MTG Standard Only Nationals

magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/return-nationals-and-changes-grand-prix-2017-02-09

Here's a quick recap:

>The World Magic Cup is now going back to three player teams playing standard.

>WMCQs are being replaced with nationals (standard only). Top 2 qualify along with top pro point earner from the country for the WMC.

>Old school PTQs will be held on the Sunday of a GP.

>Store GPTs will end after GP LV. 'GPTs' will still be held on the Friday of a GP.

Modern is oficially a dead format.
Standard is once again the golden boy.

Thoughts?

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Does wizards really believes that people will stop playing Modern and pick up standard?
I think that most modern players would stop playing at all instead of switching.

Probably this weekend some cards will start to see monetary loses as people start dropping the game and selling their shit on mass.

>on mass
en masse

Okay, there are too many competitive changes this year for me to bother to get emotionally invested, just tell me if I should get mad, applaud Wizards, lynch a format, quit Magic, or do all of the above.

>Modern is oficially a dead format.
I don't think anyone cares about the WMC being switched to Standard.

>More standard
I'd honestly rather watch frontier than this garbage.

>Mardu vehicles vs Mardu vehicles in Grand Finals.

I'd say make use of the boards dice rolling function.

1 Get mad
2 Applaud WotC
3 Get mad at a format (your choice)
4 Quit magic
5 All of the above
6 None of the above

>Modern players hating on Standard

Every single time.
Why is this always the case?
What's so bad about it?
Obviously is not the money, your format is much more expensive.

For me, and I don't represent all of modern players, there's two parts of why I don't like standard.
1. Once you hit a point in time, literally half of your deck rotates out, you lost immense amounts of value, and now you need to find a new theme.
2. In modern, our decks don't really change, so we have a one-time buy in and keep a deck forever, but we also get the thrill of standard sets having silver bullet amazing cards, such as Fatal push, that we can then start to work with and adapt to our needs.
So when I say our decks don't change, that's of course a lie, but the theme or essence of the deck is still there, ya know?

Right now, Standard is as expensive as Modern but you're not going to keep the deck
So yes, it is about money (among other things)

>As expensive
If I go and buy the top tier Standard decks I'm dropping 300$.
If I buy Jund, Im dropping 1800$.
Not quite the same.

Wizards has made so many fucking changes to the competitive structure of this game that I can't imagine anybody giving a fuck anymore.

There has been maybe 5 years of people dropping out because it's gotten too complicated to keep track of their fucking retarded system. And it's not a complicated system either but it's so fucking unstable that you could work a year only to get fucking denied in the next.

They don't know what the fuck they're doing. They have a system (Planeswalker Points) that now demands your email address but initially never did. They've made half-assed attempts to actually TALK to players by using the email for surveys but have failed in the whole endeavor. Get your stupid DCI number and that's it. Nobody new or old cares to look up their stupid rank because it doesn't fucking matter anymore. I can't believe I'm saying this but the Rewards system actually made me care to look that stuff up. So far as I know they don't solicit feedback from stores aside from anything having to do with sales and they've been fucking stores by limiting their access to product - fucking sucks when you can't attend a prerelease because they were limited in how much shit they received - was much easier when you can just crack a box for six fucking packs but NO Wizards, you need to give Magic players fucking stickers and children's bullshit.

What a fucking useless company. They never had a system to get feedback from players and they're too lazy to research competitive structures from other successful games. Beauty pageants are run better than Magic. Wizards hasn't even given us a fucking tool to let us know the highest ranking players at a store, even though it's so fucking easy to do that.

The power level is always low. Even when it's 'high for standard' it's low. Also it has been anything but balanced for years now

>If I buy Jund, Im dropping 1800$.
Jund is just a pile of value cards.

>MAJIK IS DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
>RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
That's what you're supposed to feel whenever someone post magic news.

I don't disagree with that. It is still very expensive. And it has archetype staples that you can't avoid using.
What does that have to do with the price?

I'm willing to bet that Wizards has no idea who travels to play Magic.

They have all the event data so they should be able to see which store a player plays most frequently at to determine their home and how far they are willing to travel for Magic.

I bet the only piece of data they look at is how long a player plays the game. That's it. Or maybe they don't even compile that, they just see that attendance is down across the board.

