Locations
The biggest tournament that many Magic players will not have heard of kicks off this weekend in Annecy, France. Bazaar of Moxen thrusts not only the thriving Legacy format into the public eye, but principally the old dame of Magic—Vintage—squinting into the sunlight, for a rare moment of public adulation.
Attendance at what is Europe’s most high-profile eternal event has been building steadily over the past four years and last year’s numbers were staggering: The sanctioned Vintage tournament pulled in 347 players, while the Legacy event drew 498. All things being equal (namely, the plum location nestled between Europe’s eternal heartlands), attendance this year should be similarly impressive.
For the first time, though, the always-astounding prize pool has shifted focus, and the rewards for winning the Legacy portion of the tournament are greater than battling to triumph in Vintage. That is at once a sign of the way in which Legacy has eclipsed Vintage as the game’s de facto eternal format, as well as a consequence of timing—spring has seen the prices of the cards Legacy winners in Annecy can claim shoot up, while the value of Power and other Vintage staples has remained largely static of late. Legacy is booming, as you cannot have failed to noticed. But its long-term health as a format is increasingly in question. What could Legacy learn from the fate of its older brother Vintage, a format that has been pushed steadily to the game’s margins? How do either of the eternal formats fit in with Wizards’ vision for the game? And how soon will it be before eternal players the world over have to look for radical ways to preserve the way they play the game, seventeen years after many of the cards that underpin their formats were first printed?
Vintage: Situation Critical
Vintage is Magic’s heavyweight division, fondly remembered as the stomping ground of kings by the game’s older fans, but today splintered and in a diminished state of health. Devotees remain, particularly in parts of Europe where sanctioned megatournaments on the scale of Bazaar of Moxen still pull in the crowds, but as a homogenous, global format that you can reasonably expect to encounter at your local game store or club, it has long been usurped. Indeed, and although I preface this by saying I have never played Magic in the United States, it does not appear any longer to be a format there, which you can usually expect to see played with real cards. For better or worse, since 2002 in the United States, a metagame allowing proxy cards has grown up and holds sway.
How did we get here? It is safe to say that with every day since the last Power Nine rolled off the printing presses of Carta Mundi in 1993, the difficulty of getting into Vintage has increased. The format’s most powerful cards—at this point Black Lotus, the five original Moxen, Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, Time Vault, Bazaar of Baghdad, and Mishra's Workshop—have climbed steadily in price to what for most players is an astronomical sum, while the supply (around 22,800 copies of each piece of Power were ever printed, for example) has dwindled as cards have disintegrated through heavy play (often sleeveless in the game’s earliest days—ouch!); have been lost down the back of the sofa, sealed up and graded, or simply retired; or put in a shoebox and left to gather dust by former players who have given up the game, but don’t feel compelled to part with their cards. In 2003, Mark Rosewater wrote a column on Vintage called “Playing to Type I,” in which he highlighted the format’s steep entry barrier as a reason for its gradual demise. He was not wrong.
Herein lies the reasoning for the momentous decision, initially in the United States, to allow the use of a limited number of proxies, which kicked off in earnest in 2002. The move, led by vocal members of the Vintage community and eventually supported most spectacularly by the Star City Games Power Nine series, was a drastic attempt to remove that barrier of entry.
Pandora’s Box was opened. Looking on from afar at that time in the U.K., where Vintage has dwindled away to only tens of active players, I was blown away at the radical thinking that I thought would salvage the format I loved to play, but rarely could. There was, I certainly felt, something brilliantly “New World” about it—it was an idea born of what is globally perceived as the world’s most meritocratic society, one in which perceived equality of opportunity has long underpinned the “American Dream” of social mobility. Not all saw the move so positively. Fulvio Zerbino, who helps organize Italy’s huge Ovino and D-Day eternal tournaments, says: “In the United States, a person looks for the simplest solution to a problem.”
