 format and WOTC has been dancing that devil ever since! This statement has made quite a few headaches for them over the years. Hopefully they will be leaving this criteria up to the players. We have proven to be a quiet a vocal constiuancy!
- They have also not set any expectations of reprints as well. By billing Modern as a "reprint friendly" format it has given the modern player base a unrealistic expectation of card availability ever since it's inception. Often times we forget Magic is a rare card game that has been able to develop a SUCCESSFUL secondary market mostly because WOTC learned vary early on conservative reprint policies are healthy on some level.
- Hopefully these previous 2 statements remain unchanged. Like it or not both of those policies have hampered modern in general as a format!
All in all, this news is really exciting to me. I have been holding on to my standard staples for a while as they were perfectly reasonable cards with nowhere to be relevant. Hopefully many will find a home I'm this exciting new format!
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I just don't have a problem with the gatewatch personally, I think they are fine. I understand that a lot of players attention spans are short but the decision to focus on them had more to do with wizards breaking into Hollywood and bringing Magic to a new mainstream
audience. Obviously this experiment wasn't translated into the game well but Hollywood told them they needed recognizable characters. Killing the whole squad would completely undermine that work. Do you want a gatewatch rehash? I'm sure thier second best ideas are so much better than there first ones right? Better to leave them alive and focus elsewhere for a while.
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