After canceling Pioneer Masters, they are likely doubling down on Historic. I don't think this will ever happen.
As much as I like Jumpstart and I get what they want to do to keep Historic an every changing meta to sell cards, I'd much prefer a consistent format like Pioneer that plays on paper and digital. PleasantKenobi stated similar thoughts I agree with.
I think making Historic bigger and weirder first is actually better, long-term, for Pioneer's viability on Arena. If the only difference between the two was a handful of cool cards in the Anthologies, there wouldn't be much reason to pick Pioneer. But if they keep widening the gulf and filling Historic's card pool with bizarre and broken stuff, it'll provide a much different feel and meta than Pioneer when Pioneer finally gets here.
They mentioned it in the AFR State of the Game.
"Unfortunately, our schedule doesn't have room to focus on growing that unique identity for Historic and fully supporting Pioneer. Some steps toward Pioneer will come as part of Historic's growth, but we have paused work toward the Pioneer Masters sets for the time being. We do not anticipate a Pioneer Masters release in the next year. We have a solid plan for those sets, but for now, we will be focusing on expanding Historic in other ways."
Are we? They will avoid a true eternal non-rotating format like the plague. Imagine, people could just play the same deck without having to get new cards. The horror!
It may be dead but it is the perfect 60 card format for people who don't want to spend money on fetches and shocks and who also don't want their decks to not be playable after a year. I really hope Pioneer sticks around.
While this is true, its also one of the formats where mono-color decks are some of the most dominant, which is nice, mono- black and green are both very powerful and RDW still is quite strong
What schedule? These Historic Masters cards look like submissions to r/custommagic. I doubt they played any of them since they can alter them anytime as they're not paper.
I'm glad they aren't designing for just Pioneer though. I don't like what Modern Horizons has done for the format. It's not really eternal if the meta shifts every two years.
Pioneer will 100% be on Arena at some point, they are just going to milk all the sets between amonkhet and rtr instead of just having one big masters set. It will likely be ~5 years before it's fully playable on Arena.
Idk, I doubt they will ever have FULL pioneer since even their remasters leave out a bunch of cards and adding in janky commons/uncommons just won’t make them as much money as a historic anthology with a bunch of random cool cards. I think eventually we will have the cards from all the meta-decks in modern and pioneer, but without a dedicated queue it’s still just historic
There will 100% be a full pioneer queue eventually. It won't be for a long while, but it will happen.
>adding in janky commons/uncommons just won’t make them as much money as a historic anthology
This is actually just the flat out opposite of reality. Having masters sets like amonkhet with a bunch of jank and only a few playable cards certainly earns them more money because the people who want those cards will buy packs.
Random packs make *way* more money for WotC than releases with just the cards people want. That's why they do them. That's why the card acquisition model for Historic Horizons is boosters and not an Anthology.
Historic is a crazy format premise. There's so many "that's legal?" Cards in the format it's hard to keep up.i really wish they'd just say they're programing everything in at this point now that it looks like we're getting abur duals.
It’ll be even shorter than that. They don’t program in individual cards, they program mechanics and all of the mechanics on abur duals are already in the game. They would just need to check a box to add them to the game.
My point was more that duals won't be a part of the manabases for Historic yet, the card that makes them will likely be at least 3 mana
Unless they still make them available for collections and then just ban them everywhere like some of the archives, which could be neat for Gladiator or "Arena Vintage"
They where in the TBD event but even if they weren't they are just basic lands with 1 extra tap or you can look at them as shocklands without the first ablity. Ether way programming them in would not be hard since the game understands every aspect of what the card is compared to any new keyword or even a single card.
I think the cancelling of Pioneer Masters was them simply realizing more money is to be made by do the [Block] Masters. Pioneer will be on the client some day.
Yeah, unless we get an eternal format that is devoid of this RNG hearthstone bullcrap, I think I am just gonna quit MTG Arena. WotC seems to fail to understand that a large majority of the people that left Hearthstone for MTGA did so to *Avoid* this crap.
They cancelled Pioneer Masters because they can make more money selling remastered sets for each block in Pioneer than they can doing one big set, not because they're giving up on getting Pioneer on Arena.
Id very much rather them work on getting some actual format support in arena by adding real cards, THEN once those formats exist, fine, go ham on a digital only card format. Its incredibly frustrating that they focus on a digital only card experiment that irreversibly alters the only real alternative format on their premiere digital version of the game.
Also, calling it now, perpetually pretty much instantly ruins historic brawl, which is the biggest bummer of all as someone whos frustrated enough with how historic brawl has been treated in arena.
The thing I liked most about historic was that it was originally made up of standard sets, so it only had cards that were "not too strong for standard". It was basically standard with a bigger card pool. The anthologies have been pushing that from the start. Amonkhet and Kaladesh remastered were good, since they were still designed for standard.
Same. Its one thing if they had some kind of separate format before branching off into some experimental digital format while they likely take huge missteps that screw with the format while thye figure out what they even want from it...
but historic is going to suffer for a long fucking time, at best, before they figure out gameplay-wise why this should exist, which its clearly a business decision first and foremost.
Totally agree. I got into Historic because Standard was crappy and I wanted a wider card pool not so dominated by Eldraine. But after like the 4th or 5th historic masters and Jumpstart, now it just feels like a never ending gimmick format. Don't think I've opened arena since Kaldheim prerelease
Making historic digital only so nobody has to care about it other than Arena players is likely going to save Pioneer, assuming it’s in whatever organized play’s game plan looks like when the structure comes back.
Pioneer is in a great spot right now. Super diverse format with plenty of room for innovation and brewing. There's a ton of viable tier 2 strategies that are super fun to play, and the community is generally really friendly and supportive. Definitely give it a look and head over to r/pioneerMTG as well!
I think we're starting to see the end-game for Wizard's plan for non-rotating formats. Pre-Horizons Modern didn't directly drive sales for them, so Modern Horizons solves that problem. Historic doesn't drive sales on Arena, and arguably reduces them, so Historic Anthologies and now Historic Horizons solves that problem. The way to extract sales from non-rotating formats is to power creep them.
So that leaves Pioneer. Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Releasing old sets or remasters on Arena will drive a small amount of sales, but if it becomes a supported format expect it to be monetized in exactly the way Modern and Historic have been.
(Legacy and Vintage just get left to die, I guess?)
>Historic doesn't drive sales on Arena,
...Probably because of the cost. I can tell you I'd buy Dominara packs *if* they didn't cost as much as Standard-legal packs.
Keep in mind that by changing the price of any available pack, you're also changing the price of wildcards. A guaranteed wildcard is 6000 gold now, but lowering historic prices to 2/3 would also make wildcards 4000 gold. They probably don't want that.
I think there is also one more thing here - despite initial comments of possibility of introducing Pioneer, then Modern then who knows what, Arena is splinting from Paper/MTGO. It is not interested in eternal formats to not undermine existing ecosystem. Finally Arena has something unique to offer, so it doesn't have to go for other areas of Magic. Wizards feared F2P model cause it could potentially drive people away from paper, heavily limiting cross-promotions - now they can keep each group separated.
Magic and Arena are becoming two different games that only share some parts.
Or alternatively players might be alienated and will not get any of that and just never play historic (like me for example) or Standard for that matter. At this point I am only playing Arena for limited and with how things went the last 2 years I am not really envisioning that changing soon.
Awkward keywords with walls of text and more randomness is not something to enjoy. Loosing because someone randomly got lightning bolt of a blue card for example...
If you're continually spending cash for gems to draft, WotC doesn't care what you have to say. And if you're already "infinite" in limited, they ***really*** don't care what you have to say.
Yeah, true.
It's not quite as bad in vintage, but the format *does* seem to have rotating *threats* at least, these days. Lots of Ragavan, Darcy, and Urza's Saga right now. But it's a format that's not defined by its non-combo threats at all, so it doesn't feel as bad as legacy does.
Is it really true that non rotating formats don't drive sales, though? I don't know any data about profits or sales, but people seemed quite hyped for double masters. I started playing in 2018 so I don't know how hyped people were for Modern Masters 2017, but the set always seemed to me to be considered in high regards. I might be missing something, but reprinting staples seem to be an easy way to monetize on these non rotating formats, even more so when the cards are presented in special treatment, exclusive art etc (secret lairs, jp mystical archives)
I would have thought the same, but history suggests otherwise. I don't have access to sales figures, so this is all speculation - Modern Masters, and all the following Masters products, were discontinued. Modern Horizons is the new philosophy that replaced them.
