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The viability of Modern as a Pro Tour format has been a hot topic as of late. Discussions have been taking aspects of the format and labeling them as problems or features, without the answer being clear. Is it a problem that the format has tons of linear decks, or is it just the way that things were drawn up? Is it desirable to have a PT format that rotates with bannings more than new set releases? Are fetchland manabases ban-worthy?
There's a lot to discuss when we talk about the health of Modern. That said, everything I hear boils down to the same point for me.
Aren't you just asking them to move back to Extended?
You want a format that changes with new sets? We got it. One that isn't defined by a volatile ban-list? Got that, too. A format large enough for diversity but not over-saturated with different linear decks? You betcha!
Ultimately, Extended was done away with for a number of reasons. At the forefront of my mind was concern that Stoneforge Mystic and Batterskull would be dominant at the next Extended Pro Tour. A problem that could be fixed with an aggressive ban... Something that I remember them wanting to avoid... As somebody who fondly remembers Extended, this is a painful rationale to recall.
The other problem with Extended was that people only played it when they had to and excitement about the format was generally low. It seems to me that this is a branding issue. There's nothing inherently sweet about Modern. If anything, if you support Extended the way that Modern has been supported there's no reason in my mind that it couldn't be comparably popular.
Ultimately, we're probably just way too deep into Modern to go back. At least in the short term. There's no way we can go from $10 Modern Masters packs in 2015 to returning to Extended in 2016. The PR would be a nightmare. Just as a thought exercise though, does anybody agree that Extended was a healthier format than Modern that could have easily thrived with better PR? Or am I just being nostalgic?
In my view, while Modern replaced Extended it was mostly created as an alternative to Legacy and Vintage as they are inaccessible to many players who would still prefer to play a format where they would not face their deck rotating out.
Would you say that they succeeded along these lines?
Did they define a format that is non-rotating and cheaper to get into than those 2 alternatives: yes. Is the format accessible to everyone: no. I however don’t believe it should be accessible to everyone, but, as clearly indicated by the amount of reprints we’re getting, Wizards does feel it should be accessible to more people than it is. Whether it’s a success depends on how you value these variables, personally I think it is, though improvement is certainly possible.
I think the most important aspect to modern is that it is a non-rotating format like legacy. The goal is to create a format with an eternal feel. Extended rotating is the opposite of that. I think Extended has too much baggage attached to it for us to return to using it. My play group had a running joke about Extended not existing and just being a fake format. The entire time Extended was a format, I played it a total of one time. I had extended decks at my disposal but I never had an opportunity to play the format.
It’s an intriguing concept though and you may be correct, but I don’t think we will ever go back to Extended being a format. Interesting thought though.
I for one, do actually like Modern. I wouldn’t say it’s the best it could be, but it’s still interesting. I think maybe Wizards needs to let it be a more powerful format though. Attendance at our local Modern events was at its height when pod and cruise were legal. Now that those cards are banned we haven’t even been firing events. Maybe players need to recover from their decks being banned but I think it’s just that players had tons of fun with those cards. I would have loved to see unbannings to combat those powerful cards rather than to ban them. Thoughts on that one?
It seems to me that the low opportunity to play was the exact sort of thing I was talking about when I say that the format just needs better publicity. Modern only has more opportunities to play because people push it. That’s not a fault of Extended, it’s a branding issue.
That is exactly what my problem with Extended was.
As far as I recall, everyone loved playing Extended… when it was in season. Much like Modern, people loved the decks, and had a blast playing them and talking about them. But as soon as the last PTQ during Extended season was over, nobody brought Extended decks with them anywhere.
These days, after a round at FNM/pre-re/Game Day, you can ask your opponent, “Hey, do you have Modern on you?” and reasonably expect that either that player, or someone in the match next to you will say yes, and you can grab a game. With Extended, that was literally NEVER the case outside of Extended season 🙁
yeah, if the format between legacy and standard is a rotating format, it will be difficult to keep that alive. People play it because it’s eternal and easier to find the cards they need.
Is it easy to find Modern cards though? I have exactly one deck and it’s usually not productive for me to track down things for others. Like $40 Fulminator Mages…
And isn’t rotation at the forefront of Magic’s most popular format in Standard?
Exactly, do you really think that players who already avoid standard like the plague are going to jump on to another format where their cards become worthless after x amount of time goes by? I for one wouldn’t. I play modern and Legacy and EDH and that’s the extent of it. Also it’s hard to complain about $40 fulminator mages when we have $30+ cards in standard. Do I think modern is perfect? No it definitely has several major issues that it needs working out but in the grand scheme of things its still a relatively new format and I believe will settle down into a somewhat defined meta like Legacy at a given point.
