[Official] State of Modern Thread (B&R 07/13/2020)

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Post by cfusionpm » 4 years ago

metalmusic_4 wrote:
4 years ago
When I think niche, i remember a guy I saw in my shop a few months ago with his tiny leaders deck. Seriously, niche formats imo would include block, cube (but this is growing), tiny leaders, old school 1994, NBL modern and several other mtgo only formats that most people can't name without looking them up. And then there is extended and a few others which are actually dead.

There is nothing wrong with these formats, but they are played by extremely small numbers of people at this point. I am not sure modern's player base size will ever be comparable to tiny leaders base size.
I think it is just the exaggerated and expanded version of stories many of us have about our own LGS and LGSs we hear about: Modern is being cut left and right, either moved from FNM to a random weekday, or being cut entirely. Those that still fire on FNM are seeing Modern player counts about half, or less, compared to even just six months ago. Most have ditched it in favor of Pioneer because Pioneer is putting butts in seats. And unless something changes to make Modern more desirable to actually play, it will continue down this path.

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Post by Ed06288 » 4 years ago

Not that it'll ever happen, but what about banning Prized Amalgam? Golgari Grave Troll wasn't played competitively after it's unbanning (briefly) until they started printing more of the recurring creatures. Dredge wasn't really played at all in modern before 2016 and I think people generally enjoyed that. This opened up more sideboard space to fight tron and twin. I never viewed the dredgers as the primary problem in graveyard decks.

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Post by Amalgam » 4 years ago

robertleva wrote:
4 years ago
Ktk, and Dr mark sounding the alarm bells but no one's really listening. Those who will ride the Modern wave blindly til the end won't be moved. These are your Twin-Unban, Hogaak and Looting are fine folks. So, those of you who can see the writing on the wall, what are you waiting for, come on over to Pioneer forum here. We need moar peoples developing that Forum. Pioneer is the future and we have bright minds from modern that can fill in the gaps!

The sooner y'all put those big Modern brains of yours towards Pioneer the sooner you can clean up on all the scrubs! Cmon over, there's fun inside!
Maybe when Pioneer is actually fun. The format is too early and is more linear than modern except with endless aggro decks as we currently speak. I get you are pushing the format in your own way but until wizards stops printing such %$#%$#% power level threats in standard Pioneer just simply is a waste of time of a format to play. If modern died tomorrow I would just play legacy or quit magic
Simply put the format needs major work and when the honeymoon period for it ends you will see more movement towards or away from it. Many are playing it right now with their own brews etc un aware just how bad it is at the top end of the format

Also on another note a new 2 piece combo this time in white of all colors which is nice. Heliod, Sun Crowned + Ballista, I wonder if something can come from this in modern. Earliest you can perform it is turn 5 without any other assistance. Thankfully both cards are at least semi playable on their own without assembling the combo too. Otherwise you can combo it with Spike Feeder for infinite life without having to invest mana to add lifegain on top

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Post by cfusionpm » 4 years ago

Amalgam wrote:
4 years ago
Also on another note a new 2 piece combo this time in white of all colors which is nice. Heliod, Sun Crowned + Ballista, I wonder if something can come from this in modern. Earliest you can perform it is turn 5 without any other assistance. Thankfully both cards are at least semi playable on their own without assembling the combo too. Otherwise you can combo it with Spike Feeder for infinite life without having to invest mana to add lifegain on top
Ballista sold out everywhere on major MTGO sellers. Dunno if I want to invest in paper, but UW Twin does sound like fun.

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Post by idSurge » 4 years ago

Could do it with Bant as well, get CoCo, and Mana Dorks.
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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

ktkenshinx wrote:
4 years ago
Picture Pioneer vs Modern card pool 10 years down the road. The differences won't make any sort of sense to a new player at that time, hell they don't make much sense now. Legacy has an identity, Vintage has an identity, Commander even. But Pioneer is currently holding the reigns of the "low powered eternal format". We don't need two of those. We don't want two of those in the long run.
I feel like they made a mistake in the Pioneer announcement because they championed two mutually exclusive goals. A non rotating format, and a place where old standard decks can live on with a few upgrades. The larger the card pool though, the less those decks continue to exist until more and more cards swap out and it doesn't resemble the old deck at all.