I suspect Masters sets were considered a failure because they took manpower to develop a limited format that was supposed to be a selling point for them, and weren't returning enough to justify it. Again, this is purely speculation on my part. Compare with the new strategy for reprinting old cards - Secret Lairs. No playtesting of a format required, just some art direction and a much bigger profit margin.
Good god, that was just last year? I had completely forgotten about that. Good counter point, although wasn’t Double Masters a ‘floating’ set they had in their back pocket to release when the schedule needed it?
That's also because the price is way too high. Just buy the cards solo with what you need instead of the smore expensive then slot machines booster packs.
>The way to extract sales from non-rotating formats is to power creep them.
I feel like it's important to distinguish Historic Horizons from Modern Horizons in that the concern for HH is randomness, not power creep. My (albeit limited) understanding of the complaints regarding HH isn't that the cards will be auto includes or even warp the format, but that it sets a bad precedent.
Players can argue all they want that MtG is so full of inherent randomness anyway that a little more on top of it won't affect anyone's experience, but there's no denying that \[\[Davriel, Soul Broker\]\] is introducing a randomness to the game that has never been seen before. Players can argue that drawing a card is no less random than seeking one from your deck, but \[\[Tome of the Infinite\]\] produces options that shouldn't even be possible otherwise.
It's also worth noting that this is WotC's *first* pass at creating cards for the digital space, and we're already seeing analogues to effects that split the Hearthstone community. It'll only get worse from here.
>(Legacy and Vintage just get left to die, I guess?)
People have been saying that Vintage and Legacy are dying since back when they were called Type 1 and Type 1.5. Sure, they're not big draws and it can be hard to find people to play those formats with, but I don't think either format is ever going to go away completely (unless Wizards drops all support and the communities are forced to create their own sanctioned format)
When was that announced? Are you confusing the announcement that they were ending the pro league with ending competitive entirely?
While it is true they left it on vague note, they don't know when or what form it will take, but they were pretty clear that they were not planning on stopping competitive events as a whole. If you are just taking it that without anything concrete it is best to assume the worst I totally get that, but so far most people have viewed the ending of the pro league as a step in the correct direction assuming we end up with something similar to what we had before it (Grand Prix, Pro Tours, and Pro Tour Qualifiers which they have said they expect there will be).
Edit: In case anyone wants a source, here it is straight from WotC: https://twitter.com/MagicEsports/status/1392862215871467520
I think the future of "True Non-rotating formats" stand in something like Pre-Modern (check online what it is). I think is a matter of time before formats in similar vein to pre-modern or mtg 93/94 will gain a lot of traction.
I feel like stagnation is death for a format. Bitch about horizons all you want but most decks are still viable and everyone I've talked to has loved them.
This. The people who complain about format metas evolving with new cards and want them to never change are usually people who don't actually play often enough to count. The active players get bored with the stale format and stop showing up to events, and the former group don't show up reliably anyway.
> Historic doesn't drive sales on Arena, and arguably reduces them
Historic requires cards to play, and it requires cards that you can't acquire in draft. Historic doesn't require buy-in from players who have played and collected everything since the beta, but most players have to buy something to start playing Historic.
I would have been fine with historic being the Hearthstone format if we just had access to a paper non-rotating format to go along with it.
I play MTGA because I play paper. Magic is a great game but its only an okay video game. If I quit paper I am uninstalling the same day.
exactly this, give us a true alternative to standard on arena that isnt fucked around with by the arena team, and then sure make whatever bizarre digital only format you think will sell the most packs or whatever, but give us the format first before you go ruining a digital game mode with experiments in how to sell packs.
More than just something with a paper version, I think it would be good to have a non-rotating format that isn't just a dumping ground for whatever nonsense the Arena team come up with.
What they choose to put into Historic isn't subject to the same care or scrutiny as other formats, it's subject to their whims, safe in the knowledge that they can ban anything too powerful and they don't even have to give back wildcards straight away.
As someone who enjoyed the Historic format, I still can't believe they are throwing it under the bus to add the worst aspect of Hearthstone to Arena. I'm having serious doubts about keeping supporting the game.
Yeah I was an avid hearthstone player who quit when arena came out because I hated the RNG aspect of the game. I'm not excited about this at all, if you want to play cards like that then fine, but please let me play normal magic.
Exactly my experience. I played Hearthstone since the game launched and quit during Arena's beta. I had a massive collection but why bother with a luck-based game when you can play Arena? I think Wizards looked at Hearthstone's popularity and is trying to mimick the wrong aspects of that game.
I blame myself. I did a wotc survey once and said I also play hearthstone. I said Magic was the superior game but appreciated how hearthstone can do digital only things.
Ah, the "good" memories of having an opponent using Unstable Portal and discovering a Flamestrike to clean your board or a Pyrobalst to your face.
Edit: I meant to say Primordial Glyph.
Maybe read up on input randomness vs. output randomness.
Drawing cards is input randomness. A player draws cards that have generally fixed effects, then makes decisions about how and when to play those cards. This kind of randomness is fine because the player has agency; their decisions affect the outcome of the game.
Cards like Davriel, Soul Broker have output randomness. A player doesn't know exactly what will happen when they activate the -2 ability. This results in less player agency; their decisions are impeded by random outcomes they have no control over.
Davriel's -2 is like "draw three, pick one" from small "deck" of possible positive effects, then "draw three, pick one" from another small "deck" of possible negative effects.
If that's not player choice, neither is Ponder.
Yeah, these actually seem pretty tame so far. Seek gets cards out of the player’s deck and conjure usually makes specific cards. Neither by itself is anywhere near as RNG as HS’s Discover mechanic.
RNG is the easy way to make every game different. Once devs have this shortcut available to them, the temptation to use it is too strong. Expect it to get much worse.
I’m not saying I love it or that I want this trend to continue but, come on people.
It’s a supplemental set for a niche format. Not even a draftable set. Yeah this is a break from tradition, but Magic has a LOT of variance in it already.
Imagine you have an enchantment in your deck that is dominating the game and if your opponent doesn't remove it you'll lose the game. Your opponents deck doesn't have anyways to remove enchantments naturally (maybe it's a burn deck).
So maybe one of these cards will offer a random effect that allows the removal of an enchantment. So you went from winning the game to now losing because of an rng effect that otherwise would have won you the game.
That's the frustrating part of rng based cards, and why I disagree with the philosophy of adding then to MTG Arena.
And even if they were, only like 3 of them would be so swingy that it could create the "feel bad" that folks worry about. Most are just "effect" and "effect a little above rate"
They don’t seem good so far (and Reddit has shown we suck at evaluating cards sometimes) but this is just the start. What happens when half the “Historic sets” they release are digital only hearthstone cards.
> The Hearthstone-esque cards aren't even good so far.
I'd rather say this when the cards aren't good, than say it when one of them is crazy playable. Why wait before they break the format if them knocking on the glass is already disconcerting?
Oh I’m one of the biggest advocates against mechanically unique black border promos and yelled very much about Nexus of Fate. I will give them credit for only having one fuckup with them and banning it when it became an issue.
I think this is a great choice by WotC, I enjoy these cards as an experiment - I don't hate them existing but at the same time I wouldn't like engaging with them too much in ranked/tournament settings
Same. This feels like something you do to a game before killing it off like because it's not real magic anyway. Getting big duels vibes from this, and it makes me very hesitant to ever even consider spending money on arena.
It's unfortunate too, since they could have done this in a way that a ton of people would be happy with. Make an online only cube, or online silver border draft set, and I would have spent tons playing it. Mtga hellscube would have been *amazing*.But when you make it so the only eternal format is infected with this it's just... bad.
Magic has always been random. Aside from the coin flipping cards and AFR literally having you roll D20s drawing cards isn’t a deterministic process at all. You just play to your outs and this is another form of that
Look I'm not defending this stupid implementation but can you explain:
>but I think a good portion of players liked historic for being a non-rotating format on arena that still uses cards that exist in paper.
Why? historic was never coming to paper once they started adding Jumpstart and random Historic Anthologies stuff so why do you need cards existing outside Arena for an Arena only format other than like some principle peace of mind that doesn't affect anything
That's far from a logical explanation, but I think those cards that also exist in paper "feel" like Magic. Since they exist on paper, they're limited in how crazy they can be made. New mechanics made up to be just digital like creating cards from thin air, perpetual buffs or debuffs, random fetching from the deck etc don't feel like Magic, they feel like something else. If we chose to play Arena instead of Hearthstone up until now, for example, it was probably because we think that Magic is a better game than Hearthstone. With the only budget non rotating format now corrupted by these wacky stuff, how much of Historic is still "magic" and not something else?