Players who avoid Standard like the plague are not the target demographic of the people who make Magic and manage the Pro Tour.
I disagree with this. Wizards and Hasbro has actually done a very reasonable amount to push modern and if they want it to be as successful of a format as they seem to want it to be then people caught between legacy and standard are exactly their target audience. I feel like if you want a rotating format then that is what standard is for. If you want a format that is eternalish but more accessible than legacy you have modern, and if you want a format that is completely eternal and has the most talented player base due to its exclusivity.
* you have Legacy was supposed to be the end to that. Also many people play and endorse all of these formats.
I think that you believe a smaller percentage of Modern players play Standard than those who actually do. I would be amazed if more Legacy players played Modern than Standard players.
I think you’re missing the point. It’s actually irrelevant who plays what, and I apologize because I continued off track from that point as well. The entire point is I don’t know if we can sustain multiple rotating formats. The allure of standard outside of yay new cards are refreshing and fun to play with is that its barrier to entry appears at face value as very low. The truth behind it in the past couple years is that the barrier to entry to play competitively unless you are playing UW Heroic is fairly high with many standard decks clocking in at $300+ these days. The reason this is alleviated is due to draft which people seem to enjoy and are also going to do regardless. I did some research last year into this because I argued with some standard players that they were actually spending over time, as much if not more than I spent on modern. After some research this turned out to be true, with the only perceivable difference in that I was spending around $500 at the time up front to be able to play magic, where they would spend $30 or so a week to play and build in standard. When Extended existed the magic player base was many multitudes smaller, and you are also correct that the marketing for it was horrid. I don’t think it would fare any better now because you would lose the modern allure of “pet decks”, as they would rotate probably at a rate higher than archetypes are banned out of the meta.
TL:DR
I don’t think we can sustain 2 rotating formats and the community’s overwhelming support of modern shows that despite it being a flawed format, it’s pros outweigh it’s cons for the masses. Everyone is up in arms over the TC,DTT, and Pod bannings but all I have to say is welcome to the club. How do you think I feel after having Jund assembled and them ban DRS and BBE. Yes still playable but the deck was bad enough to not want to.
By the same line of thinking the cards would be easy to find because I happen to own nearly everything that sees Modern play. I wouldn’t argue Modern cards are easy to find, though I would argue that Modern cards are acceptably easy to find for a significant number of players. You might not be one of them, but I don’t think you can assume that Modern was created to be accessible to everyone. It can certainly be argued that it should be accessible to more people than it currently is, but I feel that’s being addressed through reprints (it just takes time).
Any format showcased on the PT is supposed to be very accessible. No format is accessible to everyone, but of all the format’s Modern easily has the wackiest prices and most volatile price swings.
Is it? Do you have a reference that says any format showcased on the PT is supposed to be very accessible? I would agree that it would have to be reasonably accessible, but you make it sound like it should be as accessible as block or standard, which just isn’t going to happen because it contains older cards.
Of all the formats? Vintage would like to have a word.
I think it’s fine that it’s less accessible than Standard, but what really turns me off to the format is that the obscure and niche cards are so expensive. It makes sense to pay a lot of money for Tarmogoyf, because it’s everywhere in the format and is Legacy playable. It’s absurd to pay so much for Fulminator Mage, which is a fringe card. If that isn’t reprinted as a regular rare in MM2015 that will be very unfortunate. The fringe stuff is supposed to be very accessible.
And I would like to see examples of what makes Vintage prices “volatile”. They just go up. Sometimes they jump a lot, but it’s almost always the things that you expect to jump a lot. Very little ever goes down as well. Vintage is just difficult to access in general, but the prices are generally very dependable. They’re always high.
Yeah, it’s not a matter of being accessible – but the PT is supposed to showcase the new set. Which is pretty tough for modern.
I would call a big jump a volatile swing too. In any case, no Modern card has shown the roller coaster ride Time Vault has had back when they first killed it through errata then removed all power level errata. Vintage cards also often drop back after a jump.
The Mage’s price is mostly caused by the set it’s from having been fairly unpopular. Any played Shadowmoor card would show a similar pattern.
It’s quite a bit easier to find Modern cards in my experience.
I see a whole lot more Modern cards in binders of the average person, the cards are generally a lot cheaper, and people are less hesitant to trade out of them.
I’ll see a random Wasteland, Dual land, or Force of Will, and people tend to have an attitude of “well, I don’t want to trade it for Modern or Standard cards.” That’s fine, I understand that. But I’ll see a lot more Cryptic Commands, Mox Opals, Voice of Resurgence, and Path to Exiles, and they tend to be easier to acquire. People are less attached to them, and they carry lower price tags.