Maybe the better idea isn't to push for a Modern announcement but rather an announcement for Pioneer to be made more like Extended so that Standard decks live on? Otherwise the long term outlook is like you say. It's just another Modern.

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Post by cfusionpm » 4 years ago

idSurge wrote:
4 years ago
Could do it with Bant as well, get CoCo, and Mana Dorks.
If we go Bant, then we can also play Oko, which won't be banned because they no longer care about Modern. :laugh:

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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

cfusionpm wrote:
4 years ago
Amalgam wrote:
4 years ago
Also on another note a new 2 piece combo this time in white of all colors which is nice. Heliod, Sun Crowned + Ballista, I wonder if something can come from this in modern. Earliest you can perform it is turn 5 without any other assistance. Thankfully both cards are at least semi playable on their own without assembling the combo too. Otherwise you can combo it with Spike Feeder for infinite life without having to invest mana to add lifegain on top
Ballista sold out everywhere on major MTGO sellers. Dunno if I want to invest in paper, but UW Twin does sound like fun.
UW or Bant, I'm thinking Hierarch and other mana accelerators. Hell, lets jam Oko in here too because why not?.

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Post by The Fluff » 4 years ago

robertleva wrote:
4 years ago
Ktk, and Dr mark sounding the alarm bells but no one's really listening. Those who will ride the Modern wave blindly til the end won't be moved. These are your Twin-Unban, Hogaak and Looting are fine folks. So, those of you who can see the writing on the wall, what are you waiting for, come on over to Pioneer forum here. We need moar peoples developing that Forum. Pioneer is the future and we have bright minds from modern that can fill in the gaps!

The sooner y'all put those big Modern brains of yours towards Pioneer the sooner you can clean up on all the scrubs! Cmon over, there's fun inside!
nah... I prefer to have both. Plenty of people in our local playgroup still play modern, no reason to leave it. I do have two decks in pioneer already.

No need for insults. Not everyone who wants to stay here are fine with hogaak and looting.
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Post by idSurge » 4 years ago

cfusionpm wrote:
4 years ago
idSurge wrote:
4 years ago
Could do it with Bant as well, get CoCo, and Mana Dorks.
If we go Bant, then we can also play Oko, which won't be banned because they no longer care about Modern. :laugh:
Dorks + Path + Veil
Oko + T3feri
Heliod + Ballista

There you go. What more do you need, the formats solved.

This also gives you all the White hate cards, and access to all the best cards. Shoot, make it Snow, and your 2 Drop is the Snake.

Zzzzzz.
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Post by Card Slinger J » 4 years ago

Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
It's not the fear of bans that keep me out of Pioneer. It's a lack of faith in how Wizards is managing the game. In the past few years I have seen what I can only describe as multiple cash outs from Magic so far. Both Wizards and other major retailers.
Now you know why the EDH Rules Committee doesn't fully trust Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro with the official Banned / Restricted List for EDH / Commander. It would just be a way for them to manipulate the Secondary Market through inside trading by purchasing popular cards in advance before they spike in value.
Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
First there was SCG's cutback of Legacy. For those who don't remember, they had a fairly decent sale on Legacy staples, I think it was around 20 or 25 percent off. A few weeks after the sale they announced a major reduction in the number of Legacy events they were going to hold.

Then, there was Eternal Masters, where Wizards made a real effort to attempt to support Legacy, at least as much as the Reserved List would allow. Following this set Wizards pushed the team PT which included Legacy, barely showed Legacy on camera and then backed out of the format almost entirely. Move forward 2 years and SCG has now dropped all support for the format.
Legacy is suffering the same fate as Modern where the cost of running consistent mana bases are too much to afford. It's much cheaper in Singleton formats like EDH / Commander where you're only allowed to run 1 copy of a specific card instead of playsets of four. The only Legacy deck I was able to afford on a budget was Mono Blue Stasis which is as unfun to play against as it is to pilot.
Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
Next, we got Modern Horizons, which while including several cards that were needed for the format, has also seriously screwed the format up. The set appears to have been nothing more than a poorly thought out cash grab, and several of the answer cards that the set introduced have instead caused more problems than the problems they were supposed to solve.