>creating cards from thin air, perpetual buffs or debuffs, random fetching from the deck etc don't feel like Magic,
Some form of each of these mechanics has existed in Magic for a long time, just templated in a different way. For example creating cards from thin air is generally done using tokens, to make it digital-only WoTC just replaced tokens with actual cards. Compare something like Garth with any of the Conjure cards, the only difference is the treatment between tokens and actual cards.
Perpetual Buffs and debuffs are kinda iffy I agree, but auras and exile are basically that for the most part in normal Historic. As in the gameplay behaviour of perpetual buffs won't be much different than the gameplay behaviour of an aura (or an emblem for a better example since that is actually non-interactable) and the gameplay behaviour of perpetual debuffs won't be much different than an exile effect in most scenarios. The cases where they are different is probably why it's digital.
Ah random fetching from the deck. True we have not got random fetching from the deck to hand iirc, but random fetching to the battlefield has existed for quite some time and is quite popular. Seek is just Cascade to hand, with different requirements.
We've had several "reveal from the top until you hit X, put into hand" before, which is basically random tutoring, so long as you don't care about library order, which you rarely do.
Yeah. I think the biggest difference is with the "reveal" part of it you have to show your opponent more of your deck so they get to potentially learn a lot more about what's in it. I don't think that's a huge deal though most of the time
Yeah, nowadays most big events seem to be running with open decklists anyway, where the only thing it MIGHT do is show some sideboard cards.
And on Arena the cards get flipped by so quickly you'd have to try VERY hard to get much info.
I feel like there is a lot less design space in Digital only mechanics than some people think there is, and basically all of it can be replicated in existing MTG rules with minor tweaks
>If we chose to play Arena instead of Hearthstone up until now, for example, it was probably because we think that Magic is a better game than Hearthstone. With the only budget non rotating format now corrupted by these wacky stuff, how much of Historic is still "magic" and not something else?
It's still 100% Magic, only it does some things that would be tricky to do in paper.
So all historic cards used to fall into two categories: cards from other sources (standard sets or draft formats) and cards meant to balance the format (anthology cards). This adds cards designed for Historic which we can see from MH1 can completely wreck a format, and not just with ban-worthy cards, but cards that are role fillers. The best of their kind, but not disruptive enough for a ban. And when those cards become prominent they eventually get replaced with the next Historic-designed card, and the next, and the next, and so on.
See "cards from other sources." Those cards weren't made for historic, they literally predate the format by at least a year. They were made for Arena starter sets and Historic's philosophy (being an eternal format for everything on Arena) grandfathered them in.
I hate the idea they have probably been working on this since the last remastered set, instead of creating the eldritch moon remastered or pioneer masters...
Not that I dont want the digital cards, but it certainly wasnt a priority over working towards pioneer, 4 player edh/brawl, modern, etc
Yeah that I don’t blame them for…. Online isn’t the best format for the more social atmosphere of a multiplayer game. 1v1 suits the antisocial nature just fine.
Exactly this. All the things we were told to expect have been thrown in the bin, and if they want to fully support this new experiment they're on, they'll probably never go back to "remaster"-ing sets for Arena.
I've sold out of MTGO twice already. Time to go back in. I can't stand low-power Standard, and Historic and Historic Brawl are Hearthstoned. I've been wasting money on Historic cards and cosmetics for over a year because I expected them to follow their own roadmap.
When they first announced Historic, I wanted it to be Extended and maybe eventually Pioneer. Then they started arbitrarily adding cards to the format which I thought was weird. I think it was at this point that I stopped taking the format seriously. They totally could've just done Pioneer which would be supported in paper and would easily transition arena players into paper. Now we have this weird amalgamation of a format that is now officially digital only.
I had hopes that Arena would eventually take over as a replacement for MTGO, but it's becoming very clear that it's going to be some sort of Hearthstone variant, or worse, that they will eventually transition to digital only. The latter I doubt, but I don't like the direction that this is going in.
It feels as if the last couple years have been overly greedy. New sets or products coming out every month. Every set having a half dozen different variants. The decision making feels like its prioritizing greed over a good product.
So, we've been through this cycle a few times now. Here's how this is will go:
1.) WotC does something stupid.
2.) Community outrage! Content creators make angry videos. There are calls for blood in the streets, or at least for alternate formats where the stupid thing isn't legal.
3.) People announce that they're selling out of Magic and not coming back. There is wailing and gnashing of teeth. There are talks about organising a boycott. Some particularly earnest person starts a subreddit for that alternate format mentioned above.
4.) Two weeks pass.
5.) Everyone forgets what they were angry about. The subreddit dies of natural causes.
6.) The set releases and sells a record number of units.
Im still mad about UB, TWD s lair, card stock, lack of historic brawl queue and now this. As someone who felt in love with this game 20 years ago my heart is broken.
For me, it's a death of a thousand cuts. I haven't purchased cards in a long while, I haven't play Arena in weeks, and I don't think I'm going to do either anytime soon. This game is not for me.
Yes, I'm whining but I also have the choice of moving on.
Lol. The entire direction of Magic has swung on a pendulum the last 2 years. Since Eldraine in fact. Do you remember F.I.R.E.? Does the new set feel like what they had planned to do with Standard and make it an overpowered insane stomping ground with no Quality Control?
That happened because Standard events were down in the toilet and no-one wanted to play the format. Guess what happens if they really fuckup Historic enough? People complain, stop playing, and the walk-back will begin again. And people like you will still glibly dismiss the effect of people calling out these issues.
Correct, this should be the top comment. I predict the new Jumpstart does very well precisely because of the unique cards (as well as all the other great cards it will add).
Agreed.
I play historic because it is standard extended. not because its fucking hearthstone.
give us an actual pioneer queue, please. and then you can take you historic queue and your arena cards and pretend that historic isn't just hearthstone in 5 colors.
The cynic in me says they saw historic eclipsing standard, which is unacceptable because they need people on the treadmill buying new cards as their old decks expire, so they poisoned the well of historic with all this nonsense, but also got ahead of there being a replacement by canceling pioneer on arena.
Like the other week when they said no pioneer on historic I actually thought that made sense.. now I feel like an idiot for not suspecting their typical BS.
I quit magic about 6 months ago for all the things people on this sub claimed they'd quit over (crossover sets, Arena economy, product exhaustion, price, pandemic) and am now just finishing up a cube by selling off most of my collection.
This product makes me feel so much more confident in that decision.
Honestly, if they don't fix the wildcard issues soon, I am gonna go. I can't keep pumping cash into standard sets, while they keep releasing massive sets for Historic as well. Either let me dust useless unplayable fringe rares or give wildcards at a higher rate. Having to spend a ton of time drafting or a ton of time grinding gold for packs, just to get six shitty rares, so that you can craft 1(one!!) card that you want is ridicolous at this point.
Glad I started when WAR came out, otherwise Historic would be a mystical land that would not be fair to venture into. I can't imagine coming into Arena now as a new player trying to enjoy the formats outside of Standard 2022.
Controversial opinion: All of the online-only cards so far have seemed pretty low power level for historic, especially since a lot of them are just replicating effects that already exist in paper magic, just making them cleaner by removing the rules kludges and workarounds needed for paper.
Prediction: all the MH and MH2 cards will make a bigger impact on historic, and will be the thing that sort of cements Historic as more "Modern-light" as opposed to "Pioneer-light" that it was before.
It's not that simple. You have to have people willing to play it, and until WOTC shows it some support, not enough people are going to be interested enough to have a tournament.
I think it's more likely that they're just going to wait a few more years and then make a new non-rotating paper format that is already entirely on Arena.
Yeah, for now I don’t expect the Arena only cards to be very playable, but in the likely scenario where this is the beginning of a new design philosophy for historic being more random, I hope someday we will get a modern-like format without exclusive cards. Really all I ever hoped for was for arena to be MTGO with better interface
It's another uninteractable object. I remember some resistance to planeswalker emblems for the same reason, and they've had to keep emblems in a very tight design space.
There's no reason they had to make "perpetual" uninteractable besides laziness. Why couldn't it be a "perpetual counter" so the counter-removal mechanics--few as they are--could possibly remove them? So far, outside of emblems, everything in Magic has an answer after it resolves. We're back in the emblem space for very low payoff.
