Changes
One advantage to being an old, old writer is that I have lived through a lot of changes. I have reacted, and watched others react, to format creations and destruction. I have talked to the WotC folks that make these decisions, and have spent years hanging out with both pro players and the casual crowd. I have had favorite decks eliminated (GB Survival... sob), and watched hated enemies finally disappear. iI've learned two things, over the years.
1) You live through it.
2) Wizards knows what they are doing.
People are innately conservative. No one likes changes. Psychiatry tells us that we are affected by loss far more strongly than by new opportunities. Most people are going to feel any disappointments more acutely than any hope for an improvements in Magic and the formats. That's just the way our minds work.
People also like to gripe. Griping is far easier than constructive analysis, or taking a calm, reasoned look at the changes. Ranting is easier - and it is, truth be told, a whole lot more fun. I love to write rants - but I have learned, over the years, that squawking about how the sky is falling proves embarrassing over time.
As for whether Wizards knows what it is doing - they do. I have met a lot of the Wizards folks over the years. They range from really smart to brilliant. They are also hard working and really dedicated to the game. More importantly, they have kept Magic not only alive, but it is doing better today than at any time during its 17 year existence.
A while back, I decided to analyze whether that was expected or not. (here's a link.) I looked at all the games that won the "Best of" awards at Origins over the same period as Magic. Magic, and some its expansions, won awards over the years. Dungeons and Dragons won a couple times. Lots of other games won awards. Of those, the ones that are still being published, and thriving, are basically Magic and D&D. The rest have, almost entirely, failed. Many were great games - but they failed. Magic is going strong. So, when you want to rant about how Wizards is screwing up and going to kill Magic, just remember that the Wizards team is exceptionally good at not screwing up.
That said, let's look at the changes. The big one first, of course.
Extended
Wizards gave Extended a huge make-over. They cut the legal sets from those printed in the last seven years to those from the last four years. That makes the format basically twice the size of Standard, but much smaller than it was. Now exact numbers are hard to figure, since many sets have reprints (including basic lands) and sets like Time Spiral, with the Time Shifted cards, have weird sizes. Basically, however, the main sets run about 240 cards (excluding lands), while small sets like Worldwake run 145. Those numbers have changed over time (Time Spiral has over 500 cards), and numbers of reprints (e.g. Naturalize and O Ring) in any set vary, but 900 unique cards per year is a fair estimate. That means that cutting the format from seven to four years worth of cards means the number of cards drops from over 7,000 cards to something closer to 3,000. That is still a lot of cards, but it is nowhere near as bad.
The number of cards is significant, for two reasons. First, smaller number of cards mean a lower likelihood of strange interactions. Nearly all of the truly broken decks of the past - Trix, Pandeburst, JarGrim, Dark Depths, etc. - have resulted from an interaction between cards that seemed reasonable on their own. For example, before players discovered the interaction between Illusions of Grandeur and Donate, both of these rares were usually found in the bulk rares box in most stores. The same was true of Saproling Burst and Pandemonium, and Megrim has only been a Tier One card during the brief period that the totally broken Memory Jar was playable in Standard and Extended. Generally, these interactions were unintended consequences of having larger sets. The more cards in a format, the more likely that some cards will have such an interaction.
I doubt that Wizards intends many of these synergistic interactions. Look at Dark Depths and Vampire Hexmage, for example. It seems pretty clear that the expected purpose of the Hexmage was killing planeswalkers. Sure, Wizards knew that Hexmage could interact with other, older cards, but the odds are that it did not test all of them. Hindsight lets us point at Dark Depths, but without hindsight, there are a lot of cards that Hexmage could affect. Magic has 19 cards with Fading, 16 or so with Graft, 60 cards with Suspend (Suspend uses tokens, but is not affected by Hexmage, as Hexmage is currently written), two dozen with Persist, 60 odd with Cumulative Upkeep, a dozen cards with Vanishing, many lands - like Gemstone Mine and Gemstone Caverns - that use counters, lots of cards from Mirrodin that used various counters that could be affected with Power Conduit, and so on. Gatherer lists over a thousand cards using the word "counter," but half of those mean "counter" and in counter target something.
Realistically, Wizards tests cards for block play and for how they will work in Standard, but they have too little time to test everything. They consider the older formats, but they cannot test every card for every format. Magic has over ELEVEN THOUSAND unique cards at the moment. Any testing will likely miss a few interactions. The hope is that the missed interaction will not break a format. In the vast, vast, vast majority of instances, it does not. Sure, some combinations do unreasonable things - but they are often too clunky for tournament play. After all, we have had infinite mana combinations in nearly every Standard format in recent history, but almost none of them have been the center of even Tier Two decks.