I want to believe they have statisticians on the payroll but given they aren't willing to pay anybody and have a shit corporate culture that saps the life from new employees I'm willing to bet they don't. They don't even have the resources to focus test their fucking product. They're like a drug lord unable to find a junkie to test their new shit.

every time I go to my LCS on Modern night it's full of people bitching about how much they hate modern but they still play it

It always struck me as odd that people who vocally exclaim how much they hate the format were the ones showing up every week to play it. It's not something I see on Legacy, Standard, or EDH nights.

yeah not likely.

I would be scared shitless if I had any investment in mtg. selling off any money cards I have left over from EDH right now. I'll just re-purchase them when they're a quarter each.

As a standard player, I liked modern. It was almost always more fun to watch, but not play because fuck spending 600+ on a winning deck.

went 3/4 with a $7 treasure hunt deck once, beat out a deck that probably cost well over $500. that was luck, though, I played that deck 6-7 times and usually went 1/4.

...

>using the average for standard and the absolute most expensive for modern

I'm spending about $600-800 on a modern deck. I could play standard by dropping $300 now and $100-200 every 4 months.

So in 2 rotations, I could have a functioning, fun modern deck or 1 standard deck during that time in which their cards will not retain any value whatsoever after they rotate.

No more in-store GPTs. With how shit WPN incentives have been lately and how much more product at better prices you can get from unofficial distributors, may be what pushes a lot of stores to stop their partnership program with WotC.

I think it's kinda scary how Wizards can be so loose with changing the competitive structure of their game so frequently. It implies a lot of things about the player base that are somewhat scary.

It could mean many things including: people come and go regularly and are easily replaced, the majority of players aren't interested in competitive play thus there is little damage to confidence, the addicts will continue playing as will all the websites promoting the game for virtually free, or they're only taking feedback from a very narrow group of people i.e. Twitter and the vocal pros.

It's like DotA, they can dogfuck all they want with the competitive scene but because there are a million people ready to replace any number of pros you can fuck with everyone all you want because someone will always be happy to do it for less.

>fun
>modern

Have you SEEN the modern general? Does it look like they're having fun in there?

It's people who actually like to play magic vs people who don't want anyone to play magic, even if they sit down across from them at a magic tournament.

> you spend more by constantly playing standard

I used to like to play Magic until Wizards made it really fucking expensive for people to play Magic with me.

I admit it is completely irrational to not want people to play Magic anymore, but that's how I feel. The company has just adopted some really fucking anti-consumer practices and is just riding the intrinsic value of the property without putting any effort into player retention and making sure that communities remain intact. How the fuck can I feel good about encouraging someone to play this game when in order to even have the tools to play at my level they have to drop $20+ for each fucking land.

tr00

I really wish landbases weren't as expensive as they are. Shit like lands should be uncommon rarities at most just to allow everyone access to mana fixing.

competitive Magic has always been a tightrope for Wizards that they refuse to even try balancing on.

We can talk about what "should" happen to fix things but it's all just irrelevant if the overarching marketing philosophy doesn't change.

The focus of their current marketing is to appeal to addicts who for some period of time will pay any amount of money to play this game. It doesn't matter if they are new or if they've been playing for years. They will drop cash because this game is truly worth it. And at some point they will just quit because they realize it's the worst money situation or they keep playing.

To me, this is a problem because some number of "smart" people won't let themselves get addicted. Or if they do get addicted they won't stick around for long because they can see through the bullshit. And the problem is that your community is only going to turn to shit if you can't keep these people around. And these people leave all the time; from my perspective you can keep well balanced people playing this game because they see how ridiculous the situation is. It's like police, if you can't keep people around to become managers, chiefs, or trainers, people are just going to fucking retire after 10 years because they can see society hates them and only the super incompetent are left behind to train the next generation.

That's where Magic is. It's just shit people welcoming a new generation of players. A normal person just wants to be able to very easily get cards and play the game but they don't want to have to keep up with all the financial horseshit or trading to get what they need to play the game.

I'm not saying addicts are bad for a community, they often possess the passion and expertise that makes the game so rich. But the problem is that they're recklessly driving the marketplace in this game, a marketplace Wizards is unwilling to regulate and is driving balanced and nice people from the game.

I'll say it, I'm a fucking addict. I want to spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars on this game every month. But I won't.

modern players should be thankful that they'll stop banning things at random

>modern players should be thankful that they'll stop banning things at random
>People actually believe this
Let's cancel the Modern pro tour guys so we stop getting our format banned

this is what kills me and I don't even spend that much money because I play casually

>buy modern deck
>that deck is usable basically forever

>buy standard deck
>basically spent a whole bunch of money on something that will expire

Where is Wizards collecting their data to justify the bans? MTGO? They're certainly not collecting it from the stores, where players have to really shell out to put a deck together.

