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Main » Articles » New Frontiers

New Frontiers

Ben Friedman
Posted on November 4, 2016
 Reddit

To start, a list! (Because I’ve heard that Buzzfeed clickbait list-icles are the hottest thing going these days).

The Real, Official Top Ten List of Magic Players’ Favorite Topics to Complain About:

  1. Variance. It seems like almost every Magic player (myself included) is preternaturally unlucky. I sometimes wonder what would happen if a naturally lucky individual picked up Magic. They’d probably win Worlds, and knock off a couple Grand Prix wins the following year, to boot. Not that I know anyone like this, though . . . 

  2. MTGO. Good god, MTGO. From the scheming shuffler to the assortment of interesting bugs, MTGO must get targeted with a Shrapnel Blast at least twice a day by the amount of flak it catches.

  3. Mythic Rares. Classic money-grubbing Hasbro, printing the best cards at mythic rarity to all but shove product down our throats. This game is seriously turning into Yu-Gi-Oh!

  4. Changes to the Pro Players’ Club. Can’t we go back to the glory days of end-of-year payouts based on the number of Pro Points you got over the last season, and just use those lump sums to bankroll our transitions to full-time Poker? No? Well screw you, WoTC!

  5. Modern. Grr, Modern. A million different decks, all of which try to kill you without interacting. If you’re not losing to Lava Spike or Cranial Plating, you’re getting your brains eaten by Zombies or getting poisoned on turn three by the best creature-land ever printed. (Yep, I said it. Inkmoth Nexus is the best one ever.)

  6. The Reserved List. In all seriousness, even I want to see it go. Unfortunately, my vote doesn’t matter in this debate, and short of kidnapping the CEO of Hasbro, nothing’s going to change this one.

  7. The price of GPs. Back in my day, you paid twice as much for gas to get to the GP as you did to actually enter the tournament! Now, gas prices are halved, but GP prices have doubled! C’mon Wizards, get it together. Plus, there are three times as many people playing in each one of these. At this rate, pretty soon we’ll be paying $100 to enter a 10,000 player tournament where only the top 32 get paid out!

  8. Low-quality or absent streams for event coverage. Thank God, LSV took a year off the PT in order to save us at Grand Prixs and Pro Tours. Still, I think of Obi-Wan every time the coverage stream goes down due to technical difficulties (which happens a lot . . . )

  9. Buyouts. If Craig Berry isn’t the Martin Shkreli of Magic, he’s for sure the Jordan Belfort. At this point, I’m just waiting for him to release the secret Patrick Chapin rap album, the only copy in existence of Pat’s follow-up to the critically-acclaimed debut in Tha Gatherin’. Then we’ll know the true meaning of bellyaching!

  10. The Death of Legacy. We all just want to go back to the days of a Legacy Open every weekend, damn it! Is that so wrong? I’d even settle for a Brainstorm reprint to juice up Modern a little bit!

If I had a nickel for every doomsday-esque prediction I’ve heard about Magic, I’d have . . . well, I’d have at least a dollar, that’s for sure. If there’s one thing Magic players love to do, it’s complain. In fact, after an unsuccessful Eternal Weekend, where I lost to Show and Tell on turn two with backup countermagic two games in a row, then got hit with a turn-one Blood Moon in the next round to knock me out, I think I deserve a moment or two to complain. Surprisingly, though, I’m not even bummed out in the slightest. Why, you ask? Well, there’s another bite at the apple this weekend in Baltimore for a Legacy Open, and later this month I’m going to fly all the way to Japan to play in the Legacy Grand Prix! Why wouldn’t I be thrilled to “get the bad luck out of the way”, as they say?

Here’s my updated list now that it seems like Death and Taxes is on a huge uptick, and Storm is on the downswing.

4-Color Delver ? Legacy | Ben Friedman

Kolaghan's Command
Kolaghan's Command? Ooh baby, yes please! Snapcaster-Kolaghan's Command loops are a distinct pleasure for a particular type of player, and the Commands incidentally punish Aether Vial and Equipment super hard. They also give you an additional clean out to Chalice of the Void, which is no joke from the Eldrazi deck that has gotten big in Legacy. Kolaghan's Command is definitely where I want to be against a pile of Stoneforge Mystics and Sanctum Prelates!

But enough chatter about Legacy. After all, the format is in its death throes, right? Let’s shift our focus to a brand-new baby format for those of you who want Modern-style mana bases without all of the dumb linear decks that define contemporary Modern. It’s a new day, and there are bold new Frontiers to discover!

For those of you not up to date on every little detail surrounding developing stories in the Magic community, Frontier is a new format courtesy of Hareruya and Big Magic in Japan. The Japanese players are so hungry for new and exciting formats to sink their teeth into, that the biggest stores started offering a new non-rotating format that is both way cheaper to get into than Modern while avoiding the feel-bads that result from Standard rotations tanking the value of your decks. All sets from Magic 2015-forward are legal, and there is no banned list.