Stephen Menendian, 2007 Vintage World Champion and author of strategy book Understanding Gush, was an advocate of the move to proxies and says that they are a means to achieving a certain vision of how the game should be played: “I generally run unlimited proxy tournaments. I do that because of a very clear view that Magic is a game of skill, not of wealth accumulation. You want people to bring their A-game and their skills and compete on that level, not compete on the prior decision to invest in a certain kind of product.”
That said, the “proxy dream” has, like the “American dream,” suffered of late—and Menendian, along with other initial advocates, such as Star City Games’ Ben Bleiweiss, acknowledged as early as 2009 that the widespread acceptance of proxies in the United States (they remain only occasionally used in Europe) may have done as much harm as good to Vintage.
With the use of proxies, the incentive for players to accumulate the real cards once needed to compete is removed—and as has gradually become apparent, that has discouraged players from sticking with the format, one that is also not sanctioned, not visibly supported (either by Wizards of the Coast or Star City Games, who discontinued their Power Nine series in 2008), and rarely played. While those who have lost interest in Vintage for such reasons may be few, for a player base as small as Vintage’s, the loss of even a handful of new players could be drastic. “It may seem marginal,” says César Fernandez (perhaps better known by his forum handle, “CHaPuZaS”) who organizes an eternal league in Madrid, Spain. “But among those few players the Vintage community might have lost are article writers, future tournament organizers, forum moderators, team drivers, and deck creators.”
He is unequivocal about the harmful effect of proxies: “[The damage done by them] is so much, that it will hardly ever be undone,” he says. Although at first the switch to the use of proxies was a shot in the arm to an ailing format, it has proved no comparison to serious buy-in to the format by new players. For all the early gains, it seems that in the long run, proxies may have turned people away from Vintage—perhaps not established players who already had all or some of the cards required to play Vintage, but certainly the undecided, the inexperienced, and the ill-informed.
“Playing Magic is a lot about feelings,” says Fernandez, a remark that corresponds to the vocabulary of Wizards R&D. “There are more people out there wanting to play ‘that legendary format where Moxen are tapped’ than those wanting to play ‘that format where people play with proxied and fake cards.’ ”
It is impossible to turn the clock back, and proxies are here to stay, particularly in the United States, where Mox prizes won in the heat of Vintage’s proxy rebirth (roughly 2003 to 2008) were sold off on eBay—and often snapped up by European players. These had not moved en masse to proxies and enjoyed favorable exchange rates at the time—in July 2008, for example, the dollar fell to its lowest rate against the euro in the last decade. Asked whether a nonproxy series of Star City Games Vintage tournaments would today be possible, Menendian does not hesitate to reply, “No: The reality is that the card pool is far too limited to support a sanctioned SCG Vintage series. And it’s not just that there are so few cards, it’s that there are so few cards in the United States, available to players.”
Just as significantly as proxies proving a turn-off to new players, it must be wondered whether they have also diminished the attention Wizards pays to the format. Their product is one that relies on a bond of trust between players and the company to actually inculcate it with any value—cardboard is worth what cardboard is worth, but as players who want to have this game created for us, and as a company who believes they add value to the price of a piece of cardboard by the creativity they pour into it, together we share in the illusion that outside the basic framework of the rules, we need Wizards’ Magic cards to play the game (rather than, say, inventing or creating the game ourselves in the manner of a role-playing adventure). The use of proxy cards breaks that covenant and may have threatened any lifeline that Wizards could officially offer Vintage. Wizards held a Vintage Championships for 392 players in Paris in 2005, for example, but barring the yearly Vintage World Championship held annually in the United States, have offered no such high-profile tournaments since.
