People are saying this is good for new players who face the problem of having cards rotate out too soon. I’m not so sure.
Under the old system, a new player procuring cards from the latest set would have some 9 to 12 months to use those cards in Standard. If they acquired cards from the second latest set there would still be some 6 to 9 months to use the cards.
I’m not sure what the others consider a new player to be here but if someone is 9 months into the game, I don’t think they are really all that new.
The second concern is that new players start from a point of having to catch up with the collection of existing players in terms of the cards they can play in Standard. So now instead of having to catch up to Origins + the 4 latest sets, it becomes Origins + the 5 to 8 latest sets. That’s a lot more ground for a new player to cover.
The other concern is that new players have to accustom themselves to and account for many more mechanics in Standard under the new system. Almost every set comes with new mechanics, so increasing the number of sets in Standard will increase the learning curve for newer players.
As a frame of reference, MtGPQ is only just creeping up onto its 3rd anniversary. Having essentially what is a two year rotation is a much longer time than one might think.
I think if the concern was that XLN was only going to be in Standard for 9 months due to its delayed release and the rapid release of the sets following it, a better option would have been to announce that it stays in Standard even after GRN is release but would rotate out together with RIX when the following new set is released.
There’s an argument that it matters more what a player can play rather than what their opponents can since there’s no real PvP and the AI is pretty weak. But I think that should at best be a consolation and definitely be something to avoid building core aspects of the game around.
I do hate the previous situation where Amonkhet rotated out alone, so I guess this is fine. After all, it’s always good for this game to start following more closely to the paper Magic in whatever way possible.
On the other hand, though I do feel 4 sets being kicked out at once per year does feel plenty… Maybe should have kept 6 sets active at any given point of time then rotate them out two by two.
The blocks aren’t 2 sets constantly anymore, so rotating two at a time doesn’t really work. Let’s look at it like this if we were to do this. Next upcoming sets are Guilds of Ravnica, Ravnica Allegiance, and a third unnamed set on Ravnica, then a Core Set. After that nothing has been announced, but there will be three story sets followed by another core set. For the purposes of this example, lets say following core set 2020 we have one set on Theros followed by two on New Phyrexia. Then rotation out would look like this:
Ixalan and Rivals of Ixalan
Dominaria and Core 2019
Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance
Ravnica 3 and Core 2020
Theros and New Phyrexia 1
New Phyrexia 2 and Core 2021
You can see that twice in that example planes are split up and rotation doesn’t really align well, meaning no matter what general rule you put in place, Wizards will always have the possibility of messing with what mechanics exist together, and for this game, I don’t think it’s healthy to leave in 9 sets for Standard so you can rotate all 4 at once. If you did, the current Standard would include every set we have access to right now except for the Battle for Zendikar block. Rotation needs to be tighter in PQ than paper specifically because they’ve powered up the cards and possibly don’t know what future cards are coming out to plan for broken interactions that might occur.
Origins is always going to be the staple, until they make an announcement changing that. I would assume this is because it saves them work. All of your original 5 planeswalkers have premade decks that are 100% cards from Origins meaning you can pick up one of any of them as a new player and have cards you can use to play any event. If they rotate out Origins, that’s a stumbling block for new players. They would be forced to spend money on new cards just to play in events. Or alternatively, they would have to reconstruct the Origins planeswalker decks every time standard rotates in order to keep the game beginner friendly. In either case its better for the player that there is a solid baseline you can plan around, and it keeps the game anchored on what the general power level of cards should be.
I’m voting that this is great for one reason: it provides us with a measure of certainty as we make our resource investments in the future. Now I know how long Ixalan will be with us, for instance.
I am a bit concerned that the increased length of sets in standard, and the corresponding increase in options, will make it harder to balance new cards coming out. More options means more chance of broken combinations being discovered by the players. We already use only a tiny fraction of our collections on a regular basis; I could probably single out 100 cards, total, and cut my entire collection down to those and still have the same success in Legacy, let alone Standard. And I don’t even have a lot of the best ones yet.