A cynic would chuckle at how all these rubes are being suckered into buying old rotated-out crap from the last two Standard formats in order to make stores more money, but call me a cautious believer. I love formats with good mana and fewer hyper-linear decks, and initial reports of Frontier indicate that the metagame is open enough for a brewer to come in and try nearly anything. Plus, you can play four- and five-color decks without significant punishment, and enjoy Siege Rhino again without it being so good that it dominates the format. The first decklists from a major Frontier tournament in Japan showed us a format where, surprise surprise, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy and Siege Rhino enable a vast array of powerful archetypes, with all sorts of wacky color combinations to support them.

If you thought Jeskai Black was a menace in Standard circa 2015, just wait until you see what happens when it gains Torrential Gearhulk!

Jeskai Black ? Frontier| Frontier Challenge Cup

And for the Rally lovers among you, that deck is still superb with an awesome transitional sideboard plan to a Gideon/Nissa deck!

4-Color Rally ? Frontier| Frontier Challenge Cup

Many of you may know how much I loved Sultai Emerge last season, and Grixis Emerge isn’t cutting it for me this time around. Part of that is the loss of Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, so you can imagine my excitement when this list popped up in the Top 8 of the Big Magic Frontier tournament!

Grixis Emerge ? Frontier| Frontier Challenge Cup

Treasure Cruise LOVES Minister of Inquiries, and Jace doesn’t look too shabby either. Talk about a turbo-graveyard deck, now this is a Dredge deck I can get behind!

Then we have a deck that the tribal enthusiasts among you might like to see. It’s got Panharmonicon, it’s got Shaman of the Pack, it’s got Chord of Calling, it’s the Frontier port of Modern Elves. You even get Westvale Abbey to mitigate flooding, as long as you don’t run headfirst into a Crackling Doom.

Panharmonicon Elves ? Frontier| Frontier Challenge Cup

As odd as it is to say, I find it extremely refreshing and exciting to see how new restrictions on what cards are legal breed super unusual solutions that we haven’t seen in ages. Tormod's Crypt, good old Tormod's Crypt, is the best hate card to go to attack Jace decks of all stripes. Sideboard jukes with Kalitas, Tasigur, Gideon, and Nissa abound, and some of the new cards synergize with three-year-old sets to enable critical masses of a certain effect. When cards like Scrapheap Scrounger and Smuggler's Copter allow you to bridge together Shrapnel Blast and Siege Rhino into the heaviest-reach midrange deck I think I’ve ever seen, you know you’ve got a sweet format on your hands!

Rhino/Shrapnel Blast ? Frontier | Frontier Challenge Cup

Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t offer some starting point for actual strategy in this bold new format. I think that we are going to find that there are a few flagship cards that you will want to build around in order to succeed here, and unsurprisingly, the best ones are Blue. Dig Through Time and Jace, Vryn's Prodigy are the most flexible and powerful cards in Frontier, and they enable all sorts of midrange, control, and combo archetypes. You can combine them with Collected Company or Torrential Gearhulk and slant your deck more toward Fiery Impulse or Reflector Mage, but either way, you’ll be looking at the card selection and advantage offered by these Blue spells as a huge incentive to play Blue in the format. Delve is, as always, an unusually powerful effect that could quickly dominate the format with cheap threats (Tasigur, the Golden Fang), answers (Murderous Cut) and card draw (Cruise/Dig). Then again, the winning deck of the tournament used Smuggler's Copter over Jace as its card-selection 2-drop of choice, and forgoes Dig Through Time for the innocuous 1-drops of Faerie Miscreant and Thraben Inspector, so what the heck do I know?

Jeskai Tempo ? Frontier | Frontier Challenge Cup

Anger of the Gods
For what it’s worth, the format seems to be ripe for innovation, and new releases are sure to shake it up, but I would give it a year or two before Frontier distances itself enough from “Last Year’s Standard” to stand on its own. I know some of you will get headaches just from looking at Mardu Green decks again, and I’m with you on that one. I want there to be slightly more incentives for modest mana bases, and a good, clean Path to Exile or Anger of the Gods would be welcome in the format. Be on the lookout, though, because as Magic matures, more and more opportunities for new and exciting formats will crop up. Magic is a deeper game than any of us know; the fact that there are innumerable ways to mix and match sets and banned lists to cultivate new formats means that the game is truly infinitely complex, and we owe it to ourselves to push for more interesting and different experimental formats. Pauper is another beautiful example of this; a wonderful format that continues to gain traction among grassroots, dedicated players. And just to be clear: if you play these formats, WoTC will take notice. Even though official Organized Play channels are sometimes slow to react, eventually they will adjust their offerings to encourage these new formats. Just look at how much Commander has grown since the good old days (when it still went by EDH). Truly, the wonderful thing about Magic is how much of a voice we do actually have. Basketball fans can’t petition the NBA to adjust the height of the basket, or change the rules for foul shots. We can actually influence the direction of our hobby, and for all the complaining we indulge in, I hope we Magic players can agree that our outsized influence as customers is both unprecedented and awesome.

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TAGS articles, metagame, constructed, deck lists, legacy, ben friedman, frontier, new format. constructed

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