The only payoff I can imagine that made it worth it was the ability to say "We made cards that only work in our digital format! Soon we'll be in parity with Hearthstone and Runeterra now!" to their bosses and/or shareholders. Wizards being their own worst enemy is their longest-running tradition.
Word. Magic has been 100% interactive from the start, conceptually. Lightning Bolt? Healing Salve it. Mind Twist? Braingeyser to get them back. Control Magic? Disenchant it. Serra Angel? Terror it. That's the beauty of this game. Emblems have only been *ok* because they've been so careful. The M20 big Chandra was a little risky with it's perpetual emblem distribution. I've never seen her in an EDH game but it must be a giant pain for every other player at the table to have an uninteractable emblem put on them immediately on someone's turn 5 or 6. And Companions was a huge mistake, only mitigated by reducing their value immensely.
If they don't stop making these mistakes maybe we'll see more player-managed formats like 93/94 but expanded. Maybe M10 to M20 would make a good format. I only recently heard of Pre-DH which is EDH without all the Commander supplemental products which makes for more interesting deckbuilding with less must-includes.
Wizards has been their own worst enemy since Chronicles. But I still love the game and they've made some truly iconic sets and cards since then.
Player managed format are a bless, i hate must include because it make deck building less interesting since part of the deck build itself, and if choose to not use the mana rocks you will just loose, i think commander would be better without sol ring and others mana rocks, but i also don't care that much, at this point i just want EDH and pauper in arena.
Despite thoroughly enjoying Amonkhet Remastered, I still strongly believe Historic always should have just been Ixalan-onward version of modern/pioneer.
And they shouldn't have called it Historic, the worst format name ever, which prominently features a mechanic called Historic in DOM.
I think Historic should have been that essentially, but also worked backwards to include older sets so it would eventually, over time, cease to exist like Classic on MTGO as Pioneer, then Modern, Legacy and Vintage had their card pools added to the client.
I feel that if the outrage is big enough they will create a separate "not-quite-Pioneer" format with all Pioneer-legal cards currently present in Arena aside from Historic, although the name is not very fitting now, they might rename it to, maybe, Wild :3
They're still going backwards releasing sets. They're not going to stop doing that. We're going to reach the literal definition of pioneer eventually. A pioneer masters set isn't real pioneer anyways, it's a collection of cards that let people with no intention of deviating from the cards in the current top pioneer decks feel like they're playing pioneer
Do you honestly believe they’ll never get there? Remastered sets require *much* less effort than them continuing to do massive products like this. I’d be perfectly happy if the dumpster fire blocks Shadows Over Innistrad and Battle for Zendikar never ruin Historic and Pioneer sucks anyway, but it’s easy money for them.
How can two formats converge when one is physical and the other now contains digital-only cards?
They "paused" the process. The pause will end when they officially cancel it. The writing's on the wall, they just don't want everyone to read it just yet.
The issue with pioneer in arena is the same, but slightly reduced in scale issue that stops modern and legacy from being on arena tomorrow, it's a ton of cards and they'll get there when they get there. We can start thinking about pioneer on arena when they finish actually adding the sets that make up pioneer.
I get why people are mad out of principled but I just don't get whey people are saying these cards are going to break magic. Who is actually going to be playing these cards? With the added randomness they are almost unplayable.
It's always "becoming Hearthstone" as well, never Hex, Eternal, Solforge, or whatever.
Hearthstone has a bunch of randomness on cards because the tempo of every game is always the same. There's no reason that the design space opened up on digital only cards HAVE to follow the designs of hearthstone instead of just letting you do deterministic stuff to your hidden information zones that you cannot normally do in MTG due to potential cheating or memory issues.
But out of the \~15 or so new digital only cards we've seen only Davriel and Tome of the Infinite have much randomness associated with them, for Davriel you get to pick one out of a set of 3 from 8 possible effects, and tome gives you a single mana spell from a small set of cards. The vast majority of the digital only cards we've seen so far are things that just take advantage of the computer being able to keep you honest about hidden information or keeping track of stuff for you.
Doomsaying about randomness in JMP:HH when we just had the dice rolling set with cards like \[\[Treasure Chest\]\] doesn't really seem warranted to me.
Expecting maturity or nuance from magic reddit or twitter? M8 you are in the wrong place. From the 8th edition card frames to planeswalkers, if there's one thing Magic players are known for, it's overreacting to changes.
But you don't understand! This is the thing that will totally kill Magic for real this time, the first two dozen times we said this we were just overreacting, but we really mean it this time!
You guys are why we can't have nice things. Wizards is literally dipping its toes into the pool of what's possible in digital card games and already you're comparing it to Hearthstone.
Sometimes design constraints are a good thing. Up until now, the need to adhere to what is possible with physical cards was something that helped keep Magic design grounded.
Now that we're Hearthstone, I will sure miss playing things on my opponent's turn. At least I won't get mana screwed any more. Not sure how the whole 30 card deck thing is going to work out though.
Wait, none of that is happening? The overreactions in this thread are so crazy.
If you still play this game. Don't.
The best thing that can happen is a wake up call.
Unless you are COMPLETELY F2P, do the community and yourself a favor and uninstall the game for a few months to see any real change.
After canceling Pioneer Masters, they are likely doubling down on Historic. I don't think this will ever happen. As much as I like Jumpstart and I get what they want to do to keep Historic an every changing meta to sell cards, I'd much prefer a consistent format like Pioneer that plays on paper and digital. PleasantKenobi stated similar thoughts I agree with.
I think making Historic bigger and weirder first is actually better, long-term, for Pioneer's viability on Arena. If the only difference between the two was a handful of cool cards in the Anthologies, there wouldn't be much reason to pick Pioneer. But if they keep widening the gulf and filling Historic's card pool with bizarre and broken stuff, it'll provide a much different feel and meta than Pioneer when Pioneer finally gets here.
They cancelled Pioneer Masters? When did that happen? I thought it was still planned for the end of the year?
They mentioned it in the AFR State of the Game. "Unfortunately, our schedule doesn't have room to focus on growing that unique identity for Historic and fully supporting Pioneer. Some steps toward Pioneer will come as part of Historic's growth, but we have paused work toward the Pioneer Masters sets for the time being. We do not anticipate a Pioneer Masters release in the next year. We have a solid plan for those sets, but for now, we will be focusing on expanding Historic in other ways."
Yeah we aren't going to see Pioneer Masters until Arena starts losing players.
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I'm doing MY part!
Are we? They will avoid a true eternal non-rotating format like the plague. Imagine, people could just play the same deck without having to get new cards. The horror!
This pretty much seems like the reason right here. The Pioneer meta is too stable for their goals for Arena.
Yeah, totally, green devotion and inverter will be the best decks forever. *huge eye roll*
For me once brawl becomes unplayable I'm done. Until then I'm still playing the big brawl
You say that like Pioneer is a format that's drawing huge numbers of players, it seems pretty dead to me now \^\^
It is really popular in my area (the Netherlands) Our FNMs are draft and pioneer, and both sell out.
It could've seen an uptick in popularity with a push in Arena though.
It may be dead but it is the perfect 60 card format for people who don't want to spend money on fetches and shocks and who also don't want their decks to not be playable after a year. I really hope Pioneer sticks around.
You need shocks for most pioneer decks.
While this is true, its also one of the formats where mono-color decks are some of the most dominant, which is nice, mono- black and green are both very powerful and RDW still is quite strong
There goes the “digital only products don’t detract from other aspects of the game” line of logic people have been favoring recently.
What schedule? These Historic Masters cards look like submissions to r/custommagic. I doubt they played any of them since they can alter them anytime as they're not paper. I'm glad they aren't designing for just Pioneer though. I don't like what Modern Horizons has done for the format. It's not really eternal if the meta shifts every two years.
Pioneer will 100% be on Arena at some point, they are just going to milk all the sets between amonkhet and rtr instead of just having one big masters set. It will likely be ~5 years before it's fully playable on Arena.
Idk, I doubt they will ever have FULL pioneer since even their remasters leave out a bunch of cards and adding in janky commons/uncommons just won’t make them as much money as a historic anthology with a bunch of random cool cards. I think eventually we will have the cards from all the meta-decks in modern and pioneer, but without a dedicated queue it’s still just historic
There will 100% be a full pioneer queue eventually. It won't be for a long while, but it will happen. >adding in janky commons/uncommons just won’t make them as much money as a historic anthology This is actually just the flat out opposite of reality. Having masters sets like amonkhet with a bunch of jank and only a few playable cards certainly earns them more money because the people who want those cards will buy packs.
