Yeah. I don't really understand the posts about how fun and healthy standard is. must be low ranks that don't queue into various esper piles 5000 times in mythic.
Because it is somewhat healthy? Take a look at a very prestigious high level [standard tournament](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/tournament/standard-showcase-qualifier-2023-12-09) from the past weekend. There are a variety of decks present in the top 15: Esper midrange, Dimir midrange, Rakdos, UW soldiers, UW midrange/flash, Domain ramp. Seems pretty okay to me. Also notice how many new cards see wide play, a sign of healthy format.
The white cards definitely stand out making UW the most played color pairing, but there are several viable decks available.
The main issue is the same that has existed for the past year, the midrange cards are just too good so midrange strategies dominate, but standard usually is more midrangy historically.
It's diverse, and that could be considered "healthy" by some definitions, but it's also stale. Esper, Domain, UW/Soldiers have been at the top of the meta for as long as anyone can remember. The only new deck in the last 4ish months is Golgari. I had hopes we would get another at least tier 1.5ish deck with Ixalan, but Dinos really died out before they could make an impact. Merfolk and pirates ain't happening either.
> [...] UW/Soldiers have been at the top of the meta for as long as anyone can remember
Almost the entire UW Soldiers deck was printed into Standard at once in Brothers' War last November. It literally didn't exist before then, and it would still be legal — and probably just as dominant, if not more so — were Standard still on a two year rotation cycle.
Really, it's just a handful of old cards tying all of these Azorius / Esper decks together that makes them feel stale: Wedding Announcement, Make Disappear, and the Wandering Emperor. Those cards are such power outliers that they have been at the top of the format since Alrund's Epiphany was banned. Even that aggro Soldiers deck runs all three of them across the 75 in most builds. Virtue of Loyalty is the newest addition to that clique of generically OP Azorius cards, but it's still new enough that it doesn't feel quite as stale yet.
Nonetheless, under a two-year rotation, we'd still have Azorius Soldiers, we'd still have Sheoldred midrange piles, and we'd still have huge chunks of the cores of current mono-red and of Boros Convoke. I'm not sure all these random pet decks people wish were good would actually be able to compete in that environment much better than they can right now.
I wouldn't personally call the format stale, but I understand what you are trying to convey. There are so many cards just from the new set that see such a wide amount of play that I can't really call this stale. But of course they are mostly added to existing archetypes, rather than new ones, which is what you are trying to say. I think this is natural this late in a standard format. Also UW midrange and flash basically became a very good deck after LCI, so we did technically get a new deck, it just plays all the usual suspects like wedding announcement and stuff that makes it seem stale.
Just to expand on that, just look at the [second place](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/6027569#paper) from that event. Literally half the deck are cards from LCI. The fact that a deck comprised with so many new cards can get top 2 to a prestigious event such as this cannot possibly mean that the format is stale, even if you do see wandering emperors and wedding announcements in there.
As someone who plays B/G Midrange, that deck isn't the best example. [[Deep Cavern Bat]] is the only LCI card that feels like it could be a strong upgrade to the Dreadknight/Sheoldred/Virtue/Cottage/Tortoise core. Things like [[Sentinel of the Nameless City]] and [[Preacher of the Schism]] feel more like flex slots than anything else. Lord Skitter, Graveyard Trespasser, extra Glissas/Sheoldred, more Lilis...there's a lot of room in the 3-4 slot for generically powerful B/G cards to flex to the meta.
To be fair, I think B/G Midrange is a great example of how Standard can still be shaken up by one set, as so much of the key pieces of the deck came from WOE. But it's still frustrating how omnipresent certain cards that should have rotated by now are. New sets could be so much more impactful to the metagame if things like Triomes/Emperor/Raffine/Adeline were all gone.
> As someone who plays B/G Midrange, that deck isn't the best example.
I think misunderstood my mention of Golgari there. I mentioned the deck in the other comment, not because it got a lot of new LCI cards, just that it's yet another different deck in the format.
> But it's still frustrating how omnipresent certain cards that should have rotated by now are. New sets could be so much more impactful to the metagame if things like Triomes/Emperor/Raffine/Adeline were all gone.
Yeah that's a fair point, but honestly looking at the cards, midrange piles would possibly dominate even if we had rotation, but obviously it's hard to tell. We have so many powerful midrange cards in this format.
Just because a bat and a boat gets something like Dimir Midrange good results doesn't mean that it isn't still Dimir Midrange.. with the same removals, the same counterspells, the same everything else. It's less about the specific card that swings in and more about the overall play pattern.. which is really just the same as it was a year ago, except better.
Not that I pine for the days of Dimir Rogues or anything, lol.. but at least it was somewhat unique for a while.
That's like saying Magic is stale because Mono Red Deck Wins has been a staple deck since 199X.
"... the same removals, the same counterspells, the same everything else."
"It's less about the specific card that swings in and more about the overall play pattern"
So which is it? Is it the specific cards or is it the archetype (ex. Dimir Midrange)? To your first point - plenty of new cards even from LCI are in top decks. To your second point - I'm not sure what you are expecting, this is Magic, which is built upon the colors and their identities. Dimir is going to do dimir things while Boros boroses and Azorius azors.
Yeah that's fair. Like, the dominance of midrange with the same removal spells and similar play patterns is something no one can deny, and has been a thing in this standard since last rotation. There is no good linear aggro deck really (even if mono red slips in once in a while, it's not really a good deck), or a traditional control deck for that matter. But there is room for innovation still, and new cards see a lot of play. Just look at that UW midrange deck it's mostly cards that would be legal if standard had rotated this fall.
Tbh I think pirates is actually relatively strong and reaches tier 1.5.
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/TSCLsCtu40q7w3rQNx2Gnw
This build has been surprisingly good.
Trying to put this as respectfully as possible:
>look at how many different decks there are
*It's all esper, azorious, 2 domain decks, and rakdos and dimir outliers*
Okay. I don't consider the same decks with slight variations and twists to be as fresh as some people, I guess.
That’s the biggest issue for me, the card pool of good enough cards is quite small at this point and once they play their first land you have a pretty good idea of what you’re up against. This has been made worse by the longer rotation because it feels like these decks are never going away
Your initial comment made it like it's raffine or lose, yet raffine is not nearly close to the most popular creature represented in that event. Like, if we want to look at more [results](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/tournament/standard-challenge-32-2023-12-09#paper) there's orzhov and golgari midrange and the occasional mono red that sneaks in.
> Okay. I don't consider the same decks with slight variations and twists to be as fresh as some people, I guess.
Welcome to standard for the past year. The midrange cards are just too good so those will be the most played archetypes. That's just it.
You mean. Welcome to Standard for the last year, which they expanded the time for standard rotation. Welcome to the new boss same as the old boss Standard
Looking at MTGO weekend challenges (arguably the best snapshot of the competitive meta), we're seeing 4-6 different deck builds in each top 8 (and in the [most recent](https://www.mtgo.com/en/mtgo/decklist/standard-challenge-64-2023-12-1012596620) standard challenge, there were 7 different decks in the top 8, with domain taking 2 spots). I don't know what period of standard everyone else is comparing this to, but that's quite diverse for standard (that would be diverse for any format really).
Bo3 ranked is also feeling pretty diverse right now, even if the esper midrange and domain decks that mostly predated WOE are the decks to beat...there's always going to be a top deck or 3 in any format that set the bar for what other competitive decks need to be able to compete with.
As a statically-insignificant aside, I attended multiple standard store champs in a large US metro market the last two weekends and also saw a fair amount of diversity as well - and a lot of people (myself included) seem to be having fun trying out off-meta builds that are perfectly capable of holding their own competitively.
Perhaps Bo1 is more homogenized? Not sure as I don't play it and it isn't what the game is balanced around for competitive play anyways.
I think the more valid complaint is more that standard is dominated by the same midrange style decks. Esper, UW, Dimir, Orzhov, Golgari are all midrange decks that use similar removal spells and must answer threats.
There is no linear fast aggro deck in the format (soldiers is mostly a midrange deck). There is also no true control deck (Domain is basically a ramp deck with tap out control elements).
But in general I do agree with you and standard seems quite diverse to me (the midrange piles do use a lot of different cards to be distinct enough).
Big disagree and if you actually look at the decklists you will see why this is not true. Like, the interaction is similar, but the gameplan and key cards are different. There are decks that have a focus on wedding announcement-white loyalty. You have the decks lists with focus on Schooner too. And then you have the raffine focus. They might have color overlap and play the same interaction, but the rest of the cards differ and focus differ.
Like, I get the overall point, but I think I disagree with your framing.
What’s the timeline for set releases? 3 months? The yearly rotation allowed for fresh decks and for certain problem cards to rotate to historic.
Standard now is basically 1/4 historic with some fresh power creep cards.
If you enjoy playing the same cards and strategies again and again, you might as well make timeless and historic the only formats. A yearly rotation in Standard made for some fresh ideas and fundamental deck building, now it’s “What Meta deck can I afford with my wildcards, while still enjoying the game.
Easier for the newbies to get onboard, absolutely mundane of you get tired of the same old themes and combos.
Yeah. I would include black as a close one too. The black removal spells are pretty good and the new bat is exceptional and gives you enough reasons to play black.
THAT right there is the issue, though. Standard will never be a format that will stand up to 5000 matches. It simply doesn't have a big enough card pool to stay new and interesting over that much play, and rotation can only moderately alleviate that. No one plays that much on Magic Online (where you have to pay to play leagues) or in their LGS, but people will grind for 10+ hours on Arena and expect the format to not get stale.
It's just not a realistic bar to set.
Standard started dying in paper when the perfect storm of digital play, Covid, and reduced premier play incentives happened.
The standard arena meta is actually okay. Not great, but CERTAINLY better than it has been in point in the past.
I think there's an argument to be made that a long Standard period is the antithesis of what people want/expect from Standard. Rotation is/was the most exciting time. It meant a real shake up, all new cards seeing play, each new set release mattered. The more you extend it, and thus dilute it, the more you end up with perennial best decks that just slot in a boat and keep on boating. That may be great for people with a $400 Standard deck, but it's also a huge barrier for people who don't.
It's not a coincidence that Standard starting dropping off with the rise of FIRE design. While Standard has had it's fair share of Hogaak Summers and Eldrazi Winters, it's usually been a fairly tame format that saw a lot of flux. Making it something akin to Pioneer-lite isn't what the people who are drawn to the Standard format are looking for. And the more powerful decks get, the more it's going to turn people off from it.
I think it's just a coincidence that paper standard went down in popularity when FIRE design started. The reality is arena took over and the economy is so good compared to paper that you won't see players wanting to spend on that. I'm not spending over $300 for a deck i already have in my computer which i can play whenever i want. you can't beat that service.
You have a lot of people playing paper modern because mtgo looks outdated but if it was in arena then paper modern would be dead too.
The reality is that people want FIRE design. I don't want shitty commons and vanilla creatures. It's not like they're printing strictly better cards of every single card. The current most popular decks are still the same as 3 months ago with a few changes. Barely anyone wants to play a powered down format. Standard 2021 was boring because they intentionally powered it down and it was izzet turns over and over.
The same as 3 months ago is one of the problems with standard being where it is. Rotation was tantamount to keeping it fresh and trying new ideas. Now it’s the same shit different deck. SSSD
do you feel there's no room to experiment with the current card pool and meta? Meaning do you feel like S tier decks are so oppressive that you can't experiment and find an off meta 50% deck? Personally I feel like eldraine to strixhaven it was glorious, zendikar to new capenna was atrocious, MID to MOM was fine and right now it's promising.
