MTG: Standard

So exactly what is the issue with standard? New player so im generally curious

Depends on who you are, what you like to play and what format you're coming from.

To some people, standard is just fine. It's not impossible to think there are people playing and enjoying standard that don't run into the problems below.

However, the basic problems with the format right now are:
1) Certain power card cost too much. There are cards like Gideon, Smuggler's Copter and Emrakul that you NEED to have if you want your deck to be truly competitive, but they end up making your deck cost a lot more than it needs to.
2) Certain cards can decisively end the game the moment they come out, making the game less interactive and taking some of the skill out of winning. The main problem cards here are Emrakul and Ulamog.
3) Threats are better than answers. This makes reactive decks weaker (mainly control, but burn and some others are affected too) and hurts diversity in the format.
4) FNM attendance is (relatively) down. Likely because the promos are crap. Standard Showdown was a nice gesture but I don't know if it was successful at all.

Personally, while all the above things annoy me, I'm still having fun with it. But get too caught up in the high-level competitive scene and those flaws will focus and magnify.

Basically this. The issue is that Standard is filled to the brim with fun decks if remove Gideon, Smuggler's Copter, and a handful of others from the equation, but those cards are so obscene powerful that they hijack everything else.

They're so close to having a really solid format, especially in the wake of the Collected Company nightmare, but a select few chase items are spoiling it

>I hate standard babies
What the fuck is a standard baby? Is anyone who plays standard a standard baby? Even if they play other formats?

Too many decks feel the same. Stall until you can play your big guy, game over.

For example, In other formats, it's a viable strategy to play lot's of fast little guys (or poisonous little guys) that can beat your opponent before he has the mana to play the big guy. You can also opt to try to keep your opponent from playing their big guy by forcing them to discard, exile, or tuck it.

None of these strategies can function in the current standard (BR vampires comes close to being fast little guys competitive, but it still isn't tier 1). Also, the big guys are expensive.

Unfortunately that's probably not what's happening. Wizards doesn't think that players are too stupid for Lightning Bolt or PtE, Wizards itself is too stupid to design a set where Lightning Bolt or PtE wouldn't be busted.

The problem with standard is simple:
>For 200 you can build a quality EDH deck full of cool cards that will also buff out your collection and teach you a lot about magic.
or
>You can build a standard deck that involves buying multiple copies of the same card. These cards often have extremely cheap versions in older sets that are objectively better, so the second standard rotates, or you figure that out, you're going to be saltier than a motherfucker.
or
>You can spend $20 and draft, not worrying about netdeck thundercock and his $300 of planeswalkers.

Draft is the best format (when the draft is well made).

>Draft is the best format (when the draft is well made).
Objectively wrong, sorry user. Building for limited is what has ruined magic in the first place. It's the main reason 99% of commons are pure toilet water, and why wizards can justify printing "chase mythics" at such a low percentage, when most aren't even very good.

Yes, draft is fun, but there is nothing more satisfying than forging a deck with nothing but your mind and a pile of jank, then beating someone with a much more expensive deck they googled. Happens to me when I play commander all the time.

>but there is nothing more satisfying than forging a deck with nothing but your mind and a pile of jank
This isn't doable in constructed you mong

The only reason you can in commander is the multiple player buffer

>This isn't doable in constructed you mong
sure it is. you just have to play one of the big payoffs. you can't tell me you won't take games with a pile of draft fodder and four gideons.

That's not 'forging a deck', that's putting cards in a pile to fill out your deck and then playing a one-card game winner.

>This isn't doable in constructed you mong
It's doable in singleton. Like I said, on a relatively small budget, I consistently win against much more expensive decks because I don't just netdeck everything I want. I've put time into finding out things that are both cheap and good. It's just not doable in standard and modern because the card pools are too small, so everyone netdecks.

This user is correct. You run a few expensive things and many cheap things. It's just as you get deeper and deeper into the card pool, the better it gets, and eventually you reach critical mass where what you have is much better by virtue of cohesion. For example, this is like $0.25 cents. If it was printed for the first time in an upcoming set, you can see how it'd be worth considerably more because it'd be a chase mythic with more hype.

