Let me begin by apologizing for not having written in a while (except for the odd tidbit on MiseTings). The truth is, I have been trying to cut back on the time I spend working on and playing the game. This has been significantly easier thanks to the current qualifier season, which is Extended.
Extended is by far my worst format, making me both less enthusiastic to play it and write about it. It's not that I don't find it fun or balanced; I've just never really gotten a strategic foothold in it. On top of that, Ontario's premier event reps, Future Quest, chose this qualifier season to stop holding qualifiers in my hometown and hold them all in Oshawa instead. A reasonable decision, I suppose, as I think the London qualifiers always had worse attendance, but this has led to me deciding not to bother putting in hours of testing so that I can leave at 6:30 a.m. and get back at 2:00 a.m. from a tourney that I have no chance of winning (not to mention actually getting the cards together).
Long story short, I have no thoughts to share on Extended and thus no strategy to discuss - and that's how it'll stay through January.
That leaves me with 'community issues' as my only subject matter to talk about. Now, I have never been issue-shy in my submissions, but the simple fact is that lengthy issue discussions seem to always precede a slew of discussions on the decline of Internet writing. Besides, I have actually written about a dozen different articles in the last two months (or at least partly written). I usually catch myself about halfway through, and either the tone seems too angry, or in the case of the Magic Online issue, I keep getting trapped wanting to say more than I probably should (as an alpha tester with an NDA and all that).
But after a while minor annoyances and various arguments have left me in desperate need of a sense of closure.
Let's look at some of the recent issues that have been debated on this site:
- Extended versus Block Party and/or BYOB
- Rotating Sets in Extended
- The presence of dual lands in Extended
- WOTC and the reprint policy
- Magic Online, evil corporations, and why pay for something free?
- Whether writers should invoke Ockham's Razor into topics in which it has practically no bearing
- Whether or not Gary Wise is a booger head
The last issue is one I consider myself unfit to answer, and may be one of the great mysteries of our time.
Looking at the others, they tend to blend together when you consider the actual subject matter. The first three address issues with Extended, whether it is exclusive, and whether it is a healthy format. The fourth is not directly related (although I do intend to make it so).
Your only other issue is Magic Online, since it seems to be the party most guilty of inciting false invocations of logical principles.
Extended, expenses, and the good 'ole dual lands
Since the recent decline of Trick (which has now been demonstrated as a deck not too strong for the cardpool), almost every article complaining about Extended seems to come back to the subject of dual lands, and more specifically what they cost.
No one really seems to hate the dual lands or argue that they are bad for gameplay. They open the doors to tons of gameplay options, and keep multi-coloured decks alive and thriving. The problem seems to be that to build just about any Extended deck, you need a lot of them. This means you need a lot of money.
The counter-argument to this is that duals require a one-time investment, and are thus actually much cheaper in the long run than trying to keep up with Standard. There is a good deal of truth to that argument... But it is not a particularly helpful one for a teenager two months into the game who can build a Standard deck in a week but would take six months to put a dual-infested deck like Three-Deuce together.
So we have a problem with dual lands. This problem is compounded (as it was recently pointed out by Will Rieffer) that as the cards have not been printed since unlimited, there really are not that many duals out there, which puts a cap on Extended's potential for growth as a tournament format.
So what is our solution to this problem?
Get rid of the dual lands? You seriously hurt multi-colour and the format goes hard towards mono-colour.
Replace Extended with Block Party? Decks would be running at the block power level, and this would be a very boring format for deckbuilding. Limiting options sucks - plus, every new block would have to be competitive with previous blocks or never see use. In short, this strategy shoots itself in the foot.
Replace Extended with Bring Your Own Block? A misunderstanding may have produced this suggestion, but it has much more merit than using block. At least this would introduce deck variety. But it would be a hornet's nest for judges (deck registration would suck), and would still not be as fun as just playing Extended.
I don't find any of these solutions any more appealing than maintaining the status quo. I think the duals belong in Extended and are an important link to the history of the game. So what we need is some other option.
Speaking of other options, I would like to shift for a second to another topic which has been getting posts on StarCity for the last little while: The Wizards reprint policy. These arguments tend to center around reprinting the Power Nine; a drastic move that I thankfully believe will never come to pass. Collectors or no, there are players out there who have shelled out the dough for those cards so they could use them and don't deserve a backstab like that. Non-tourney legal reprints are pointless (use proxies, people! That's all these would be) and tourney legal ones are both unnecessary (not too many type one tourneys out there), and completely unfair to those who have already bought the cards. Saying that a true collector doesn't care what his cards are worth completely ignores the tourney players who have already spent that money. And my guess is you would have more people quitting Type One than joining it.
As for other type one cards, the prospect of buying cards only legal in a largely unsupported format is not likely to send people racing to the aisles. One or two here or there would be reasonable, but I don't think Wizards could market a set of purely Type One cards without reprinting the P9.
