And let me be the first to say that with this action WOTC has clearly ruined Magic forever and I'll never play again.
You weren't even close to the first to say that, but you know it already.
I have no strong opinion one way or the other. Standard is my weakest format by far, so this won't bother me all too much. I'll miss the "anthology" feel the Core Sets had, but ever since the revival back in 2010, it felt like less of one. Oh, things came back now and again, but not like it used to be. They could easily bring stuff back in the new expansions, though. It just goes from a big expansion and two small ones for a block and a Core Set - which was just a big expansion size, anyway - every year, we get two big and two small. Sounds like the same balance, to me. It's just more ways to tell original stories. I'm fine with it. It doesn't mess up Modern or EDH that much, which is where my attention is these days.
Either new expansions will have to include more reprints than before to make up for the loss of the core set, or the game is going to start to see a deficiency of reprints, which could have some interesting effects. It's probably not going to matter, though. As far as stories go, WotC probably underestimates just how
bad they are at telling stories. No, really. I still try to follow Magic lore even now, and they're just not very good at this. They might even be so bad at it that they don't realize that they've taken away their ability to fall back on the crutch of tacking their ideas onto the scaffold of the traditional three-act play, which is what they've been doing since
Odyssey (aside from an experiment in 2007 and 2008, when the lore sucked even worse than normal).
Does this mean we'll get more new cards every year? If so, then I'm wit it.
Yes, and that's the main point of interest, really. Or it should be as far as most casual players are concerned (casual players who primarily focus on Limited formats excepted).
Yes, my statement was a parody of the standard internet reaction to any change or announcement. This is basically completely benign for casual players. I mean, the Core set has a bunch of new cards and is a lot more like a regular expansion now (I had the same thought about "staple" cards, but just looking at the current set, what are the staples you'd be getting).
Since Giant Spider left the core set for M13, there have been zero cards that have been staples for every core set. Everything's been missing at some point. And really, who cares about Giant Spider anyway (except maybe Spiderman)? The days when Lighting Bolt and Counterspell were core set staples are long, long gone.
The people who really care about standard will have to pay more money as cards rotate out faster. For people who don't care about standard, it's basically no change.
I've noticed two major camps on this issue with regard to Standard. The first has a line something like this...
"Now that sets will rotate out of Standard faster, we'll all be forced to buy more cards! Wizards is releasing new cards more often in a blatant grab for more of our money! More new cards is bad news. I don't want more! I want fewer!"
While it is plausible that profit is part of the motive here, all that whining just seems rather pitiful. The second camp says something more like this...
"Actually, since there won't be big set rotations in Standard that eliminate one block and replace it with a single set that builds up to a new block, decks won't be phased out as abruptly as they were under the old system. Individual cards will be in Standard for less time, but only by a few month. But now Standard will have more sets in it more of the time, which should make deck design more stable. This could mean that you get to keep your Standard deck for longer, and that therefore Constructed players actually won't have to spend as much money as before."
This is convoluted and probably contingent on too many things, but it might apply some of the time. I don't really know, as I don't actually play Standard. In any case, the economics that will be particular to this would only apply to competitive Standard players anyway. The change doesn't seem like it would affect the rest of us.
I'm not sure they did it for that reason, secondary market is not a major point in WoTC's methodology.
One would think that it wouldn't be, but sometimes the secondary market really does matter. For Standard, this happens because chase rares only enter the secondary market after they've been opened in boosters. This indirectly increases demand for sets that have more chase rares. That's supposedly why
Dragon's Maze sold poorly.
But I see that they changed the PT from only standard for 2015 to add Modern back in......
I know it'll sound like some tinfoil hat silliness, but I'm serious: they're trying to make Modern successful and marginalize Legacy. Wizards of the Coast tried, several years ago, to promote Legacy. But the format can't become successful with the Reserved List in place. Also, no one at WotC understands Legacy (this might seem like an odd assertion, but the entire Legacy community has finally come around to the realization that it's the case—also, I can present support for the claim if anyone wants to see more of my ranting) and the gameplay in Legacy is different from how they envision Magic anyway. Modern, being a format that the company understands and can more easily control, offers a sort of blank slate. But until recently, the Modern community was only growing very slowly. Modern is finally successful enough that they're willing to push it and make it the real successor to the Extended of the old days. And more diversity in the structure of the Pro Tour is probably better for generating interest in it...