Oh, in case you don't understand, buries means sacrifices. This is a way to get around hexproof indestructible creatures relatively easily for BB at an instant.

Whether that's condescension or not, I happen to know players who have started playing this year, and even they can see that this whole 'chase Mythic' bullshit needs to stop. Put simply, the reason standard numbers are down is because Wizards is trying to milk players dry by making such a tiny quantity of decent cards, and everyone, even new players, can see it.

Yes, I love brewing decks and certain 'unsolved' formats are better for it than others. Standard shouldn't be able to be solved given the nature of rotation, but when the number of playables is in the low twenties, then it happens over night.

Yes it's dying and there's nothing to do about it, the new CEO wants to replace Standard as a Pro Tour format with a new digital product to compete with Heartstone in the esports arena. Once it's no longer the Pro format, nobody will want to play paper Standard anymore.

Only purpose of standard is to give my niche edh decks new cards.

Everyone's starting to play EDH anyway.

>It's doable in singleton.
Perhaps that should be amended to "supported constructed."

>"buh, Gideon Copter and Emrakul too stronk, standard ruined"

Wizards gave us plenty of tools to use against them but you fucking retards don't use them. Ruinous Path takes care of Gideon just fine. AND works against creatures.

Ceremonious Rejection takes care of Emrakul and even Smuggler's Copter.

Unlicensed Disintegration takes care of Copter too.

Are they all main deckable? Maybe not Ceremonious Rejection but everything else is fine and will take care of the cards you all keep complaining about.

The REAL problem with standard is that you all hear someone say "oh yeah, this is the best card in standard" and fucking take that at face value and just assume they're right.

There are answers to what you're bitching about. Run them.

there are a lot of problems with standard currently
granted this format is better than the last few but saying "there are answers" to these cards just isn't true

right now we have a problem where almost all the "Answers" to these specific win conditions are reactive, not proactive. Emrakul is probably the biggest offender currently with no real graveyard hate getting her down to 6 or 7 isn't uncommon in games where she is actually hard cast. And countering her isn't exactly an answer either unless you are using Summary Dismissal. Cards like Ruinous Path have been made basically useless as a maindeck due to the prevalence of Copter which increases the relative strength of cards like Gideon making the problem even worse.

the biggest thing hurting the format right now though is probably the lack of an actual tier 1 control deck. Something to keep everyone honest and keep things in check would do wonders for a format where Emraukls are being cheated out on turn 4 and people are just playing agro or graveyard solitaire to eventually win the game

but this is kind of beside the point.
The actual biggest problem with standard is the lack of color identity for 2 of our three colors
black, white, and green are all doing fine
but blue and red have been pretty much forgotten about and kicked to the curb
Red has just slowly morphed into worse green and blue doesn't get to do blue things anymore because that is deemed "unfun"

1. Get rid of Gaywatch
2. Print good answers/hate cards
3. Print more good cards on ALL the rarities, don't just fill common/uncommon rarities with draft fodder and leave rare/mythic slot for constructed play. Fucking copter, why is it rare?
4. Fuck T4 Emrakul/Gideon. I'm sick of these cards.

> how to fix standard

Win standard tournaments without planeswalkers

your gonna love turn three Gideon then next format :^)

>what is G/R Aetherworks

k
they have Chandra in the sideboard sometimes but honestly these decks don't have to run any walkers to be the best deck in standard

Good
Glad to hear it

I only play limited and legacy

>When I pulled a sol ring and an aether vial at the prerelease
My opponent flipped his fucking shit

>Opened two boxes, played 2 pre-releases and a Sealed league and drafted many times during BFZ/Oath
>No Expeditions
>Opened a box, played 2 pre-releases and a sealed league and drafted several times during Kaladesh.
>No Masterpieces

I-I'm not mad!

>Ceremonious Rejection takes care of Emrakul and even Smuggler's Copter.

True, but the biggest problem with Emrakul is her cast trigger, not the big fat Emrakul itself (as you can keep chumpblocking it).