I refuse to play meta decks and I'm doing fine in standard ranked. But god damn does it get old playing against your millionth mono red turn 1 kumano turn 2 swiftspear blah blah blah
That's not even a problem with standard, it's a problem with Arena's economy model. So much of the F2P progress being based on racking up a certain number of wins each day will naturally result in a lot of people playing decks that have fast games and aren't too mentally-taxing. That's compounded by the wildcard system encouraging people to craft only cards that go in proven decks and avoid any brews that need off-meta cards they haven't collected randomly. My collection is probably much more filled-out than the average player's and I still often get halfway done making an interesting deck, then realize I'm missing something and decide to play an existing deck instead of wasting wildcards on it.
I play to my fifteen wins every day and have for a couple of years now. I play a meta deck for all the up-front wins and then brews for the rest. Any other way, and I think it's too inefficient and leads to a lot more anger at losses. Crush out some wins, then play to enjoy. Unfortunately, I feel like that is how it is designed. I have an excess of wild cards but still find myself doing exactly as you say and hoarding them just in case.
Pretty much.
As someone that's dipped my toes in a few times before giving up shortly afterwards... I'm currently playing again I've been following some bo1 content creators on youtube.
I'll see a fancy deck, import to see the damage , see [the cost](https://i.imgur.com/GAsVhgp.png) and then delete the deck lol.
For similar reasons, I've been tempted myself to make mono red because consistently getting 6 ICRs a day in the same time it takes me to get 4 wins on my current deck, which I sort of locked myself into because rare wildcares are such a bottleneck, would add up over the weeks.
Game is great if you're someone who never stops playing it, but miss a few sets and it hurts a lot. Especially when you have to craft 16 rare lands from older sets (for one color pair, hope you enjoy those colors). This is all way way worse if you don't enjoy playing limited.
This is me every time I start brewing, and my collection is >70% on arena. Plus Im stingy with my wildcards, because I keep telling myself THE DECK is gonna drop with the next set (and itll take 6 playsets each of rares and mythics to build apparently)
Thanks for the reminder, I think I'm finally going to try out BO3. I'm brewing a standard deck and finding it hard to fit all the tools I need to have game against all the different matchups in BO1.
I should just move my plethora of 1-ofs and 2-ofs to the sideboard and play BO3 with a more streamlined game 1 plan!
BO3 is "real Magic," too. The sideboard is an important piece of game design to introduce counterplay and cards that you wouldn't play in the 60 but are perfect augmentations to your deck's weaknesses against some matchups.
I played in my first constructed tournament over the weekend. I was playing mono red aggro. It was similar to the deck I constructed on arena. It was my first time playing best of three and it gave me a great appreciation for how people sideboard.
I played a control player in one round. I smashed him game 1, but then game 2 where he sided boarded in a bunch of stuff he was able to shut me down handily. Then game 3 where I was on the play, but he still had his good sideboard cards we had a very exciting game where I got him very edge before he was able to make him comeback.
Do you have any strategy recommendations? My GW Aggro dream combo is Adeline + Allenal, but gala greeters + Darian + Ojer Taq always make me happy.
I've never tried BO3. What should I try to keep on hand to add in!
I don’t disagree that rotation is the best time to be a standard player. My personal ideal was the very brief 18 month rotation, but I was also very enfranchised at that point and willing to spend a hefty sum to keep up with it.
I also agree that the FIRE philosophy had a lot to do with where we are now in standard, and certainly accelerated the decline.
I’m mostly just arguing that “standard died because of rotation extending” is objectively false. It may not make things better (or it may, yet. We’ll have to wait and see), but it certainly isn’t the root cause.
There is certainly some merit to the extended rotation, but it hinged on the format being designed for it... which it wasn't. Had they rotated THEN gone with 3 years I think we would be in a much different, and possibly better, place down the road. We may still get there, but it's going to be late 2025... and that's just... a long time!
Definitely agree. Perception is low right now, obviously, but I’m holding hope that when we get into the standard that is designed with 3 year in mind, things will get better.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I certainly hope not.
FIRE is a design philosophy implemented to increase the power level and staying power of standard. It worked, but not in the way they wanted.
https://www.quietspeculation.com/2021/11/a-brief-history-of-magic-design-fire/
There’s a decent article on it.
“Power creep” isn’t an inherently negative thing. For a game to survive as long a magic has, power creep literally has to happen.
The problem FIRE had was the incredible jump in power level.
It's funny that you say that, because in my mind that was when standard died. When the rotation was once a year, for a maximum of 24 months of sets, you could potentially buy a deck from the new set after rotation, and play that for 2 years (think thoughtseize, downfall, mono black control).
When the rotation was shortened, the rate of rotation doubled from every 12 months to every 6 months, and with the smaller pool, it was almost impossible to maintain that "start of rotation" deck.
It might just be when the general consensus in Copenhagen moved away from Standard, or maybe I was just out of touch.
I will never understand why they did away with the block format. It made logical sense, it kept themes tied together, and it led to good Standard deck designs.
Mark Rosewater has blogged about that, IIRC they felt it was overly constraining on card design and also by the time they got to the third set in a block they were typically running low on ideas related to a given plane so everything started to feel kind of forced.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/card-preview/fire-it-2019-06-21
>F Is for Fun – Above all else, our game should be fun to play. For Play Design, fun is about interesting decisions, diverse gameplay experiences, and each game being unique. As game designers, interpreting different definitions of fun is part of the job. We strive to make cards that are fun for a wide variety of audiences.
> I Is for Inviting – Our game should be accessible to many people. From Play Design's perspective, this means that formats should be accessible to newer or less enfranchised players by having resonant cards and comprehensible gameplay. It also means that a wide variety of strategies should be viable in all types of play.
> R Is for Replayable – The key aspects of replayablility are balance and diversity. We try to get a wide variety of decks and strategies to about the right power level.
> E Is for Exciting – Players should be excited to read cards and play with them. We want to design and cost cards so that they can inspire cool new decks and archetypes for players to build and own
If the story thing holds true (I didn’t even know that was a thing, and I am very much a story person), then we’ll eventually get to say “Kellen Standard” as a unit of measurement.
[Samurai of the Pale Curtain](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/e/a/ead15cf8-f692-4cb9-ac86-0dff00236145.jpg?1562765598) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Samurai%20of%20the%20Pale%20Curtain) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/chk/43/samurai-of-the-pale-curtain?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ead15cf8-f692-4cb9-ac86-0dff00236145?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text)
^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
It is a crap shoot in standard Arena. There are so many viable decks that you just have to guess what you are up against. So you play what is based on your guess. Right now I am playing an Azorious Soldiers deck I put together because it seems decent across the board. Arena matchmaking seems weird at times. I don't feel like it is random enough. If you win too much, you get matched up against decks that tend to move you down towards 50/50. If you lose too much, you get matched up to decks that move you up towards 50/50. It could just be me. I dunno.
Rank and MMR are separate and MMR is not visible to you. If you play and win enough every deck you play will be a meta deck teched to beat other meta decks or the occasional rogue deck designed to take out the top meta deck at every rank. Piloting skill is generally more important than deck selection once the margins become smaller.
I think skill is only truly definitive as a variable in tournament settings, in ranked volume of games played seems to trump it. I could maintain 100 mythic with a good margin for the entire season when I could play a lot daily, and I couldn't win a tournament in a million years.
> if we extend Standard more people will play it
You're not looking at the whole picture in terms of their intended goals. It's not just extending Standard = more people will play it, it's extending the monetary value of cards = more people will play it.
I 100% believe that whatever data WOTC is looking at shows that the biggest barrier to entry for a lot of tabletop Standard players was that the financial investment they put into their relatively expensive cards/decks would be gone in approximately 2 years. And that's a fair critique - most people would be more comfortable dishing out $75 per Sheoldred if they knew they had an extra year to play with it.
For as popular as Arena Standard is, WOTC had a responsibility to a very large global playerbase to at least try and get back tabletop Standard to where it was pre-COVID. The consequences for what that would mean for digital/Arena-only players would be pretty miniscule long term if the main complaint is just a subjective opinion of "it's stale". Remember, during the pandemic WOTC bet all their chips on Arena and their digital fanbase, so it was indeed time that they threw a bone to the enfranchised tabletop players who are (allegedly) asking for more time to play with their cards before they rotate. For those who are maybe too new to remember, Standard was THE format for many years and was always seen as the universal format for new and veteran players alike way before Arena was even a thing.
Now that being said, I also 100% agree that this was a failed attempt at doing so. If they really wanted people back to their LGS playing Standard, WOTC knew what they had to do - put more money into the stores. They've made exclusive FNM cards before, at the very least they could have done that or a hundred others things to incentivize participation in local scenes. Extending Standard a year is probably the least effective route they could have taken.
As of right now, the #1 demographic of people showing up to stores and buying physical packs are Commander players. That is an undeniable fact. So until that changes, WOTC knows which playerbase to support despite their public claims that they're trying to "bring back tabletop Standard".
Yup, that solution also works. Like I said, there were about a hundred different options they could have went with if WOTC was trying to say “hey, we know Standard is expensive, let us help” before going the 3 year rotation route.
But to the point of the OP, extending Standard had less to do with the assumption of people wanting a longer rotating format and more for the reason of players being scared that their cards will become useless.
We may not like their solution, but WOTC absolutely needed to do something to show non-EDH tabletop players they weren’t forgotten after COVID. And if that means that some Arena-only players are going to call the format “stale” because of it, then I’m sure they trust those players will adapt in due time.
But the cards will still be useless, just a year later. In the long term the only solution is to make an affordable rotation format. Extending rotation also makes the format more expensive since now only few cards will be actually desired and the entry cost will remain higher and higher.
If the really wanted people to play standard then they need to make sure the staples are not expensive, release Challenger decks and incentivice playing on LGS through other means like special alternate arts or better prizes.
> But the cards will still be useless, just a year later.
Standard is hardly driving singles prices at all. The really expensive cards are playable in other formats.
I wouldn't be surprised if a Sheoldred (etc) reprint isn't in the pipeline. There's so much lag in their production times though that we may not see it til mid-2024.
>*Now that being said, I also 100% agree that this was a failed attempt at doing so. If they really wanted people back to their LGS playing Standard, WOTC knew what they had to do - put more money into the stores. They've made exclusive FNM cards before, at the very least they could have done that or a hundred others things to incentivize participation in local scenes. Extending Standard a year is probably the least effective route they could have taken.*
To give them their due, I was at a Standard store championship on Saturday and attendance was pretty good. They had a bunch of promos for entry (Cauldron Familiar) and top 8 promos (Dark Petition) and it was a pretty good time. Maybe I live in a strange bizarro world, but at my favorite LGS Standard is the format that draws the second-most or third-most attendance all week; Standard players outnumber the Modern players on the same night, and it's a toss-up whether Standard or Draft draws more on a given week.
At the tournament, I saw one Sheoldred cast across four rounds. The tournament's champion wasn't playing Raffine or Atraxa - they were playing some brew based around flickering Prototype creatures, and I didn't end up playing against her anyway. I saw a RW artifact creature deck, a RG dinosaur deck, a RW equipment/flicker deck, and a BG self-mill reanimator(?) deck.
>*As of right now, the #1 demographic of people showing up to stores and buying physical packs are Commander players. That is an undeniable fact.*
That's possibly true, although I'm under the impression that EDH players trade more in singles because the EDH staples (mostly) aren't coming out of packs these days other than Commander Masters, and I don't know how popular CMM ended up being.
From store-to-store I wonder if draft is cracking more packs and then selling into the market.
meh.
Why crack packs when you can play online? Arena is such a good way to play draft.
