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Magic: the Gathering |OT9| Kaladesh - Cruisin' Down the Street in my 6/4

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I'd add Gideon to that list, solely because Gideon is at least seeing some play in Modern/Legacy.

But most of that stuff is going to drop.


What is Frontier?
Hareruya in Japan started up Frontier mostly as a way to start selling off all their rares. It's basically Modern 2.0, with the start point being M15's new border.
 

Wulfric

Member
What is Frontier?

A format where every standard set from M15 and onward is legal. Until the card pool gets larger, it's just a lot of Elves vs CoCo. The power level is naturally lower than modern, but only time will tell if that's a limiting factor to it's acceptance. If it takes off, I think it will only attract former standard players who didn't starting playing Magic until after the modern boom.

Yeah, it's awkward as it sounds.
 

GoutPatrol

Forgotten in his cell
RIP Legacy- there are apparently only 52 players at the SCG Classic this week, and it pays out to top 32.

The event is pays out something like 6,000 in store credit according to twitter (it's all prize wall tickets), has a $40 entry fee, so SCG is incinerating money running this event

And yet people complain when SCG says they are cutting Legacy tournaments.
 

OnPoint

Member
And yet people complain when SCG says they are cutting Legacy tournaments.
They started the deathball rolling by eliminating coverage of legacy on day 2 of the Open series. I used to watch religiously and bought in to play. I get why they changed things, but it still sucks
 

hermit7

Member
Yikes. Why am I still trying to obtain 2 more Tropical Islands to complete my legacy deck lol?

Playing D&T, so all the duals I get are for edh. I get your thoughts though I am only planning on one of each.

I do like legacy much more than modern and hardy play standard but it is hard when the nearest shop is 40 or so minutes away for a regularly firing event.
 
Can you say more about this?

It doesn't have cards going back to the beginning of the game. It also doesn't fit the play pattern of Vintage and Legacy, where there are some super long-running archetypes that bounce around in top-line level of success but always stay somewhat balanced over time. Modern (in part due to banning strategy, in part due to smaller cardpool) is much more volatile than older formats and as a result isn't (yet) a great choice for that kind of "build your deck, play it for a long time with tweaks" mode.
 

HK-47

Oh, bitch bitch bitch.
It doesn't have cards going back to the beginning of the game. It also doesn't fit the play pattern of Vintage and Legacy, where there are some super long-running archetypes that bounce around in top-line level of success but always stay somewhat balanced over time. Modern (in part due to banning strategy, in part due to smaller cardpool) is much more volatile than older formats and as a result isn't (yet) a great choice for that kind of "build your deck, play it for a long time with tweaks" mode.

Affinity and Jund
 
It doesn't have cards going back to the beginning of the game. It also doesn't fit the play pattern of Vintage and Legacy, where there are some super long-running archetypes that bounce around in top-line level of success but always stay somewhat balanced over time. Modern (in part due to banning strategy, in part due to smaller cardpool) is much more volatile than older formats and as a result isn't (yet) a great choice for that kind of "build your deck, play it for a long time with tweaks" mode.
Affinity, Jund, and arguably Infect(the core of the later 2 has remained the same. The only changes have been mainly in flex spots) have all been super long running archetypes in Modern. One could argue the same for certain Tier 1.5 decks like Tron or Merfolk(Tron rarely gets new treats, and I think the last card that Merfolk added was Master of Waves and even that's still a bit iffy)

Volatility I can somewhat agree, but the biggest example recently of "Whole new archetype" becoming viable in Modern is Eldrazi, which is literally something that's become big in both Legacy and Vintage as well.

