Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge the inspiration for this article, one Mr. Aaron Forsythe. Aaron, the director of Magic R&D, engaged in some remarkably frank and open discussions about Legacy and the Reserved List on Twitter this week. The conversations Aaron and others engaged in over those couple of days are recorded for posterity, and they form the foundation of my article today.

At Australian Nationals last year, the biggest Magic tournament I've been a part of, I met a lot of new and wonderful players who were part of the game from many different angles—drafters, Cubers, EDHers, judges, store owners, Standard grinders, and the almost mythical eternal players. Vintage is virtually unheard-of in Perth, and even our Legacy tournaments are unsanctioned and allow proxies, as we don't have the card supply necessary to support sanctioned play. Drafting the night before the main show, I started chatting to a Vintage evangelist who regaled me with the wondrous tales of his obscure format. He was bemoaning the lack of players and trying to convert me, arguing that it really wasn't as expensive as people made out. Vintage tournaments allowed some proxies, so I wouldn't have to buy power. He was making some headway through my doubt until he tried to convince me to start with what he said was the cheapest deck in the format, Dredge.

"All you'll need to buy is four Bazaars, you can proxy the other expensive cards!"

Sure, buddy. A thousand bucks for four cards to get into a dead-end format, and I still couldn't play sanctioned events if they even existed? He was a nice guy, and we had a good chat, but I wasn't buying it. I had to sell my Jaces to pay for my accommodation for the event, after Plan A of "win Nationals" fell through, so I didn't have a spare few thousand lying around to drop on cards. Recently, I've been reminded of that conversation, however, by the reignited discussion about Legacy, "Overextended," singles prices, and the Reserved List. The fear of some in the community is that in a few years' time, today's Legacy players will be having that same conversation with someone like me. "All you'll need is the four Time Spirals, you can proxy the other expensive cards!"

The Legacy Surge

It's finally starting to occur to people that Legacy cards are the lowest that they're going to be for a while, and it's time to get in.

—Jonathan Medina

The reason for this infectious Chicken-Little-ism is that the dramatic increase in U.S. demand for Legacy cards is being met by the same limited supply of old cards. The reason I say U.S. demand is that I believe this increase is tied closely to the SCG Open series, which to this point is only operating in the United States. Legacy GPs in Europe are getting massive turnouts, yes, but Legacy GPs have been getting massive turnouts in Europe for years. Meanwhile, my informal Twitter polling confirms what I expected about Asia and Australia—that eternal formats are still as dead as they've ever been. Nonetheless, the prices that are generally used for reference in these discussions are those set by the large U.S. stores, and they have been rising rapidly and consistently for some time now. They show little sign of slowing, as buy-list prices have been rising parallel to the sale prices.

An excellent way to see these price trends is to check out Black Lotus Project, a website that graphs eBay average card prices over time. Just look up any of the duals. Tropical Island, for instance, has gone from $35 in January 2010 to a current price of $65. Force of Will, a format staple, is up from $25 to $48. Candelabra of Tawnos, an overnight hit due to the unbanning of Time Spiral, has gone from $30 to $170. These are some of the more prominent examples of the general upward trend on Legacy card prices.

This is simply supply and demand. The Open series has allowed a previously relatively unpopular format to reach a whole new audience, and people like what they see. The new Legacy players are demanding their piece of the pie. The supply side of the equation is constrained, however, as there are no new copies of certain highly desirable cards entering the market. Being from old sets with comparatively short print runs means there are considerably fewer Savannahs, for example, than there are Knight of the Reliquary available. I won't go into this in detail, since it should be pretty obvious, but the short version is, more demand for a static number of each card means that those cards will rise in price.

The Reserved List

I know that personally, the second an opponent plays a foil alternate art Tropical Island, I will be having less fun in Legacy.

—Matt Sperling

Normally, in this situation, Wizards could, if they wanted to, print more copies of the rare old cards to increase the supply to meet demand—a new core set, perhaps, or even a boxed set product containing dual lands, Force of Will, Candelabra of Tawnos, and so on—would sell like hotcakes without a doubt, and make Legacy far more accessible to the new player by bringing down prices. Unfortunately, in the game's infancy, Wizards of the Coast made a promise to the then-community after reprints destroyed the value of certain cards. Cards that had been $20 rares could suddenly be had for 50¢, and the confidence of the singles buyer and particularly of card stores was sorely shaken as their investment was destroyed overnight. This promise was that a stated list of cards would never be reprinted in a tournament-legal way. This list is called the Reserved List.

