Effective May 3, 2013
B/R Announcement
Modern: Second Sunrise is banned
Vintage: Regrowth is unrestricted
B/R Announcement
Modern: Second Sunrise is banned
Vintage: Regrowth is unrestricted
April 22, 2013 B/R Announcement
- Thread starter Spiderman
- Start date
Oversoul
The Tentacled One
Commander is not regulated by the DCI. That's why changes to Commander don't appear in a DCI announcement. Anyway, I'll belatedly voice my approval of the Vintage change. I'd really forgotten that Regrowth was restricted in the first place, and it certainly didn't need to be restricted anymore. I'll also chuckle at how lame of a format Modern is that what seems to be an incarnation of the old Sunny Side Up deck was actually good enough to warrant banning a card. It's probably for the best that I don't actually know any Modern players personally. I'd be constantly harassing them.
Oversoul
The Tentacled One
Modern's sets are everything after the 2003 card-face change, which includes several sets not on the Reserved list (Modern allows Eighth Edition onward, while the reserved list only goes up to cards from Urza's Destiny). Me calling it lame is perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek. When Modern arose some Legacy players found it amusing to deride Modern. I may or may not be the only person willing to continue that harangue these days. I mean really, it's an established format (0fficially sanctioned even) and it has its players. If that's the format they want to play, good for them.
That being said, there are somethings about Modern that I genuinely dislike...
- The whole point of excluding older sets was traditionally a means of providing a more evolving format. New sets come in, and simultaneously, old sets go out. That was the historical distinction between Type I, where every new set adds more power to an increasingly powerful pool, and Type II, where the pool was smaller and less powerful, but shifted much more. Other formats have their own niches. 1.X is a compromise, still rotating, but allowing for a bigger cardpool. Block Constructed takes the cardpool rotation to the extreme. 1.5 lets cards stay in the pool perpetually, but bans the egregiously broken cards. Modern doesn't really fit into this scheme. It maintains sets in its pool perpetually, so your cards are never too old unless they already were. Wizards of the Coast has basically branded all sets before Eighth Edition as "pre-Modern." Yeah, some cards and mechanics really are outdated, but I prefer to let the evolution of the game stand on its own merits, not to have antiquation dictated by fiat.
- While not everyone is going to interpret it this way, I find it sort of a snide dismissal of the old card face. I think many of the newer sets really have made big improvements to gameplay, but I've always thought that the old card face was better. It's been a few months shy of a decade since the change and of course I've gotten used to it even if I'll never be a fan of it. The new card face is now a fact of life. Apparently that isn't enough: we also need a tournament format that only allows cards from the sets with the new card face?
- Modern is such an underpowered format. Cards that can, at best, make for some rogue decks in Legacy get banned in Modern. To an extent, this is to be expected, as Modern has a smaller cardpool. That's totally reasonable. But it goes beyond that. Legacy has a handful of questionable bans (Land Tax was one for a long time), but the vast majority of the cards on it are obvious powerhouses that no one really questions. Reading Modern's banned list can seem almost surreal. Second Sunrise is in good company, I guess.
- Tendrils of Agony doesn't exist in Modern.
- Even though the format is basically gimped, it's filled with combo decks. Combo decks seem to to better in Modern than they do in Legacy, although really it's probably not a big discrepancy. They're silly, underpowered decks compared to Legacy combo decks, but they show up in tournaments and do well anyway, and then get mediocre cards like Second Sunrise banned. I don't know whether to be jealous or disgusted.
- At least half the successful decks in Modern are blatant ports of Legacy decks modified to account for the new deckbuilding restrictions. Part of that could be necessity, but it sure makes it look like a redundant format.
- While Magic Online gets a new official format every five seconds, paper magic formats are few and far between. Extended was a pretty big deal and so was Legacy. Two-Headed Giant hasn't gotten much attention, although it's cool to finally have it as an official format. Even though Commander has become pretty popular, it still doesn't have DCI sanctioning. Whatever time and effort went into the establishment of Modern could have gone into some format that doesn't suck.
Mooseman
Isengar Tussle
Tendrils of Agony doesn't exist in Modern.
Are the other points just window dressing for this fact?
I don't see card faces being a very strong point, but if your into that kind of thing (like artwork, flavor text or beveled picture edges) it could be a factor.
Seeing that it's a fairly new format, I'm not surprised that about half the succesful decks are just mutated Legacy decks, the legacy decks have been around and are very mature.
I remember when they started banning or restricting cards and there was lots of criticism and some blatant oops.
