I played Magic A LOT from 2002-2014 (Onslaught to Khans) During Theros and Khans I still played but much less seriously

I played Magic A LOT from 2002-2014 (Onslaught to Khans) During Theros and Khans I still played but much less seriously.

I'm looking to get back into Magic now after my ~2 year absence. What's changed? I feel like I'm coming out of a time pod here. Explain Magic to me as it stands.

How's Modern doing?
How's Standard doing?
Is EDH still popular? Are there other custom formats that have become popular?
What's casual Magic like now? Casual with light Vintage/Legacy/House/don't be a dick rules was my playgroup's bread and butter for 10+ years.

Magic is stale. Standard is still Creatures: The Happening. Modern still bans anything playable and the price to play has only increased. The story is now focused on a group of poorly written marketable mascot characters. You were smart to get out when you did. Go play something else. I don't care what.

>How's Modern doing?
Modern is in a rough state, the whole format is all about being as uninteractive as possible, and because wizards doesn't like printing strong answer cards in standard, they have been using the banhammer quite liberally.
>Is EDH still popular? Are there other custom formats that have become popular?
Yeah, EDH has exploded, just make sure that you have a group that is all the same powerlevel, our last friday FNM had like 8 people with the precons, and the rest had vintage singleton.
>What's casual Magic like now? Casual with light Vintage/Legacy/House/don't be a dick rules was my playgroup's bread and butter for 10+ years.
That sounds really cozy, actually. I mostly play Legacy/Pauper, so I don't know, but I can't imagine it's changed that much. Did you allow proxies?, prices have exploded on eternal cards.
>How's Standard doing?
Can't really speak for standard, aside from the fact that it seems pretty low power at the moment.

Casual is still fun, because it's casual.

Casual will always be fun.
Sets are sort of low power at the moment but Kaladesh casual/block is straight fun if you liked where it was going during Khans
You missed nothing of value after Khans.

Modern is pretty expensive but your cards retain value and even gain value over time if you build a real deck. The format is really, really diverse but it's a little too fast imo.

Standard is pretty good. It's cheap to play, especially if you don't build a meme deck. BTW don't get tricked into building an expensive meme deck, unless you really like it. There's a huge range of powerful cards in standard and there's a lot of room for innovation.

Commander is more popular than ever. Just try to find a group that doesn't play competitive, fast combo decks (unless you like that kind of thing)

Couldn't say about casual magic. Commander is casual magic to me. I've played 10 years and never felt the need to play outside of a format (because some asshole would play something broken and ruin it)

>How's Modern doing?
People will always bitch. Be glad you missed Eldrazi Winter. It's been pretty cool seeing new (and old) decks come up since Twin got banned, even if the old faithfuls are still prevalent.
>How's Standard doing?
Coco's gone, so it's pretty diverse (except every deck running 4 looter scooters). There was also a change to rotation recently. Worth looking into:
whatsinstandard.com
>Is EDH still popular?
Depends on your store really. It's just as lively as ever at mine, and the new 4 color commanders are neat (mileage may vary)
>Are there other custom formats that have become popular?
Frontier is being touted around as being the new hot format. M15 and all standard sets onward. It's hard to say whether it's actually going to be a thing.
>What's casual Magic like now?
Every casual group is different and isolated. As long as everyone understands the group's overall tempo and budget, everyone's happy. Also Cubes are a godsend.

Damn I forgot the most important question: Draft! Anything as fun/deep as triple Innistrad come out recently?

>Standard is still Creatures: The Happening.
Can't be worse than Titans: the Meta?

>Modern is in a rough state
That sucks, I had hope for Modern.
>EDH
Power level has always been my big problem with EDH. I'm that dude with a Hazezon Tamar deck full of Camels and Deserts and shit, so it was always lame to see a dude turn 1 Iona me.
>Casual
Nice, my buddy was way into Pauper so maybe I'll see where that goes. My group was proxy-free since we'd been playing long enough that we had a decent mix of impressive Legacy stuff. The only time you'd proxy something is the weekend before you get it in the mail. Glad I still have all my shit.
>Standard
Low power standard sound like fun, honestly.