The reprint policy has been revised several times, and over the last few years, several cards from the list actually were reprinted in limited-edition products like the Phyrexia vs. The Coalition duel decks. This led to rumors spreading that the Reserved List was on the way out, that Wizards might do away with it entirely and free their hand to reprint as they saw fit. Unfortunately, the hopes of the community were dashed just over a year ago, on March 18, 2010. The updated reprint policy as of that date reads in part:

To maintain your confidence in the Magic game as a collectible, we've created this Magic: The Gathering card reprint policy. It explains why we reprint cards and lists which cards from past Magic sets will never be reprinted.

Why We Reprint Cards

The Magic trading card game has tremendous appeal as both a game and a collectible. For us, however, the Magic game is first and foremost a supreme game of strategy and skill. We choose to reprint cards because we believe (a) the cards we reprint make for enjoyable game play, and (b) all Magic players deserve an opportunity to play with these cards. Any card that isn't on the reserved list may be reprinted.

Reserved Cards

The complete list of reserved cards appears at the end of this document. Reserved cards will never be printed again in a functionally identical form. A card is considered functionally identical to another card if it has the same card type, subtypes, abilities, mana cost, power, and toughness. No cards will be added to the reserved list in the future. No cards from the Mercadian Masques set and later sets will be reserved. In consideration of past commitments, however, no cards will be removed from this list. The exclusion of any particular card from the reserved list doesn't indicate that there are any plans to reprint that card.

Premium Cards

A previous version of this policy allowed premium versions of cards on the reserved list to be printed. Starting in 2011, no cards on the reserved list will be printed in either premium or non-premium form.

"Starting in 2011, no cards on the reserved list will be printed in either premium or non-premium form."

Unequivocal, wouldn't you say? Personally, I despise the Reserved List. I think its continued existence has only a negative impact on the game. However, I don't think Wizards can now reasonably get rid of it, following this reaffirmation and indeed strengthening of the reprint policy. The Reserved List is here to stay, against the wishes of a vocal portion of the player base and even of some of those within Magic R&D, the game's stewards. Aaron Forsythe, the director of R&D, recently engaged with the community on this issue via Twitter, stating,

If the Reserved List could be removed, it would have [been] by now. That can't be part of any realistic solution. The end.

We are all stuck with the Reserved List, and any solution to Legacy card affordability is going to have to work around it.

Circumvention

There has been a huge amount of discussion within the community on potential workarounds for increasing the availability of Legacy staples without contravening the reprint policy. Several ideas have emerged from the discussion, each with their own advocates and detractors. Considering each in turn:

Snow Duals

While Wizards aren't permitted to reprint Underground Sea, or a functional reprint named Underground Ocean or some such, it has been suggested that they could print a functionally distinct version that is not meaningfully different in most situations. Mostly, the suggestion is that the Snow supertype could be added to Reserved List cards, which will not come up in most game situations. Other variants include adding the Tribal type, or adding an irrelevant enters-the-battlefield ability, or even obsolescing the original duals by printing, for example, dual-type lands that gain you life, or triple-type lands. Detractors raise the idea that this would allow decks to play up to eight of a given dual, to which it is countered that most decks wouldn't want to play more than four, citing the lack of play seen by the Ravnica duals.

My biggest problem with this is the actual reprinting of these cards. They have to be printed in some sort of commercial product, but whatever it is, it will be impossible to conceal the real motivation for printing them. Print them in an upcoming normal set? New players will be confused by the irrelevant “snow” type on their cards, and it will break Standard and Extended. Print them in a separate box set, like From the Vaults: SnowLegacy? Current Legacy players will see exactly what you're doing, and be understandably pissed off that you are selling at a fixed, lower price the cards that they sunk hundreds of dollars into, confident that the Reserved List would protect their investment. Having affirmed the Reserved List, printing Snow duals or any other virtual reprint would be dishonest, even if it were legally permissible. While I may applaud a good Jedi mind trick within a game of Magic, I could not condone it in business.