I mean, I do agree it's not an eternal format(and Wizards seems to be acting like everything's fine when they really need to actually enforce guidelines/hard rules/a Reprint policy that isn't shit) and that it's kind of stupid how previous standards were much better for "Oh, I'll upgrade to modern!"(Affinity/Infect/Burn all have a large number of their core either be common or part of a big standard deck during their era), but I don't think there's really much they can outside of maybe bringing back the Modern Event Deck in some form. Like, Burn minus the fetches and guides is about $180 on TCG Player, Infect minus lands/hierarchs is $160ish. Considering they sold the BW tokens event deck (which was somewhere around $170ish at launch in terms of cards included), I don't see why Wizards hasn't tried to do budget Modern Event decks.
 

ElyrionX

Member
That kind of talk in here is scary; Legacy dying, Modern being in a poor spot and people not showing up as much to FNM. I have a collection that is priced at $12k on TCG mid now so I can presumably liquidate it immediately for $8k or so. My interest in EDH has definitely waned over the last few months and I don't have the time to play Modern (events are on weekday nights and I work too late for that).

Maybe I should sell everything and cut my losses while I still can before WotC mismanages the whole thing to the ground (which I expect to occur within 10 years, conservatively speaking).
 

y2dvd

Member
Yeah I'm starting to believe the product overload is a thing. Probably caused players to be burnt out or something.
 

Hero

Member
I think part of it has to do with the Core set being phased out in favor of a story/block set had a decent amount to do with it since people generally skipped out on the core set.

I feel like they should do:

Commander - No brainer
Masters series - Alternate between Modern and Eternal?
Something else multiplayer focused - Conspiracy was alright. Would love to see a new Planechase but I feel like they want to sell boosters.

I think Duel Decks are fine to do since it's mainly just a precon. This year was brutal since there were so many pack-focused products.
 
That kind of talk in here is scary; Legacy dying, Modern being in a poor spot and people not showing up as much to FNM. I have a collection that is priced at $12k on TCG mid now so I can presumably liquidate it immediately for $8k or so. My interest in EDH has definitely waned over the last few months and I don't have the time to play Modern (events are on weekday nights and I work too late for that).

Maybe I should sell everything and cut my losses while I still can before WotC mismanages the whole thing to the ground (which I expect to occur within 10 years, conservatively speaking).

The thing that gives me pause, and motivates much of my magic dealings, is that at the end of the day it's just cardboard. The wind can blow and the whole house of cards that is the value of mtg could be destroyed at a whim because none of it has an intrinsic value.

I sold out of legacy as soon as it became clear that it was going downhill, despite loving legacy, because I was sitting on several $200+ pieces of cardboard. I didn't pay that much for them, and some of them have gotten more expensive since, but the bubble popping becomes ever more likely the more dead legacy becomes.

It would be as easy as wizards printing some kind of non-tournament legal power cube. Or fetch lands that make lands come into play untapped. Or the already occurring scenario, counterfeits reaching prominence.

I sold down to a quarter of what I had and kept modern and edh stuff. Some friends sold down to just edh. The tipping point for a lot of us was counterfeits.
 

Firemind

Member
Counterfeits are precisely why I'm hesitant to sell off my collection. Don't want to bother figuring out anti-counterfeit measures when I want to come back to play a random GP.
 
Counterfeits are precisely why I'm hesitant to sell off my collection. Don't want to bother figuring out anti-counterfeit measures when I want to come back to play a random GP.

Well, the danger is perfect counterfeits flooding the market right?

Standard is super healthy right now too /s

That mtfgoldfish article on hate cards is so true.

How can they be this clueless

Wizards has been neglecting one of the greatest strengths of magic for a long time: diversity in play style. Being able to play the game how you want is a large reason its popular, but Wizards has been funneling towards a creature centric playstyle for a while now. Though I do consider Kaladesh to be an improvement in that regard, plenty of ways to do things to be found there.
 

y2dvd

Member
They should have spaced the releases better, EMA and Conspiracy were too close.

It was such a weird window. Conspiracy had like a 2-3 weeks lifespan before the next product was released. I pretty much only got to play it during release and that's it.
 

jph139

Member
They should have spaced the releases better, EMA and Conspiracy were too close.