>Modern is diverse
>Standard is cheap
This is all I wanted from these formats.

>How's Standard doing?
>Coco's gone, so it's pretty diverse

what

People were talking about Frontier at my LGS and I was excited. But then I found out it's just standard+khans. Khans wasn't even that interesting, just three color goodstuff decks. Plus fucking Siege Rhino.

They say Frontier is meant to be a cheaper and more accessible format than Modern. Why not make it RTR-onward? That's the set that caused prices to really go down because of huge printings. That would be enough blocks to actually feel different than Standard, has very few expensive cards in it, and would be very different than Modern with no New Phyrexia or Future Sight bs

Collected Company. My bad, I assumed you played all of Khans block. This fucker was almost as bad for standard as Siege Rhino.

Triple Innistrad is a pinnacle, but I hear that Triple Kaladesh is pretty good.

If that feeling is shared with too many people for Frontier to catch on, they'll just wait for Standard to run a couple more rotations.
Yeah, right now it's basically Standard plus ally fetches (not actually that horrible with the only duals being ally taplands), flipjace, rhino, languish and coco.

Looter Scooter looks fucking absurd, Looter il-Kor on steroids. I kinda love it
RtR-forward format would be cool. That's when I felt the beg shift in Magic and they started to lose me.
>Frontier
HA, I predicted this shit when they (slightly) changed the cardframe. Guess I'll wait til it gets bigger before I look into it
>Instant two dudes
Absurd. What did people usually try to grab with it?
Fucking sweet. Draft a best.

Pauper is great, and really deserves more love.

>Absurd. What did people usually try to grab with it?
Flip Jace, Den Protector, Deathmist Raptor, Reflector Mage, Tireless Tracker, Sylvan Advocate, Matter Reshaper, Duskwatch Recruiter
I'm probably forgetting one or two. Also it makes for a pretty okay replacement for pod in modern Melira combo decks (Anafenza, Kin Tree Spirit is also a neat new inclusion there).

>Khans wasn't even that interesting, just three color goodstuff decks.
>Why not make it RTR-onward?
I am confused as to why one block that forced three color goodstuff down our throats isn't interesting while another block that forced three color goodstuff down our throats is fine.
>Modern
Even more expensive. Can you believe it? May or may not be on the decline since Wizards is no longer using it on the Pro Tour.
>Standard
Looks like BG is still king of the format at the moment.
As a quick aside, the winner of the Worlds 2016 tournament tweeted some snark about a big tournament in Knoxville over the weekend. BG Delirium took a large share of the top 32 slots and he made a sly remark about that, which is hilarious because Worlds 2016 was heavily dominated by Bant Coco midrange, which said champion was playing in what may very well be the most boring match in recorded history. I found that amusing.
Anyway, despite the fact that BG Delirium and UW Flash are on top right now, Standard's been doing a lot of shifting lately. Sure, Smuggler's Copter shows up in practically every deck, but it's been a little refreshing to see things come and go.
>EDH
Immensely so. They just released a new batch of precons with four color legendaries. They're pretty neat.
>Casual
That seems like the kind of thing that you can't really keep track of.

It's not more diverse though. The top 2 decks , U/W flash and B/G Delirium take up about 50 percent of the meta. It's not as bad as coco format, but it's not what I'd call "diverse".

Because RTR-onward would be 5-6 blocks rather than just being a slightly larger standard. I picked RTR because it was comparatively cheap for standard while the block right before it has some paywall cards like Snapcaster and Liliana of the Veil.

>it's not what I'd call "diverse".
I absolutely would. Two decks with nothing in common sharing 50% of the meta (it's less than that) in the smallest possible standard is diverse. There are 3 more sets to fill out this standard before anything rotates out at the end of 2017. You can expect all kinds of Temurge or RW Vehicles or Shitbrew Control/Aggro builds at your FNM. This format is far from solved.

This thread has made me feel old.


.t started playing as a kid in 1996 and more or less quit when Stronghold came out.

I remember fucking Necropotence decks.