After Modern Horizons, we got the announcement for Pioneer. This has left many Modern players honestly wondering what is about to happen to Modern. Wizards says they're going to continue to support it, but they said that about Legacy too, and look at what happened. Actions speak louder than words here, and so far we've seen no actions and very few words in terms of Moderns current issues or it's future.
I think Wizards is focusing too much on designing cards for EDH / Commander instead of other formats because that's where most of their Paper MTG revenue comes from. They're too afraid to fix Modern because of the potential backlash it will have on players who end up losing money from basing their decks around popular cards getting banned where functionally identical replacements are scarce and hard to find. Look what happened with Birthing Pod and why Hibernation's End wasn't a good replacement for it.
Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
Next is the GP issue. We are seeing fewer and fewer paper tournaments broadcast. SCG has cut back, GP's have been almost entirely eliminated from coverage, As a paper player I am honestly wondering how much longer I'm going to be able to find places to play the game regularly. All I am seeing is fewer and fewer advertisements for the paper game. Not helping matters is the fact that LGS's have been seeing a decline in support for years and sets like Secret Lair (and already having confirmation that such sets will continue) show that Wizards doesn't even intend to distribute through stores any longer.
It's probably due to the overall cost of running these events where Wizards doesn't want to put in the time and resources to do it where they think it's much easier to advertise for digital as opposed to paper where they promote and advertise cheating instead of holding players accountable for it. I'd probably go as far to say that these players were paid to cheat by Wizards because they were desperate for money.

According to MTGLion on YouTube, apparently the MPL (Magic Pro League) was nothing but a scam to reward people who are bad at playing MTG competitively and to make things worse a Wizards employee had to beg on his knees just to get an invite to the Mythic Championships. Looking at this makes Star City Games and Channel Fireball much more credible when it comes to Competitive MTG doesn't it?
Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
The formats I play are Modern, Legacy, and EDH. I am willing to play Pioneer, but I will not play it online and I will not continue to buy product in Magic without the paper game continuing to exist. Magic is an excellent game, but it is a horrible video game. I want to continue to buy new cards and give Wizards money so that they continue to make Magic, but I am not going to be a willing customer if I don't have confidence that the game is going to continue in paper, and that my older cards have formats where they can be played and supported. I have made my peace with Legacy but only because EDH exists. There will be no such salvation for Modern.
Most of the consumer confidence when it comes to Paper MTG rests solely on EDH / Commander nowadays. Why does Wizards continue to release new Standard sets for Paper MTG If the future of the format is Digital on Arena? Maybe that's why we're mostly getting EDH / Commander products in 2020 so that Wizards can make as much money reprinting everything into oblivion. They've been more careful with reprints since the Masters set fiasco a few years ago.

A few reasons why they haven't stopped releasing new Standard products for Paper MTG is how important Pre-Release events are for the LGS in order to build an active community and playerbase. They still want players to grind competitively at their LGS but for what? To sell their decks for Arena codes because they're forced to play digitally? Wizards wants to promote Digital yet they don't know how to do it in a way that actively promotes Paper.
Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
Finally, on that note... EDH will not be coming to Arena either. That is a realistic card pool orders of magnitude larger than anything we are talking about for Modern. Brawl is Wizards intended replacement for the format. Although I am only a casual player of EDH, I am concerned for the future of that format as well as the intended transition has already been made clear.
What strikes me is that aside from Commandfest and releasing supplemental products, Wizards hasn't really done much to help promote EDH / Commander in a way that encourages players to attend their LGS. cEDH is a thing yet they have no intention of promoting it due to how games end on turn 3 or 4 while waiting for the next round to begin. Most players don't have the time and resources to put together Singleton decks as opposed to non-Singleton.