There aren't enough tournament players to make Legacy a full time format or even Vintage. If WoTC were to push Legacy/Vintage over Modern as a tournament format, those older cards would become so pricey that it would effect the format. They are a company that's trying to first make money, not make money for the secondary market first.
We do run some Commander games that are sanctioned at GP's..... not sure about this, but we run them and submit them to WoTC.....
Are the other points just window dressing for this fact?
I don't see card faces being a very strong point, but if your into that kind of thing (like artwork, flavor text or beveled picture edges) it could be a factor.
Seeing that it's a fairly new format, I'm not surprised that about half the succesful decks are just mutated Legacy decks, the legacy decks have been around and are very mature.
I remember when they started banning or restricting cards and there was lots of criticism and some blatant oops.
There aren't enough tournament players to make Legacy a full time format or even Vintage. If WoTC were to push Legacy/Vintage over Modern as a tournament format, those older cards would become so pricey that it would effect the format. They are a company that's trying to first make money, not make money for the secondary market first.
We do run some Commander games that are sanctioned at GP's..... not sure about this, but we run them and submit them to WoTC.....
Oversoul
The Tentacled One
Yeah, I wonder about that. Commander seems to have received some official recognition, but I'm not sure what the full extent of that might be. It started as a variant with physical cards, but Wizards of the Coast does now have Commander as a Magic Online format. Commander outside Magic Online still isn't regulated by the DCI in any way as far as I can see. I don't seriously contend that it would be but for the establishment of the Modern format distracting from that. But I am speculating that things of that nature could potentially happen (considering how few official formats have ever been created outside Magic Online).
I recognize that it's long been the case that Legacy and Vintage get less attention because so many of the cards used for those formats are on the secondary market, so the formats are intrinsically less profitable than Standard. Modern's cutoff before Eighth Edition doesn't really solve that problem, though. It excises the first ten years of Magic, but not second ten years. As more and more sets are added, the difference in size between Modern's cardpool and Legacy's will continue to shrink. This isn't tied directly to the money angle necessarily, but I think it's interesting, at least, in light of the varying degrees of success the official formats have had. A format has to stand out as something unique in an appealing way in order to draw players. Before the revision of Type 1.5, one of the problems that format faced was that because it banned everything Vintage restricted, Extended decks could use almost all of the relevant cards available to 1.5 players, and with more of the powerful cards unbanned (four copies of Tinker sure sounds fun, right?), so Extended was the format with the more broken decks and there was even less interest in 1.5 than there would have been otherwise. Even when Legacy broke away as its own format, the playerbase still wasn't developed and many of the early decks were just ports of existing or old Extended decks. The new 1.5 (Legacy, but it wasn't called that yet) was nicknamed "Overextended." Another issue that may or may not have affected Wizards of the Coast was that Block Constructed, which was usually a minor sort of off-season companion format to Standard, stole attention from Standard back during the era of Mirrodin Block Constructed, as the new block was so inordinately powerful that players could still build the same decks they'd use for Standard anyway. This eventually led to the odd situation of all of the Mirrodin Block Constructed staples getting banned shortly before the season for Mirrodin Block Constructed tournaments was completely over anyway. Mirrodin Block Constructed as it exists today is not even remotely similar to the format as my friends were playing it back when there were actual tournaments for the format (they banned all of the artifact lands and like four other cards).
I sort of suspect that Modern as a format will have to either change somehow (maybe new sets being released will happen to change it in some unique way without any sort of sweeping format revision even taking place) or stagnate. I don't really know which of those is more likely. But seeing cards like Second Sunrise and Hypergenesis banned makes me more inclined to think that it's the latter that's happening.
Modern also started as an Online format and became a paper format a couple of years ago. 2HG is officialy sanctioned by the DCI, so I wouldn't be surprised if Commander joins those ranks in the future. It probably depends on its popularity though.