Hopefully the increase of Standard options will come with an increase in the variety of secondary objectives and/or event restrictions to encourage us to use a wider range of cards, and disincentivize players from tossing the same set of broken mythics together for every challenge.
Removing origins would be a big, big mistake.. For this app, there needs to be some kind of “basis” for new and returning players.
(see the arguments for new players above)
A coalition mate left the game back before booster crafting was introduced. He returned two weeks ago, his collection 100% legacy & origins. Without origins, he couldn’t even have built a standard legal deck (so would’ve be restricted to totp, TG every second day & random legacy events) .. He had some gold left, okay, but that’s been lucky. Even with origins and his gold, he’ll struggle for a while since his collection is rather week and he’s in the top competitive tier (the last one is more an argument about the tier system, but doesn’t devalue the main point)
You can jump into any paper format at any time because all that takes is creating a decklist, and buying the cards to build the deck. Specifically because you can buy exact singles you need on the secondary market, you can create a deck that is to your taste or competitive or fun or whatever you’re after. PQ doesn’t have any means for players to gift cards to other players to help new or returning players build their collection, nor does it have a way for a returning player to get needed cards without playing the booster lottery or trying to craft it. However, if I’m a returning player trying to get Storm the Vault, and wasn’t around for any Rivals of Ixalan, I only have a less than 5% chance of getting that care from crafting or from my included rare if I buy a Premium Pack of Rivals of Ixalan.
Arguably the game is worse for returning player than for new players specifically because of the mastery tier system. Someone leaving from platinum for an extended period will struggle when they get back if all they have to go off of is Origins, but without Origins, that player won’t be able to do much of anything at all, and will be discouraged from ever returning without that baseline.
3000 crystals costs $99, and that will get you about 10 PPs. That’ll make you about as competitive in MTGPQ as spending an equivalent amount in MTG, won’t it? Certainly, if you want a really competitive standard deck in paper, it’ll cost you hundreds of dollars.
Yeah, but if you want to sell your paper cards later to get your money back you can. Paper cards have real value.
PQ cards are completely worthless. If D3 decides the app isn’t worth the hassle anymore we get nothing back for all the time and money we’ve put in to the game. You’re comparing apples to oranges.
The simple fact of the matter is that anybody could stop playing paper magic for years and then jump back in without much issue (since there is a plethora of other ways to play, including casually with friends where deck restrictions aren’t really a thing). Also, if you know your collection isn’t really strong, you won’t immediately enter a Grand Prix right away.
In PQ, however, a player who stops playing for a couple years is forced back into the game at whatever tier they left at (usually platinum), and thus forced to play against top-tier decks before really getting a chance to accumulate new cards. Sure you can spend a ton of money to catch up, but why should you have to? This is a free game (whereas paper MTG is not a free game and it is understood that you need to spend money to get cards). Having Origins permanently standard means that any player can jump back in with legal and competitive decks (Origins has some really good cards). That’s why it should remain always standard, for better or for worse
That would be a thing, but naturally the tiers should permanently adjust as sets appear/disappear from standard. Let me explain:
The current tiers are FLAT, so they don’t keep track of the number of sets in standard.
As new sets get introduced, tiers should slowly adjust to the introduction and accumulation of cards on those sets.
As sets leave Standard, the card pool contracts once again, so this should also be accounted for, for players say who get to play GRN and maybe even the upcoming set, but then go absent and return after IXN/RIX/DOM/M19 have rotated out
This is of course even more complex when we consider the way players manipulate tiers by selectively mastering cards to stick to a lower tier. I wouldn’t say that keeping track of all cards a player has available is a solution either since you can get unlucky and fetch a lot of useless mythics for instance. Right now we simply don’t play with them as they are not good cards, not because we want to manipulate the tier system.