Wizards is trying desperately to push for Brawl because it's the closet thing to their bread and butter being Standard that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to compete when the problem has always been a scarce card pool to work with due to rotation. Competitive players want consistency more than a 60 card Singleton deck that is able to function but not work as a finely tuned EDH / Commander deck that has all the resources available toward it.
Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
In short, I am losing confidence that Wizards wants any cards prior to 2012 to exist any longer. That not only bothers me now, but should I continue to play Magic in the online realm as they want, what happens when in a few years they move to a platform other than Arena, have to import a new card pool, and yet again decide to leave cards behind (not to mention make me rebuy previous cards)?
The Reserve List cards will still hold their value regardless of when Hasbro sells Wizards of the Coast to another company with rumors of Square Enix being a potential buyer due to how similar Final Fantasy TCG is to MTG. That and it helps Square Enix avoid any kind of copyright lawsuit that would've affected them in the same way it did with Konami, Upper Deck, and Yu-Gi-Oh! back in the early 2000's.
Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
And since Modern Horizons I am RAPIDLY losing confidence. There was a mismanaged response to Hogaak. There has been a mismanaged response to Urza and Oko (what that response is, I am not sure... but I am certain that radio silence is not a good response). The large Modern tournaments following Modern Horizons were in large part not streamed, in an era when any game store has the capability to stream games. And Pioneer while so far signaling zero intent to keep Modern around as a premier format (especially since it's conveniently no longer on the online platform they endorse) released slightly after Modern Horizons stopped selling, has left me feeling more than a bit burned.
Maybe they tried to stream live events for Paper MTG on Twitch but didn't get the views and funds they needed to keep going. That's probably why they're trying to experiment with Digital MTG competitively even though the main series Pokémon games have a much better chance at becoming an eSport than Digital MTG when it comes to Arena. The only real way I see MTG becoming an eSport is by live streaming Paper MTG games and to hold cheaters accountable instead of giving them a pass.
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Post by Amalgam » 4 years ago

I just don't understand wizards as a company when it comes to their 'throw %$#% until something sticks' leading to flip flopping on decisions endlessly. It's why we are in this predicament in the first place when it comes to paper magic. They had the entire market and rather than try move to also have digital side by side with paper they have all but killed off a lot of what they were good at in place of arena as the only option. In the last 18 months competitive magic for paper is basically non existent and if you don't live in america you don't get anything at all. Why would people buy and sell cards when their is no demand due to their being no events or push for improvement. In my region we went from having competitive events almost every 2 weeks to none at all over the last 12 months and the only response wizards would give anyone who asked was to play arena instead.
I would like to re iterate how this is not a modern only issue and by wizards giving up their biggest strength to push only in the digital space is only going to make people quit the game outside EDH. Not even digital card games are as big as they used to be and I can't see it getting much better.

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Post by idSurge » 4 years ago

They (top end exec types) saw the positive reception to Arena, and since they see no physical product they must shift, it's pure profit to them.

It's like temporary insanity, because in the end.

1. They lucked out, Dominaria was amazing.
2. Arena was free.
3. It was new.

When Standard sucks, it REALLY sucks, and I would bet that they saw a massive decline in Arena after WAR and Oko broke everything.

Paper is 'sticky', you own it. You hold it, you see it, it's on your desk, or in a box on your mantle or in a binder.

Turn off your computer, fire up the next big PC game, or go hang with friends...and Arena is gone. It may as well not exist.

I've still maintained interest in Magic, I still miss Modern as it was, and am very hopeful for Pioneer, but I have not loaded Arena since using some Wildcards on T3feri and realized that he breaks how Magic is best played. I had zero desire in fighting over his resolution, so easily walked away, because there are better options on PC, it is not 'sticky'.

That's the major flaw with Arena.
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Post by MashedPotato » 4 years ago

idSurge wrote:
4 years ago
I've still maintained interest in Magic, I still miss Modern as it was, and am very hopeful for Pioneer,
I love Modern (not how it currently appears to be), but at a local meta level. Online is poop, I have considered getting a Blue Moon deck on MTGO, but I feel paper is where I am at. Happy to eat a loss on those cards as I have a good core group that play Commander and would gladly pick up whatever deck I decide to move in pieces (currently GDS is going)

Pioneer looks good, but as said earlier will suffer what modern does in the future with the large card pool. I did take my U tempo down to my lgs before christmas and it copped a beating, so much for being able to move standard over to pioneer.

I hope Modern endures as I love what the format offers outside of the meta regarding janky stuff or mono coloured decks with splashes. My LGS is supportive of a lot to. So long as LGS have modern support, the numbers will drop off but it will endure "offline"
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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

idSurge wrote:
4 years ago
They (top end exec types) saw the positive reception to Arena, and since they see no physical product they must shift, it's pure profit to them.
It's more than that. They could have ported MTGO to Arena. Changed the front end, the back end, maybe moved accounts over importing cards as they go live. Or even just build Arena, and move cards between accounts. They didn't though, and there's a reason for that.

Arena has no secondary market. There is no trading between players. If you want to collect something, you buy packs/wildscards until you get it. It's impossible for them to ever overprint or over distribute something because the market simply can't get flooded.