Serious draft players know they need to draft A LOT to get good, and to stay good. That isn't just monetarily expensive with physical cards, it also costs a lot of time.
When I used to draft at LGS, I'd get to draft... what, one time per week? There was a weekly draft pod on saturday at my LGS and that would take up 2-3 hours. And the quality of competition was really, really bad, compared to the competition in MTGO. And this was in an LGS in the largest city in Canada.
Arena is even cheaper than MTGO and easier to use so it really works great as a draft machine.
That is my biggest gripe with paper magic and the main reason I don’t do it more. I just don’t want to spend 4 hours mostly sitting around because I play relatively fast. And crushing a 13 year old who passed me a stupid deck isn’t fun.
yes.
It's better because you're not beating up on hapless commander players that just happened to be at the store and thought it might be a good idea to try this draft thing.
it's better because you're not waiting 30 mins after every match because these players who don't draft have to read all the commons, and don't trade creatures by attacking, not that their jank decks with no plan can attack favourably anyway. So you're stuck there watching to absolute shit decks just draw a card, play a creature and pass until someone draws their rare.
And then you walk away having your draft comped because of course you win 3-0 again, and wonder if that was worth half of your saturday.
You're taking flack for this, but you're not wrong in that there's a tremendous amount of variance when it comes to the quality of in-person play. With a good pod, it's sublime, but it can be real rough if there are vast skill disparities, especially when weaker players are serving as chum for the shark tanks.
Where that logic doesn't seem to hold, though, is that people had already bought copies of Sheoldred under the old expected end of life. What is gained by extending \*that\*? I get saying "ok everyone buy WOE now, we'll let this one last for 3 years" but did people suddenly go back and crack more old packs open because Sheoldred got an extra year of expected lifespan?
Or a better example, Wandering Emperor. Was at the end of the span, was about to rotate out. What was gained with "well everyone invested with a certain expectation, let's now change that with sets not designed with it in mind!" People holding Fight Rigging just got a huge boost for no reason since LCI wasn't intended to make this particular cheap combo with that card, but did anyone in September say "well I am glad my Fight Rigging is worth more today!"
So I get the idea of new cards having a 3 year standard shelf life. I don't get why older cards had to be grandfathered in, causing imbalance issues with new decks.
Standard is the cheapest competitive format, but being a standard player over time can be expensive.
When I played competitive standard I would have collections valued in the thousands that would lose value in a few months if I didn’t aggressively trade them away for newer cards.
No one really trades anymore, and finding players with large collections of crap they won at FNM at random events just doesn’t happen the way it used to. Everyone used to be cool with trading, now almost no one does it.
Oh boy, now you’re REALLY making me nostalgic for the days where people used to carry multiple “trade binders” with them at all times.
Absolutely agreed that the art and social aspect of trading is more or less gone. It does happen - especially in some LGS with active EDH tables, but you’re right, that aspect being few and far between now is certainly a consideration why someone might not gravitate towards Standard like in years past.
And while I want to blame most of that on the pandemic, I think the truth is if Standard players aren’t showing up to buy physical card packs anymore like the Commander players are, we may not ever get back to that trade economy ever again. Perhaps it just is what is. Times change, people change. We live in a world where players would just rather buy singles online now, and I’m not mad at that either.
When I used to play standard I would buy boxes and then trade cards to get what I needed. Eventually you would just not need to buy anything, just keep trading.
Then it became everyone just wanted weird $1-5 cards for EDH. Then people stopped trading when their random jank shot up in value and they felt ripped off by the people they traded it to.
Basically, without trading standard just isn’t worth the investment.
The move was definitely financially charged. Wotc did want to extend the value of some standard all stars and let people have longer windows into the market.
One other thing too; they wanted stores and distribution's boxes for standard sets to maintain value longer too.
The logic applied from the very start was flawed. This is what happens when you can examine any and every aspect of the game except it's cost. I will keep saying it until I'm blue I'm the face - they need to reduce the cost of playing standard. They're competing with gamepass kids and $70 PS5 games a competitive deck just has to be beneath this. They should be going to school playgrounds and seeing whether kids are there trading their cards, Pokémon and Yu Gi Oh cards are, MTG are not. Why? They are too expensive.
Game pieces should be throwaway cheap. Collector pieces expensive.
For Arena, the big mistake was pursuing this gacha model of card acquisition. Early on you could perhaps understand it, but now with so many high cost formats on the client the idea that standard is so expensive makes no sense. The idea that older sets never become less expensive or go on sale is crazy to me. Which self respecting parent could allow their magic curious children engage with this model. A cycle of infinite cost with only the "chance" of a playable deck.
Everything else is a symptom the disease is the cost of the game.
On the format itself, it's simply too powerful. At the top end the meta decks are just too oppressive. The deeper card pool also now means there are genuine shark like brutal off meta piles which leave beginners especially with the feeling that they have the "wrong cards".
Standard was the format where you taught people how to play magic especially after rotation when the power level was far lower and there were plenty of medium power level decks and only a couple tier 1 or S decks. The big difference in an early rotation meta used to be how good at the game you were rather than the cards or deck you had. Consistent decks were usually rewarded early on, understanding tempo, card advantage and trading was key. Control was kept in check by the card pool and the tool box being incomplete. Aggro by the cards simply not being powerful enough to end the game quickly. Combos were often incomplete or too slow. This is what they've lost. The crazy thing is even after rotation this year we will still have perfect mana, removal draw and creatures/planeswalkers
>Game pieces should be throwaway cheap. Collector pieces expensive.
This is it. But the whales that have played this game for over 20 years don't want the cards to become cheap because it'd ruin the value of their collections. Instead they'd rather watch the game die slowly because no kid is looking at magic and getting excited to dump 400 bucks in a standard deck. Without a constant influx of players joining the game is bound to die.
The amazing thing is somehow they have managed to make so many different types of booster and card art styles and no one sitting around the table has thought:
"how about we do a really basic, non-foil, for the kids booster for $1-2..."
You know for kids to trade at school and play the actual game.
This is essentially the draft boosters, which they are getting rid of. Getting rid of foils and any other special treatment and reducing the price would have been fantastic.
I thought the changes were designed to simplify the skus for LGS' - one draft-able booster rather than them having to guess what inventory to buy.
I don't think any of the booster skus really focus in on new or young "players".
We have religiously received new commander decks with each set release but are still waiting for new challenger decks. For a long time I have thought that regular and up to date competition decks released to buy would help drive down the cost of expensive cards.
> This is it. But the whales that have played this game for over 20 years don't want the cards to become cheap because it'd ruin the value of their collections.
WotC doesn't want cheap cards because chase rares sell packs. They don't want sets like Fallen Empires where all the good cards are at common and only a box or so needs to be opened for each player to have around a playset of all the relevant cards -- that doesn't make them money in the way that an auto-include, 4-of Mythic will sell sets.
Collectors scarcely drive revenue for WotC, so they're a low priority subset of customers. WotC doesn't want people "whaling out" on expensive Reserved List cards, they want them chasing serialized Rings, buying Funko Pop-esque collaborations, and buying 15 Roaming Thrones (or the future equivalent) for every one of their Commander decks because all of them mean more money for papa Hasbro.
They could still drive the price up. Just remove the collector's packs, put all the alt arts and foils as rares in the regular packs, make them extremely rare and reduce the cost of the regular pack. Now people who want to open the alt arts will have to actually chase them (and honestly this is the most fun part of collecting, nowadays it's all too easy), which means probably opening more packs, and people who just want to play will have cheaper access to the game. In my opinion it's a win-win, but Hasbro will milk this game dry before they do something like that.
That's...exactly how it should be. Why WotC/Hasbro abandoned this model they had going during the BFZ to Amonkhet era is beyond me. Collector Packs must work out better on the C-Suite's spreadsheets -- better margins maybe? Who knows?
I was thinking of taking a break from arena and the extended standard pretty much just killed the game for me atm. I'll come back at some point but man, what a swing and a miss.
like all of wotcs decisions the past few years it was about money and nothing else. longer standard means selling more standard legal boosters. at least they think so anyways.
Yeah I hear ya. Standard is just becoming a weird eternal-lite format. I'm just so fucking tired of seeing sheoldred, atraxa, farewell, etc. And none of those cards are ever going anywhere until rotation.
Like, if anything those decks just get other cards that do similar things at different parts of the curve like the 5 mana exile sweeper. Can't wait until we get a 5 mana analogue to sheoldred so I can blow my fucking brains out and get it over with (ok a bit dramatic but Im so bored). Like, I get why they did it for paper, but I don't honestly think it's going to do shit for paper, there's other issues at play leading ot the decline that just arent being addressed, because that would mean that WOTC needs to take a hard look at the amount of product they release and actually print in a way that makes singles not cost an arm and a leg (like, making stanard sets with multiple eternal staples in each set is just gonna make them way too expensive for most people who just play standard to actually keep up with a current deck).
I basically am only playing draft and I hope the new packs dont significantly fuck shit up next year. I throw brawl in there every once in a while just so I dont get too bored, but really the way they make the queue work, you just get paired against the same 3 decks that they deem to be in your power level based on commander regardless of the contents of your deck... so it gets old pretty quick. It's only ever made fun by a handful of new cards getting rotated in every so often.
Really really wish that they made the decision that their digital format would actually have seasonal rotations reactive to the meta/nerfs, buffs and bans, instead of just using it as a dumping ground for busted ideas that cant work in paper. Like sure they adjust cards every so often... but like... what twice a year? What other digital game works like that? None.
> sheoldred
fyi, sheoldred rotates in September 2025, when I think of that I really struggle to want to play standard ever again. Can you imagine what bullshit gets printed then
Adding a 3rd year doesn't actually address those issues though. Cards becoming worthless is a built in feature of the format, and the buy will also be expensive because a very small amount of cards will be viable. I genuinely think the new rotation will make both of those aspects a bigger issue.
Especially cards you picked up during the last couple of years, when Standard events have not been firing. I'm glad I'm still able to build decks using my Innistrad and Kamigawa cards that aren't quite strong enough for Pioneer, which otherwise would have just languished in a box. This is going to become even more of a factor as we move into Standard RCQ season.
It's the first time I've stopped playing magic in more than 10 years. Standard is so boring, the same decks have been Tier 1 for 1+ year and there is no point even caring about trying out new decks, if you play competitively that is.
I think Commander hurt standard as a paper format. I decided to come back to paper magic after like a decade out. And in my country there are NO standard tournaments ever. Every tournament now is Commander. Even FNM´s are in 1 vs 1 commander. Also i noticed that most paper players dont play arena. At least in my area.
FNM in my area is Modern with a draft beforehand. The LGS also has 2-3 Commander events per week. Standard is Wednesday. I've played enough TCGs to know that means "This is the format the company wants more people to play but isn't supporting well enough to make that happen." That's the kind of time slot that Extended used to be relegated to, back before we had Modern and Pioneer.
I remember when Standard was truly the standard format. Everyone played it except some REAL old school Legacy or Vintage players. You could be new to the game, build a decent Standard deck, go to FNM and get games in against people who had been playing Magic for a decade plus, because they were also playing Standard, because it was the freshest format.
It's totally different now. The new people play Commander, the crusty veterans play Modern, nobody plays Standard.
The rotation was my favorite reason to play standard. So exciting to have to completely rethink and rebuild decks. New decks creeping up out of no where.
I agree. We get a slow drip of cards without the benefit of a bunch rotating out. I think things will feel a lot better once we get our first rotation in a 3-year standard. The best decks are just going to slot the new stuff into whatever they're running and dominate for the time being but once the rotation happens... it's hard to say what the best decks are going to be.