In the "interests of format diversity" how many paper players did they shove into the cold. How many struggling Modern communities just collapsed after Twin and Pod took a hit to the balls.

Forget Modern for a moment. How many fucking Standard players got their goddamn decks shattered by the bannings. I'm thoroughly convinced now that taking away someone's ability to play with their $20 bills is NOT worth the "joy" others feel who never had the $20 bills to play with.

The only situation where it is okay to be aggressive with bannings is if the affected players can pivot easily into a recovery position with little effort. That is NOT the case for most players on account of how expensive the decks are. We aren't even talking about good gameplay anymore; that is a shit excuse when the financial reproductions players experience quickly overtakes any feeling of "the format is now better".

Cards are fucking expensive, THAT is the problem. That has always been the problem. And Wizards is making all these useless fucking gestures that do everything but solve this one more significant problem in the game.

Hey

Hmmn ... think I'll just keep NOT PLAYING STANDARD and buy SINGLES INSTEAD OF BOOSTERS.

I just think it is kind of boring. I know modern is not that thrilling either but every now and then you see something new. In standard it's the same four decks over and over, see bant company or siege rhino the rhinoning for example. Gets pretty stale.

Just my opinion tho.

I don't even know who this is but his bookcase makes me believe he is a huge fucking faggot
>splay all your books with the cover facing out so everyone can see how sophisticated you are and not how empty your bookshelf it
>load the rest of it up with those Barnes and Noble classics so you can look cultured
>wear a bow tie so you can look like a total queer

I know Wizards doesn't have the data to back it up, but I wonder how you can weigh the loss of one player losing the ability to play a deck and possibly quitting your format/game over the happiness other players have not playing against that deck/card.

Realistically, what are the numbers? 5 players losing a deck so that 15 other player don't have to play against it. Let's consider Copter. 5 people, playsets of Copter at $20/piece, that's each person eating a loss of some $80 (assuming they can't sell the cards) each so 15 others don't have to deal with it.

If you told a Magic player that if they paid $20 they could buy a round of soda for everyone in the store, would they? What if you told them for $80 everyone gets pizza? What if you told them that for $80 everyone is a bit happier for the few months... maybe.

You know what he likes more than Magic cards?
KNAWLEDGE

He is. also acts pretty cringeworthy and seems to be a total cunt. only could bear to watch one of his videos tho so I can't really tell.

Desolator pls go

Not until I have told you about my super secret standard tech that beats all these netdeckers.

I think he's a pretty funny guy. I don't understand the cringe talk. People are just jealous he has the money to invest in this shit and at least keep his head above water doing something they wish they could.

youtube.com/watch?v=w18nBjSuzAI

He's like your crazy uncle, if your crazy uncle was just pretending to be crazy.

Stop shilling your channel and kill you self you faggot

Honestly I don't want to treat this game like a stockmarket, I just want to play it.

Maybe I just got a bad first impression of him because I watched the wrong video, but still..

Tons of tier 1 modern decks around the $500-600 mark. Merfolk, Burn, Infect, Tron, Affinity. It's only really the 3 colour control decks which exist to stuff as many expensive cards in as possible that cost $1500 dollars.

Standard is around $400 right now if I'm not mistaken. There's a couple of cheaper decks like R/G energy but the main contenders are almost at modern levels and will be mostly worthless this time next year.

This is such an obvious sign for a post standard format it's ridiculous.
Really sad that post standard is likely to be siege rhino, jace, and CoCo goodstuff decks. Lucky the format isn't solved yet so MAYBE this won't be the case. Tiny chance, but there's a chance.

Dude, it's Veeky Forums talking about a solved format. Of course they're going to be no fun to talk to.

That doesn't mean the whole of modern isn't fun. If anything, there's plenty of decks to play and fun decks to brew outside of the meta

If Magic make a frontier type format I'm willing to bet they'd start at Origins not Khans. It just makes so much more sense as that was the set that defined the current power level. Plus from a thematic standpoint saying the format starts at Origins sounds better than starting at Khans.

They could just stop printing shit cards and then maybe people would be more interested in modern.

Unban things, Print busted shit, raise the power level of standard, unban some stuff and print worse stuff. Just stop taking every-fucking-thing away from decks.