Particularly as two draft sets. With those two and Eldritch Moon one after the other, I think I drafted each set once and forgot about it.

On the other hand, Kaladesh has been hanging around for two months now, Aether Revolt is still a ways off, and the Commander decks don't fill that gap.
 

Santiako

Member
Yeah, having EMA, Eldritch Moon, Conspiracy 2 and Kaladesh back to back left no time for them to breathe and caused most people to ignore Conspiracy 2 and underopen Eldritch Moon. Now Kaladesh is the only set being opened for about 4 months. Such a bad release schedule.

EDIT:

In other news, MaRo has done another storm scale article:

Storm Scale for Zendikar and Battle for Zendikar blocks

Cohort and Converge are the lowest rated mechanics of all time, and Support is just above Megamorph, making 3 of the mechanics basically trash in everyone's eyes.

Also, Ingest and Processors are never coming back and when they need colourless coloured cards again they'll just ditch Devoid for just spelling "This card is colourless".
 
I dont get conspiracy. Its a very cool limited format, but stores run it for a weekend and thats it. I dont even see GPs having it as a quickfire event.

I totally forgot EMA came out as well. I say let legacy die.
 

explodet

Member
Yeah, having EMA, Eldritch Moon, Conspiracy 2 and Kaladesh back to back left no time for them to breathe and caused most people to ignore Conspiracy 2 and underopen Eldritch Moon. Now Kaladesh is the only set being opened for about 4 months. Such a bad release schedule.
Wow, that is pretty dire.
It was just Eldritch Moon and Commander 2016 for me recently. Conspiracy adds stuff to the game I don't like and I didn't even get to play though EM as much as I wanted.
 
lmao three BFZ block mechanics are in the bottom five of all-time mechanic popularity

So what supplements should they keep? You have to keep Commander stuff.

This last year was kind of a perfect storm of issues: two full-on booster-based supplemental products, plus all the other side stuff they always release, plus a set calendar that shoved things in much too close together so people felt fatigued by something like the EMN -> CN2 -> KLD transition.

I don't think the solution is actually to reduce SKU count particularly (other than good riddance to FTV) but rather to work around these specific issues. First thing: don't do two supplemental booster products in a year ever again. They're already in better shape for 2017 on this one since the summer multiplayer product is Archenemy Nicol Bolas, which doesn't even have any new cards so only people who actively want new schemes will buy it. In the future they should just alternate this, do Conspiracy or something like it on even years with some preconstructed reprint set, then do MM on odd years with a low-key preconstructed MP product.

The other thing is pacing set releases better. The desire to squeeze in these two extra booster sets, plus some other factors, led to a really badly spaced calendar this year. The first half was fairly empty, with three empty months after OGW, then two months after SOI, but after that it was EMA, EMN, CN2, and KLD all with only a month gap -- then three months where the only significant thing is C16. If they cut to one supplemental booster release and spread those dates out better I think it would do a lot to improve the situation.
 
EDIT:

In other news, MaRo has done another storm scale article:

Storm Scale for Zendikar and Battle for Zendikar blocks

Cohort and Converge are the lowest rated mechanics of all time, and Support is just above Megamorph, making 3 of the mechanics basically trash in everyone's eyes.

Also, Ingest and Processors are never coming back and when they need colourless coloured cards again they'll just ditch Devoid for just spelling "This card is colourless".

I thought cohort was great, gave you something to do when games stalled out. Converge was just unfit for the set and support too complicated for what little it did.
 

Wulfric

Member
Hareruya has posted their Frontier introduction page. I quoted the interesting bits. Smh, it's still too early for this sort of thing. The only thing this will do is fragment the people who are only halfheartedly playing standard.

In August 2014, Standard rotation changed dramatically, making new cards perform better and changing Standard to an exciting format. On the other hand, usable expansions rotated out once every 6 months, which made a group of players that cannot keep up with this speed of Standard.