The support offered has instead been piecemeal, and it is at times difficult to fathom where Wizards stands on Vintage. Menendian makes the point that Wizards has been sympathetic to the format in both their handling of the banned and restricted list and the recent spate of printings powerful enough to break into the game’s most discriminatory card pool: “I can hardly think of a set in the last few years that hasn’t given Vintage at least three or four good cards and probably
For a six-month period between autumn 2009 and spring 2010, it felt like something momentous was afoot that would seriously adjust the standing of Vintage; the announcement of From the Vault: Exiled had many players speculating that iconic Vintage card Mana Drain would be reprinted (it is not on the Reserved List and was banned from Type 1.5). Zendikar unleashed perhaps the most startling promotion ever undertaken by Wizards, “Hidden Treasures”—old cards including Power inserted into booster packs. And momentum behind a scrapping of the Reserved List seemed to be building.
Suffice it say that Mana Drain was not reprinted, and the Reserved List was not scrapped—rather, it was tightened, leaving the Hidden Treasures promotion looking very incongruous indeed. Was it intended to put some exciting Vintage cards into new players’ hands and create a buzz about a format Wizards planned to revive with reprints? Or was it simply an on-theme way of selling boosters? It is impossible to be sure. But if it had been bookended by a Mana Drain reprint and the abolishment of the Reserved List, the Vintage landscape would today look very different indeed.
As it is, Vintage is now between a rock and a hard place—damned if it introduces proxies to lower the barrier to entry (see the diminishing U.S. scene) and damned if it does not (stuck with an exclusive and aging player base). Above all that hovers Wizards, who despite laudable efforts to print new cards for the format, seems as confused about its future as anyone.
To twist a phrase from the newspaper industry, Vintage is the “format of record,” encapsulating the game’s long development. Wizards no doubt recognizes and respects that. Vintage is an important historical statement on the origins of the game.
At least . . . it was.
Not a Legacy to Stand On
In 2004, Legacy was born from the ashes of the Type 1.5 format (Type 1 with restricted cards banned). Legacy was gifted its own distinct banned list that finally defined an eternal format without the Power Nine, but with a unique character of its own.
That character increasingly resembles what Vintage once claimed as its own—the ability to “play all your cards.” Superficially, the Legacy banned list is large and includes iconic beasts such as the Power Nine, but the omission of the game’s most busted cards has created a format unmatched for breadth. The threshold for a card to be competitive in Vintage is so much higher that it is relatively hard for cards to make an impact on the playable card pool. In Legacy, not only new printings but gems from yesteryear can find homes in a variety of decks that really do showcase the widest range of the 10,000 or so different Magic cards in existence. That challenges Vintage’s raison d’être—perhaps not to the hardcore players still slinging Moxen in outposts around the globe, but in the eyes of Magic’s mainstream.
The effect on Vintage in terms of participation has therefore not been negligible. Oliver Daems, who founded Morphling, an online eternal tournament database, is emphatic about the effect of Legacy on Vintage, at least in Germany: “The Vintage scene has been decimated due to the growing popularity of Legacy,” he says. Strongholds certainly exist, such as in the Frankfurt area, but the most famous scene in Iserlohn is no more. Berlin—“poor, but sexy,” in the words of mayor Klaus Wowerweit—is perhaps unsurprisingly not a Vintage hotspot. Legacy holds sway here.
Daems’s view is echoed by Zerbino. He points the finger at Wizards for the momentous Vintage restrictions in June 2008 and claims they decisively swung momentum away from a Vintage scene enjoying a renaissance from proxies in the United States and the glut of power on the market in Europe. Says Zerbino of the shakeup: “Wizards destroyed the real Vintage by restricting all the Blue cards, such as Brainstorm, Ponder, and Merchant Scroll, all at once. At that time, Vintage went down and a lot of players passed to Legacy where these Blue cards were not restricted. It was the breaking point; thank you, Wizards.” It was a decision that left many Vintage players disenchanted (even if the effect on the actual format’s playability has been largely positive).
The rapidly increasingly popularity of Legacy since then has seemingly known no bounds. It is the second-most-popular format behind Standard, and one that increasingly hogs virtual column inches on Magic websites. It commands slots on Wizards’ Grand Prix schedule, something that Vintage players dream of for their format, and with vocal support from some of the game’s most charismatic players and writers, has built up a positive image, removed from the “turn-one kills” hokum surrounding Vintage.