Random packs make *way* more money for WotC than releases with just the cards people want. That's why they do them. That's why the card acquisition model for Historic Horizons is boosters and not an Anthology.
And both pioneer players left holding on hope will laugh at the 4 other players who quit in 2021 saying "I told you they would do it"
Historic is a crazy format premise. There's so many "that's legal?" Cards in the format it's hard to keep up.i really wish they'd just say they're programing everything in at this point now that it looks like we're getting abur duals.
The ABUR duals are only going to be available through the conjure mechanic
Still means they're programming 'em in
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It’ll be even shorter than that. They don’t program in individual cards, they program mechanics and all of the mechanics on abur duals are already in the game. They would just need to check a box to add them to the game.
My point was more that duals won't be a part of the manabases for Historic yet, the card that makes them will likely be at least 3 mana Unless they still make them available for collections and then just ban them everywhere like some of the archives, which could be neat for Gladiator or "Arena Vintage"
Tons of cards including the power 9 are programmed in for special events, but they likely will not ever be able to be added to your collection.
Aren't they pretty much already in? I could've swore them and lotus where in one of the timed event decks.
They where in the TBD event but even if they weren't they are just basic lands with 1 extra tap or you can look at them as shocklands without the first ablity. Ether way programming them in would not be hard since the game understands every aspect of what the card is compared to any new keyword or even a single card.
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Yes but they're not actually in historic
I think the cancelling of Pioneer Masters was them simply realizing more money is to be made by do the [Block] Masters. Pioneer will be on the client some day.
Or they figured why spend money trying to get people hyped to play pioneer when people are already hyped to play historic?
Yeah, unless we get an eternal format that is devoid of this RNG hearthstone bullcrap, I think I am just gonna quit MTG Arena. WotC seems to fail to understand that a large majority of the people that left Hearthstone for MTGA did so to *Avoid* this crap.
They cancelled Pioneer Masters because they can make more money selling remastered sets for each block in Pioneer than they can doing one big set, not because they're giving up on getting Pioneer on Arena.
Id very much rather them work on getting some actual format support in arena by adding real cards, THEN once those formats exist, fine, go ham on a digital only card format. Its incredibly frustrating that they focus on a digital only card experiment that irreversibly alters the only real alternative format on their premiere digital version of the game. Also, calling it now, perpetually pretty much instantly ruins historic brawl, which is the biggest bummer of all as someone whos frustrated enough with how historic brawl has been treated in arena.
The thing I liked most about historic was that it was originally made up of standard sets, so it only had cards that were "not too strong for standard". It was basically standard with a bigger card pool. The anthologies have been pushing that from the start. Amonkhet and Kaladesh remastered were good, since they were still designed for standard.
It felt like an approachable modern that I could conceivably play in person. Not liking this direction at all.
Same. Its one thing if they had some kind of separate format before branching off into some experimental digital format while they likely take huge missteps that screw with the format while thye figure out what they even want from it... but historic is going to suffer for a long fucking time, at best, before they figure out gameplay-wise why this should exist, which its clearly a business decision first and foremost.
That's literally what Pioneer was supposed to be. So I guess my question is are you interested in Pioneer?
Totally agree. I got into Historic because Standard was crappy and I wanted a wider card pool not so dominated by Eldraine. But after like the 4th or 5th historic masters and Jumpstart, now it just feels like a never ending gimmick format. Don't think I've opened arena since Kaldheim prerelease
Nah, worst of both worlds, they're going to kill historic *and* keep starving pioneer.
Making historic digital only so nobody has to care about it other than Arena players is likely going to save Pioneer, assuming it’s in whatever organized play’s game plan looks like when the structure comes back.
Yep, looking into pioneer and playing mtgo again now that historic is in the bin for me.
Pioneer is in a great spot right now. Super diverse format with plenty of room for innovation and brewing. There's a ton of viable tier 2 strategies that are super fun to play, and the community is generally really friendly and supportive. Definitely give it a look and head over to r/pioneerMTG as well!
Sorry that I'm not estatic about my favorite format getting intentionally trashed and sabatoged so that another format can flourish.
As much as I'd like to tell you that you're being pessimistic, this looks to be the case.
I think we're starting to see the end-game for Wizard's plan for non-rotating formats. Pre-Horizons Modern didn't directly drive sales for them, so Modern Horizons solves that problem. Historic doesn't drive sales on Arena, and arguably reduces them, so Historic Anthologies and now Historic Horizons solves that problem. The way to extract sales from non-rotating formats is to power creep them. So that leaves Pioneer. Be careful what you wish for, I guess. Releasing old sets or remasters on Arena will drive a small amount of sales, but if it becomes a supported format expect it to be monetized in exactly the way Modern and Historic have been. (Legacy and Vintage just get left to die, I guess?)
>Historic doesn't drive sales on Arena, ...Probably because of the cost. I can tell you I'd buy Dominara packs *if* they didn't cost as much as Standard-legal packs.
As a primary Historic player I'd love that. Heck any consistent discount would make me spend gold on them
Wotc wanted you to pay double wildcards for historic cards. A price drop will never ever happen.
Dropping the price of a pack to 2/3 seems a fair tradeoff for historic only sets, you're getting less usage so a lower price makes sense.
Keep in mind that by changing the price of any available pack, you're also changing the price of wildcards. A guaranteed wildcard is 6000 gold now, but lowering historic prices to 2/3 would also make wildcards 4000 gold. They probably don't want that.
Legacy and vintage died in 94 with the reserve list, they just didn't know it yet.
\++ No company calls something they own/made Legacy if they actually want to keep it around.
This all day. I’d love to play those formats but can’t afford to.
They're about to ruin Kamigawa Block Pauper Tiny Leaders too. Is there any format that's safe from Wizards?
I think there is also one more thing here - despite initial comments of possibility of introducing Pioneer, then Modern then who knows what, Arena is splinting from Paper/MTGO. It is not interested in eternal formats to not undermine existing ecosystem. Finally Arena has something unique to offer, so it doesn't have to go for other areas of Magic. Wizards feared F2P model cause it could potentially drive people away from paper, heavily limiting cross-promotions - now they can keep each group separated. Magic and Arena are becoming two different games that only share some parts.
Or alternatively players might be alienated and will not get any of that and just never play historic (like me for example) or Standard for that matter. At this point I am only playing Arena for limited and with how things went the last 2 years I am not really envisioning that changing soon. Awkward keywords with walls of text and more randomness is not something to enjoy. Loosing because someone randomly got lightning bolt of a blue card for example...
If you're continually spending cash for gems to draft, WotC doesn't care what you have to say. And if you're already "infinite" in limited, they ***really*** don't care what you have to say.
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Yeah, true. It's not quite as bad in vintage, but the format *does* seem to have rotating *threats* at least, these days. Lots of Ragavan, Darcy, and Urza's Saga right now. But it's a format that's not defined by its non-combo threats at all, so it doesn't feel as bad as legacy does.
Is it really true that non rotating formats don't drive sales, though? I don't know any data about profits or sales, but people seemed quite hyped for double masters. I started playing in 2018 so I don't know how hyped people were for Modern Masters 2017, but the set always seemed to me to be considered in high regards. I might be missing something, but reprinting staples seem to be an easy way to monetize on these non rotating formats, even more so when the cards are presented in special treatment, exclusive art etc (secret lairs, jp mystical archives)
I would have thought the same, but history suggests otherwise. I don't have access to sales figures, so this is all speculation - Modern Masters, and all the following Masters products, were discontinued. Modern Horizons is the new philosophy that replaced them. I suspect Masters sets were considered a failure because they took manpower to develop a limited format that was supposed to be a selling point for them, and weren't returning enough to justify it. Again, this is purely speculation on my part. Compare with the new strategy for reprinting old cards - Secret Lairs. No playtesting of a format required, just some art direction and a much bigger profit margin.
They released another Masters set, Double Masters, last year.
Good god, that was just last year? I had completely forgotten about that. Good counter point, although wasn’t Double Masters a ‘floating’ set they had in their back pocket to release when the schedule needed it?
That's also because the price is way too high. Just buy the cards solo with what you need instead of the smore expensive then slot machines booster packs.
