I've always enjoyed the limited formats. I've periodically checked back in and played in prereleases or leagues or whatnot, without ever committing to building something preconstructed.
I think I may be done, though. The power and complexity creep has gotten to me in the past few years. I can understand that cards need to be rebalanced, or that new rules get introduced over time, but the complexity of the current version of the game has gotten out of hand. The cynic in me says that the power creep is there so that people playing formats like modern will pay for new sets, and since the new cards are more powerful and have more abilities, it drags down the game.
WotC, especially Mark Rosewater, has addressed this issue many many times. I would recommend checking out some of his columns and podcasts.
Short answer: the game has evolved quite a bit (I've been playing for 17 years).
Long answer:
> Anybody using the old ones is a sucker.
There are several different Constructed formats, each with its own restrictions on which cards can be played. The three most popular are Legacy, Modern, and Standard. In Modern and Standard, only newer cards are allowed, so there naturally aren't any from older sets. In Legacy, there are plenty of older cards being played. Take a look at the lists from any Legacy tournament, and you'll see a mix of old and new. Now, the power levels of each type of card have changed (in general, creatures have gotten more powerful and non-creature spells less powerful), so you'll often see earlier non-creature spells and more recent creatures, but this isn't set in stone.
There's also the idea of power creep. The natural progression of a game like Magic is to allow more and more powerful effects, since not doing so will dis-incentivize buying new cards. For at least the past 10 years, then, Wizards has made a conscious decision to vary the power level between blocks (cycles of sets). Different types of cards will be more or less powerful at different times (in the last block, enchantments were the focus, now multicolor cards are being emphasized).
It's true that if you want to stay competitive takes a certain amount of money, but this is true in many hobbies. Magic has been constantly getting more popular over the last few years, and it's still around when 99% of its competitors are gone. Let's check back on your game in 20 years and see where it's at.
Yep, I agree with this. The game’s complexity is an order of magnitude greater than the early days, and much of the issue is self-inflicted by WotC.
However, I’d argue that the only eternal format of significance is EDH, and it is very much not competitive. It’s popularity is just as much a curse as it is a blessing for the game, IMO.
The limited formats (draft and sealed) remove the issue that your opponents' cards might just be better than your cards, but they make the cost problem much worse. It's several times more expensive to play limited (where you have to buy new product every time you want to play) than to play constructed, where you're allowed to reuse the cards you own.
> It's the sheer amount of new supplemental sets that they're throwing out, many of which are cards that you basically _have_ to but to remain competitive.
That’s literally been going since around Mirrodin. It’s why I gave up on the game.
Now I just have a massive set of only commons that everyone can build their decks with and I don’t have to deal with the insane power inflation.
I prefer having cheap cards. You are paying for the experience not the cards when you draft.
What I don’t like is wotc printing new powerful cards in non-standard sets. Modern horizons, commander sets, etc print absolutely must play busted cards but the sets are limited print quantity and artificially scarce.
If it was up to me all new cards would be printed in standard sets and supplemental sets are reprints only.
2016 magic was nice because you could play reserved list cards without having to sell a kidney…
wow sounds terrible. I left mtg because I thought a new core set and 4x sets. ayear was too many. the cost to keep playing was not worth it, and the power creep really killed the enjoyment of the game for me.
to think it is even worse now! F...
I would love to just have magic go back to 1 core set a year, and an expansion to it 6 months later at most.
Agree completely. The redesign of the card format ruined the game for me. IMO the old format made it feel like you were holding some ancient and special.
I think the problem has always existed, but to a much lesser extent than it has in the last 3-4 years. Vintage has always had the bulk of deck's value in Power 9 and lands, and the only recent changes there have been things like Mystic Sanctuary ($1 card), Cavern of Souls ($10 when it came out in 2012, now $50), Urza's Saga ($40), etc. Legacy & Modern also rely on an expensive but versatile land base, but in terms of staples they've both been hit hard by stuff like Modern Horizons 2 where stuff like Ragavan, Urza's Saga, and the elementals (Fury, Endurance, Subtlety, etc) are so pushed that they warp the metagame drastically. I can't think of a time when that was case in a way which impacted so many different decks. Some cards were problematic (Oko!) and made specific decks that included it much better for a time, but I've never seen a single set impact modern in such a big way.