This rosy tableau was shaken in March, though, when Star City Games released a buy list for Legacy staples that left many speechless. The financial implications of that have been discussed in great detail on this site as well as others—but the implications for the long-term health of the format are profound. In March 2010, Stephen Menendian had already identified access to the dual lands as the key to future format growth. They are the fundamental building blocks of the format and among the most eye-catching climbers in price terms.
How did Menendian react to the new buy list? “My reaction,” he says, “was a little bit of frustration, a little bit of disappointment, but sort of not entirely unexpected. This is where things are going, and it just confirmed my suspicions of the trajectory of where Legacy is heading.” That trajectory involves a near-mint Revised Edition Underground Sea currently retailing for $119.99 on Star City Games, as players (and speculators) snap up the sought-after format staple, printed only 270,000 times. It is a trend that for Menendian is not sustainable and does not bode well for Legacy’s future.
“Just think back to 1994,” he says. “In November, Black Lotus had reached $50 to $100, and the following March, it was $100 to $150. It was around that time that Wizards began thinking about the separation of the formats [previously only one format, constructed, existed]. So if Black Lotus at $100 is cause enough to generate separate formats, what does that mean about cards like Jace, the Mind Sculptor? What does that mean for Legacy? I think it’s a serious problem.”
If a twenty-two-page thread on The Source Legacy forum discussing the possible consequences of the buy list is anything to go by, Menendian is not alone in his concerns. It makes intriguing reading for anyone who has followed Vintage’s travails in the last decade, and users themselves have expressed a sense of déjà vu. The spike in prices has caused the same soul-searching, the same frustration, and indeed some of the same proposed solutions: proxies, or the scrapping of the Reserved List, which stops the dual lands from being reprinted. The first is an option few Legacy players have an appetite for (accumulating rating points is part of the format’s attraction for them), and the second is currently pie in the sky, however damaging the list’s continued existence to the format may be.
Fernandez says: “Legacy has proven to be a great constructed format, and its growth is being stopped just by the availability of cards not matching the number of players looking for them.” In 2010, following a visit to discuss the future of the Reserved List at Wizards, Menendian was also emphatic: “The Reserved List is a fundamental impediment to the growth of eternal formats, and Legacy most pressingly. Legacy’s growth, on its current course, is simply unsustainable without reprints.”
A year down the line, for reasons only known to a few individuals bound by nondisclosure agreements, the Reserved List remains well and truly in place, and Legacy’s future viability increasingly in the balance. Aaron Forsythe reiterated as much in March on his Twitter feed: “If the Reserved List could be removed, it would have [been] by now. That can’t be part of any realistic solution. The end.” It was grim reading for the legion Legacy fans out there.
What Could Change in the Future?
With it clear, then, that the Reserved List will not be changing in the future, what else will have to, in order preserve the eternal formats? Because let’s be clear: Vintage, although not dead, is at least hospitalized with a bevy of doctors casting worried glances at its charts—what Menendian calls a “low-grade comatose state. It’s alive, but somewhat barely.” Legacy, meanwhile, although on a meteoric rise now, remains seriously threatened by dual-land scarcity and sharply rising prices for other staples.
In the absence of reprints, Wizards’ looks set to turn to the time-honored solution of introducing a new format, one that like a shiny monorail spans the growing gap between the eternal formats and the rotating formats, Extended and Standard. Should “Overextended” appear, the Legacy player base can expect to be top-skimmed in the way Vintage’s has been, as the new format competes for players’ bucks, attention, and weekends.
Although on the surface there appears to be little more than an administrative cost to adding a new format, there is an opportunity cost, too—players can only devote so much time to thinking about, writing about, and playing the game. There is only so much play space available, so much room in packed tournament schedules, and so many judges out there. Extended, although by all accounts a fairly grim format to play at the moment, seems already to be suffering from this fate. Although not completely zero-sum, the format landscape is already busy—and if more formats appear to paper over gaps, Vintage and Legacy risk getting lost in the clutter.