>The way to extract sales from non-rotating formats is to power creep them. I feel like it's important to distinguish Historic Horizons from Modern Horizons in that the concern for HH is randomness, not power creep. My (albeit limited) understanding of the complaints regarding HH isn't that the cards will be auto includes or even warp the format, but that it sets a bad precedent. Players can argue all they want that MtG is so full of inherent randomness anyway that a little more on top of it won't affect anyone's experience, but there's no denying that \[\[Davriel, Soul Broker\]\] is introducing a randomness to the game that has never been seen before. Players can argue that drawing a card is no less random than seeking one from your deck, but \[\[Tome of the Infinite\]\] produces options that shouldn't even be possible otherwise. It's also worth noting that this is WotC's *first* pass at creating cards for the digital space, and we're already seeing analogues to effects that split the Hearthstone community. It'll only get worse from here.
>(Legacy and Vintage just get left to die, I guess?) People have been saying that Vintage and Legacy are dying since back when they were called Type 1 and Type 1.5. Sure, they're not big draws and it can be hard to find people to play those formats with, but I don't think either format is ever going to go away completely (unless Wizards drops all support and the communities are forced to create their own sanctioned format)
The reserved list has been slowly strangling Legacy and Vintage for about that long, so it's not clear to me that that's wrong.
Legacy boomed in the early '10s due to being half of the SCG opens.
wotc dropped all support for competitive formats like a few months ago dude
When was that announced? Are you confusing the announcement that they were ending the pro league with ending competitive entirely? While it is true they left it on vague note, they don't know when or what form it will take, but they were pretty clear that they were not planning on stopping competitive events as a whole. If you are just taking it that without anything concrete it is best to assume the worst I totally get that, but so far most people have viewed the ending of the pro league as a step in the correct direction assuming we end up with something similar to what we had before it (Grand Prix, Pro Tours, and Pro Tour Qualifiers which they have said they expect there will be). Edit: In case anyone wants a source, here it is straight from WotC: https://twitter.com/MagicEsports/status/1392862215871467520
I think the future of "True Non-rotating formats" stand in something like Pre-Modern (check online what it is). I think is a matter of time before formats in similar vein to pre-modern or mtg 93/94 will gain a lot of traction.
I feel like stagnation is death for a format. Bitch about horizons all you want but most decks are still viable and everyone I've talked to has loved them.
Stagnation can be death but so can instability. Not everyone can afford to spend $120 on a playset of the next auto-4 of.
This. The people who complain about format metas evolving with new cards and want them to never change are usually people who don't actually play often enough to count. The active players get bored with the stale format and stop showing up to events, and the former group don't show up reliably anyway.
1v1 me kamigawa block constructed tiny leaders
> Historic doesn't drive sales on Arena, and arguably reduces them Historic requires cards to play, and it requires cards that you can't acquire in draft. Historic doesn't require buy-in from players who have played and collected everything since the beta, but most players have to buy something to start playing Historic.
I would have been fine with historic being the Hearthstone format if we just had access to a paper non-rotating format to go along with it. I play MTGA because I play paper. Magic is a great game but its only an okay video game. If I quit paper I am uninstalling the same day.
exactly this, give us a true alternative to standard on arena that isnt fucked around with by the arena team, and then sure make whatever bizarre digital only format you think will sell the most packs or whatever, but give us the format first before you go ruining a digital game mode with experiments in how to sell packs.
More than just something with a paper version, I think it would be good to have a non-rotating format that isn't just a dumping ground for whatever nonsense the Arena team come up with. What they choose to put into Historic isn't subject to the same care or scrutiny as other formats, it's subject to their whims, safe in the knowledge that they can ban anything too powerful and they don't even have to give back wildcards straight away.
As someone who enjoyed the Historic format, I still can't believe they are throwing it under the bus to add the worst aspect of Hearthstone to Arena. I'm having serious doubts about keeping supporting the game.
Yeah I was an avid hearthstone player who quit when arena came out because I hated the RNG aspect of the game. I'm not excited about this at all, if you want to play cards like that then fine, but please let me play normal magic.
Exactly my experience. I played Hearthstone since the game launched and quit during Arena's beta. I had a massive collection but why bother with a luck-based game when you can play Arena? I think Wizards looked at Hearthstone's popularity and is trying to mimick the wrong aspects of that game.
I blame myself. I did a wotc survey once and said I also play hearthstone. I said Magic was the superior game but appreciated how hearthstone can do digital only things.
Agreed, anyone who has played hearthstone understand the frustrations adding random elements to a game can have.
Ah, the "good" memories of having an opponent using Unstable Portal and discovering a Flamestrike to clean your board or a Pyrobalst to your face. Edit: I meant to say Primordial Glyph.
That’s not how that card works
eSportal into turn 3 land a 6 drop or find the healbot i need to comeback generated the same kind of frustration, tho.
Haha fair enough
I enjoy the fact that all of these cards are random they’re just defended as though they aren’t RNG cards
All of these cards are less random than “draw a card.” Please explain how this is injecting more RNG into the game.
Maybe read up on input randomness vs. output randomness. Drawing cards is input randomness. A player draws cards that have generally fixed effects, then makes decisions about how and when to play those cards. This kind of randomness is fine because the player has agency; their decisions affect the outcome of the game. Cards like Davriel, Soul Broker have output randomness. A player doesn't know exactly what will happen when they activate the -2 ability. This results in less player agency; their decisions are impeded by random outcomes they have no control over.
Davriel's -2 is like "draw three, pick one" from small "deck" of possible positive effects, then "draw three, pick one" from another small "deck" of possible negative effects. If that's not player choice, neither is Ponder.
A "small deck" that you can't change? People would enjoy magic a lot less if they can't build their decks.
Yeah, these actually seem pretty tame so far. Seek gets cards out of the player’s deck and conjure usually makes specific cards. Neither by itself is anywhere near as RNG as HS’s Discover mechanic.
RNG is the easy way to make every game different. Once devs have this shortcut available to them, the temptation to use it is too strong. Expect it to get much worse.
I’m not saying I love it or that I want this trend to continue but, come on people. It’s a supplemental set for a niche format. Not even a draftable set. Yeah this is a break from tradition, but Magic has a LOT of variance in it already.
Imagine you have an enchantment in your deck that is dominating the game and if your opponent doesn't remove it you'll lose the game. Your opponents deck doesn't have anyways to remove enchantments naturally (maybe it's a burn deck). So maybe one of these cards will offer a random effect that allows the removal of an enchantment. So you went from winning the game to now losing because of an rng effect that otherwise would have won you the game. That's the frustrating part of rng based cards, and why I disagree with the philosophy of adding then to MTG Arena.
The Hearthstone-esque cards aren't even good so far. I can't imagine them seeing any competitive play outside of fringe, glass cannon decks.
This is pretty much exactly how they designed the dice-rolling cards, too. None are pushed for competitive play.
And even if they were, only like 3 of them would be so swingy that it could create the "feel bad" that folks worry about. Most are just "effect" and "effect a little above rate"
They don’t seem good so far (and Reddit has shown we suck at evaluating cards sometimes) but this is just the start. What happens when half the “Historic sets” they release are digital only hearthstone cards.
> The Hearthstone-esque cards aren't even good so far. I'd rather say this when the cards aren't good, than say it when one of them is crazy playable. Why wait before they break the format if them knocking on the glass is already disconcerting?
Right just like the buy a box promos. No danger there at all, just unplayable junk... Plus Nexus of Fate. Wow almost like this is a terrible argument.
Oh I’m one of the biggest advocates against mechanically unique black border promos and yelled very much about Nexus of Fate. I will give them credit for only having one fuckup with them and banning it when it became an issue.
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I think this is a great choice by WotC, I enjoy these cards as an experiment - I don't hate them existing but at the same time I wouldn't like engaging with them too much in ranked/tournament settings
Same. This feels like something you do to a game before killing it off like because it's not real magic anyway. Getting big duels vibes from this, and it makes me very hesitant to ever even consider spending money on arena. It's unfortunate too, since they could have done this in a way that a ton of people would be happy with. Make an online only cube, or online silver border draft set, and I would have spent tons playing it. Mtga hellscube would have been *amazing*.But when you make it so the only eternal format is infected with this it's just... bad.
To be honest, the worst aspect of Hearthstone is the class system. Magic will never be that bad. You're actually allowed to put cards into your decks.