With Extended being reduced to far fewer cards, the odds are much better than Wizards will spot any problem interactions. No guarantee, but Wizards is pretty good at this, and with half the cards, each card will get a bit more scrutiny. That's not saying that Wizards won't print an interaction that could produce a 20/20 flying indestructible creature again - but Wizards will try hard not to let you do it on turn two.
Of course, the ability to test for combos is not the main reason that Wizards changed the format. The real reason is much simpler.
People simply did not play Extended.
Sure, people were willing to play it when Wizards made it a PTQ format. That's different. People would play Coldsnap Highlander or packwars if it were the PTQ format - they just would not enjoy it. But, outside of the PTQs, no one played Extended.
On MTGO, Extended Daily Events would not fire.
I run paper tournaments at my local store. I routinely get 20-30 people to show up for Vintage Two-headed Giant on Thursdays. Another store runs Standard on Tuesday. Three different stores all run FNM drafts, and get plenty of players. Madison, WI, has population of about a quarter million people. Even if you include the entire county, the total number of people is maybe 400,000. The DCI database shows 175 active Magic players in Madison. Those 175 players support weekly Standard, Legacy, even Vintage 2HG tournaments. MTGO, drawing from the entire world, cannot get 16 players together to fire Extended tournaments. That's a problem.
The new format is supposed to appeal to more players. In theory, it should be cheaper to get into than current Extended (no Tarmogoyf, for one thing - after October, that is.) It should also be an easier jump up from Standard. If someone is playing Standard, they should have a rough familiarity with about half the cards in the new Extended. If they have played Standard for more than a year, they will know more of the cards - and they may have favorite cards that have rotated, but are still playable in new Extended. That was true for the old Extended, but the difference in the power level of Standard and old Extended was great enough that only a very small number of cards rotating out of Standard were good enough for Extended play. That should change.
At least, that's the theory. Time will tell, but banning two of the more degenerate cards in the new format seems to be a good start.
Legacy
Wizards made just a few changes to Legacy - one card banned, and two previously banned cards made legal. This is leaving.
It was at the core of the two best decks, Reanimator and ANT. Those decks were so good. I have a paper version of Reanimator together, and I have smashed a lot of decks with it - but it is not a fun deck to play against. Turn two Iona is a little ridiculous. Still, if you play competitive Legacy, you know all about both decks, and if you don't, then you will never have to learn just how annoyingly consistent they were with Mystical around.
Let's look at the more interesting changes. These cards are coming back:
and 
At one time, these cards were feared, then banned. They allowed for some broken effects. However, Magic has moved on from that period. Grim Monolith was, arguably, scariest in the Accelerated Blue decks, which could power out fast Masticores or Morphlings. That's not scary now. Grim Monolith may be better, today, in Stax decks, which play lots of lock-down elements, but Stacks is not that good without Monolith. Illusionary Mask let people cheat Phyrexian Dreadnought into play - but decks can already do that with Stifle. Yes, Mask might be better in some cases - but you cannot pitch a Mask to Force of Will.
Small changes to B&R lists, like these, are usually pretty well tested by Wizards. In a few cases, like Entomb, the unbanned card will spawn a really good deck. In most others - Metalworker, for example - the unbanned card has little effect. At the very least, though, B&R changes do shake up the format a bit, which is good.
We will see at GP Columbus, which is the first big post-changes Legacy event. (I am really looking forward to that tournament, but I may not be able to attend, due to personal conflicts. :( )
Changes in Card Values
A number of people have complained about the loss in value of their cards, as a result of the format changes. While it is true that a lot of cards have lost value - at least for now - that always happens. Every time a format changes, lots of cards lose value.
Whenever a set rotates out of Standard, or out of Extended, or whatever, cards drop in value. It's the way of the world. I can remember pulling out a couple $20 bills to buy cards at various times. I bought two copies of Replenish, back when it was Standard legal. I won the event - but the card is now worth only a fraction of what it cost then. Call of the Herd was well over $20, back when it was first printed, but it is under $2.00 now (in paper), and even cheaper online.
This does not just happen when formats rotate. It also happens when decks are superseded, either because people learn to beat them, or because new cards are printed. Back when Mirrodin was around, Broodstar Affinity was the big deck, and Broodstar was expensive. When Darksteel was released, however, Arcbound Ravager and company redefined Affinty, and Broodstar went from star to back bench - and the value fell like a rock. In more recent terms, look at the prices for Nissa Revane and Eldrazi Monument both before and after the Andersons won the StarCity Games $5k. Eldrazi Monument is making a comeback. Nissa is not. Look at what Ajani Goldmane cost at the height of the Kithkin craze, and what it is worth now. Cards drop in value.