It's honestly not so much that set. It's the sheer amount of new supplemental sets that they're throwing out, many of which are cards that you basically _have_ to but to remain competitive.
Formats like legacy and vintage are no longer things you can buy into and play a similar deck for a long period of time. Instead, they're things where you have to buy new cards once every two to four weeks to remain competitive. That's a big change from a few years back when those formats tended to be relative stable for 1-2 year periods.
That's the real thing that folks are frustrated with. The 30th anniversary packs are just something that's easy to point at and go "this is a money grab". If it were just those, it would really be a "to each their own".
There's more to it than that. They've re-released edition after edition to obsolete the previous. Used to be 1 mana got you a 1/0 or 1/1 creature with nothing else. Now you can get cards with 1 or two features, flying etc. Anybody using the old ones is a sucker. Its easy to think its all about the money, you have to buy new cards to keep competitive.
In fact this is why our game club designed their own card game (Orion Empire, check it out on Kickstarter!) The idea is, new cards will always be different in some way from old ones, so no card is ever completely eclipsed. So you can buy new decks to keep it interesting, but your old one is probably still competitive.
(will try be a bit verbose here so that people who are not MTG fans will still be able to follow sorry if it's a slog to get through!)
I was in a similar boat, though for a long time during university I shared a collection with a friend and we did a pretty good job at selling off stuff to keep the effective costs down.
Since 2016, I stopped playing heavily rotational formats like Standard [for those unfamiliar, there's many different formats of MTG which are played and 'Standard' is one of the most popular ones in which you can play "all the mainline cards released from the last X sets", normally ~2 years worth], and moved to Modern [all cards printed since mid-2003 are playable]. My hope was that because of the longer (and growing) availability of cards, Modern would be more affordable in the long term - since decks would remain viable for long periods of time (perhaps with small adjustments with new cars coming out).
Then over ~20 months, that view changed a lot. First Wizards banned Oko & Mox Opal in January 2020. Firstly, these cards lost value directly - but they also caused quite a big shift in the metagame to the point where entire decks got awful, and hence less valuable. Then in mid-2021 they released the Modern Horizons 2 set, which had a massive impact on very many Modern decks (per MTGGoldfish, 8 of the 10 most commonly played creatures in the Modern metagame at the moment are from Modern Horizons 2). Once again, this totally decimated the value of many existing cards.
I hate the sort of "MTG Finance" approach to the MTG scene, but like you say - it's hard to justify $30/hr for a hobby, and its clear that Hasbro will print whatever it takes to maximize their profits (even if it has a significant negative impact on existing customers).
That sounds pretty much like what I said: card inflation keeps people buying new cards. I was being a little cynical, but if they cop to it, then great.
I don't see it as a 'natural progression'. Its lazy; you can think of new cards without obsoleting old ones, but it takes effort. I know; we've got an edition and 3 expansions so far (500 cards) and they took a lot of work.
As for being around; I see people come into our local card shop for tournaments, but nobody is 'playing Magic' any more. There has to be a gimmick, like a contest or draft tournament or some such. The kids in my Scout Troop were crazy about it 10 years ago; now its dropped off the radar. So maybe its still around, but its 30 year olds with money that keep it going.
I'm not depending on anything personally :) I'm not buying any NFTs with the expectation that I'm going to be using them in anything beyond what already exists (or will exist in the short-term) today.
But power creep management will exist to the extent that gaming companies make an active attempt to control, just like any other game. Magic The Gathering might be a good template for how companies could (but won't necessarily) handle it.
Magic The Gathering is almost 30 years old at this point, has released over 140 sets over that 30 years, and has developed techniques to manage power creep pretty well (maybe not perfectly, I don't really pay attention to MTG much anymore, but they clearly think about it, as they have articles they've written about it[1]).