And REPRINT THINGS THAT NEED TO NE REPRINTED, HOLY FUCK

But user.. people would complain. We can only have staple reprints if they are mythics and the booster packs they are in cost $9.99 per pack.

Didn't people complain about thoughtseize in theros too or some shit?

Because theros was a shit show besides thoughtsieze...

They need to make standard FUN and STRONG, not as linear as possible with only creatures being good.

>Didn't people complain about thoughtseize in theros too or some shit?
IIRC those were complaints about it being too powerful, nothing to do with it's cost.

>Print busted shit, raise the power level of standard
Must I remind you what shitshow Khans were?

People only complained about Thoughtseize in Theros because it's a shit card to play against in a low-consistency format like Standard. Anybody who played against Thoughtseize in Lorwyn can attest to that; the fact that nobody in Wizards can't remember how degenerate that card was back then is fucking ridiculous.

A T1 Thoughtseize is just the most savage thing you can do to anybody in any Standard format. It can just break a deck after a mulligan. Imagine Thoughtseizing a Burn deck after it has mulliganed to 5, not big deal right? But in Standard doing that to a player means that's game.

OR Wizards always knew that it would have the effect it would on Standard. And they used it as a sacrificial cow to justify their lack of reprints in the future citing the fears caused by Thoughtseize. They've done more outrageously evil shit than that. I would do it, shit up Standard for a year to give yourself an excuse to not reprint anymore good cards in normal booster packs.

Kahns was only good because only a few cards were good. But it was a step in the right direction.

The problem was most of the good cards were in Junk

> Plus from a thematic standpoint saying the format starts at Origins sounds better than starting at Khans.

They could even use
> Origin
as format name if they wanted to.

>treating a card game like investment
>people paying his patreon can have the "honor" of buying a booster box of him that in a "incredible" price
That guy is an asshole and nothing more

What this signals is the complete opposite.
a) They're not ready to promote their own "Frontier".
b) They realize Standard is suffering greatly in sales, the market doesn't want the product WotC's selling.
c) The quality of the product is not gonna change, even if corporate has ordered MaRo and Stoddard to stop it with their creature/walker wankfest and develop a powerful format that promotes sales. Amonkhet is already printed, Hour of Devastation is in it's way to the printers, Atlazan block is already in marketing post production, and the set after Atlazan is already in art and flavor. The earliest we can see changes to R&D's crap is 15 months from now.

This changes denote that corporate knows the game is shit and they're doing the only thing they can to ensure sales of these shit blocks: Prohibit older sets from being playable at a sponsored competitive setting.

He's not an asshole, he's just profiting off a profitable situation and I don't blame him for that. I do however, hate the fact that his situation is profitable at all, that there's room for fucking scalpers in this game.

He's a financial investor. He invests his own money to make money AND he offers his advice to others and gets paid for it. And the thing is, if people follow his advice, it only makes his own investments worth more because his followers will create scarcity or flood the market for him. Everyone wins a little, he wins a lot.

And guess what, there's no stopping that sort of behavior because everyone wants to win. Nobody buying actual stocks cares about the people in a company when the stock tips too low and a takeover happens and they all get fired post-acquisition.

The only people who can put a stop to this guy and others like him is a regulator like Wizards. Wizards can say, no, fuck you people, the game comes first and getting the game out to as wide an audience is what matters. But Wizards doesn't think that way. Wizards for some fucking reason thinks this sort of behavior and the perception of financial value adds emotional VALUE to the game; and maybe it does.

>And guess what, there's no stopping that sort of behavior because everyone wants to win.

Well there is stopping that behavior, but it requires an outside entity (the government) to step in and regulate the market and impose rules to curb shady investment practices.

But that shit ain't happening anytime soon with actual robber barons running the government.

cards have value means it's a healthy tcg.

Wizards values this type of investing because a big chunk of investor types are stores and the more the stores profit from janky cardboard "investments", the more they will buy from Wizards.

This is the same reason the RL still exists. The stores are a crucial part of Wizards' distribution model. If the RL goes, so does the 2ndary market. The 2ndary market crashing crashes LGSes and this crashes WotC.

No doubt value means a healthy card game.

But now we have reached a real problem. You hand a kid $400 and they have to spend it on something. They only have three choices: a Magic deck or a Playstation 4.

Stop citing the fucking Reserve List as if it had any impact on any store's fucking bottom line. Any store that buys that shit probably wants to sell it ASAP. Whoever is sitting on hundreds of valuable Reserve List cards is straight up retarded - you turn that shit into cash and you throw it into a real account where it will make you money way faster.