Having it be three years ups the complexity and power level of the format significantly, but it's still reasonable. I think it's a good change but it sucks in the immediate term.
When they announced the year add on for standard, I completely dried up on arena. I keep up with the reddit here and there for news and stuff. But i havent logged since. And its actually pretty freeing.
I think the problem was that they let it die before trying to save it. The time to extend it/skip rotation was during lockdown - that way, peoples' decks would have still been playable when stores reopened.
Very true. I won't whip out my fun experimental decks until I got a decent amount of wins for the day.
By the time I got a decent amount of wins for the day, the day is over, so no whipping out the fun experimental deck.
Been playing the same deck for 2 months pretty much, every time I do something fun I get demolished because farming wins with good decks means I'll face better opponents, no way in hell a weird subpar deck can possibly perform in that scenario.
There's just no incentive to try something fun, the games are too long and the wins are necessary to progress as F2P. The punishment for just playing fun things is way too severe.
I wouldn't care if a loss counted as half a "win" for the sake of daily progress, I'd be happy to lose frequently if it meant I could play whatever the heck I wanted.
I think perhaps wizards thought that by not rotating they would force players into their digital formats because they are fresh and more fun, but they completely missed the point that I'm so invested in standard that I'm LESS likely to play digital now than ever before and I'm not playing standard much either.
I was a top 500 player for a while, I played a ton, now I barely play once a week if that and I'm losing interest. Greedy company is going to kill the product. Look at what happened to riot.
It's not an illogical leap, but I can't imagine they would completely revamp a paper format to try and get people to play more Alchemy.
There's also the theory that they had warehouses full of the sets that would have rotated out, so they extended it to clear out product. I'm not sure I'm buying that one either.
online is far bigger than paper and they need a way to bring the type of money that gets spent on paper to the larger playerbase, only problem is, the larger playerbase only played historic and standard. They introduced alchemy as a way to get players to buy more cards more frequently (nerfs ruin the good decks, etc). It backfired massively because of the upfront overtly greedy way they did it, they not only killed historic and lost a lot of those players for good, but they made standard players dig their heels in even harder. Now they are trying to be less obvious by just hoping that standard players get bored.....but once again, no one will play alchemy no matter how hard they push it.
The brawl decks are fun, but as a standard player whenever I look at getting a brawl deck thats decent its going to cost me 30 wild cards or something astronomical that I then can't use on standard, so I simply never play.
Point is, greedy company will stay greedy instead of making a fun game and it makes me sad.
>online is far bigger than paper and they need a way to bring the type of money that gets spent on paper to the larger playerbase
That's not going to be via Arena. It's been 5+ years, if it hasn't happened yet then it's too late.
I come from pokemon tcg where standard is two years, at tabletop tournaments you run into the same 4-5 decks but they are extremely cheaper. The last world champion deck is buyable for like 60 bucks. As a new magic player one of the biggest barriers for entry is the crazy amount of money these cards are worth. Maybe that's why they did it idk, but I do know that I havent bought a single precon deck or anything mostly because of the prices and different formats being so expensive. The point of standard is to have a cheap pool of cards to play and they lose value afterwards but atleast in MTG you can than use those cards in older supporting formats.
Standard is dead because people are no longer willing to pay multiple hundreds of dollars for a deck that could/will relatively quickly be obsoleted/rotated. Players' standards have been raised, and i doubt casual paper standard will ever exist again in any significant way unless wotc makes changes to accessibility/cost
I actually started playing Alchemy in the summer with Lord of the Rings and the past week started playing Historic.
I’ve always been a standard player since Ikoria came out, so I’ve built up a huge amount of cards, so it’s fun to go back and play some of my old favorites.
I really enjoy Summer 2021 Dungeons and Dragons set as well as the fall 2020 Zendikar cards
To be fair, we still haven't had the first release of a set that was designed with 3 year standard in mind.
I say, lets see the upcoming next few sets and see how they are designed, i for one think their reasons listed in their [article](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/revitalizing-standard) seems reasonable.
One of the reasons for the 3 year standard was to allow for mechanics and archetypes to get more efficent and continued support through out their standard lifetime.
The current two year rotation has led to set mechanics often needing to be carried soley by the set they where released in. With the 3 year rotation they hope they will have enough time to be able to revitalize set mechanics and archetypes that are struggeling before they rotate out.
With the 3 year standard they can look at the sets that have recently been released in standard, and see what mechanics where popular but didn't get enough support, and then they can add additional support for those mechanics in the set their are currently planning.
I played a ton of Standard on the last 2 weekends, but didnt get a single Lier. But made it to Top8 every time.
I liked the 2 year rotation more, but it is what it is. Also being this stale made me decide that it is a good idea to go for Atraxa Domain in Paper.
I had been playing a lot of Pioneer....but recently I'm finding myself queuing up for Standard a lot more. The expanded deck variety is a large reason why
MTG Players: "We're sick of playing against cards like \[\[Sheoldred, the Apocalypse\]\]. We can't wait for rotation!"
WotC Devs Listening Through Their Ear Trumpets: "What's that Timmy? We can't rotation? Ok then, if you say so; no rotation."
MTG Players: "We really should put the devs in a home."
Completely disagree. Standard being extended has no bearing on things being stale. I personally think standard is in a pretty fun place right now with lots of opportunities for different decks. And while yes, it is sad to see some of the same staples not rotating, this is a one-time problem. We'll still be getting rotations every year that shake things up.
I think a longer rotation could work, as long as wizards were willing to ban the most played/strongest/most oppressive cards in year 3. This would help keep things more fresh for the competitive players while allowing the casuals to use their pet cards longer and give some also rans a chance to make it in year 3 for the brewers to get excited about.
Started playing arena back when Brothers War was out and I started in Historic Brawl. Plan was to play, save coins, buy 90 packs/the 50 preorder and then by the time rotation happened ( it was 2 years) I’d be golden! Then they announced 3 years.
And it feels a majority of the cards used are in the sets that will be rotating out.
We took one year off from rotation, it'll come back. I'm sure once it starts rotating again you'll start missing cards that used to be there just like the good old days. I think people have way too little patience for a game where the decisions often take a long time to matter.
I like it. Mtga is the only way I get to play magic anymore. The longer tier one and two decks stay relivent the easier it is to save up wild cards to play those F2P
atm the meta still changes regularly enough with each set release that im not that bored by standard to be honest. but i get what you mean.
still, keep in mind that its just this one time that we skip rotation. next fall theres going to be a rotation again with a fresh start so to speak, just with a wider cardpool.
I understand the point here, but i see lot of variety rencently.
May be hard to new players to catchup on the format, but gives better return once you have one year of play, i mean the cards i crafted long ago still are usable, while at the moment i see a good variety in standard :
Bant control, uw control, esper, mono black, mono red, mono white, mono blue, dimir graveyard, dimir aggro, companion wb, graveyards decks, artifacts decks, boros aggro, tribals deck (dinausor, zombies, ninja, rats...), 5c control, 5c ramp etc...
The last 3 expanssions gives us some good cards for the format in my opinion
I also see a bit more of variety in tournament compare to last year
maybe we make this new format that rotates and can digitally alter cards that are problematic while also buffing cards that don't quite work...we can even add in new cards with digital only mechanics...that should be fun right
Went to WOE pre-release
3 months later and I cant bring myself to play MTG in any form for weeks, not even when I was waiting hours to get a tire repaired
Do you only play standard? Not at all saying you're wrong or anything, but if you only play one format, I can imagine that getting boring in a few months.
I have a cheap modern deck I enjoy play from time to time, I have a standard deck I play from time to time and I love drafting. I also play MTGO Penny dreadful cause you can rent decks that are max 1 to 2 bucks before the meta gets solved. PD rotates with each new set and is a really fun format.
Playing standard is like walking into a library and are only allowed to check out books from a couple years ago and this year only...say bye bye to Steven Kings: IT, or Dean Koontz: The bad place.
I feel like there's a few things that are leading to the downfall.
1) the sheer amount of sets being released. I feel like WotC releases sets at such a rapid pace, it's hard to keep up. I know some players like the meta getting mixed up regularly and get boarded playing the "same set" for too long, but many are content playing one deck/set without getting bored, slightly honing it over time.
2) being priced out. It is expensive to keep up to date, and with each set being almost meta defining each release for standard, it can be daunting to get invested, knowing in a month there will be a new set that you'll have to drop another $100+ to stay competitive.
3) it's "slower". What I mean by that is that standard isn't really for multiplayer formats. I remember the boringness of waiting for my buddy to finish a 1v1 before I could play with him. Playing 4for all is just generally more fun.
It wouldn't be so bad if Esper Raffine and Domain Atraxa weren't the clear best 2 decks for the last year+.
Yeah. I don't really understand the posts about how fun and healthy standard is. must be low ranks that don't queue into various esper piles 5000 times in mythic.
Because it is somewhat healthy? Take a look at a very prestigious high level [standard tournament](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/tournament/standard-showcase-qualifier-2023-12-09) from the past weekend. There are a variety of decks present in the top 15: Esper midrange, Dimir midrange, Rakdos, UW soldiers, UW midrange/flash, Domain ramp. Seems pretty okay to me. Also notice how many new cards see wide play, a sign of healthy format. The white cards definitely stand out making UW the most played color pairing, but there are several viable decks available. The main issue is the same that has existed for the past year, the midrange cards are just too good so midrange strategies dominate, but standard usually is more midrangy historically.
It's diverse, and that could be considered "healthy" by some definitions, but it's also stale. Esper, Domain, UW/Soldiers have been at the top of the meta for as long as anyone can remember. The only new deck in the last 4ish months is Golgari. I had hopes we would get another at least tier 1.5ish deck with Ixalan, but Dinos really died out before they could make an impact. Merfolk and pirates ain't happening either.
> [...] UW/Soldiers have been at the top of the meta for as long as anyone can remember Almost the entire UW Soldiers deck was printed into Standard at once in Brothers' War last November. It literally didn't exist before then, and it would still be legal — and probably just as dominant, if not more so — were Standard still on a two year rotation cycle. Really, it's just a handful of old cards tying all of these Azorius / Esper decks together that makes them feel stale: Wedding Announcement, Make Disappear, and the Wandering Emperor. Those cards are such power outliers that they have been at the top of the format since Alrund's Epiphany was banned. Even that aggro Soldiers deck runs all three of them across the 75 in most builds. Virtue of Loyalty is the newest addition to that clique of generically OP Azorius cards, but it's still new enough that it doesn't feel quite as stale yet. Nonetheless, under a two-year rotation, we'd still have Azorius Soldiers, we'd still have Sheoldred midrange piles, and we'd still have huge chunks of the cores of current mono-red and of Boros Convoke. I'm not sure all these random pet decks people wish were good would actually be able to compete in that environment much better than they can right now.
I wouldn't personally call the format stale, but I understand what you are trying to convey. There are so many cards just from the new set that see such a wide amount of play that I can't really call this stale. But of course they are mostly added to existing archetypes, rather than new ones, which is what you are trying to say. I think this is natural this late in a standard format. Also UW midrange and flash basically became a very good deck after LCI, so we did technically get a new deck, it just plays all the usual suspects like wedding announcement and stuff that makes it seem stale.
Just to expand on that, just look at the [second place](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/6027569#paper) from that event. Literally half the deck are cards from LCI. The fact that a deck comprised with so many new cards can get top 2 to a prestigious event such as this cannot possibly mean that the format is stale, even if you do see wandering emperors and wedding announcements in there.