However, if you ask many dedicated Type One players, the dual lands are almost as large a barrier to people playing the format as the P9 are, and is compounded by the fact that you need four of any one that you use. Meanwhile, the duals were reprinted in Revised - a set with a much larger print run than its power-packing predecessors had. Black-bordered and even unlimited dual lands are already 'premium' cards in that their values hardly even seem related to their revised cousins. A Beta Dual is easily worth three or more times what a Revised one is worth.
So if the dual lands were to be reprinted (in a set like Beatdown, for example), the only cards that would really be dropping in value would be the revised dual lands, especially if you used different artwork (original Ball Lightning art hardly dropped in value at all post-Beatdown). Obviously, this would not be great news for those that have already bought revised dual lands, but we are talking about nowhere near the same lost value that reprinted power cards would cause.
Plus, we need to weigh the price drop that revised duals would get from a reprint compared with the drop they would get if they left Extended. I suspect that they would be roughly equivalent - and that if anything, reprinting would be better at preserving the cards' value. Meanwhile, Extended would be a much easier-access format for newer players, as duals would be more readily available. Best of all, this would be achieved without neutering multi-colour decks or scrapping one of Magic's most popular formats.
This leaves us only with the issue of set rotation within Extended. I have to agree with Will Rieffer over Peter Jahn on this one. Unlike Peter, I don't think that the loss of Tithe and Mirage fetch lands would lead to a mono-colour dominated field. Formats with no duals at all run successful multi-colour decks as well, and having 4 duals per colour combination is still better than having none. Also consider that the mono-colour decks that are being competed with will be losing just as many key cards. And as Peter himself points out, cards rotated out are not necessarily gone for good.
As Extended continues to grow without set rotations, however, the format becomes more unwieldy and even intimidating. A new player to Magic (lets say you started around invasion and have been playing for a full year and a half) is likely familiar with much less than half of the cards available in the format. This handicaps their ability to compete in a format where players like Peter who are familiar with more sets. Effectively, a new player is building his deck from a cardpool half the size of the one the older player has access to, simply because learning thousands of cards is tough. Worse yet, this problem will be progressively more daunting for each successive generation of new players as the card pool grows and grows. This is probably one of the reasons for Tony Sculimbrene's somewhat knee-jerk reaction of doing away with Extended. While I don't find that solution appropriate, this problem does need to be mitigated - or Extended as a tourney format will slowly die (as the older players who favor it move on from the game).
The second problem we need to be concerned with is card interactions. Wizards R&D seem to be getting better with each set at evaluating card power and pre-testing cards to protect against degenerate decks (with the exception of ignoring type one). But as Extended grows (by more than five hundred cards a year), it will get progressively harder for them to find possible broken card interactions, which could lead to more emergency bannings - or worse, boring combo-dominated qualifier seasons.
Weighed against this, I think losing 'old favourites' and having to adjust one's thinking for each new Extended season is not a bad thing. Old favourites can still be reprinted to the base set, and innovation is meant to be part of the game.
The Whole Magic Online Thing
Is Wizards of the Coast trying to charge for something we can already get for free in Magic Online?
Sort of.
Then again, broadcast TV is free, but people still buy cable. This whole Apprentice versus Magic Online thing is very similar.
As an example, I am not an avid online player. My only interest in Apprentice, and only to get in practice; playtest decks, and get in drafts without having to buy packs. I don't play in online leagues, and with the exception of the odd Type One thingy, don't play in online tournaments. If you were like me, I would not worry about Magic Online. As cheap as it could get, people like me don't need it. We also have no reason to complain about it. Apprentice will still be there.
Let's say you are not like me. If you enjoy online play, and participate in leagues and/or tourneys and love Apprentice, then there is no reason you won't love Magic Online. In fact, it will be a godsend for you. Because chances are by now, you are sick of stupid rules arguments, poor time controls, and 'cheat' patches eating into your fun. And as promised, Magic Online does away with all that. And for those sharing Tony Sculimbrene's opinions (and interesting logical conclusions), I assure you that a computer is very capable of keeping track of rules, upkeep costs, and other such entanglements. Don't believe me? Beta test it.
Sure, it would be nicer if it was free, but few things in life are. It cost Wizards money to develop and will cost them a heck of a lot to maintain, so they need income from somewhere. Ongoing costs demand ongoing revenues. Would you rather pay a flat rate subscription fee and have the two drafts a week guy pay as much as the eight hours a day guy?
Now I'm not saying MO is all sunshine and happy days, but most of the complaints I have read about it have been unfounded. I have my own issues with a few aspects of the game, but I'll save those for its public release, and most are related to my motivations for playing online in the first place.
Final Note: Misetings
God, I'm having fun with that site. The Magic community as a whole has taken itself far too seriously for far too long. Egos are being deflated faster than the Hindenburg, and it's about time. Just be careful making fun of Oscar Tan, who has already threatened to use his authoritaaah to do naughty things to my bdominia account. It's also a site about Magic that isn't selling Magic, which is a refreshing change.
Anyway, I figure I should end this thing now, as if I get into Tiered Tournaments and other such problems, this thing will turn into a novel.
Until Next Time,
Mark Acheson
Nevyn on IRC and www.bdominia.com
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