So yeah, many many factors to consider. Let’s wait and see if there are any changes in the direction of matchmaking and tiers with 3.0 coming out (I’m hopeful about this but we’ll have to see if there are any pleasant or unpleasant surprises coming up)
Which is where a system that counts how many cards you own rather than how many cards you’ve played to mastery might work. You can still sandbag into lower tiers, but doing so means you can’t attempt to acquire good cards, and still adjusts to allow returning players to do Standard events at lower tiers while rebuilding a collection.
Exactly what I was saying, the number of owned cards does not reflect their quality. Take Origins alone for instance. Imagine you have only relatively meh stuff from there like Tragic Arrogance, Skaab Goliath and Demonic Pact, while another player gets Gaea’s Revenge, Day’s Undoing and Nissa’s Revelation. Just “drawing the short stick” does not do it as an approach for me.
Yep, which is why the mastery system is actually clever enough by itself: if you get a "meh"sterpiece and don’t use it, then it doesn’t count against you. It’s as though the card doesn’t exist for you, which in effect it doesn’t because you never play it. Your status is based on what you use, which is as close to a proxy as we can get to a ranking based on how you play.
The issue with the current system is that it’s unrelentingly cumulative, so anything you’ve done in the past is always counted moving forward. All your Legacy play ends up impacting your non-Legacy status. I don’t know of any other system that doesn’t at least account for changes over time, either through expiration/exclusion or through raising standards. Based on the original Color Mastery page that Brigby linked to in the new player guide, I think the intention of the setup was to keep up with the new sets by adding tiers/raising thresholds. That approach would have been perfectly fine, but that’s a very manual approach and has obviously not been maintained over time.
To get back to the poll, I think it’s fine enough to expand the standard, so long as there are also plans to streamline the mastery system (so we’re not all stuck in Platinum by the time the next rotation occurs) and the meta-warping effects of having multiple sets/mechanics available together are handled quickly/effectively. No one wants Standard to become the Legacy Part II when it too gets to 8 sets.
From Brigby’s other comments that mastery and matching are being worked on, I’m taking the wait-and-see approach on whether this is a good thing overall. I think the devs are doing a good job of moving things forward, albeit slowly compared to the insatiable pace of internet time. The changes to 3.0 were fairly major: implementing a visible graveyard was probably no small feat, and they had to introduce five new mechanics (a couple of which were fairly complex) in one set release. The other changes to tier, mastery, etc. will probably take some time as well.
@TheDude1 I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said above. A lot of people forget the dire situation the game was in a year ago.
Oktagon have issues, they’re not perfect. But overall I’m a lot happier and a lot more confident in the longevity of the game because of them. They’ve had a busy year trying to balance catching us up and the to do list for them is still long, but overall I appreciate their efforts.
To relate this back to the topic at hand, I’m interested to see how the new Standard is implemented. It will change how and when you purchase things, but I hope that I will change up my decks more than once a year if I’m given new tools to play with. (There’s even a creature that prevents gem changes while it’s on the board in the upcoming release… A step towards a Storm the Vault answer?)
I too will say that I would like to wait and see, but to give people more time to accumulate cards before they slip into Legacy isn’t bad. Admittedly the pressure is still on for the upcoming 4 sets, but nothing we haven’t seen before.
@Imbrium I think the “new standard” will be OK until this time next year when we lose four sets all at once, which was the level of impact from the initial implementation of standard and caused some rage quits…
@ElfNeedsFood
True. It will be like losing a limb … but, we will gain 4 sets on top and new cards. I mean, I’m already cherry picking the cards that I will not yet let go off from the first 4 sets to make room for the new release… but in a year’s time? A good card is a good card, but we’re gaining new ones every 3 months too!
It’s also an inevitability that we will lose the 4 sets. I don’t know about you, but a year is fair warning. Creativity and back up plans are encouraged!
Shrug. You will never placate everyone, but room has to be made.