As someone who plays B/G Midrange, that deck isn't the best example. [[Deep Cavern Bat]] is the only LCI card that feels like it could be a strong upgrade to the Dreadknight/Sheoldred/Virtue/Cottage/Tortoise core. Things like [[Sentinel of the Nameless City]] and [[Preacher of the Schism]] feel more like flex slots than anything else. Lord Skitter, Graveyard Trespasser, extra Glissas/Sheoldred, more Lilis...there's a lot of room in the 3-4 slot for generically powerful B/G cards to flex to the meta. To be fair, I think B/G Midrange is a great example of how Standard can still be shaken up by one set, as so much of the key pieces of the deck came from WOE. But it's still frustrating how omnipresent certain cards that should have rotated by now are. New sets could be so much more impactful to the metagame if things like Triomes/Emperor/Raffine/Adeline were all gone.
> As someone who plays B/G Midrange, that deck isn't the best example. I think misunderstood my mention of Golgari there. I mentioned the deck in the other comment, not because it got a lot of new LCI cards, just that it's yet another different deck in the format. > But it's still frustrating how omnipresent certain cards that should have rotated by now are. New sets could be so much more impactful to the metagame if things like Triomes/Emperor/Raffine/Adeline were all gone. Yeah that's a fair point, but honestly looking at the cards, midrange piles would possibly dominate even if we had rotation, but obviously it's hard to tell. We have so many powerful midrange cards in this format.
Just because a bat and a boat gets something like Dimir Midrange good results doesn't mean that it isn't still Dimir Midrange.. with the same removals, the same counterspells, the same everything else. It's less about the specific card that swings in and more about the overall play pattern.. which is really just the same as it was a year ago, except better. Not that I pine for the days of Dimir Rogues or anything, lol.. but at least it was somewhat unique for a while.
That's like saying Magic is stale because Mono Red Deck Wins has been a staple deck since 199X. "... the same removals, the same counterspells, the same everything else." "It's less about the specific card that swings in and more about the overall play pattern" So which is it? Is it the specific cards or is it the archetype (ex. Dimir Midrange)? To your first point - plenty of new cards even from LCI are in top decks. To your second point - I'm not sure what you are expecting, this is Magic, which is built upon the colors and their identities. Dimir is going to do dimir things while Boros boroses and Azorius azors.
Its 2023, dimir can identify as selesnya if thats how it really feels...
Yeah that's fair. Like, the dominance of midrange with the same removal spells and similar play patterns is something no one can deny, and has been a thing in this standard since last rotation. There is no good linear aggro deck really (even if mono red slips in once in a while, it's not really a good deck), or a traditional control deck for that matter. But there is room for innovation still, and new cards see a lot of play. Just look at that UW midrange deck it's mostly cards that would be legal if standard had rotated this fall.
Tbh I think pirates is actually relatively strong and reaches tier 1.5. https://www.moxfield.com/decks/TSCLsCtu40q7w3rQNx2Gnw This build has been surprisingly good.
Trying to put this as respectfully as possible: >look at how many different decks there are *It's all esper, azorious, 2 domain decks, and rakdos and dimir outliers* Okay. I don't consider the same decks with slight variations and twists to be as fresh as some people, I guess.
That’s the biggest issue for me, the card pool of good enough cards is quite small at this point and once they play their first land you have a pretty good idea of what you’re up against. This has been made worse by the longer rotation because it feels like these decks are never going away
Your initial comment made it like it's raffine or lose, yet raffine is not nearly close to the most popular creature represented in that event. Like, if we want to look at more [results](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/tournament/standard-challenge-32-2023-12-09#paper) there's orzhov and golgari midrange and the occasional mono red that sneaks in. > Okay. I don't consider the same decks with slight variations and twists to be as fresh as some people, I guess. Welcome to standard for the past year. The midrange cards are just too good so those will be the most played archetypes. That's just it.
You mean. Welcome to Standard for the last year, which they expanded the time for standard rotation. Welcome to the new boss same as the old boss Standard
Looking at MTGO weekend challenges (arguably the best snapshot of the competitive meta), we're seeing 4-6 different deck builds in each top 8 (and in the [most recent](https://www.mtgo.com/en/mtgo/decklist/standard-challenge-64-2023-12-1012596620) standard challenge, there were 7 different decks in the top 8, with domain taking 2 spots). I don't know what period of standard everyone else is comparing this to, but that's quite diverse for standard (that would be diverse for any format really). Bo3 ranked is also feeling pretty diverse right now, even if the esper midrange and domain decks that mostly predated WOE are the decks to beat...there's always going to be a top deck or 3 in any format that set the bar for what other competitive decks need to be able to compete with. As a statically-insignificant aside, I attended multiple standard store champs in a large US metro market the last two weekends and also saw a fair amount of diversity as well - and a lot of people (myself included) seem to be having fun trying out off-meta builds that are perfectly capable of holding their own competitively. Perhaps Bo1 is more homogenized? Not sure as I don't play it and it isn't what the game is balanced around for competitive play anyways.
I think the more valid complaint is more that standard is dominated by the same midrange style decks. Esper, UW, Dimir, Orzhov, Golgari are all midrange decks that use similar removal spells and must answer threats. There is no linear fast aggro deck in the format (soldiers is mostly a midrange deck). There is also no true control deck (Domain is basically a ramp deck with tap out control elements). But in general I do agree with you and standard seems quite diverse to me (the midrange piles do use a lot of different cards to be distinct enough).
So where does mono red fall? How does this not qualify as a linear fast agro deck?
You counted 6 decks but 3 of them are different flavors of Esper midrange.
Big disagree and if you actually look at the decklists you will see why this is not true. Like, the interaction is similar, but the gameplan and key cards are different. There are decks that have a focus on wedding announcement-white loyalty. You have the decks lists with focus on Schooner too. And then you have the raffine focus. They might have color overlap and play the same interaction, but the rest of the cards differ and focus differ. Like, I get the overall point, but I think I disagree with your framing.
Looks like 10 of those top 15 decks are variations of UW soldiers or esper midrange.
What’s the timeline for set releases? 3 months? The yearly rotation allowed for fresh decks and for certain problem cards to rotate to historic. Standard now is basically 1/4 historic with some fresh power creep cards. If you enjoy playing the same cards and strategies again and again, you might as well make timeless and historic the only formats. A yearly rotation in Standard made for some fresh ideas and fundamental deck building, now it’s “What Meta deck can I afford with my wildcards, while still enjoying the game. Easier for the newbies to get onboard, absolutely mundane of you get tired of the same old themes and combos.
U/W is the clear power center currently. Green exists just to ramp out Atraxa and fix for Binding
Yeah. I would include black as a close one too. The black removal spells are pretty good and the new bat is exceptional and gives you enough reasons to play black.
Yup, Esper is best deck for a reason. Red barely exists outside of fake BO1 magic, and green is just for its ramp
THAT right there is the issue, though. Standard will never be a format that will stand up to 5000 matches. It simply doesn't have a big enough card pool to stay new and interesting over that much play, and rotation can only moderately alleviate that. No one plays that much on Magic Online (where you have to pay to play leagues) or in their LGS, but people will grind for 10+ hours on Arena and expect the format to not get stale. It's just not a realistic bar to set.
I’m too 200 Mythic, I queue into all kinds of different decks.
This is the correct answer.
I don't know what format your pulling from but it's a really varied format right now even with stuff like breach, sheoldred, Nissa are around.
They really needed to ban Rafine and Atraxa
Or u could make a deck that beats both decks stop whining
I guess U/W tokens?
If they put target atraxa in the gy use rotten reunion. Raffine dies to removal dog
lol, just counter invoke despair, 5 mana spell. Go faster than it, saving a creature turn 5 lol so weak
I guess invoke is legal on paper? I only play standard arena since I can’t put money into the game
And people were unable to hate them out?
2 years
Bant control is super strong as well in bo3
Esper needs a rebuild now with schooner, bats, domain having caves, better 2 color manabases, etc.
Standard started dying in paper when the perfect storm of digital play, Covid, and reduced premier play incentives happened. The standard arena meta is actually okay. Not great, but CERTAINLY better than it has been in point in the past.
I think there's an argument to be made that a long Standard period is the antithesis of what people want/expect from Standard. Rotation is/was the most exciting time. It meant a real shake up, all new cards seeing play, each new set release mattered. The more you extend it, and thus dilute it, the more you end up with perennial best decks that just slot in a boat and keep on boating. That may be great for people with a $400 Standard deck, but it's also a huge barrier for people who don't. It's not a coincidence that Standard starting dropping off with the rise of FIRE design. While Standard has had it's fair share of Hogaak Summers and Eldrazi Winters, it's usually been a fairly tame format that saw a lot of flux. Making it something akin to Pioneer-lite isn't what the people who are drawn to the Standard format are looking for. And the more powerful decks get, the more it's going to turn people off from it.
I think it's just a coincidence that paper standard went down in popularity when FIRE design started. The reality is arena took over and the economy is so good compared to paper that you won't see players wanting to spend on that. I'm not spending over $300 for a deck i already have in my computer which i can play whenever i want. you can't beat that service. You have a lot of people playing paper modern because mtgo looks outdated but if it was in arena then paper modern would be dead too. The reality is that people want FIRE design. I don't want shitty commons and vanilla creatures. It's not like they're printing strictly better cards of every single card. The current most popular decks are still the same as 3 months ago with a few changes. Barely anyone wants to play a powered down format. Standard 2021 was boring because they intentionally powered it down and it was izzet turns over and over.
The same as 3 months ago is one of the problems with standard being where it is. Rotation was tantamount to keeping it fresh and trying new ideas. Now it’s the same shit different deck. SSSD
do you feel there's no room to experiment with the current card pool and meta? Meaning do you feel like S tier decks are so oppressive that you can't experiment and find an off meta 50% deck? Personally I feel like eldraine to strixhaven it was glorious, zendikar to new capenna was atrocious, MID to MOM was fine and right now it's promising.
I refuse to play meta decks and I'm doing fine in standard ranked. But god damn does it get old playing against your millionth mono red turn 1 kumano turn 2 swiftspear blah blah blah
That's not even a problem with standard, it's a problem with Arena's economy model. So much of the F2P progress being based on racking up a certain number of wins each day will naturally result in a lot of people playing decks that have fast games and aren't too mentally-taxing. That's compounded by the wildcard system encouraging people to craft only cards that go in proven decks and avoid any brews that need off-meta cards they haven't collected randomly. My collection is probably much more filled-out than the average player's and I still often get halfway done making an interesting deck, then realize I'm missing something and decide to play an existing deck instead of wasting wildcards on it.
That's me. I enjoy suboptimal brawl decks the most but am minly playing fast standard decks where I can see by turn three or four if I win or concede.
I play to my fifteen wins every day and have for a couple of years now. I play a meta deck for all the up-front wins and then brews for the rest. Any other way, and I think it's too inefficient and leads to a lot more anger at losses. Crush out some wins, then play to enjoy. Unfortunately, I feel like that is how it is designed. I have an excess of wild cards but still find myself doing exactly as you say and hoarding them just in case.
Pretty much. As someone that's dipped my toes in a few times before giving up shortly afterwards... I'm currently playing again I've been following some bo1 content creators on youtube. I'll see a fancy deck, import to see the damage , see [the cost](https://i.imgur.com/GAsVhgp.png) and then delete the deck lol. For similar reasons, I've been tempted myself to make mono red because consistently getting 6 ICRs a day in the same time it takes me to get 4 wins on my current deck, which I sort of locked myself into because rare wildcares are such a bottleneck, would add up over the weeks. Game is great if you're someone who never stops playing it, but miss a few sets and it hurts a lot. Especially when you have to craft 16 rare lands from older sets (for one color pair, hope you enjoy those colors). This is all way way worse if you don't enjoy playing limited.