Many people were ranting about this change because they had no warning. Well, so what? The price changes would have happened immediately, no matter when the change was announced. Dark Depths was going to plummet the instant it rotated out of the popular formats in which it was legal, and go back down towards the $2.00 mark casual play had pegged it at. No surprise there. The only surprise was that it rotated faster than expected.
Would more warning have made any difference? No - unless you were the very first person to know, and you could sell out before anyone else found out. If you actually have inside knowledge, and can trade before the news breaks, that's called insider trading. It is illegal on the stock market, and I would be amazed if Wizards didn't take steps to prevent it with regard to format changes as well. I'm pretty sure Wizards employees were not out there selling Dark Depths and buying Grim Monoliths before the announcement. If you did not have information ahead of time, then you were just like everyone else, trying to sell out in a falling market. Changing when that announcement would have been made would not change that fact.
I suspect that Wizards made the announcement as soon as they knew what the problem - and what the best fix for the problem - were. There was little reason to sit on the announcement for any length of time. After all, if Wizards had known how busted Extended was, and how to fix it, a year ago, then they would have fixed it a year ago. Bad formats that don't do anything for players don't do anything for Wizards, either.
Players have also ranted about the cards that are dropping in price, given the rotation. Most of shouting has been about Dark Depths and the Ravnica Duals. I have no sympathy for those, like me, whose playset of Dark Depths has crashed in value. That card had an artificially high value solely because of one combo deck. It should have been clear to everyone that the combo was living on borrowed time. It was too good, and it was pretty clear that either it was going to be banned, or Wizards was going to print a hoser. When a card dominates a format and when a new players first reaction to seeing it played is "What?!? ... That's stupid!" it is pretty clear that the card is going to fall.
The Ravnica duals are a different story. They were format defining, expensive cards, and they rotated early. However, that is not the end of the story. I would expect that the Ravnica duals will recover their value. First off, Wizards created them with generic names. (Stomping Grounds) is not named "Gruul Stomping Grounds" - and the main reason for that loss of flavor was so that they could be included in core sets. Aaron Forsythe discussed including them in M10, and M11 - and why the M10 duals appeared in their place. I would expect that the Ravnica and M10 duals will see alternate printing in core sets in the future.
The Ravnica duals will also be the go-to lands in the Masques-Forward "OverExtended" format that keeps being rumored. I really expect this format to appear, simply because Legacy is becoming too expensive to be the eternal format Wizards want to use for PTQs and GPs. I would expect Wizards to announce the format about the time Masques block is released online. At that point, the price of cards will rebound.
Rebounds happen. Back in 1999, Grim Monolith was really, really expensive. Then, after GP Venice, it was banned. The buy price dropped to $0.25. Today, StarCity Games is selling paper copies for $32.00 apiece.
Many years ago, I wrote an article called "Don't Worry, Just Buy the Duals!" My argument was that good lands, like the dual lands, won't drop in value over time. People were panicking then, as now, about a format rotation. I said that the duals were a good investment, and I didn't expect them to rotate out of Extended. I was 1-2 on those predictions. They did rotate, but the price at the time I was recommending buying them was $12-$15 per dual. The price of paper duals is a bit higher now - higher by almost an order of magnitude. (The article has an table comparing the prices of various tournament cards from the 1999-2000 Standard format when they were legal and when they had rotated. It's an interesting piece of nostalgia.)
The point is that card values do change, and change again. For all of you with Ravnica duals that just took a temporary hit, sorry about that. For all of you with Cryptic Commands and various Faeries that have just jumped in value - congratulations. Neither change is permanent.
I guess my final point is that Magic is a hobby, not an investment. Don't confuse the two.
Four Booster Sealed
I want to finish with a look at another possible change - one that was supposed to be rolled out at the Community Cup Challenge. In Renton, players were supposed to play four booster sealed, but the format didn't work. I expect Wizards may change that.
The way I understand the format is to work is pretty straight-forward: you get a sealed pool with four packs of cards, instead of six. You have to build 30 card decks. Anything you don't use in your deck is sideboard. It is a lot like current sealed, with a couple exceptions.
1) It's Cheaper.
This is probably why Wizards want to give the format a try. Right now, the Swiss Sealed queues simply do not fire. I don't know the reasons, but I'm pretty sure Wizards has studied the problem. They seem to think that four booster sealed will be more appealing than six booster sealed. I'll trust them, even if I don't know why. It could be that people with six boosters prefer to draft twice, but if they had just four boosters left, they would play in a sealed. Maybe the difference is just the price. I don't know, but Wizards probably does.