Both paper and MTGO have secondary market economies. This lets players trade cards and seamlessly move between decks for a fraction of the price, especially with the rise of deck and card rental services. Wizards does not want this, because above all else they want to avoid solved metagames. Which is why they've eliminated so much information on the metagame, and yet players were still solving it. So the next attempt is to slow down the rate at which players can shift between what cards they play. And it has the bonus that every person now needs to buy every card. They can't trade them between each other.

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Post by drmarkb » 4 years ago

Wotc have decided that they don't need pro mtg beyond a small number of contracted players, who are the face of the game for a small number of players. They are no longer selling Mtg as a 'see the world, play the game' type thing. The group of players selected for pro contracts are selected to be diverse, good at the game, and preferably the type of people who already have a big online following.
They only need an illusion of a laddered pathway to get on to that, but the pathway does not need to start at the LGS. They don't need a huge industry of people playing 2000 player events, or a network of hundreds of 200 player PTQs. LGS are now superfluous to that model, beyond being places for EDH.
First they killed most independent TOs and focused on LGS centered models. Now LGS are relegated in terms of importance, and we are back to big box stores and direct sales.
Digital is not meant to replace paper, it is meant to replace Standard etc at LGS level. LGS are not going to be totally excluded, they are just a smaller part of the picture.
The hard headed obsessive Spikes playing top decks are now unwelcome in the LGS part of the equation. They can play online, but LGS are now centered on Edh, with Pioneer and Standard a smaller part aimed at FNM level events rather than PTQ level events.


They know the people buying boosters are the EDH crowd.

Spike Mtg is no longer their demographic. We used to have them selling the game by dangling a carrot of being a pro. The more they dangled the more people joined and paid huge sums for an increasingly small chance of success. Those days are gone, they worked out that that crowd was not buying the boosters, and had been made obsolete by the EDH monster.

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Post by cfusionpm » 4 years ago

Card Slinger J wrote:
4 years ago
According to MTGLion on YouTube, apparently the MPL (Magic Pro League) was nothing but a scam to reward people who are bad at playing MTG competitively and to make things worse a Wizards employee had to beg on his knees just to get an invite to the Mythic Championships. Looking at this makes Star City Games and Channel Fireball much more credible when it comes to Competitive MTG doesn't it?
Please don't put any credence into what that lazy, ostracized, clickbait troll, drama queen has to say. This individual, much like Jeremy Hambly (MTG Headquarters/Unsleeved Media), spends considerable amounts of time and effort systematically trolling and harassing WOTC, the game of Magic, and everyone in the community they can.

I'm honestly shocked he still makes videos. I thought he gave up that shtick years ago.
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Post by robertleva » 4 years ago

Aazadan wrote:
4 years ago
idSurge wrote:
4 years ago
They (top end exec types) saw the positive reception to Arena, and since they see no physical product they must shift, it's pure profit to them.
It's more than that. They could have ported MTGO to Arena. Changed the front end, the back end, maybe moved accounts over importing cards as they go live. Or even just build Arena, and move cards between accounts. They didn't though, and there's a reason for that.

Arena has no secondary market. There is no trading between players. If you want to collect something, you buy packs/wildscards until you get it. It's impossible for them to ever overprint or over distribute something because the market simply can't get flooded.

Both paper and MTGO have secondary market economies. This lets players trade cards and seamlessly move between decks for a fraction of the price, especially with the rise of deck and card rental services. Wizards does not want this, because above all else they want to avoid solved metagames. Which is why they've eliminated so much information on the metagame, and yet players were still solving it. So the next attempt is to slow down the rate at which players can shift between what cards they play. And it has the bonus that every person now needs to buy every card. They can't trade them between each other.
Oh %$#%. I think you are right. It never completely crystallized for me. You have nailed the reason that they didn't just add Arena as a GUI to MTGO. This is bad because what the customers ultimately want is Arena graphics on MTGO. I really like the Arena graphics but theres no way in hell I would leave behind all of the MTGO features that they have developed for the last two decades.