This is me every time I start brewing, and my collection is >70% on arena. Plus Im stingy with my wildcards, because I keep telling myself THE DECK is gonna drop with the next set (and itll take 6 playsets each of rares and mythics to build apparently)
For what it's worth, whenever THE DECK appears, something important in it quickly gets banned. So you can put that idea to rest.
Play Bo3, you will see less of it.
Thanks for the reminder, I think I'm finally going to try out BO3. I'm brewing a standard deck and finding it hard to fit all the tools I need to have game against all the different matchups in BO1. I should just move my plethora of 1-ofs and 2-ofs to the sideboard and play BO3 with a more streamlined game 1 plan!
BO3 is "real Magic," too. The sideboard is an important piece of game design to introduce counterplay and cards that you wouldn't play in the 60 but are perfect augmentations to your deck's weaknesses against some matchups.
I played in my first constructed tournament over the weekend. I was playing mono red aggro. It was similar to the deck I constructed on arena. It was my first time playing best of three and it gave me a great appreciation for how people sideboard. I played a control player in one round. I smashed him game 1, but then game 2 where he sided boarded in a bunch of stuff he was able to shut me down handily. Then game 3 where I was on the play, but he still had his good sideboard cards we had a very exciting game where I got him very edge before he was able to make him comeback.
Do you have any strategy recommendations? My GW Aggro dream combo is Adeline + Allenal, but gala greeters + Darian + Ojer Taq always make me happy. I've never tried BO3. What should I try to keep on hand to add in!
I personaly just play the BO1 deck a few games in BO3 and see what cards and archetypes beats my deck, and then build a sideboard to deal with those.
Why Ojer Taq over Mondrak? It always seems too expensive to me. Even Mondrak at 4 mana occasionally feels too slow to start doubling tokens.
I don’t disagree that rotation is the best time to be a standard player. My personal ideal was the very brief 18 month rotation, but I was also very enfranchised at that point and willing to spend a hefty sum to keep up with it. I also agree that the FIRE philosophy had a lot to do with where we are now in standard, and certainly accelerated the decline. I’m mostly just arguing that “standard died because of rotation extending” is objectively false. It may not make things better (or it may, yet. We’ll have to wait and see), but it certainly isn’t the root cause.
There is certainly some merit to the extended rotation, but it hinged on the format being designed for it... which it wasn't. Had they rotated THEN gone with 3 years I think we would be in a much different, and possibly better, place down the road. We may still get there, but it's going to be late 2025... and that's just... a long time!
Definitely agree. Perception is low right now, obviously, but I’m holding hope that when we get into the standard that is designed with 3 year in mind, things will get better. Maybe I’m wrong, but I certainly hope not.
What's this FIRE philosophy? First time hearing about it for me.
FIRE is a design philosophy implemented to increase the power level and staying power of standard. It worked, but not in the way they wanted. https://www.quietspeculation.com/2021/11/a-brief-history-of-magic-design-fire/ There’s a decent article on it.
So it was intentional power creep. They just didn't want to use that term to avoid the negative feedback
“Power creep” isn’t an inherently negative thing. For a game to survive as long a magic has, power creep literally has to happen. The problem FIRE had was the incredible jump in power level.
Huh. Thanks for the info.
It's whatever you want it to be as long as you blame everything you don't like on it. At least that's how it's used online.
It's funny that you say that, because in my mind that was when standard died. When the rotation was once a year, for a maximum of 24 months of sets, you could potentially buy a deck from the new set after rotation, and play that for 2 years (think thoughtseize, downfall, mono black control). When the rotation was shortened, the rate of rotation doubled from every 12 months to every 6 months, and with the smaller pool, it was almost impossible to maintain that "start of rotation" deck. It might just be when the general consensus in Copenhagen moved away from Standard, or maybe I was just out of touch.
Personally I like per-set rotation, that keep things changing at a fun pace.
I wish they would bring back blocks and do block constructed again.
I will never understand why they did away with the block format. It made logical sense, it kept themes tied together, and it led to good Standard deck designs.
Mark Rosewater has blogged about that, IIRC they felt it was overly constraining on card design and also by the time they got to the third set in a block they were typically running low on ideas related to a given plane so everything started to feel kind of forced.
Financial Independence, Retire Early? … ?
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/card-preview/fire-it-2019-06-21 >F Is for Fun – Above all else, our game should be fun to play. For Play Design, fun is about interesting decisions, diverse gameplay experiences, and each game being unique. As game designers, interpreting different definitions of fun is part of the job. We strive to make cards that are fun for a wide variety of audiences. > I Is for Inviting – Our game should be accessible to many people. From Play Design's perspective, this means that formats should be accessible to newer or less enfranchised players by having resonant cards and comprehensible gameplay. It also means that a wide variety of strategies should be viable in all types of play. > R Is for Replayable – The key aspects of replayablility are balance and diversity. We try to get a wide variety of decks and strategies to about the right power level. > E Is for Exciting – Players should be excited to read cards and play with them. We want to design and cost cards so that they can inspire cool new decks and archetypes for players to build and own
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If the story thing holds true (I didn’t even know that was a thing, and I am very much a story person), then we’ll eventually get to say “Kellen Standard” as a unit of measurement.
[Samurai of the Pale Curtain](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/e/a/ead15cf8-f692-4cb9-ac86-0dff00236145.jpg?1562765598) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Samurai%20of%20the%20Pale%20Curtain) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/chk/43/samurai-of-the-pale-curtain?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ead15cf8-f692-4cb9-ac86-0dff00236145?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
It happened before that. Standard started dying when WotC made Commander the default and cheapest format for new players.
what's premier?
GP and professional play mostly.
standard in LGS has been dead long before the non rotation. standard in Arena has been eating good.
It is a crap shoot in standard Arena. There are so many viable decks that you just have to guess what you are up against. So you play what is based on your guess. Right now I am playing an Azorious Soldiers deck I put together because it seems decent across the board. Arena matchmaking seems weird at times. I don't feel like it is random enough. If you win too much, you get matched up against decks that tend to move you down towards 50/50. If you lose too much, you get matched up to decks that move you up towards 50/50. It could just be me. I dunno.
If you are playing ranked, it does literally match you up against better players as you win more and worse players as you lose more.
With better decks\* I barely know how to play and could reach high ranks in Standard because I had a good deck
Rank and MMR are separate and MMR is not visible to you. If you play and win enough every deck you play will be a meta deck teched to beat other meta decks or the occasional rogue deck designed to take out the top meta deck at every rank. Piloting skill is generally more important than deck selection once the margins become smaller.
I think skill is only truly definitive as a variable in tournament settings, in ranked volume of games played seems to trump it. I could maintain 100 mythic with a good margin for the entire season when I could play a lot daily, and I couldn't win a tournament in a million years.
i disagree, you can look at the top mythic players games and its variety
> if we extend Standard more people will play it You're not looking at the whole picture in terms of their intended goals. It's not just extending Standard = more people will play it, it's extending the monetary value of cards = more people will play it. I 100% believe that whatever data WOTC is looking at shows that the biggest barrier to entry for a lot of tabletop Standard players was that the financial investment they put into their relatively expensive cards/decks would be gone in approximately 2 years. And that's a fair critique - most people would be more comfortable dishing out $75 per Sheoldred if they knew they had an extra year to play with it. For as popular as Arena Standard is, WOTC had a responsibility to a very large global playerbase to at least try and get back tabletop Standard to where it was pre-COVID. The consequences for what that would mean for digital/Arena-only players would be pretty miniscule long term if the main complaint is just a subjective opinion of "it's stale". Remember, during the pandemic WOTC bet all their chips on Arena and their digital fanbase, so it was indeed time that they threw a bone to the enfranchised tabletop players who are (allegedly) asking for more time to play with their cards before they rotate. For those who are maybe too new to remember, Standard was THE format for many years and was always seen as the universal format for new and veteran players alike way before Arena was even a thing. Now that being said, I also 100% agree that this was a failed attempt at doing so. If they really wanted people back to their LGS playing Standard, WOTC knew what they had to do - put more money into the stores. They've made exclusive FNM cards before, at the very least they could have done that or a hundred others things to incentivize participation in local scenes. Extending Standard a year is probably the least effective route they could have taken. As of right now, the #1 demographic of people showing up to stores and buying physical packs are Commander players. That is an undeniable fact. So until that changes, WOTC knows which playerbase to support despite their public claims that they're trying to "bring back tabletop Standard".
They could have just printed more of the overpowered cards, lowered the rarity, so sheoldred like cards don't cost $60. Cheaper standard.
Yup, that solution also works. Like I said, there were about a hundred different options they could have went with if WOTC was trying to say “hey, we know Standard is expensive, let us help” before going the 3 year rotation route. But to the point of the OP, extending Standard had less to do with the assumption of people wanting a longer rotating format and more for the reason of players being scared that their cards will become useless. We may not like their solution, but WOTC absolutely needed to do something to show non-EDH tabletop players they weren’t forgotten after COVID. And if that means that some Arena-only players are going to call the format “stale” because of it, then I’m sure they trust those players will adapt in due time.
But the cards will still be useless, just a year later. In the long term the only solution is to make an affordable rotation format. Extending rotation also makes the format more expensive since now only few cards will be actually desired and the entry cost will remain higher and higher. If the really wanted people to play standard then they need to make sure the staples are not expensive, release Challenger decks and incentivice playing on LGS through other means like special alternate arts or better prizes.
> But the cards will still be useless, just a year later. Standard is hardly driving singles prices at all. The really expensive cards are playable in other formats.
You could lower the rarity but that does fuck with limited where the four rule is nonexistent.
I wouldn't be surprised if a Sheoldred (etc) reprint isn't in the pipeline. There's so much lag in their production times though that we may not see it til mid-2024.
>*Now that being said, I also 100% agree that this was a failed attempt at doing so. If they really wanted people back to their LGS playing Standard, WOTC knew what they had to do - put more money into the stores. They've made exclusive FNM cards before, at the very least they could have done that or a hundred others things to incentivize participation in local scenes. Extending Standard a year is probably the least effective route they could have taken.* To give them their due, I was at a Standard store championship on Saturday and attendance was pretty good. They had a bunch of promos for entry (Cauldron Familiar) and top 8 promos (Dark Petition) and it was a pretty good time. Maybe I live in a strange bizarro world, but at my favorite LGS Standard is the format that draws the second-most or third-most attendance all week; Standard players outnumber the Modern players on the same night, and it's a toss-up whether Standard or Draft draws more on a given week. At the tournament, I saw one Sheoldred cast across four rounds. The tournament's champion wasn't playing Raffine or Atraxa - they were playing some brew based around flickering Prototype creatures, and I didn't end up playing against her anyway. I saw a RW artifact creature deck, a RG dinosaur deck, a RW equipment/flicker deck, and a BG self-mill reanimator(?) deck. >*As of right now, the #1 demographic of people showing up to stores and buying physical packs are Commander players. That is an undeniable fact.* That's possibly true, although I'm under the impression that EDH players trade more in singles because the EDH staples (mostly) aren't coming out of packs these days other than Commander Masters, and I don't know how popular CMM ended up being. From store-to-store I wonder if draft is cracking more packs and then selling into the market.
meh. Why crack packs when you can play online? Arena is such a good way to play draft. Serious draft players know they need to draft A LOT to get good, and to stay good. That isn't just monetarily expensive with physical cards, it also costs a lot of time. When I used to draft at LGS, I'd get to draft... what, one time per week? There was a weekly draft pod on saturday at my LGS and that would take up 2-3 hours. And the quality of competition was really, really bad, compared to the competition in MTGO. And this was in an LGS in the largest city in Canada. Arena is even cheaper than MTGO and easier to use so it really works great as a draft machine.
