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  • I'm glad that Standard is doing well again, but deeply disappointed that they apparently consider the experiment a success. I wish I could go back to a two-year Standard. Now it'll probably never happen.

    • This is obviously anecdotal, but I've talked to the owner of the LGS near me a lot, and specifically about Standard events. This is the latest they had to say about it:

      I'm not a fan of standard myself and neither are most of my patrons in the area, so I avoid running any regular standard events on principle, with the exception of the store championships because they give out some cool promos for that and it's the only available format for it.

      There isn't much interest in my area, and my reason for contacting them was to try and see if Standard was interesting and approachable enough for me to try and get into. My takeaways so far from looking into it:

      1. It's expensive to buy into, so you better love the deck you choose to play. There are many different archetypes for sure, but each one is filled with different rares/mythics that you will need to buy to play competitively.
      2. There's no reason to play competitively local with the low reps vs. competitively online. My only reason for playing in store would be to play Standard casually but why would I do that given #1 above.

      Below is a screenshot of MTG Goldfish's top 10 standard meta decks in the last 90 days. I averaged the cost to be $351, which is high enough to limit playing multiple decks. Mono red at $100 was the easiest buy in, but you have to love that play pattern to keep into it.

      I agree, I think it's way too premature to call this a success. I would much prefer to go back to 2-year cycles and limit the number of sets in Standard. They are touting the increased card pool as a positive, but I think it just opens up more rares/mythics into the pool to choose from which equates to loading up decks with more rares and mythics. I would love to see them experiment with limiting the number of rares and mythics decks can have in Standard.

      • Yeah, I think Wizards heard "it's too hard to maintain a collection for Standard" and took that to mean "cards need to stay legal in Standard for longer", when the actual takeaway should have been "cards in Standard need to be cheaper and easier to acquire". But "cheaper" cuts into their bottom line, and "easier" is something they have only indirect control over.

        Limiting rares and mythics sounds great to me. I keep thinking about how I'd like to play a format with only commons and uncommons -- in other words, only cards with a reasonable power level. They won't do it, of course, because, again, the bottom line.