Aaron posed a hypothetical scenario: If Snow duals were printed, and the originals lost 85 percent of their value, how would original dual owners feel? Their sentiments were divided. On the one hand, we have @amclay:

Not happy at all. I made the investment based on the word of WotC that they would not be reprinted.

On the other, we have @markconkle:

Yes, the future of Magic is much more important than my personal collection.

And Aaron's own thoughts on Snow duals?

We've discussed Snow-covered Tundra. It feels like cheating on 2 levels, pissing off those that wanted Tundra reprinted & those that didn't.

Not . . . gonna . . . happen.

Ban Cards Based on Price

One simple way to eliminate the cost of buying, say, Underground Sea or Candelabra of Tawnos is to ban it from tournament play. This would make Legacy cheaper in the short term; however, it would also warp the metagame, destroy card owners' confidence in the stable value of their cards, and almost certainly be a slippery slope. Singles price is not a good reason to ban a card from tournament play—for one thing, it gives Ben Bleiweiss control over the Legacy metagame. If you judge by the singles price of a store or stores, those stores could, if they so chose, inflate the price of a card in order to have it banned. This would have a knock-on effect on other prices, which could be manipulated for profit, and would lead to a constantly and randomly shifting metagame and a volatile market that punishes investing in cards that do well. I am not trying to paint Ben as some sort of Machiavellian schemer, but allowing card prices to influence format legality is a dangerous move.

Ban the Entire Reserved List

Neatly sidestepping the issues associated with banning based on price, it has been suggested that Wizards could simply ban the entire Reserved List from Legacy play. This would mean that any card remaining in the format could, if R&D saw fit, be reprinted in a future expansion set or boxed set. There are two problems with this move—first, if you think Reserved List card values would tank following reprints, they would fall even faster and further if they were no longer tournament-legal. Anyone who would be upset by the Reserved List being canceled would be doubly upset by this, unless they were so fixated on a point of honor that they wouldn't allow Wizards to break their decade-old promise "just because." Second, the format that would emerge from this mass banning would be almost unrecognizable from the Legacy of today. If you look at any list of Legacy decks, you will see that nearly all of them feature Reserved List cards. The dual lands, in particular, are core to Legacy's identity. This “solution” is essentially saying "If I can't play Legacy, no one can," and the end of Legacy is certainly not my goal.

@mtgaaron: I'm in no way seriously considering banning the Reserved List in Legacy. I don't want to mess with a good thing. But it has spurred thought.

@JoshJMTG on Twitter is apparently releasing his doctoral thesis on this very subject in 140-character snippets, with the hashtag #SaveLegacy. As well as the above ideas, he presents several further suggested fixes, with their own pros and cons:

6. Go a totally different direction: ban the fetchlands, and print no-drawback duals without the basic land types.

8. Power level errata on the original duals to remove the basic land types. Pros/cons similar to fetchland bans.

9. Restrict the dual lands in Legacy, or errata them to be Legendary. Pros: "4x" as many dual lands. Cons: Obviously awful.

Josh admits that some of his suggestions are obviously unworkable, but they are at least thought-provoking. At this stage, I don't think we have a satisfactory solution for Legacy's low card availability. The Reserved List is here to stay, and any functional reprint, banning, or deliberate obsoleting of the Legacy staples on the list would be against the spirit of the list—which is explicitly designed to prop up the secondary market prices of these cards.

Overextended

The important thing about this format is it shouldn't just be Legacy-lite . . . That I can think of at least ten archetypes off the top of my head nobody has even mentioned yet is really a testament to the diversity of this format.

—Gavin Verhey

Parallel to the conversation about Legacy's rising popularity and declining affordability is another conversation about Extended. Extended underwent some serious changes recently in an attempt to boost its popularity—the card pool was drastically cut, with the idea being that players would be able to get value out of their new cards even after they rotated from Standard, and that new players would have easier access to the format since the old cards that hadn't been printed for years were no longer legal. Unfortunately, despite these drastic changes, the popularity of the format has barely changed, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. We are almost at the end of Extended PTQ season, and nobody is talking about playing it beyond this period of immediate relevance.