That's two choices. :^)

Anyway, i doubt wizards can regulate this shit. They tried printing the cards to oblivion right now and prices tanked for everything except tournament worthy cards.

Wizards is one of the worst companies ever made and MTG is successful DESPITE them. Seriously their entire 20 year history is a series of poor choices one after another.

Here are some stats to put it in perspective.

Magic is the 2nd most popular card game in the world right now, after Yugioh (which absolutely dominates Magic in terms of sales and profit).

MTGO is not only not the first, it is also not the second, nor the third, nor the fourth but the FIFTH! most popular online card game. Behind Hearthstone, which came almost two decades after, that new shadowvanguard whatever game, a WWE card game, and get this, Yugioh Duel Links. A game that came out only a month ago (world release) is already more popular than MTGO.

Wizards is a fucking mess of a company with no self-awareness other than their bottom line at this point. I think we all could write entire papers on how bad they are.

"Oh my God we need more casual newbies to play the game quick do surveys and cater to them!"

"Sir Standard sales are falling even more now that we started doing that!"

"Just keep catering to casual players and see if it works this time!"

Its almost as if the casual fanbase doesn't want to spend money on the game and are more likely to migrate over to a "free" game anyway! Whoah! Shocker Wizards!

I'm actually interested in seeing Magic eat shit.

When it does, large communities will hold out obviously, but outside of large cities the paper game will be dead. And that's just going to be weird. Without the paper game, there's no reason to play the online game. The scope of what they have to do to ensure the online game stays alive is going to be massive when paper goes. Paper is already going because there's no way the company is going to be able to claw back the prices from the secondary market where they are.

I mean Wizards are charging stores like $65 for a box. Stores are in turn selling the boxes for $90 when the MSRP is somewhere like $144. Wizards is going to have to take the hit there and not the stores. At some point Wizards will have to charge more for a box but they can't because they actually have to sell product. Do you know how fucking hard it is for a company to decide to take a shot in its own foot?

>vintage, legacy and modern are all in varying degrees of trouble
>wizards won't dignify the existence of pauper, a format full of cards that were never meant to be played together

>OR Wizards always knew that it would have the effect it would on Standard. And they used it as a sacrificial cow to justify their lack of reprints in the future citing the fears caused by Thoughtseize. They've done more outrageously evil shit than that.
Like?

Not him but I know they used it as an excuse to not Include Liliana of The Veil in standard when some people were trying to get them to (my bet is on Ian duke).

The reserve list isn't important because the cards on it are important, it's important because it's the only strict reprint policy wizards has.

Sure most stores aren't paying the rent with P9 but if Wizards goes back on the reserve list it'll destroy any confidence that store owners have in Wizards to maintain the value of the cards that do matter.

Fetches, tarmogoyf, lilly, etc. aren't on the reserve list, but they are on a soft reserve list and if Wizards breaks the hard RL, then stores will have real reason to worry about the soft RL being thrown out the window as well.

>Goyf is on a soft reserve list
>Has been reprinted in both Modern Masters sets

Considering it is only ever printed in heavily controlled LIMITED print run sets, I would say it is on a soft reserve list.

This is an important distinction because when a limited reprint is announced store owners know that the supply will only increase by a trivial amount.

*reprinted

They could sell singles direct. Maybe provide single stock to LGSs. Set the price relatively high. £15 a Mythic, £5 a rare and it's still better in the majority of cases to buy from a second party. It just means you don't get shit like £35 for a Lilliana the Last Hope.

You mean certain games stores would have to operate like regular fucking businesses instead of relying on predatory speculation to stay open in the face of their otherwise-certain failure?

Tell me why that's a bad thing again?

>megek is ded

This, desu

Rudy is literally /ourguy/ and should be treated as such. He is the most important figure in modern day MTG.

>Creating another Extended format when they couldn't even make Modern work
That's just what this game needs.

Reprinting LotV in a Standard with that monoblack control list would have resulted in her getting banned anyway.

Wizards should just make a modern format that only rotates every 4 years, with a max 8 year card pool.

Boom. I fixed magic.

My LGS isn't even open on Sundays.

Are they not doing aether revolt real drafts in mtgo anymore? My only option is phantom drafts for new players.

Jund fetches that price because it is such a good deck. It's fair, doesn't really blow any deck out and isn't really dominated by anything. But its a really good and powerful deck.