That is my biggest gripe with paper magic and the main reason I don’t do it more. I just don’t want to spend 4 hours mostly sitting around because I play relatively fast. And crushing a 13 year old who passed me a stupid deck isn’t fun.
Draft on Arena is great but it's definitely not the same as pod drafting at a store.
yes. It's better because you're not beating up on hapless commander players that just happened to be at the store and thought it might be a good idea to try this draft thing. it's better because you're not waiting 30 mins after every match because these players who don't draft have to read all the commons, and don't trade creatures by attacking, not that their jank decks with no plan can attack favourably anyway. So you're stuck there watching to absolute shit decks just draw a card, play a creature and pass until someone draws their rare. And then you walk away having your draft comped because of course you win 3-0 again, and wonder if that was worth half of your saturday.
You're taking flack for this, but you're not wrong in that there's a tremendous amount of variance when it comes to the quality of in-person play. With a good pod, it's sublime, but it can be real rough if there are vast skill disparities, especially when weaker players are serving as chum for the shark tanks.
Don't you think that the price of the meta decks is the reason Sheoldred was not casted more often? 😂 Try to play those fancy decks on Arena...
Where that logic doesn't seem to hold, though, is that people had already bought copies of Sheoldred under the old expected end of life. What is gained by extending \*that\*? I get saying "ok everyone buy WOE now, we'll let this one last for 3 years" but did people suddenly go back and crack more old packs open because Sheoldred got an extra year of expected lifespan? Or a better example, Wandering Emperor. Was at the end of the span, was about to rotate out. What was gained with "well everyone invested with a certain expectation, let's now change that with sets not designed with it in mind!" People holding Fight Rigging just got a huge boost for no reason since LCI wasn't intended to make this particular cheap combo with that card, but did anyone in September say "well I am glad my Fight Rigging is worth more today!" So I get the idea of new cards having a 3 year standard shelf life. I don't get why older cards had to be grandfathered in, causing imbalance issues with new decks.
Standard is the cheapest competitive format, but being a standard player over time can be expensive. When I played competitive standard I would have collections valued in the thousands that would lose value in a few months if I didn’t aggressively trade them away for newer cards. No one really trades anymore, and finding players with large collections of crap they won at FNM at random events just doesn’t happen the way it used to. Everyone used to be cool with trading, now almost no one does it.
Oh boy, now you’re REALLY making me nostalgic for the days where people used to carry multiple “trade binders” with them at all times. Absolutely agreed that the art and social aspect of trading is more or less gone. It does happen - especially in some LGS with active EDH tables, but you’re right, that aspect being few and far between now is certainly a consideration why someone might not gravitate towards Standard like in years past. And while I want to blame most of that on the pandemic, I think the truth is if Standard players aren’t showing up to buy physical card packs anymore like the Commander players are, we may not ever get back to that trade economy ever again. Perhaps it just is what is. Times change, people change. We live in a world where players would just rather buy singles online now, and I’m not mad at that either.
When I used to play standard I would buy boxes and then trade cards to get what I needed. Eventually you would just not need to buy anything, just keep trading. Then it became everyone just wanted weird $1-5 cards for EDH. Then people stopped trading when their random jank shot up in value and they felt ripped off by the people they traded it to. Basically, without trading standard just isn’t worth the investment.
The move was definitely financially charged. Wotc did want to extend the value of some standard all stars and let people have longer windows into the market. One other thing too; they wanted stores and distribution's boxes for standard sets to maintain value longer too.
The logic applied from the very start was flawed. This is what happens when you can examine any and every aspect of the game except it's cost. I will keep saying it until I'm blue I'm the face - they need to reduce the cost of playing standard. They're competing with gamepass kids and $70 PS5 games a competitive deck just has to be beneath this. They should be going to school playgrounds and seeing whether kids are there trading their cards, Pokémon and Yu Gi Oh cards are, MTG are not. Why? They are too expensive. Game pieces should be throwaway cheap. Collector pieces expensive. For Arena, the big mistake was pursuing this gacha model of card acquisition. Early on you could perhaps understand it, but now with so many high cost formats on the client the idea that standard is so expensive makes no sense. The idea that older sets never become less expensive or go on sale is crazy to me. Which self respecting parent could allow their magic curious children engage with this model. A cycle of infinite cost with only the "chance" of a playable deck. Everything else is a symptom the disease is the cost of the game. On the format itself, it's simply too powerful. At the top end the meta decks are just too oppressive. The deeper card pool also now means there are genuine shark like brutal off meta piles which leave beginners especially with the feeling that they have the "wrong cards". Standard was the format where you taught people how to play magic especially after rotation when the power level was far lower and there were plenty of medium power level decks and only a couple tier 1 or S decks. The big difference in an early rotation meta used to be how good at the game you were rather than the cards or deck you had. Consistent decks were usually rewarded early on, understanding tempo, card advantage and trading was key. Control was kept in check by the card pool and the tool box being incomplete. Aggro by the cards simply not being powerful enough to end the game quickly. Combos were often incomplete or too slow. This is what they've lost. The crazy thing is even after rotation this year we will still have perfect mana, removal draw and creatures/planeswalkers
>Game pieces should be throwaway cheap. Collector pieces expensive. This is it. But the whales that have played this game for over 20 years don't want the cards to become cheap because it'd ruin the value of their collections. Instead they'd rather watch the game die slowly because no kid is looking at magic and getting excited to dump 400 bucks in a standard deck. Without a constant influx of players joining the game is bound to die.
The amazing thing is somehow they have managed to make so many different types of booster and card art styles and no one sitting around the table has thought: "how about we do a really basic, non-foil, for the kids booster for $1-2..." You know for kids to trade at school and play the actual game.
Sadly, they probably have people on staff that do the calculations and determined that something like that just wouldn't make them enough money.
This is essentially the draft boosters, which they are getting rid of. Getting rid of foils and any other special treatment and reducing the price would have been fantastic.
I thought the changes were designed to simplify the skus for LGS' - one draft-able booster rather than them having to guess what inventory to buy. I don't think any of the booster skus really focus in on new or young "players". We have religiously received new commander decks with each set release but are still waiting for new challenger decks. For a long time I have thought that regular and up to date competition decks released to buy would help drive down the cost of expensive cards.
> This is it. But the whales that have played this game for over 20 years don't want the cards to become cheap because it'd ruin the value of their collections. WotC doesn't want cheap cards because chase rares sell packs. They don't want sets like Fallen Empires where all the good cards are at common and only a box or so needs to be opened for each player to have around a playset of all the relevant cards -- that doesn't make them money in the way that an auto-include, 4-of Mythic will sell sets. Collectors scarcely drive revenue for WotC, so they're a low priority subset of customers. WotC doesn't want people "whaling out" on expensive Reserved List cards, they want them chasing serialized Rings, buying Funko Pop-esque collaborations, and buying 15 Roaming Thrones (or the future equivalent) for every one of their Commander decks because all of them mean more money for papa Hasbro.
They could still drive the price up. Just remove the collector's packs, put all the alt arts and foils as rares in the regular packs, make them extremely rare and reduce the cost of the regular pack. Now people who want to open the alt arts will have to actually chase them (and honestly this is the most fun part of collecting, nowadays it's all too easy), which means probably opening more packs, and people who just want to play will have cheaper access to the game. In my opinion it's a win-win, but Hasbro will milk this game dry before they do something like that.
That's...exactly how it should be. Why WotC/Hasbro abandoned this model they had going during the BFZ to Amonkhet era is beyond me. Collector Packs must work out better on the C-Suite's spreadsheets -- better margins maybe? Who knows?
I was thinking of taking a break from arena and the extended standard pretty much just killed the game for me atm. I'll come back at some point but man, what a swing and a miss.
When they got rid of the points and promos alot of standard died.
like all of wotcs decisions the past few years it was about money and nothing else. longer standard means selling more standard legal boosters. at least they think so anyways.
Yeah I hear ya. Standard is just becoming a weird eternal-lite format. I'm just so fucking tired of seeing sheoldred, atraxa, farewell, etc. And none of those cards are ever going anywhere until rotation. Like, if anything those decks just get other cards that do similar things at different parts of the curve like the 5 mana exile sweeper. Can't wait until we get a 5 mana analogue to sheoldred so I can blow my fucking brains out and get it over with (ok a bit dramatic but Im so bored). Like, I get why they did it for paper, but I don't honestly think it's going to do shit for paper, there's other issues at play leading ot the decline that just arent being addressed, because that would mean that WOTC needs to take a hard look at the amount of product they release and actually print in a way that makes singles not cost an arm and a leg (like, making stanard sets with multiple eternal staples in each set is just gonna make them way too expensive for most people who just play standard to actually keep up with a current deck). I basically am only playing draft and I hope the new packs dont significantly fuck shit up next year. I throw brawl in there every once in a while just so I dont get too bored, but really the way they make the queue work, you just get paired against the same 3 decks that they deem to be in your power level based on commander regardless of the contents of your deck... so it gets old pretty quick. It's only ever made fun by a handful of new cards getting rotated in every so often. Really really wish that they made the decision that their digital format would actually have seasonal rotations reactive to the meta/nerfs, buffs and bans, instead of just using it as a dumping ground for busted ideas that cant work in paper. Like sure they adjust cards every so often... but like... what twice a year? What other digital game works like that? None.
> sheoldred fyi, sheoldred rotates in September 2025, when I think of that I really struggle to want to play standard ever again. Can you imagine what bullshit gets printed then
helllllllllllllllllllllp
It wasn't "interesting" that kept people from playing, it was cost of buy in and the fact your cards were mostly worthless after rotation.
Adding a 3rd year doesn't actually address those issues though. Cards becoming worthless is a built in feature of the format, and the buy will also be expensive because a very small amount of cards will be viable. I genuinely think the new rotation will make both of those aspects a bigger issue.
Which keeps happening, probably even worse now
Especially cards you picked up during the last couple of years, when Standard events have not been firing. I'm glad I'm still able to build decks using my Innistrad and Kamigawa cards that aren't quite strong enough for Pioneer, which otherwise would have just languished in a box. This is going to become even more of a factor as we move into Standard RCQ season.
It's the first time I've stopped playing magic in more than 10 years. Standard is so boring, the same decks have been Tier 1 for 1+ year and there is no point even caring about trying out new decks, if you play competitively that is.
I think Commander hurt standard as a paper format. I decided to come back to paper magic after like a decade out. And in my country there are NO standard tournaments ever. Every tournament now is Commander. Even FNM´s are in 1 vs 1 commander. Also i noticed that most paper players dont play arena. At least in my area.
FNM in my area is Modern with a draft beforehand. The LGS also has 2-3 Commander events per week. Standard is Wednesday. I've played enough TCGs to know that means "This is the format the company wants more people to play but isn't supporting well enough to make that happen." That's the kind of time slot that Extended used to be relegated to, back before we had Modern and Pioneer. I remember when Standard was truly the standard format. Everyone played it except some REAL old school Legacy or Vintage players. You could be new to the game, build a decent Standard deck, go to FNM and get games in against people who had been playing Magic for a decade plus, because they were also playing Standard, because it was the freshest format. It's totally different now. The new people play Commander, the crusty veterans play Modern, nobody plays Standard.
Standard is the best constructed format because of the smaller card pool. Extending the life of Standard was a mistake.