I personally believe that WOTC is currently thinking the way you described but that model will ultimately fail and they will take the longest route possible to finally realizing they just need to add Arena graphics to MTGO and be done with it.
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Post by ktkenshinx » 4 years ago

I'm still figuring out the best way to address these Modern issues in an article (short of just abandoning Magic in frustrated despair). As I'm doing that, I noticed something odd about the legality of the Historic Collection cards in Arena (https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2019-11-13). I thought Historic was mostly meant to be a bridge to Pioneer, but I realized that almost every one of those twenty cards wouldn't actually be legal in Pioneer at all! They are all pre-Return to Ravnica. Except even there, Captain Sisay is a huge outlier because she's not even legal in Modern. The only exceptions to this are Cryptbreaker, Elvish Visionary, and Ornithopter (let me know if I missed one). The other 16 cards are Modern legal cards that aren't even in Pioneer proper.

I'm not sure how to interpret this. On the one hand, it could be that Wizards is just bridging Historic cards into Cube, Pauper, and even a long-term Commander bid. Various cubes might see these cards, and Sisay seems like a clear Commander homage. It's clearly not Pauper alone because more than half of these Historic cards aren't even legal in Pauper either. All of this opens the door to other formats in Arena, even if Wizards hasn't tipped their hand yet as to what those formats are. Call this EXTREMELY cautious optimism that there is still a (potentially tiny) chance that Modern is on the Arena agenda.

Again, I'll emphasize that Modern can be largely "saved" almost overnight if it becomes clear Modern is coming to Arena. There's no clear or confident indicator of this, but the odd, mixed legality of these Historic cards does raise questions about future Arena formats. What thoughts do people have about this?
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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

ktkenshinx wrote:
4 years ago
Again, I'll emphasize that Modern can be largely "saved" almost overnight if it becomes clear Modern is coming to Arena. There's no clear or confident indicator of this, but the odd, mixed legality of these Historic cards does raise questions about future Arena formats. What thoughts do people have about this?
Reading their statement for Historic, they plan to release cards quarterly. Lets say they double this rate and goto 40 cards per, we could probably expect 25 or so of those to goto Modern, if Modern is a long term goal. That would be 100 cards/year, meaning we would need 5 to 6 years to get Modern into Arena as the minimum number of cards that need to be added is approximately 550 cards between 8th edition and Innistrad block.

I agree that it could be a method to ultimately move Modern into Arena but the rate so far seems to be too low. They seem to be looking more for archetype defining cards that can be paired with Standard. Those don't always translate well to older formats.

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Post by cfusionpm » 4 years ago

ktkenshinx wrote:
4 years ago
Again, I'll emphasize that Modern can be largely "saved" almost overnight if it becomes clear Modern is coming to Arena. There's no clear or confident indicator of this, but the odd, mixed legality of these Historic cards does raise questions about future Arena formats. What thoughts do people have about this?
This will never happen, and holding any ideas that it might ever happen are efforts in futility. The team that can't even properly code the bare necessities into any halfway competent piece of software is not going to transcode thousands upon thousands of cards into a new client as long as MTGO exists. Never mind that 99% of those cards will never see any play of any kind in any format if included. Hoping, thinking, wishing, or assuming this will ever happen is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Arena is a cash grab at casual and Standard markets, as well as a platform to show they can hang with the 'big boys' like Hearthstone and other real eSports. Nothing about that lends itself to support dying eternal formats that most of the player base complains about.

Pioneer on the other hand....

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Post by Amalgam » 4 years ago

The same Arena team that took over a year to add a basic feature such as a friends list? I only can see incompetence when it comes to Wizards, especially their digital side.
The biggest factor against arena is it launched without a mobile client and until it gets one I can't see this game getting played seriously by the more casual audience. By the time Wizards works this out I wouldn't be surprised if Arena had mostly died off

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Post by Tomatotime » 4 years ago

ktkenshinx wrote:
4 years ago
I'm still figuring out the best way to address these Modern issues in an article (short of just abandoning Magic in frustrated despair). As I'm doing that, I noticed something odd about the legality of the Historic Collection cards in Arena (https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2019-11-13). I thought Historic was mostly meant to be a bridge to Pioneer, but I realized that almost every one of those twenty cards wouldn't actually be legal in Pioneer at all! They are all pre-Return to Ravnica. Except even there, Captain Sisay is a huge outlier because she's not even legal in Modern. The only exceptions to this are Cryptbreaker, Elvish Visionary, and Ornithopter (let me know if I missed one). The other 16 cards are Modern legal cards that aren't even in Pioneer proper.