Yes, I know that Leagues would be - arguably - better. The software does not support leagues. A sealed format where you open 30 boosters of Beta, a price of 25 TIX and with full redemption would also be popular, but that isn't happening, either. Four pack sealed might be the best option we have.
2) More Variance.
Smaller decks and smaller card pools may make for a much more interesting game. I have played in dozens of six-pack prereleases, a couple dozen six pack sealed events, and probably a hundred five pack sealed events over the years. The six pack sealed events simply have better decks. The extra pack makes the decks far more consistent. In my experience, six packs may be too much of a good thing. The decks are too consistent. It feels much more like Constructed than five-pack sealed used to be.
Here's an example. I'm going to take my last two Rise drafts and lay out the packs. Look at the difference in pool quality if you use just four packs, versus all six.
Imagine building a deck with just the above. Now add these packs.
They are not great packs, but the deck clearly gets better if you can draw from all six packs. Using fewer packs does give sealed a more "limited" feel.
For the most part, I like the idea. It works fine for single sets, and okay for two set formats (e.g. Zendikar / Worldwake would use two packs from each set.) A more interesting question would be for three set formats. For example, if you did a Tempest / Stronghold / Exodus four pack sealed, which set gets doubled up? Tempest is the large set, so it is more likely. On the other hand, Exodus is the underdrafted third set, so the constructed player in me would like to see more Exodus. Well, if and when Wizards does a TSE four pack sealed, we will see.
It's all food for thought. Right now, though, I'm headed for a draft.
PRJ
"one million words" in some queue, somewhere.
11 Comments
Awesome article Pete, I mostly agree with all your points.
About card price & rotation/banning, there is also an another think I would like to point out : that's true that many people complaining about price drop. But it is amazing to observe that simultaneously, there are very few people who are claiming their happyness when a card price skyrockets thank to a rotation/ban decision or a new released card, . In example, I bought more than 1 year ago a playset of entomb at 4/5 bucks each on modo. This card was banned in legacy and only played in classic. One thing was sure : this card was and still is a very potent card. Thank to the unbanning, I could play them in legacy, and btw I saved around 140 bucks on a 40$/entomb basis (and it was much more a few days ago). I could sell them and pick alsmost 2 fow with that, or almost any dual playset except underground sea. That was a crazy good deal to me. And I dont remember to have seen at this time any article or forum post telling "YEAH ! I WON A LOT FUND THANK TO THE B/R CHANGES"... Funny thing. And the situation was pretty identical for many player with Natural Order, Dark Depth, or even recently with all the faeries stuff (and there is many other example as well).
The change to a new ext format isnt what angers people, its the lack of respect shown to the players by only giving 2 weeks notice. Not only does it give players no time to prepare (sell/buy cards, change decks), having a 2 week notice also made it so all the cards that will be rotating out immediately dropped in value, instead of a slower decline that 6 months notice wouldve made. On top of that, the best format for casual games (i know its hard to fathom that some people are not tourney players, just casual players) is now gone. ext might not fire tournements but its alive and well for casual. Standard and new ext are both too limited to make any unique decks, and legacy is far too expensive for the average player. A huge majority of magic players dont play tournements, just casual. This change makes most casual decks obsolete.
STOP TALKING ABOUT OVEREXTENDED!!!!!!!!!!! WOTC HAS NEVER MENTIONED IT, IT DOES NOT EXIST AND WONT UNLESS IT SELLS PACKS!
And I strongly disagree with you when you say wotc knows what they are doing. They know what they are doing when it comes to tourney players. Not everyone else. Tourney players are a tiny fraction of the magic players out there, and when every decision is based on those few, it makes the game worse for everyone else.
It would also be nice if people would be honest about why they did the change. It has nothing to do with ext being popular or not. It has to do with selling product. They will sell more packs if people need more new cards instead of being able to buy older cards for decks. Very simple.
Here here... plus those of us who play online only are pretty much at the mercy of the client when it comes to getting into games. With old extended I could get a game in the casual room easily and the decks I play there were good for a couple of years. Now suddenly they're legacy or classic decks, and the legacy and classic players really don't want me showing up with my lame extended dex.
1) screw those who don't like your decks. I am so tired of hearing players tear other players down. Play what you want.
2) I sympathize with the feeling of deprivation over the loss of "old" extended. I do think however that for the casual player this can be just a matter of social agreement to play with certain sets as if it were a legal format. Takes a bit more effort and trust but I think it can be done. I think there are enough players who enjoyed extended casual that this should not be a problem picking up games.