That seems to be the way it is to keep the newer players happy and to have a format where they feel they can compete and not worry about having the "older" cards
Then another format will be introduced excising the first 15 years or so of Magic setsOversoul said:
That seems to be the way it is to keep the newer players happy and to have a format where they feel they can compete and not worry about having the "older" cards
Oversoul
The Tentacled One
Is it? Are there throngs of newer players that are into Modern, the format that considers Cloudpost too good to play? I'm sure Wizards of the Coast does maintain data on this sort of thing and will eventually make whatever move they think would benefit them the most, but they seem to have been slow to act in such situations, so it might be quite a while. I'd think Standard would be the format that would appeal to newer players that don't want to invest in older cards. Modern addresses the majority of that, but Standard is the much bigger, better supported format and it addresses all of that issue. Extended is a similar option in that regard. Of course, some people obviously are interested in playing in a format where Mirrodin is a "new" set and therefore allowed while Scourge is an "old" set and therefore not allowed and where that will always be the case (unless they change Modern). Also, where Blazing Shoal is banned. I have no idea how many players are in that situation. Apparently it's enough.Then another format will be introduced excising the first 15 years or so of Magic sets
And like I said, good for them. If they want to play in a format where Rite of Flame is totally considered an overpowered card that needs to be banned, Wizards of the Coast has got them covered.
Sorry, mixed up the target player base for Modern. Not "newer", but whatever set of players covering that span of years for which Modern is good.
So in five or so years, today's newer players-and-liking-Standard will want to play with their rotated out cards but not group them with the Modern cards so a new format will be made. Sure it's a self-perpetuated cycle, but if you don't want to play the format, don't. For those who do, will. More choices aren't going to hurt.
So in five or so years, today's newer players-and-liking-Standard will want to play with their rotated out cards but not group them with the Modern cards so a new format will be made. Sure it's a self-perpetuated cycle, but if you don't want to play the format, don't. For those who do, will. More choices aren't going to hurt.
Oversoul
The Tentacled One
This is starting to sound a lot like a replacement for Extended.
True, and my deriding Modern for banning a card every time a deck does well won't hurt either. At least, I think that's the case. Who knows? Maybe if I point out that Preordain is banned, Modern players will have seizures or something. But seriously, Modern's banned list reminds me of 1990's when I'd see a banned list and not understand why a certain card was banned.
Hm, to be fair, I guess that's distinct from the existence of Modern as a concept. The DCI went ban-happy on the format pretty early on, but that wasn't how it started and many of the players weren't thrilled about it. It's not my intention to conflate "Modern occupies a weird place as a non-rotating format that disallows older sets" with "Modern has a weird and heavy-handed card-banning policy." Both are, I contend, viable criticisms of the format. But they are not tied together.
Shabbaman
insert avatar here
That is not completely correct. Commander started as an online format, shaped after the paper format named Elder Dragon Highlander. Wizards saw an opportunity for a viable paper product, the commander precons, and merged the two formats. From then on, Commander used the EDH banlist.
Oversoul
The Tentacled One
I stand by what I said. I'm aware that they changed the name. It still started out as a variant with physical cards. The words "variant" and "format" probably have some relevant connotative differences here, and off the top of my head I'm not completely sure how I'd parse differences in classification of formats or of variants. But I think I'm comfortable saying that a name change is pretty minor. Vintage used to be Classic and used to be Type 1. I wouldn't say each of those was some entirely new format. There was some sense of continuity there. Similarly, there is a Magic Online format called Classic that obviously has its roots in the original "paper format." I'd consider the sentence "It started as a variant with physical cards, but Wizards of the Coast does now have Classic as a Magic Online format" to be correct for the same reasons.
Oversoul
The Tentacled One
The change from elder dragons as exclusive commanders (or generals) to legendary creatures in general predates the Magic Online version. It was (and in some places still is) called EDH because the elder dragons were the original basis for the variant, but that was a long, long time ago.
Shabbaman
insert avatar here
Magic Online's Commander used a banlist that was different from paper EDH. With the name change, online Commander became EDH, and then changed it's name to Commander. So, same format, different variant? Anyway, Wizards used to post changes to it's online formats on their website, and since Commander became EDH and was renamed to Commander, they stopped posting these changes. Or maybe they just hid them better.
Oversoul
The Tentacled One
Yes, but all online formats have different banned lists to account for the differences in the pools of cards available in print Magic and MTGO. Like I said, I've never played MTGO, but my impression was that EDH both with printed cards and online were still pretty recognizably similar otherwise. Variations on the same format? I don't know. If it's actually the case the online format employed a radically different banned list or radically different rules, beyond what would be necessitated for the shift from traditional Magic and MTGO, all before WotC became involved, then I'd be surprised. I don't pay much attention to MTGO, but still, I'd be surprised.
Spiderman's link in the first post explains that WotC is now using a blog for announcement related to Magic Online and leaving them out of the regular banned/restricted list updates. I really have no idea why they've made that change. Some move for greater consolidation of Magic Online stuff? A preliminary step before making similar changes to all of their announcements? A devious scheme to hide changes to Magic Online formats? Beats me.