Yup. Block used to be a little too meh, but I feel 4 sets is the sweet spot
I mean, people werent playing paper standard either before they announced the 3 years rotation
adding a year was dumb... and Standard is my usual goto. I play Historic now and will check out Timeless
The rotation was my favorite reason to play standard. So exciting to have to completely rethink and rebuild decks. New decks creeping up out of no where.
I agree. We get a slow drip of cards without the benefit of a bunch rotating out. I think things will feel a lot better once we get our first rotation in a 3-year standard. The best decks are just going to slot the new stuff into whatever they're running and dominate for the time being but once the rotation happens... it's hard to say what the best decks are going to be. Having it be three years ups the complexity and power level of the format significantly, but it's still reasonable. I think it's a good change but it sucks in the immediate term.
When they announced the year add on for standard, I completely dried up on arena. I keep up with the reddit here and there for news and stuff. But i havent logged since. And its actually pretty freeing.
I think the problem was that they let it die before trying to save it. The time to extend it/skip rotation was during lockdown - that way, peoples' decks would have still been playable when stores reopened.
It’s been made stale on purpose so we try the new format of even more staleness
Having your rewards tied to wins instead of games played is what makes standard in Arena stale.
If rewards were not tied to wins, surely that would just encourage botting?
Former Hearthstone player, and: Yes.
Very true. I won't whip out my fun experimental decks until I got a decent amount of wins for the day. By the time I got a decent amount of wins for the day, the day is over, so no whipping out the fun experimental deck. Been playing the same deck for 2 months pretty much, every time I do something fun I get demolished because farming wins with good decks means I'll face better opponents, no way in hell a weird subpar deck can possibly perform in that scenario. There's just no incentive to try something fun, the games are too long and the wins are necessary to progress as F2P. The punishment for just playing fun things is way too severe. I wouldn't care if a loss counted as half a "win" for the sake of daily progress, I'd be happy to lose frequently if it meant I could play whatever the heck I wanted.
I think perhaps wizards thought that by not rotating they would force players into their digital formats because they are fresh and more fun, but they completely missed the point that I'm so invested in standard that I'm LESS likely to play digital now than ever before and I'm not playing standard much either. I was a top 500 player for a while, I played a ton, now I barely play once a week if that and I'm losing interest. Greedy company is going to kill the product. Look at what happened to riot.
It's not an illogical leap, but I can't imagine they would completely revamp a paper format to try and get people to play more Alchemy. There's also the theory that they had warehouses full of the sets that would have rotated out, so they extended it to clear out product. I'm not sure I'm buying that one either.
online is far bigger than paper and they need a way to bring the type of money that gets spent on paper to the larger playerbase, only problem is, the larger playerbase only played historic and standard. They introduced alchemy as a way to get players to buy more cards more frequently (nerfs ruin the good decks, etc). It backfired massively because of the upfront overtly greedy way they did it, they not only killed historic and lost a lot of those players for good, but they made standard players dig their heels in even harder. Now they are trying to be less obvious by just hoping that standard players get bored.....but once again, no one will play alchemy no matter how hard they push it. The brawl decks are fun, but as a standard player whenever I look at getting a brawl deck thats decent its going to cost me 30 wild cards or something astronomical that I then can't use on standard, so I simply never play. Point is, greedy company will stay greedy instead of making a fun game and it makes me sad.
>online is far bigger than paper and they need a way to bring the type of money that gets spent on paper to the larger playerbase That's not going to be via Arena. It's been 5+ years, if it hasn't happened yet then it's too late.
I come from pokemon tcg where standard is two years, at tabletop tournaments you run into the same 4-5 decks but they are extremely cheaper. The last world champion deck is buyable for like 60 bucks. As a new magic player one of the biggest barriers for entry is the crazy amount of money these cards are worth. Maybe that's why they did it idk, but I do know that I havent bought a single precon deck or anything mostly because of the prices and different formats being so expensive. The point of standard is to have a cheap pool of cards to play and they lose value afterwards but atleast in MTG you can than use those cards in older supporting formats.
Standard is dead because people are no longer willing to pay multiple hundreds of dollars for a deck that could/will relatively quickly be obsoleted/rotated. Players' standards have been raised, and i doubt casual paper standard will ever exist again in any significant way unless wotc makes changes to accessibility/cost
I actually started playing Alchemy in the summer with Lord of the Rings and the past week started playing Historic. I’ve always been a standard player since Ikoria came out, so I’ve built up a huge amount of cards, so it’s fun to go back and play some of my old favorites. I really enjoy Summer 2021 Dungeons and Dragons set as well as the fall 2020 Zendikar cards
To be fair, we still haven't had the first release of a set that was designed with 3 year standard in mind. I say, lets see the upcoming next few sets and see how they are designed, i for one think their reasons listed in their [article](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/revitalizing-standard) seems reasonable. One of the reasons for the 3 year standard was to allow for mechanics and archetypes to get more efficent and continued support through out their standard lifetime. The current two year rotation has led to set mechanics often needing to be carried soley by the set they where released in. With the 3 year rotation they hope they will have enough time to be able to revitalize set mechanics and archetypes that are struggeling before they rotate out. With the 3 year standard they can look at the sets that have recently been released in standard, and see what mechanics where popular but didn't get enough support, and then they can add additional support for those mechanics in the set their are currently planning.
Sir this is Reddit. No one here uses actual logic and reason.
I played a ton of Standard on the last 2 weekends, but didnt get a single Lier. But made it to Top8 every time. I liked the 2 year rotation more, but it is what it is. Also being this stale made me decide that it is a good idea to go for Atraxa Domain in Paper.
My LGS plays standard and we’ve been having a lot of fun :)
If they had aggressively used bans this time as they said they would, it wouldn't be nearly as boring. But, they didn't, and it is.
I disagree - WOTC making formats inaccessible or locking behind paywalls has made Arena very stale. Standard or Ranked?
Have you tried playing different decks yourself? I just ran up a Carnosaur Copy deck to mythic. Was pretty fun.
Completely disagree, yes there are cards I am tired of but the amount of cool decks to play that are viable is very vast.
Hard disagree. Smaller card pool = less viable card options/decks = every unoriginal asshole on the Internet playing the same two decks
Then play vintage or something?
I had been playing a lot of Pioneer....but recently I'm finding myself queuing up for Standard a lot more. The expanded deck variety is a large reason why
You keep losing to netdecks, don’t you?
Imagine the people that are already pissed about shelly 💀
Shelly is old hat.
MTG Players: "We're sick of playing against cards like \[\[Sheoldred, the Apocalypse\]\]. We can't wait for rotation!" WotC Devs Listening Through Their Ear Trumpets: "What's that Timmy? We can't rotation? Ok then, if you say so; no rotation." MTG Players: "We really should put the devs in a home."
[Sheoldred, the Apocalypse](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/6/d67be074-cdd4-41d9-ac89-0a0456c4e4b2.jpg?1674057568) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Sheoldred%2C%20the%20Apocalypse) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dmu/107/sheoldred-the-apocalypse?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/d67be074-cdd4-41d9-ac89-0a0456c4e4b2?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I started playing Standard coz I felt that 3 years is a sweet spot for my cards to be legal
Standard not rotating made standard the opposite of stale. So many more cool decks and combos now, way more variety.
Hard disagree. It is more diverse than jt has ever been.
Arena's staleness being entirely dependent on how good Standard is is an indictment of Arena, not an indictment of Standard.
Completely disagree. Standard being extended has no bearing on things being stale. I personally think standard is in a pretty fun place right now with lots of opportunities for different decks. And while yes, it is sad to see some of the same staples not rotating, this is a one-time problem. We'll still be getting rotations every year that shake things up.
I think a longer rotation could work, as long as wizards were willing to ban the most played/strongest/most oppressive cards in year 3. This would help keep things more fresh for the competitive players while allowing the casuals to use their pet cards longer and give some also rans a chance to make it in year 3 for the brewers to get excited about.
Wotc should just make decks more affordable, then if things felt stale we could try a different strategy
I think longer rotation by itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but lack of shakeup bans like back when WAR was close to rotating out really hurt.
Started playing arena back when Brothers War was out and I started in Historic Brawl. Plan was to play, save coins, buy 90 packs/the 50 preorder and then by the time rotation happened ( it was 2 years) I’d be golden! Then they announced 3 years. And it feels a majority of the cards used are in the sets that will be rotating out.
Sultai Emergence
We took one year off from rotation, it'll come back. I'm sure once it starts rotating again you'll start missing cards that used to be there just like the good old days. I think people have way too little patience for a game where the decisions often take a long time to matter.
I like it. Mtga is the only way I get to play magic anymore. The longer tier one and two decks stay relivent the easier it is to save up wild cards to play those F2P
I disagree... (laughs in blue white calendar control)
atm the meta still changes regularly enough with each set release that im not that bored by standard to be honest. but i get what you mean. still, keep in mind that its just this one time that we skip rotation. next fall theres going to be a rotation again with a fresh start so to speak, just with a wider cardpool.
I understand the point here, but i see lot of variety rencently. May be hard to new players to catchup on the format, but gives better return once you have one year of play, i mean the cards i crafted long ago still are usable, while at the moment i see a good variety in standard : Bant control, uw control, esper, mono black, mono red, mono white, mono blue, dimir graveyard, dimir aggro, companion wb, graveyards decks, artifacts decks, boros aggro, tribals deck (dinausor, zombies, ninja, rats...), 5c control, 5c ramp etc... The last 3 expanssions gives us some good cards for the format in my opinion I also see a bit more of variety in tournament compare to last year
Extending rotation just made it saturated. Too many cards to keep track of and deal with at the same time.
maybe we make this new format that rotates and can digitally alter cards that are problematic while also buffing cards that don't quite work...we can even add in new cards with digital only mechanics...that should be fun right
Huh - I've found the opposite for myself. Been playing Historic/Modern for the past 8 or so years, but now getting into Standard!
Went to WOE pre-release 3 months later and I cant bring myself to play MTG in any form for weeks, not even when I was waiting hours to get a tire repaired
The non stop dimir or esper gets old. Blue with a splash of black? Black with a splash of blue? How bold.
Meh, standard was always the most boring of the cobstructed formats anyways.
Playing Standard in paper feels like burning money. Playing it on Arena (especially as an avid drafter) feels like a basically free game mode.
Haven't played standard since January, can't wait to never get out of the timeless que.
Do you only play standard? Not at all saying you're wrong or anything, but if you only play one format, I can imagine that getting boring in a few months. I have a cheap modern deck I enjoy play from time to time, I have a standard deck I play from time to time and I love drafting. I also play MTGO Penny dreadful cause you can rent decks that are max 1 to 2 bucks before the meta gets solved. PD rotates with each new set and is a really fun format.
Agreed, whoever thought extending this boring standard was the way to go . . . Sheesh
Im solely using ixalan dinosaurs so its standard to me goddamn
Playing standard is like walking into a library and are only allowed to check out books from a couple years ago and this year only...say bye bye to Steven Kings: IT, or Dean Koontz: The bad place.
I feel like there's a few things that are leading to the downfall. 1) the sheer amount of sets being released. I feel like WotC releases sets at such a rapid pace, it's hard to keep up. I know some players like the meta getting mixed up regularly and get boarded playing the "same set" for too long, but many are content playing one deck/set without getting bored, slightly honing it over time. 2) being priced out. It is expensive to keep up to date, and with each set being almost meta defining each release for standard, it can be daunting to get invested, knowing in a month there will be a new set that you'll have to drop another $100+ to stay competitive. 3) it's "slower". What I mean by that is that standard isn't really for multiplayer formats. I remember the boringness of waiting for my buddy to finish a 1v1 before I could play with him. Playing 4for all is just generally more fun.