You see Extended as a format that casual players play intentionally? I realize that I only know my area, but I have literally never encountered a human who intentionally built a deck extended-legal not for an extended event. Casual games I've been a part of - hundreds, with dozens of players - are all either "anything goes/Legacy" (with the implied agreement that you're not playing something too brutal) or Standard, and even then overwhelmingly the former. It's possible that it may be popular in some areas, but literally zero people I have ever met play it casually - _ever_ - and tournament players only play it when they have no choice. It's basically a fiat format, one that exists only because they have events for it. It's not a _bad_ format, just one that humans almost never independently decide to play. I surprised that any casual player would even care at all, simply because of the many I know well and the many more I've met, I don't think anyone has ever expressed any actual desire to play extended-legal decks against other extended-legal decks. (That's not to say that people don't build and use decks that are incidentally extended-legal, particularly newish players who just don't own old cards; it's just that nobody gets together for a game of casual extended.)
"I looked at all the games that won the "Best of" awards at Origins over the same period as Magic. Magic, and some its expansions, won awards over the years. Dungeons and Dragons won a couple times. Lots of other games won awards. Of those, the ones that are still being published, and thriving, are basically Magic and D&D. The rest have, almost entirely, failed. Many were great games - but they failed."
Hey Peter, this is fellow judge Eric. I would have to take issue with this statement. HeroClix won game of the year in 2003, and is still going strong. Hackmaster as well. If you're only talking card games, I believe L5R is also still publishing, and it won as well.
The Origins awards are a bit hard to parse because they've changed categories about 7 times in 20 years, but I don't think the statement "all games that won 'best of' except Magic and D&D have failed" holds any real weight.
This is a great article and you have a great point, but I don't think that particular paragraph adds much to the thesis that Wizards knows what it is doing, and impugns several other awesome games.
-Eric
"I guess my final point is that Magic is a hobby, not an investment. Don't confuse the two."
Good point. Good article.
LE
There's a difference between treating playing Magic as an investment and expecting there to be some consistency in the values of cards. It's a hobby, and for many players it's a fairly expensive one; one of the best ways to mitigate the cost has been to make smart purchases of valuable (both in dollars and in play versatility) cards that are relatively stable. It's basically the opposite of speculating; if I have a fixed amount of money to spend on new cards, historically one of the best ways to go about it was to focus on buying cards that can be used in multiple decks that are most likely to retain their value over the course of a season. Look at Reflecting Pool during Lorwyn standard -- basically a four-of in every deck. In extended, Ravinica duals were the poster-child for this approach to the game; stable in monetary value and playable in almost every deck in the format. Buying these cards wasn't an "investment" in the sense of speculating on their value, but it certainly was an investment in your ability to enjoy your hobby. The way in which the early rotation was handled, specifically the lack of notice, created a situation where what had been incredibly conservative collections evaporated in value.
I don't think the realigning of extended is a bad thing (even if I suddenly don't have anything to trade for the Jaces and Baneslayers that will dominate it any more), but it's completely disingenuous to say "Well, so what? The price changes would have happened immediately, no matter when the change was announced." When format rotations are known ahead of time (and it wasn't that long ago that Wizards realigned and normalized extended rotations -- we haven't even made it through a full cycle in the most recent system), it allows players to make informed decisions about the collections they are expected to spend money on, trading or selling at the height of a PTQ season, for instance, rather than waiting for the season to end. Sudden announcements like this destabilize the underlying idea of spending money on pieces of cardboard and INCREASE the inherent speculation on card value, which isn't a good thing for anybody involved.
I was very angry over the changes and still am feeling slightly put out. Mainly because after the last season of extended I decided to buy some of the Ravnica lands for two reasons. One, at the time they would have been legal for two and a half more years. and Two, they are necessary to be competitive and were at their cheapest at the time. So a smart buy in order to play them and not have to worry about the price jump that occurs near the start of extended season. I know a lot of others who happened to do the same. Then we get told...yeah extended guess what in two weeks its completely different. Which sucks because now Ive bought a lot of cards to play in a format which is fundamentally different and now own cards that have no play anywhere. I dont care that they lost value. I care I lost money in an attempt to actually play.
I have plenty of cheese here for all the whine on this board. Good lord, grow a set and suck it up. Its a game, if you think its anything more, you are delusional.
You mentioned Forsythe discussing the ravnica dual land inclusion in m11/10 and why they were not. Do you have a link too that article? I would like to read it.