I have a question about Vintage format since it somewhat interests me cause my YGO background due to being the format that's most similar to YGO in which it's an eternal format with a rather decent sized banlist. Legacy is similar but bans the money cards.
How does one outright get the things like Black Lotus and the gems? Do people actually spend thousands of dollars on each to obtain a copy? Do they pull them from packs? Are these players who have been collecting MTG cards since day 1?
It seems silly how a featured format exists that the majority of the playbase cannot afford to play. I mean there's always online games for it but seems shortsighted in design especially since the prospect of actively supporting an eternal format could be beneficial to players of all walks.
I get that Modern is kind of the new eternal format for newer players who want to make an investment...but regardless, I dunno. I jus the idea that only a select few players have access to certain formats is something I dislike a lot.
It is a big misnomer to call Vintage, at least Paper Vintage, a "featured" format. None of the big tournaments that Wizards puts on (Grand Prixs or Pro Tours) are Vintage. Most areas don't even have a Vintage scene at all, because, as you said, the decks are literally tens of thousands of dollars. From what I understand, if an area does have enough interest in Vintage stores there will often run unsanctioned tournaments that allow a certain number of proxy cards, so that people don't have to have quite as many insane cards. I think most people generally start playing in these proxy tournaments in their local scene, and might add a Mox every year or something until they can finally go to the big deal no-proxy tournaments that there are couple of each year. And yeah, they are buying these things for thousands of dollars each. Or making huge trades.
Wizards itself really doesn't even support Legacy anymore. There are a few Legacy Grand Prixs a year. Legacy is mostly held up by 3rd Party Tournaments most notably the weekly Starcity Opens that travel around the country.
The cards are simply too expensive for the majority of people to get into it. The reason that both these formats are so expensive is that a while ago Wizards made a promise to never ever ever reprint a bunch of cards that are integral to those formats. This is known as the
Reserved List. So there is a finite number of Black Lotuses, Moxes, Dual Lands and etc that will ever exist.
This is why they created Modern. So they'd have an eternal, non-rotating format, where they could reprint any cards they wanted. As you mentioned, they do support both these formats in Magic Online. The Reserved List only applied to physical cards.