Menendian has no doubt that at the very least, Star City Games’ support for Legacy would take a knock: “The way they have it now with a first day of Standard and a second day of Legacy—I don’t think that can continue,” he says. “At some point, they will probably substitute in the middle format, to some number of their tournaments. It doesn’t make sense to entirely discontinue supporting Legacy, because they want to continue selling Legacy
As the timeline of Magic printings stretches ever onward (Mark Rosewater says he could design new cards for the rest of his days), the solution simply to add more formats that bridge the gap between the current set and the moment a given significant-enough portion of the player base started buying cards is untenable. Just as Legacy has dented Vintage, and as Overextended could siphon support from Legacy, so whatever comes next will have its impact. Magic risks going the way of boxing, where eighteen separate weight divisions have fractured interest in the sport.
With that in mind, unifying the eternal formats might be a prospect that players will have to consider in the long term, if as a community they are to continue to punch their weight in terms of attracting attention, support, and new players. If we accept that Legacy has now usurped Vintage as the “format of record,” tweaking it to attract lapsed, wavering, or frustrated Vintage players, as much as those players currently trading in their Standard collections for dual lands, might be the future. What might that mean in a concrete sense? How about unbanning Mana Drain in Legacy, and reprinting it to take the sting out of its price?
“It’s a natural idea,” says Menendian. “People who enjoy eternal formats tend to enjoy Blue-based control decks and people—particularly, long-term Legacy players tend to enjoy playing control decks like Landstill. It’s a natural question that a lot of people eventually arrive at. I just don’t think it’s a good idea. Mana Drain would be very imbalancing, somewhat like Survival of the Fittest in terms of metagame performance. And Gush would be the same way.”
That said, even in Vintage, where Mox Sapphire exists to power out a first-turn Mana Drain, the iconic counterspell has been reduced to a role-playing two-of or three-of in many Blue decks, rather than the ubiquitous four-of it has been at various times in the format’s history. Spell Pierce has provided serious competition to the card, and it might be that unleashing Mana Drain on Legacy would prove enough of a pull factor to hardened Vintage players without it actually overwhelming the format.
If attempting to consolidate a single eternal format at some point in a competitor-clogged future is one side of a coin, another might be to reconsider the eternal formats’ relationship with Wizards entirely. It is debatable just how great a role they play in Wizards’ business model anyway, which although diverse, still remains largely predicated on selling booster packs to limited and Standard players. Eternal players, meanwhile, acquire out-of-print staples on the secondary market.
Stephen Menendian argues convincingly that that cannot be taken in isolation: “[Wizards’] business model is actually much larger than [selling booster packs], and part of it is dependent on a strong secondary market,” he says. “In a sense, the secondary market is kind of like a loan. The secondary market gives store owners liquidity to buy more boxes.”
If the vitality of Legacy in particular is seriously threatened by the existence of the Reserved List, though, how significant will the liquidity provided to stores by selling format staples remain if (or, rather, when) the current price bubble pops? If the trend is a downward one over enough years, it is reasonable to wonder how much use the format is to Wizards. Similarly, if the cutoff point for a future Overextended format is, as mooted, Mercadian Masques (or indeed at any point after cards stopped being added to the Reserved List), how large a role will the secondary market continue to play in Wizards’ business model, considering they will be able to reprint cards for the format at will?
This is certainly speculative, but it would be intriguing to see how true Menendian’s assertion is. For that, we would need to see if there is at least some correlation between Wizards’ profit and the existence of the Legacy format since 2004 (although causality would be tough to prove). Without sales data available though, it is alas impossible to investigate further.
Should Wizards’ financial interest in supporting the eternal formats dwindle in tandem with their health, though, would they continue to be the best custodians for the formats? Vintage might be better served, for example, by being handed over altogether from Wizards to an independent (neither the creators nor a store) governing and sanctioning body, similar in function to the Commander bosses.