>buries means sacrifices
Wrong-o, newbie. "Bury target " means "Destroy target . It can't be regenerated." Urborg Justice was errata'd to say sacrifice.

>1. Get rid of Gaywatch
pls yes. Magic story right now feels like fan fiction for teenage girls. Where are my bearded wizards?

>Some people have to play against Sol Rings in KLD limited
Poor guys.

>chump blocking the 13/13 flyer with trample

while I agree that counters aren't answers to Emrakul I also don't think you can really chump block her

1. Not going to happen. Gaywatch has wide appeal. Best we can hope for it some sort of rotating membership where new planeswalkers replace old ones.

2. MaRo thinks answers and hate cards are un-fun. It's the hearthstone school of thinking where your opponents shouldn't stop you from doing the "cool shit".

3. But muh draft.

4. Least these'll be gone by autumn.

Sorry; PtE?

Path to exile

>WAHHH WAHHH WIZARDS DOESN'T PRINT ANSWERS
>WAHH WAHH WHERE'S MUH COUNERSPELL
Wow it's almost like it's right fucking here!

Retards, all of you.

I thought they rotate out in 2018 when we get not-Aztec plane?

>3 mana counterspell
>Rare

Stop making everything good rare and mythic.

It used to be that you had strong utility in the common, uncommon section, cards like mana leak, lightning bolt, go for the throat/ doomblade, path to exile, ECT.

Now the same kind of effects are exclusively rare.

Wait Emrakul is from Innistrad isn't he. Yup. 2 more years of him. Gideon should rotate with the set after AE though so less than a year with him.

2006 called

>printed at rare for another fucking chase card

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the prohibitive price of chase cards hurt secondary markets instead of help? Card shops lose a lot of opportunities to sell singles if players don't attend FNM due to deckbuilding prices, right?

Let's just pretend Disallow is good enough.

Now you need 4 fresh Rares to play fucking Cancel. CANCEL.

Hey, let's print Terminate, except let it hit Planeswalkers. Make it worse by making it a Sorcery and up the fucking rarity to Rare.

Take Wizards' dick out of your mouth. Standard Jund was once a good enough deck using nothing but Commons and Uncommons. If you wanted to spend money you could buy some Maelstrom Pulses and Raging Ravines and throw in your dragon of choice. It was degenerate but at least it was affordable.

The chase cards help move boxes, which is the primary way a shop will make money. The MtG economy balances between cheap enough, so that players don't feel locked out by price, but expensive enough to where shops can reliably move boxes due to the card value inside the boxes. Right now I feel like the standard economy is shifted to being too expensive because a lot of the cards you need are in rare and mythic. For an example of it being too cheap look at Force of Will (the game not the card). They printed that game to Hell and back, and now prices are low as shit. This means that shops don't carry it because no sensible person would buy a box or pack because singles are so cheap.

I would also like to add that Kaladesh is a shit set in terms of value, and people have been taking Eldritch Moon as prize support for events at my LCS.

2000 sends their regards

2013 says to shut up, gramps

Were these the only hard answers available in their format?

Broken Concentration was printed in Shadows Over Innistrad. At worst its just Cancel.

Absorb certainly wasn't, it had UUB counterpart.

>Hey user you're slightly wrong but still correct, therefore you must be new.
Syntax user. Bury target creature is much different than each opponent buries a creature.

basically I look at it like this. When I started playing standard in alara, I put together a bunch of jank I opened from boosters (like terminate, BBE, blightning, putrid leech, goblin ruin blaster, fucking lightning bolt) and I had a solid and powerful deck. it didn't storm FNM, but I won games time to time with it.

This shit you open from boosters now is all 4cmc destroy an artifact and put a +1/+1 counter on something. 6cmc destroy a creature and gain 3 life. or 5 cmc put a +1/+1 counter on a creature and gain 5 life. Then at the end of the pack its a mythic rare planeswalker that steamrolls the fucking game all by himself and you need 3 more of it to be remotely competitive.

if I could build a reasonably competitive deck for under $100, I might play standard again. I know there will always be the more expensive decks, UW control with JTMS and celestial colonnade and day of judgment was an expensive deck, and it was a good deck, but it wasn't the only viable one.