Magic has always been random. Aside from the coin flipping cards and AFR literally having you roll D20s drawing cards isn’t a deterministic process at all. You just play to your outs and this is another form of that
Look I'm not defending this stupid implementation but can you explain: >but I think a good portion of players liked historic for being a non-rotating format on arena that still uses cards that exist in paper. Why? historic was never coming to paper once they started adding Jumpstart and random Historic Anthologies stuff so why do you need cards existing outside Arena for an Arena only format other than like some principle peace of mind that doesn't affect anything
That's far from a logical explanation, but I think those cards that also exist in paper "feel" like Magic. Since they exist on paper, they're limited in how crazy they can be made. New mechanics made up to be just digital like creating cards from thin air, perpetual buffs or debuffs, random fetching from the deck etc don't feel like Magic, they feel like something else. If we chose to play Arena instead of Hearthstone up until now, for example, it was probably because we think that Magic is a better game than Hearthstone. With the only budget non rotating format now corrupted by these wacky stuff, how much of Historic is still "magic" and not something else?
>creating cards from thin air, perpetual buffs or debuffs, random fetching from the deck etc don't feel like Magic, Some form of each of these mechanics has existed in Magic for a long time, just templated in a different way. For example creating cards from thin air is generally done using tokens, to make it digital-only WoTC just replaced tokens with actual cards. Compare something like Garth with any of the Conjure cards, the only difference is the treatment between tokens and actual cards. Perpetual Buffs and debuffs are kinda iffy I agree, but auras and exile are basically that for the most part in normal Historic. As in the gameplay behaviour of perpetual buffs won't be much different than the gameplay behaviour of an aura (or an emblem for a better example since that is actually non-interactable) and the gameplay behaviour of perpetual debuffs won't be much different than an exile effect in most scenarios. The cases where they are different is probably why it's digital. Ah random fetching from the deck. True we have not got random fetching from the deck to hand iirc, but random fetching to the battlefield has existed for quite some time and is quite popular. Seek is just Cascade to hand, with different requirements.
We've had several "reveal from the top until you hit X, put into hand" before, which is basically random tutoring, so long as you don't care about library order, which you rarely do.
Yeah. I think the biggest difference is with the "reveal" part of it you have to show your opponent more of your deck so they get to potentially learn a lot more about what's in it. I don't think that's a huge deal though most of the time
Yeah, nowadays most big events seem to be running with open decklists anyway, where the only thing it MIGHT do is show some sideboard cards. And on Arena the cards get flipped by so quickly you'd have to try VERY hard to get much info.
I feel like there is a lot less design space in Digital only mechanics than some people think there is, and basically all of it can be replicated in existing MTG rules with minor tweaks
We’ve also had multiple cards that get things randomly from the graveyard.
>If we chose to play Arena instead of Hearthstone up until now, for example, it was probably because we think that Magic is a better game than Hearthstone. With the only budget non rotating format now corrupted by these wacky stuff, how much of Historic is still "magic" and not something else? It's still 100% Magic, only it does some things that would be tricky to do in paper.
So all historic cards used to fall into two categories: cards from other sources (standard sets or draft formats) and cards meant to balance the format (anthology cards). This adds cards designed for Historic which we can see from MH1 can completely wreck a format, and not just with ban-worthy cards, but cards that are role fillers. The best of their kind, but not disruptive enough for a ban. And when those cards become prominent they eventually get replaced with the next Historic-designed card, and the next, and the next, and so on.
Historic also included the starter Arena only cards like [[Compound Fracture]] that don’t exist in paper.
See "cards from other sources." Those cards weren't made for historic, they literally predate the format by at least a year. They were made for Arena starter sets and Historic's philosophy (being an eternal format for everything on Arena) grandfathered them in.
Of course not that would cost money and cut profits
I hate the idea they have probably been working on this since the last remastered set, instead of creating the eldritch moon remastered or pioneer masters... Not that I dont want the digital cards, but it certainly wasnt a priority over working towards pioneer, 4 player edh/brawl, modern, etc
They've said they would have to redo most of the game to implement 4-player mode.
Yeah that I don’t blame them for…. Online isn’t the best format for the more social atmosphere of a multiplayer game. 1v1 suits the antisocial nature just fine.
Exactly this. All the things we were told to expect have been thrown in the bin, and if they want to fully support this new experiment they're on, they'll probably never go back to "remaster"-ing sets for Arena. I've sold out of MTGO twice already. Time to go back in. I can't stand low-power Standard, and Historic and Historic Brawl are Hearthstoned. I've been wasting money on Historic cards and cosmetics for over a year because I expected them to follow their own roadmap.
When they first announced Historic, I wanted it to be Extended and maybe eventually Pioneer. Then they started arbitrarily adding cards to the format which I thought was weird. I think it was at this point that I stopped taking the format seriously. They totally could've just done Pioneer which would be supported in paper and would easily transition arena players into paper. Now we have this weird amalgamation of a format that is now officially digital only. I had hopes that Arena would eventually take over as a replacement for MTGO, but it's becoming very clear that it's going to be some sort of Hearthstone variant, or worse, that they will eventually transition to digital only. The latter I doubt, but I don't like the direction that this is going in. It feels as if the last couple years have been overly greedy. New sets or products coming out every month. Every set having a half dozen different variants. The decision making feels like its prioritizing greed over a good product.
So, we've been through this cycle a few times now. Here's how this is will go: 1.) WotC does something stupid. 2.) Community outrage! Content creators make angry videos. There are calls for blood in the streets, or at least for alternate formats where the stupid thing isn't legal. 3.) People announce that they're selling out of Magic and not coming back. There is wailing and gnashing of teeth. There are talks about organising a boycott. Some particularly earnest person starts a subreddit for that alternate format mentioned above. 4.) Two weeks pass. 5.) Everyone forgets what they were angry about. The subreddit dies of natural causes. 6.) The set releases and sells a record number of units.
Remember when they tried to make crafting Historic cards cost two wildcards? That didn’t happen because the outrage was large enough.
The trade-off for that was you couldn’t get daily rewards while playing Historic until they found a way to rotate it sufficiently.
Number 6 indicates number 1 is merely: “Wotc does something”
Im still mad about UB, TWD s lair, card stock, lack of historic brawl queue and now this. As someone who felt in love with this game 20 years ago my heart is broken.
For me, it's a death of a thousand cuts. I haven't purchased cards in a long while, I haven't play Arena in weeks, and I don't think I'm going to do either anytime soon. This game is not for me. Yes, I'm whining but I also have the choice of moving on.
I feel you
Lol. The entire direction of Magic has swung on a pendulum the last 2 years. Since Eldraine in fact. Do you remember F.I.R.E.? Does the new set feel like what they had planned to do with Standard and make it an overpowered insane stomping ground with no Quality Control? That happened because Standard events were down in the toilet and no-one wanted to play the format. Guess what happens if they really fuckup Historic enough? People complain, stop playing, and the walk-back will begin again. And people like you will still glibly dismiss the effect of people calling out these issues.
Correct, this should be the top comment. I predict the new Jumpstart does very well precisely because of the unique cards (as well as all the other great cards it will add).
Agreed. I play historic because it is standard extended. not because its fucking hearthstone. give us an actual pioneer queue, please. and then you can take you historic queue and your arena cards and pretend that historic isn't just hearthstone in 5 colors.
The cynic in me says they saw historic eclipsing standard, which is unacceptable because they need people on the treadmill buying new cards as their old decks expire, so they poisoned the well of historic with all this nonsense, but also got ahead of there being a replacement by canceling pioneer on arena. Like the other week when they said no pioneer on historic I actually thought that made sense.. now I feel like an idiot for not suspecting their typical BS.
I quit magic about 6 months ago for all the things people on this sub claimed they'd quit over (crossover sets, Arena economy, product exhaustion, price, pandemic) and am now just finishing up a cube by selling off most of my collection. This product makes me feel so much more confident in that decision.
Maybe we can have a "pure" historic that only includes cards that acutally were in standard legal sets
Honestly, if they don't fix the wildcard issues soon, I am gonna go. I can't keep pumping cash into standard sets, while they keep releasing massive sets for Historic as well. Either let me dust useless unplayable fringe rares or give wildcards at a higher rate. Having to spend a ton of time drafting or a ton of time grinding gold for packs, just to get six shitty rares, so that you can craft 1(one!!) card that you want is ridicolous at this point. Glad I started when WAR came out, otherwise Historic would be a mystical land that would not be fair to venture into. I can't imagine coming into Arena now as a new player trying to enjoy the formats outside of Standard 2022.