Comparing Cryptic Command and Mox Opal to high-end Legacy staples isn’t very relevant to the Modern versus Extended discussion. Cryptic Command and Mox Opal are dramatically more expensive as Modern staples than they would be as Extended staples.
I suppose I misunderstood your comment where you said, “Is it easy to find Modern cards though?”
My point was I DO find them fairly easily.
I think it’s kind hard to compare finding Modern cards to finding Extended cards though, if you factor in prices and how the market is these days. I remember seeing Shocklands, and Shackles, and Bobs in binders outside of Extended season, but that was a different time. The market has changed so much since then. Extended wasn’t seen as the financial safe haven that Modern is. People expected cards to rise and fall in value based on the season, and the next likely rotation.
Definitely fair. Extended would definitely look different in today’s market than it ever did before.
Modern is the reason I returned to magic after a 4 year break. If not for its non rotating nature I would not have even considered it. Extended was my favorite format for over 10 years but would get worse after each rotation IMO. Part of the appeal is the fact you can use your older cards. If I want a rotating format I’ll play standard.
As far as prices go they are and will reprint cards aggressively to help get them in the hands of those that want them. Do you really think Extended wouldn’t be as expensive if it was as widely adopted?
I had no cards when I reentered the game back in 2012, so I know first hand how expensive it can be.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that modern is actually less diverse after the most recent bannings and there are at least 4 or 5 cards that can and should eventually come off. For consumer confidence the bannings should stop but even if they don’t it will still be much better than trying to resurrect a rotating format like Extended.
I believe wizards can make Modern a better format than Extended could ever be by unbanning, reintroducing and making new cards to fill the gaps that currently exist. If Legacy can be a fun and diverse format then wizards may need to apply some of the fundementals that make it so to Modern.
Anecdotally, we have dedicated modern players who play it weekly, year-in and year-out. We never had that for extended.
This is exactly what I mean when I say the format has better support though. If we brought back Extended and there were Extended PPTQs, aka the same amount of support that Modern sees instead of just a couple months of PTQs, then I think you could see way more people playing Extended.
I would still not play extended because Modern is more fun. I played extended, and even when I could find games it just was never as fun as Modern is.
That’s going to depend on what you’re looking for as an individual.
Wotc tried everything they could think of to make people play extended and it didn’t work. What makes you think it will now?
There’s a much larger player-base now and they never put nearly as much effort into Extended as they have into Modern.
One problem w/ Extended was that it combined a problem of Standard with a problem of Modern:
Standard problem- It’s a rotating format, so every season some cards lose most of their value and every deck list has to be re-evaluated.
Modern problem- Cards stay in the format for a lot longer than they do in Standard, so a powerful deck stays viable for a lot longer than it does in Standard. People hate it when a rotating format is dominated by 1-2 decks. For example, compare all the complaining from last year, when Monoblack- and Monoblue Devotion ruled Standard, to the lack of complaining this year, when multiple decks have been viable. Do players really want to jump into a new format (i.e., a re-launched Extended) knowing that they’ll be dealing with Monoblack Devotion for a couple more years?
My memories of Extended are limited, but what I remember is that decks that were good in Standard usually remained good or got a little better, so playing Extended tended to feel like playing last year’s Standard with the decks souped up somewhat.
Modern currently seems to have an identity crisis. If it is going to be an Eternal format, as it has been advertised and perceived, then WotC is gonna have to lay off the banhammer and let the format do powerful, sometimes degenerate things, the way that Eternal formats are supposed to. That is one of the attractions of Eternal formats- the decks are supposed to do much more powerful things than Standard decks.
But if WotC wants Modern to be periodically shaken up, then they must decide which path is less damaging to the format: shaking up the format every year by castrating the most powerful decks via bannings that reduce players’ confidence in the format, or morphing Modern into a rotating format so that the format gets regularly shaken up without the need to ban cards.
Last comment- I strongly disagree with the sentiment, expressed by some, that WotC must shake up Modern every year prior to the Modern Pro Tour in order to keep the pro players happy. The pros are gonna play no matter what; it’s their livelihood. They’re not gonna skip a premiere event with a big cash prize pool just b/c the metagame didn’t change much since last year’s Modern Pro Tour. But lots of lower-tier players have been selling out of Modern in disgust since Pod was banned. So what happens next year if Twin is deemed too strong? Or Amulet is winning on turn 3 a little too often? Do those 2 cards get banned just so a couple of hundred pro-level players can experience a more open metagame at one Pro Tour while thousands of lower-level players see their pet decks banned while watching their $20 Twins drop to $5 each b/c they no longer have a format they are viable in?
Modern needs an identity, and once chosen it needs to stick to that identity even though some drawbacks are inevitable.