Started playing Magic with Portal and Mirage. Currently play off-and-on Historic and Commander.

I love collecting older cards, and I’ve put together a full Portal set cube and about 20 thematic tribal decks with cards all from 2012 and earlier.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • what is the actual player retention rate from these sets?

    I would love to see this too. It’s like a company that doesn’t care about retaining any customers, just using the new customer data to show growth. The bottom falls out of that because any company/game/etc needs a core group of repeat and engaged long-term customers/users to keep it alive. That same group kept Magic alive for 30 years and they’re now being told the game isn’t for them anymore.

    I think they truly think of Magic like Fortnite, and just as a joke, but in that they don’t really care if someone plays for 2 weeks or 2 years, they just want as many people in the “system” as possible, thinking they will come and go throughout their lives. Maybe they see a new set that interests them and they come back in for a few months or years.

    I don’t think they care about or want to support the interests of players who play EVERY set and try to collect every card. I think that ship has sailed and it’s now just all about casting a much wider net of peripheral customers and perhaps that can keep them showing growth for a while.

    However, this all hinges on a couple very flimsy assumptions – (1) that UB sets will never lose appeal as In-Universe sets supposedly have, and (2) that there are enough of this type of customer-player. What happens when UB sets are scraping tier 2 and tier 3 properties and sales go down? What happens when there’s no more in-store in-person standard at all? At what point do they have to scale this back and return to “Classic Magic” to regain what was lost and try to grow the company again? What happens after 2 consecutive down-growth quarters for WoTC?



  • No Pioneer RCQ season is the most insane thing to me. Just starts to get really good with the Amalia and Sorin bans, good enough to convince me to buy into the format after staying out of constructed for 6 years and then this rug pull. No clue what they’re thinking here.

    most players I know were into at least partially to avoid UB sets

    This was why I bought in. I don’t want a rotating format and this was the only non-rotating format without UB.


  • I didn’t read the whole thing, mostly because I’m kinda scared to, but if this means UB sets are floating in through Standard and Pioneer than I think I’m done with the game for a little while. Pioneer was the last thing I was interested in and just bought into it in paper simply because it wasn’t on Arena and wasn’t part of the UB system but this changes that entirely for me. I don’t know what the heck they’re thinking here.


















  • Here’s the idea: There are four power brackets, and every Commander deck can be placed in one of those brackets by examining the cards and combinations in your deck and comparing them to lists we’ll need community help to create. You can imagine bracket one is the baseline of an average preconstructed deck or below and bracket four is high power. For the lower tiers, we may lean on a mixture of cards and a description of how the deck functions, and the higher tiers are likely defined by more explicit lists of cards.

    Ok… I’m listening 🤔

    In this system, your deck would be defined by its highest-bracket card or cards.

    This now becomes an eternal battle over which cards are in Tier 3 and which cards are in Tier 4 imo.

    For example, if Ancient Tomb is a bracket-four card, your deck would generally be considered a four. But if it’s part of a Tomb-themed deck, the conversation may be “My deck is a four with Ancient Tomb but a two without it. Is that okay with everyone?”

    This seems kinda gnarly to me. Perhaps it can work though by farming this decision out to every single play group.



  • Sad but necessary for the Professor to spend the first 7 minutes telling magic players to not harass or threaten people online anonymously.

    But onto the video - I have to disagree with the Professor entirely on this:

    [08:57] I was much more in favor of reasonably reprinting these cards so that they became affordable

    He first says that Commander will be more fun in 3 months, and then says he thinks WoTC should have just re-printed the problem cards to make them more available. I can’t understand how any entrenched player could believe this. Especially given just how long and how many reprints were needed for Sol Ring to get the cost down.

    But beyond that, if you first agree that the format is better without the cards, how and why are you suggesting to first reprint them to oblivion? There is a clear problem with fast mana in commander (and tutors and other things) and there’s no amount of reprinting that will ever solve this.

    He also says that Jeweled Lotus should never have been printed, but then says it should not have been banned? And instead just printed MORE? A card that should never have been printed should now be printed more? This makes no sense, and it’s inconsistent, which is very out of character for someone who approaches things very logically.

    Also, the comparisons to other formats like Pioneer make no sense to me. There is no comparison with these formats, Commander is completely unique compared to competitive 60-card formats. It’s not even apples and oranges, it’s apples and baseballs.

    Finally, his suggestion to put the cards on a watchlist as a waiting period does a huge disservice to players who don’t follow news closely. It would create a cash-out event for entrenched players and leave non-entrenched players as the bag-holders. That is nuts to me, and this is yet another reason why I agree with the path they took here.