Now it's spend money or get fucked. I'd rather spend my money on modern/legacy. to hell with standard until the "everything but chase rares suck DICK" sales model goes away

>the madness cost could have been (UU)

Grixis madness control would have sound like fun.

Emrakul is also a girl user. :^)

So many creatures and planeswalkers generate so much value and demand immediate answers without a diverse enough collection of efficient spells to answer them. They tone down the power level of sets overall and then jam a few power mythics in them that end up auto includes.

I will say this format is still better than last year with CoCo jammed in everywhere.

>Lightning Bolt gets shifted to rare
>Ball Lightning gets shifted to mythic

>goddamned autists who spend 300+ dollars on a rotating format that cards lose value the second they rotate.
Why would wizards want to hurt the people who give them so much money?

Because this business model still didn't bit them in the ass.

But as people who goes to FNM know, their time is coming.

was Alara after or before NWO?

Before.
>Here was the problem that reared its head during Lorwyn and Morningtide. This type of complexity isn't about what cards can do but rather about how they interact with one another while they are on the battlefield. This problem was most noticeable to R&D during the employee Prerelease for Morningtide. The casual players were quitting after one or two rounds and we kept watching people who stayed in suffer as they couldn't figure out what they had to do. There was just too much dependent interaction.
Lorwyn/Shadowmoor confirmed for both Best Set and Beginning of the End.

>This week, on Veeky Forums is bad at magic.
A straight translation, including only the errata for the term "bury," would have read "Target opponent chooses a number of creatures [...]. Destroy those creatures. They can't be regenerated." Sacrificing is a different effect. Savra, for instance, triggers specifically on sacrificing.

BFZ and SOI rotate when Atlazan comes in.

>Our sales people are retards so fuck you nerds.
I want MaRo to leave.

Meanwhile, playing Hearthstone costs $0.00

I will take even pokemon TCG over anything blizzard shits out.

>tfw really enjoyed Time Spiral and Lorwyn
>tfw you know a set like that will never happen again

Ironically, Pokemon has the best standard out of the bigger games right now.

Even though Pokemon is pricey as fuck with Shaymin, it's kept the meta pretty healthy.

Cool thing about pokemon is that you don't NEED shaymin for a competitive deck. Typhlosion meme master race reporting in

Grenigger Break, reporting.

My Frogadier is my Shaymin.

>tfw over 90 roaring skies packs and just one shaymin I'm not retarded it's the pokemon online booster count

are you two me?

>There was just too much dependent interaction.

This mentality is why I suspect the game has turned into Creatures: the Battling. Why interact with your opponent when you can just attack past each other in a race to 20 damage?

I think problem is the interactions are in the form of creature cards.

What the fuck is the point of slapping an ability like this on a creature? The ability could be an entire separate card for less mana and be fucking fantastic.

So do you guys actually talk about decks in here or just bitch?

I've borrowed all kinds of decks from my friends and, strictly speaking of standard, Pokemon is currently the most fun.
I'm assembling a Greninja deck, it costs less than $100 for a competitive deck.

420.5n is life.

To be fair this is a bitching thread. The generals bitch a lot too but you can get deck discussion going if you actually ask for advice.

That's because nobody wants a card with a heavy colour weight that requires the player to be in two colours showing up every other draft, dumbass.

From the rulebook

>A term that meant “put [a permanent] into its owner’s graveyard.” In general, cards that were printed with the term “bury” have received errata in the Oracle card reference to read, “Destroy [a permanent]. It can’t be regenerated,” or “Sacrifice [a permanent].”

>tfw like 6 out of 18 players at LGS run aetherworks
That card was a mistake. Not only can it cast non-permanents, but it counts as casting so shit like Nulamog and Em get their bonus effects. Turn 4 Em is fucking backbreaking and I'm tired of people spending so much god damn time trying to figure out what to do with my hand or 2 now useless instants .

Ravnica drafts are all about 2 colours though.