When players that cannot keep up with the Standard format, are thinking of starting Modern, cards that represent Modern like Tarmogoyf and Liliana of the Veil are very expensive to buy and and hard to get a hold of. From a card shop perspective, these cards are hard to recommend to customers, and is a risk for shops to have a big inventory of.

The new “Frontier” format has no card rotation, just like Modern.You can use cards from “Magic 2015 Core Set” and forward. These cards are from recent sets where cards are easy to get a hold of. So this new format is easy to start and a format that you can use your favorite recent cards forever.
 

Santiako

Member
Holiday card:

h1z2l74S9k.png


Silver border looks rough with the new border, eesh.
 

Yeef

Member
Standard is super healthy right now too /s

That mtfgoldfish article on hate cards is so true.

How can they be this clueless
I actually think that article is off the mark. He talks about having hate cards printed in the next block and next core set, but at the time that meant ~8 months to a year later. If you look at the hate cards they've been printing though, it's pretty clear that they're sticking to that schedule. BFZ came out a year ago and we got Summary Dismissal and Ceremonious Rejection to deal with Eldrazi shenanigans.

I think the two-block model and the super-dense release schedule is throwing off perception for a lot of people. Even in the case of ISD to Grafdiffer's cage in DKA, that's a gap of about 3 months. Graveyard strategies only became viable with Eldritch Moon, which was released only two months before Kaladesh. If we don't see graveyard hate in Aether Revolt and/or Amonkhet, then it'll be time to worry.
 

explodet

Member
What didn't you like that conspiracy added? (just curious)
Full confession, I've never actually played a Conspiracy game. So I may be talking out of my ass. But what I've read about Conspiracy made me want to stay away from it.

I'm not much of a draft player, so draft cards don't do a thing for me. And conspiracies are different for each player, which adds more rules for every player at the table, instead of applying the same rules for every player. And voting is another lengthy phase they added in the game itself.

It's a LOT of extra rules.
 

Wichu

Member
Full confession, I've never actually played a Conspiracy game. So I may be talking out of my ass. But what I've read about Conspiracy made me want to stay away from it.

I'm not much of a draft player, so draft cards don't do a thing for me. And conspiracies are different for each player, which adds more rules for every player at the table, instead of applying the same rules for every player. And voting is another lengthy phase they added in the game itself.

It's a LOT of extra rules.
I'm also not much of a drafter, but I love Conspiracy. The extra stuff and the card pool make the draft itself way more fun (you can really go deep into off-the-wall strategies).

I don't see the problem with changing the rules for each player - after all, isn't that what a bunch of cards already do? Are you also against cards like Telepathy and Ghostly Prison?

Voting tends to be super quick - in the cases where not everyone knows how they want to vote immediately, it's never taken long for them to decide. It's much faster than combat in a multiplayer game at any rate.
 
Sometimes you have to go back and make sure your deckbuilding decisions aren't crazy, so I redid my Bogles deck to look more like a traditional build with a little blue for the Stalker and Unstable Mutation.

Above: Current
Below: Traditional Slanted

Goddamn do I hate the bottom version. The mana is so bad and I want to stick the Dryad Arbor in the sideboard if anywhere at all. Basically I think GW plays too many terrible cards and if you want to add colors it's best to just go with a full rainbow for the most consistency. I do think I should swap the Flamespeaker's Will for a Mortal Obstinacy, though. There's more artifacts than enchantments in the format but I'm more likely to get a hit in with against a Blood Moon than I am Ensnaring Bridge or Spellskite.
 

HK-47

Oh, bitch bitch bitch.
Hareruya has posted their Frontier introduction page. I quoted the interesting bits. Smh, it's still too early for this sort of thing. The only thing this will do is fragment the people who are only halfheartedly playing standard.

Hooray, you can play all the busted standard decks you are still sick of.
 
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