I'm not sure how to interpret this. On the one hand, it could be that Wizards is just bridging Historic cards into Cube, Pauper, and even a long-term Commander bid. Various cubes might see these cards, and Sisay seems like a clear Commander homage. It's clearly not Pauper alone because more than half of these Historic cards aren't even legal in Pauper either. All of this opens the door to other formats in Arena, even if Wizards hasn't tipped their hand yet as to what those formats are. Call this EXTREMELY cautious optimism that there is still a (potentially tiny) chance that Modern is on the Arena agenda.

Again, I'll emphasize that Modern can be largely "saved" almost overnight if it becomes clear Modern is coming to Arena. There's no clear or confident indicator of this, but the odd, mixed legality of these Historic cards does raise questions about future Arena formats. What thoughts do people have about this?
A couple things, firstly, even if they have some secret plan to at some point make Modern in Arena a reality, until they actually come out and put on the public development roadmap, it is pure conjecture and won't improve format confidence. Second, do you have a plan in mind for actually bringing your views and opinion to the attention of Wotc or others who can do so on your behalf. As much as some amount of the conversation in this thread can be helpful, unless someone important hears it, it doesn't necessarily amount to anything.

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Post by ktkenshinx » 4 years ago

Tomatotime wrote:
4 years ago
A couple things, firstly, even if they have some secret plan to at some point make Modern in Arena a reality, until they actually come out and put on the public development roadmap, it is pure conjecture and won't improve format confidence. Second, do you have a plan in mind for actually bringing your views and opinion to the attention of Wotc or others who can do so on your behalf. As much as some amount of the conversation in this thread can be helpful, unless someone important hears it, it doesn't necessarily amount to anything.
I'll just write some more articles, put them on Reddit, and Tweet them at certain staff members. My older articles on Modern Nexus had significant traffic, online exposure in Modern circles, and similar Tweets aimed at relevant R&D people, so it seemed likely the powers that be were reading them. Forsythe's April 2016 "Where Modern Goes From Here" addressed two of the biggest issues I raised in March 2016 articles, so either he was reading them or they just contributed to a wave that pushed him to write the article. My =recent stuff has been more on the metagame statistics side than format management, but I'm sure Wizards' team (who we know is active on the MTG subreddits) saw them in some capacity.

As for the Historic cards on Arena, I know it's pure conjecture and I hope nothing in my previous post suggested otherwise. I am currently operating from the standpoint of Pioneer coming to Arena, Modern not coming to Arena, and this combining with other Modern issues to represent a grave format threat.
Over-Extended/Modern Since 2010

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Post by Aazadan » 4 years ago

cfusionpm wrote:
4 years ago
This will never happen, and holding any ideas that it might ever happen are efforts in futility. The team that can't even properly code the bare necessities into any halfway competent piece of software is not going to transcode thousands upon thousands of cards into a new client as long as MTGO exists. Never mind that 99% of those cards will never see any play of any kind in any format if included. Hoping, thinking, wishing, or assuming this will ever happen is just setting yourself up for disappointment. Arena is a cash grab at casual and Standard markets, as well as a platform to show they can hang with the 'big boys' like Hearthstone and other real eSports. Nothing about that lends itself to support dying eternal formats that most of the player base complains about.

Pioneer on the other hand....
Game dev here professionally, mainly work in Unity which is the engine they used to build Arena. Also I've built my own card game engines.

I'm thinking about how they likely went about doing this given what we've seen, for probably an additional $600k/year on their end (3 employee team), they could double the rate they add cards to arena which is currently about 900 cards per year (out of the 1200 new cards per year they make). Given the earlier estimates of needing about 500 cards to recreate the competitive Modern meta with pre RTR. This would mean it would take them 6 months beyond adding the complete Pioneer format. Beyond those cards, leveraging MTGO data would then let them prioritize adding which lesser played cards show up.

The real problem in such a changeover is that when the switch is flipped, data on fringe cards stops outside of paper tournaments (much harder to track) because they aren't there to be played in the first place and prior data becomes more obsolete by the day. At ~10,000 cards in total to add, a complete Modern would be a 10 year investment with diminishing returns on each card added.

So I guess the question is, what sort of sales volume do they get off of Modern? Would they be able to make back triple or more their investment in a reasonable time period?

I still think that the best financial argument is that regardless of the direct profit that such a move would bring, the loss in consumer confidence from not supporting Modern and other older formats would be devastating to the brand and cost them far too many sales in the future.

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