You can pretty much consider each type of card in MTG as an NFT. Certain tournaments allow certain cards or don't if it turns out they're too powerful, or only allow the most recent sets where they've balanced things better, or whatever.
Different types of games allow different types of things. Some games or game modes might let anything go, whatever you've got, bring it, no matter how broken it is, while more tournament like games or game modes might limit what's included to more tightly control it.
Kind of like what I heard in Halo Infinity, where professional players think the Mangler gun is too powerful and want it nerfed, while casual players are having fun with it and asking the devs not to nerf it, or at least not in more casual modes.[1]
It's not like these solutions don't exist elsewhere, it's just up to the developer how they're going to incorporate it. Will some players hate that X NFT gets banned in Y game mode for Z game, and will it devalue it some? Oh I'm sure it will, just like I got annoyed that my Mind Twist card and a couple dozen other cards I had in Magic The Gathering got banned. But I still have it 20 years later, and I still throw it in to play with friends every once in a while.
> Agreed that Limited is better. But it still costs money, yes? A new deck every time?
The draft I play in charges $8 for three boosters. You get to keep the cards and you can easily sell your rares for >$8 most of the time if you want. $8 for an evening of entertainment isn't bad, cheaper than a movie.
> My problem with M:TG is that the knowledge keeps turning over.
It really doesn't though, it just changes form on the surface. The pillars of Magic are card advantage, speed, efficiency and a good mana curve. Those things apply universally, it really doesn't take long to get up on the new cards. In draft you are rarely going to make an elaborate deck, it's much more about bang for the buck (granted, this does mean you are missing out on a entire side of the game, but that's the side that requires money and time, so...) At most 3 expansions are legal at a time. I was a very serious/obsessed player in the 90's, now I am a very casual for fun player. All the cards I own fit easily in one tiny box. Draft/limited play really can be for fun and simple.
If you are exclusively buying singles that screams to me you are just powergaming and netdecking your decks instead of actually figuring out the game and playing it.
Sure you can get a better deal that way - meaning a higher win rate deck while spending less money, but a lot of the fun of MtG is (or at least was when I played) the discovery of new cards in the set, trading cards with your gaming group(s), and trying to build the best deck(s) you collectively had access to. When people started to just look what wins tournaments and just order whole decks as singles from web stores it ruined the hobby.
A) There was less cards to go around for the rest of us
B) they were just playing something someone else designed and play tested and tuned for GP or PT
I've gotten into MTG three times, once around 1997, then 2003, and then 2017.
Differences today: FNM is still available, relatively inexpensive, and fun. EDH is now a common format, but I never enjoyed it. League is also a common format: you play three matches per week for four weeks. The first week you start with three booster packs, and then each week afterwards you open another pack, and you can rebuild your deck as much as you like. You're paying something like $20 for cards and you get four weeks of games out of it.
I don't care for constructed play but part of that might be the fact that 2003 and 2017 had problems with standard constructed.
As a former MtG player I think the difficulty lies not in creating cards, but in ensuring there's a level of balance between existing cards and new sets.
That doesn’t include other supplemental products such as secret lairs or commander decks.
Not only are there many more sets per year, but the power creep is quite insane meaning that if you want to be competitive you need to constantly keep up with the new sets and buying new cards.
I will say that the draft experience has gotten better on average.
I don’t know if it is priced into Hasbro’s stock price, but they are still sitting on a golden egg of the reserved list. If they reprinted the reserve list I’m guessing they could easily rake in a few hundred million for basically doing nothing, and would in general improve customer relations.
It might be slowly moving to that model: with precon decks, challenger decks and secret lairs, WotC is selling a lot of non-randomized stuff. They even split for a while draft boosters from collector boosters (and then reversed the decision when nobody was buying the draft boosters and risked killing the format).
I think I may be done, though. The power and complexity creep has gotten to me in the past few years. I can understand that cards need to be rebalanced, or that new rules get introduced over time, but the complexity of the current version of the game has gotten out of hand. The cynic in me says that the power creep is there so that people playing formats like modern will pay for new sets, and since the new cards are more powerful and have more abilities, it drags down the game.
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