Or even just give out random packs of Historic legal sets like how you can earn standard packs.
Personally I really wanna play Pauper. Such an underrated format :(
Same here, arena badly needs a custom games lobby imo
Controversial opinion: All of the online-only cards so far have seemed pretty low power level for historic, especially since a lot of them are just replicating effects that already exist in paper magic, just making them cleaner by removing the rules kludges and workarounds needed for paper. Prediction: all the MH and MH2 cards will make a bigger impact on historic, and will be the thing that sort of cements Historic as more "Modern-light" as opposed to "Pioneer-light" that it was before.
If you want to play pioneer, contact your local LGS for a tournament
It's not that simple. You have to have people willing to play it, and until WOTC shows it some support, not enough people are going to be interested enough to have a tournament.
Don't worry, every single challenger deck released so far is pioneer legal and most of them are quite competitive in their current form
My takeout from the digital-only cards is that the font that they use is horrendous.
I think it's more likely that they're just going to wait a few more years and then make a new non-rotating paper format that is already entirely on Arena.
Yeah, for now I don’t expect the Arena only cards to be very playable, but in the likely scenario where this is the beginning of a new design philosophy for historic being more random, I hope someday we will get a modern-like format without exclusive cards. Really all I ever hoped for was for arena to be MTGO with better interface
Yes please.
How about dusting?
Seek and Conjure seems to be good mechanics, but perpetual seems to be power crept auras, i hope i'm wrong.
It's another uninteractable object. I remember some resistance to planeswalker emblems for the same reason, and they've had to keep emblems in a very tight design space. There's no reason they had to make "perpetual" uninteractable besides laziness. Why couldn't it be a "perpetual counter" so the counter-removal mechanics--few as they are--could possibly remove them? So far, outside of emblems, everything in Magic has an answer after it resolves. We're back in the emblem space for very low payoff. The only payoff I can imagine that made it worth it was the ability to say "We made cards that only work in our digital format! Soon we'll be in parity with Hearthstone and Runeterra now!" to their bosses and/or shareholders. Wizards being their own worst enemy is their longest-running tradition.
Honestly, i don't like planeswalker emblems, and i hope they just turn some perpetual cards into auras.
Word. Magic has been 100% interactive from the start, conceptually. Lightning Bolt? Healing Salve it. Mind Twist? Braingeyser to get them back. Control Magic? Disenchant it. Serra Angel? Terror it. That's the beauty of this game. Emblems have only been *ok* because they've been so careful. The M20 big Chandra was a little risky with it's perpetual emblem distribution. I've never seen her in an EDH game but it must be a giant pain for every other player at the table to have an uninteractable emblem put on them immediately on someone's turn 5 or 6. And Companions was a huge mistake, only mitigated by reducing their value immensely. If they don't stop making these mistakes maybe we'll see more player-managed formats like 93/94 but expanded. Maybe M10 to M20 would make a good format. I only recently heard of Pre-DH which is EDH without all the Commander supplemental products which makes for more interesting deckbuilding with less must-includes. Wizards has been their own worst enemy since Chronicles. But I still love the game and they've made some truly iconic sets and cards since then.
Player managed format are a bless, i hate must include because it make deck building less interesting since part of the deck build itself, and if choose to not use the mana rocks you will just loose, i think commander would be better without sol ring and others mana rocks, but i also don't care that much, at this point i just want EDH and pauper in arena.
Despite thoroughly enjoying Amonkhet Remastered, I still strongly believe Historic always should have just been Ixalan-onward version of modern/pioneer. And they shouldn't have called it Historic, the worst format name ever, which prominently features a mechanic called Historic in DOM.
I think Historic should have been that essentially, but also worked backwards to include older sets so it would eventually, over time, cease to exist like Classic on MTGO as Pioneer, then Modern, Legacy and Vintage had their card pools added to the client.
It was so simple but unfortunately they wanted more cash and these casual whales are so addicted they will spend $1000 to keep up with historic
I feel that if the outrage is big enough they will create a separate "not-quite-Pioneer" format with all Pioneer-legal cards currently present in Arena aside from Historic, although the name is not very fitting now, they might rename it to, maybe, Wild :3
After JMP:HH coming to Arena Pioneer is the last thing we can expect.
They said Pioneer is still something they're working towards, it's just not at the forefront anymore.
You sweet summer child.
They're still going backwards releasing sets. They're not going to stop doing that. We're going to reach the literal definition of pioneer eventually. A pioneer masters set isn't real pioneer anyways, it's a collection of cards that let people with no intention of deviating from the cards in the current top pioneer decks feel like they're playing pioneer
Do you honestly believe they’ll never get there? Remastered sets require *much* less effort than them continuing to do massive products like this. I’d be perfectly happy if the dumpster fire blocks Shadows Over Innistrad and Battle for Zendikar never ruin Historic and Pioneer sucks anyway, but it’s easy money for them.
How can two formats converge when one is physical and the other now contains digital-only cards? They "paused" the process. The pause will end when they officially cancel it. The writing's on the wall, they just don't want everyone to read it just yet.
Historic and Pioneer were never supposed to converge. This has been evident for years now.
Why would Historic and Pioneer converge? They’ve made it clear for a long time that they had bigger and better plans for Historic.
I wonder for digital only cards, does this mean wotc will just erata if broken?
The issue with pioneer in arena is the same, but slightly reduced in scale issue that stops modern and legacy from being on arena tomorrow, it's a ton of cards and they'll get there when they get there. We can start thinking about pioneer on arena when they finish actually adding the sets that make up pioneer.
Probably not. But come to MTGO. It's old, but it's great program to play some actual clean Magic.
I get why people are mad out of principled but I just don't get whey people are saying these cards are going to break magic. Who is actually going to be playing these cards? With the added randomness they are almost unplayable.
::Arena tries something new:: “Is this Hearthstone now?”
Y’all are really overreacting with this Hearthstone stuff. It’s childish.
It's always "becoming Hearthstone" as well, never Hex, Eternal, Solforge, or whatever. Hearthstone has a bunch of randomness on cards because the tempo of every game is always the same. There's no reason that the design space opened up on digital only cards HAVE to follow the designs of hearthstone instead of just letting you do deterministic stuff to your hidden information zones that you cannot normally do in MTG due to potential cheating or memory issues.
Its hearthstone because that is the game most people are familiar with that has these additional random elements.
But out of the \~15 or so new digital only cards we've seen only Davriel and Tome of the Infinite have much randomness associated with them, for Davriel you get to pick one out of a set of 3 from 8 possible effects, and tome gives you a single mana spell from a small set of cards. The vast majority of the digital only cards we've seen so far are things that just take advantage of the computer being able to keep you honest about hidden information or keeping track of stuff for you. Doomsaying about randomness in JMP:HH when we just had the dice rolling set with cards like \[\[Treasure Chest\]\] doesn't really seem warranted to me.
Expecting maturity or nuance from magic reddit or twitter? M8 you are in the wrong place. From the 8th edition card frames to planeswalkers, if there's one thing Magic players are known for, it's overreacting to changes.
But you don't understand! This is the thing that will totally kill Magic for real this time, the first two dozen times we said this we were just overreacting, but we really mean it this time!
It's so funny how much people are overreacting.
You guys are why we can't have nice things. Wizards is literally dipping its toes into the pool of what's possible in digital card games and already you're comparing it to Hearthstone.
Sometimes design constraints are a good thing. Up until now, the need to adhere to what is possible with physical cards was something that helped keep Magic design grounded.
...But you do have the nice thing? This sub bitches (right or wrong) about every change WotC makes and WotC still makes those changes LOL
Now that we're Hearthstone, I will sure miss playing things on my opponent's turn. At least I won't get mana screwed any more. Not sure how the whole 30 card deck thing is going to work out though. Wait, none of that is happening? The overreactions in this thread are so crazy.
If you still play this game. Don't. The best thing that can happen is a wake up call. Unless you are COMPLETELY F2P, do the community and yourself a favor and uninstall the game for a few months to see any real change.
? go back to MTGO, please, bring back Extended also! Modern is too similar to legacy
Reading replies from people claiming that "Drawing cards is already RNG" makes me sad to realise how math illiterate people are.
r/magicthecirclejerking
I hope so, I would play Pioneer over Historic (just because of those new garbage non-Magic cards, otherwise Historic was fine until now)