I feel the main reason for this disinterest, beyond any shortcomings of old or new Extended as a format, is the lack of tournament support. Star City Games have offered Standard and Legacy tournaments with big cash prizes almost every weekend this year. Channel Fireball, TCG Player, and other retailers are running their own cash tournaments across North America. Worldwide, local stores are running Standard and limited FNMs every week, as well as their own tournament series. These tournaments lend year-round relevance to these formats, and they are the major subject of discussion on forums, Twitter, and Magic websites. I have to wonder, if there were an Extended Open series running every week, would the players come? I believe they would, in greater numbers than Legacy, due to the greater card availability. Extended seems like a decent format, but one that most of the player base has passed by—without the attention focused on it by regular high-level tournaments, why should we get excited about it over other formats?

Aaron Forsythe has stated explicitly on Twitter that he wants "to find a viable and popular second constructed format." His issues with the current secondary formats:

The average player can't become invested in Block Constructed. You throw your whole deck out every year. It never gets played outside PTQs.

Eternal has card availability issues.

Singleton formats have problems as well. Competitive EDH would crush the format, and decklists for singletons are bafflingly unprocessable.

I'm not sure we can capture Legacy's awesomeness in a smaller format. "I can use anything I own" is powerful, more so than "Duals + FoW herf."

This last line refers to a popular suggestion for another alternative format, commonly called Overextended. Ben McDole on ManaNation.com has been investigating this theoretical format for a couple of months now, so if you want to know more about the format, I recommend checking out his archive. This format would be larger than old Extended but smaller than Legacy, with many suggested starting points for the format. The most popular suggestion so far has been Masques block, based on the rather blunt delineation that sets prior to Masques are subject to the Reserved List while those after it are not. Alternative suggestions include starting with Invasion block, as it is a turning point in Magic design and the first "modern" block, or with Ravnica in order to avoid the brokenness of Mirrodin and the crumminess of Kamigawa—I think the real reason for this last suggestion is just because Ravnica was such a killer block. Starting with Ravnica would be similar in size to old Extended, which was just recently changed due to its unpopularity!

The Invasion block suggestion I first heard from Gavin Verhey on Facebook, and it generated a lot of talk between the various Magic pros and joes—the general consensus seemed to be that it would likely create a compelling format, with appropriate power-level bannings. Masques or Invasion is rather beside the point, however, as the issue with an Overextended format to my mind is that it would start infringing on Legacy's territory. While it wouldn't be Legacy per se, the two would occupy similar mental real estate for the new player, and if Overextended were to get the tournament support that I believe it would need to be a real second constructed format, it would largely have to replace Legacy. I don't think the Magic community is big enough for a successful Legacy format and a successful format starting with Masques or Invasion. Both formats, to the new player, would be "the ones with all the old expensive cards"—I know that I couldn't tell the difference between Vintage and Legacy when I first got into Magic. This is much like the "Ban the Reserved List" solution above. If the new format wins, Legacy players are unhappy; if the new format loses, Wizards has another failed format on the roster.

That's only my view, though. Aaron posed the question to his followers: would an Overextended format be more popular than current Extended? Would it have a different audience than Legacy? Responses were mostly positive:

@serialrobertson: I'd be way more interested in getting into it than I am in Legacy. I can't justify paying for duals and FoW, but RAV Duals? sure.

@AndyMag201: I would definitely be able to use the older cards I own and not worry about spending the large amounts Legacy requires...

@ElPayoFran: I am a Legacy player and totally would play OE instead.

So there is interest in Overextended, from both Legacy and non-Legacy players. Has Magic ever supported three popular constructed formats, though? Something to think about is to picture what the Magic schedule looks like with Overextended as a success. Do we have a fourth Pro Tour back? Do we have mixed constructed-format PTs? Does the Sunday format at SCG Opens rotate between the two?

The Story So Far

So there we have it. I felt the conversations of last week were important enough that the Magic community at large should be made aware of them. Though I don't have the solution for Legacy card availability, here's a positive thought from Aaron to close on.

Do you think that if 10K people can play Legacy but 15K can't that the 10K all just quit? Why would the format die and not plateau?

At least with the status quo, existing Legacy players can keep doing their thing. The trick for Wizards to figure out is how to make Legacy available to new players without destroying the format in the process. If you have any thoughts of your own, please let us hear them in the comments, or chase me up on Twitter @rtassicker. Wizards evidently aren't sure what to do, and do see it as an issue, so if you have a good idea, please share it!