This is uncharted territory—but such a body need not be antagonistic to Wizards, and there is no reason to think that a separate body could not interact in a positive way with them, just as has happened with Commander. The change could be liberating for both Wizards and Vintage players, who might see the restricted list managed with more transparency, for example, or a global proxy limit put in place.
Imagine if Vintage adopted a global five- or seven-proxy standard. Not enough to play any deck without some buy-in into the format (one or two pieces of Power), but enough for players owning a selection of non-Power staples to play a decent selection of optimized decks. Though many players are not fans of proxies, would the trade-off of a genuinely global Vintage ranking system built around a standardized limited-proxy format (something Wizards cannot currently condone) not be an enticing one? Perhaps such a move could even pave the way for a Vintage World Championships that was more representative and accessible to the world’s player base, something the format is crying out for.
Commander’s casual status has not proved incompatible with Wizards providing it new printings and it could be that the format’s outsider status has actually lent to its appeal. And although the Commander ruling council manage their format to be a social just-for-fun format, there would be nothing to stop a new independent Vintage ruling body making the format as healthily competitive as it wants.
Such a development would not be incompatible with what will, in any case, be an important part of Vintage’s future: Magic Online. Last year’s Master Edition IV brought Mishra's Workshop, Bazaar of Baghdad, and Time Vault to the online fray, and it must now only be a matter of time before the Power Nine joins them. For many, owning the iconic cards in virtual form might be the only realistic way of getting their hands on them—but that might just be enough. There is a neat tension in the online world: Cards are not free, creating that idea of buying into the format, but they would remain significantly cheaper than the paper versions, opening up the format to a potentially huge audience.
“Paper Magic and online Magic actually have a symbiotic relationship,” says Menendian. “The Vintage community would do well to embrace Magic Online because it becomes a way to satisfy deep-seated needs to own cards. There is, to some extent, this feeling that one must actually own the cards, and if you can satisfy that online, then I think you can get away with having more proxies in real life. I think that’s the future function of Vintage online.”
The End, My Beautiful Friend
In the meantime, here, online, there is much discussion about the direction of the much-loved eternal formats. This piece was an attempt to take a look at the formats together in the most holistic manner possible—how they interact with each other and with Wizards, and how both might fare in a future straightjacketed by the Reserved List. That catalogue of the 572 cards consigned to Magic’s oubliette sadly makes “eternal” seem nothing short of a cruel misnomer for the formats that represent the game’s storied past and face an endangered outlook.
“With the Reserved List in existence,” says Fernandez, “something has to happen to the Eternal formats (let’s say a big change), or something tricky has to be done by Wizards to not let Vintage and Legacy vanish.” He is undoubtedly right, and it is with the radicalness implied in Fernandez’s statement that I have tried to discuss the long-term future of eternal Magic. Although I can’t claim to have offered perfect solutions, I hope such speculation is a diverting break from the very short-term future Magic players are wont to consider: What cards to trade for next, what to play this weekend, and what the next set will look like.
And if such supposition remains for you either too nearsighted or simply harebrained, there is another alternative, says Menendian: “At some point, the copyright will expire, like in 2080 or something, so then anyone can print Magic cards. I say that facetiously, but there’s also a serious element: I see Magic as a long-term game that will be around rather indefinitely in some form, because the core mechanics and structure of the game [are] so strong. It is no more complicated in some ways than chess, backgammon, or other really enduring games. And at some point, the Reserved List won’t matter. We won’t necessarily be alive to enjoy it, but the reality is that others will.”
While that might be scant comfort to those struggling to save up for dual lands, it is a heartening thought to those whose love of the game already stretches back numerous years and who envisage it stretching on for many more. Eternal Magic might be as stable as a house of cards. The players who care about it, endure.
Special thanks to:
- Stephen Menendian - Buy his ebook "Understanding Gush" on QuietSpeculation.com - Buy!
- Cesar Fernandez
- Oliver Daems
- Fulvio Zerbino
