Introduction

Step right up, step right up! You, over there, the scruffy fellow with the long face. Come on over here and tell us your name. Why, hello there, Mr. Legacy-Player, tell me, what is it that ails you? Is it your life, your health, or perhaps money troubles getting you down? That’s it you say? Well, what if I were to tell you that I could not only solve all of your troubles, but also increase the number of Legacy players for you to play with and make everyone happy all at the same time? I know I’m right to think that this may be something you’d be interested in, so sit down and have a listen, but prepare yourself to be startled, amazed, and befuddled with what I’m about to tell you.

Legacy Prices Haven’t Capped

Dropping the act, I can tell you that after being an avid Legacy aficionado since before the format existed, in the local circles I field a lot of questions about the format and most recently the biggest questions have been about finances. And since you don’t see this under the Finance heading, I have been quite unsure telling people numbers without feeling uneasy about it. You see, up until a few years ago, I was an avid trader; I could speculate profitably and had memorized a lot of prices, and I was able to do quite well for myself. After I got most everything I needed and opportunities for trading dwindled as prereleases got smaller and smaller, I entered a form of trading hibernation. Recently, I’ve started trading again after a long winter of dormancy, and I did quite poorly on my first few trades, which made me realize that I needed to sharpen up or my collection would be gone in no time. Since then I’ve been learning card values again and really staying on top of my business. Now, because of all this I can feel a lot more confident in some of the advice I’m giving in that department, specifically the overall advice I’ve given on the format.

Legacy prices have not peaked.

Of course, I may have a biased opinion on the matter; as I said, you don’t see Financial as the heading, but under Legacy (or maybe Editorial from time to time), and that suggests I have a vested interest in the long-term viability in Legacy. I’ve been playing the format since times when it was difficult to get eight people for an event and the cards were worth nothing, and I’ll keep playing it if the format goes back to that at some point in the future. I can’t tell you when prices will peak, but I have an idea of what may be an indicator: when we start repeatedly seeing competitive lists placing in Top 8s with the use of shock lands over duals, or when we see a lot of events allowing proxies that have successful turnouts. For me, these are the signs that Legacy prices are about to peak because it’s so similar to the landscape when I was playing Vintage so many years ago. There was a distinct difference between budget decks that were fully functional and the “Powered” decks capable of doing some truly unfair things compared to the lists that were unpowered. Only aggro, aggro-control and in some cases combo decks were able to function without the use of power and for Legacy we may see a day where the format shifts drastically because there are only so many strategies that are able to function without the use of real duals.

Proxy events allowed people to bypass some monetary restrictions of Vintage, but it skewed the field towards a few specific decks (variable to the number of proxies allowed) and decreased the value people attached to actually owning the cards. Over the last few years none of the Legacy events that have allowed proxies had very large turnouts, and while I’m in favor of people running Legacy events, I think that anyone who cares about the health of the format should boycott proxy events as it undermines the foundations of the format, and I don’t think there is a number of proxies that you can play in a deck that doesn’t have this effect. For a while an Ohio venue was allowing unlimited proxies and was struggling to get eight people, even with guaranteed (and rather generous) cash prizes. Other events have allowed for 10 or 15 proxies, which is an entire mana base or Forces, Goyfs, and a pair of Jaces, but the most likely event is that people just start proxying Imperial Recruiter and play Aluren or Imperial Painter or perhaps Candelabra of Tawnos and seeing if they can break through Mental Missteps to combo off. In any event, it will almost undoubtedly be counteractive to the hope of producing a legitimate metagame because almost no one will attend and those that do attend will play a fringe deck.

So why did Proxy events draw people into playing Vintage but push people away from Legacy?

There are two major difference between Legacy now and Vintage back then. Firstly, the stepping stone to playing a viable, non-budget deck in Vintage was much higher than it is in Legacy today—a ten-proxy event would allow for a person without any of the Power Nine to pick what they needed, play a few Drains and suddenly have a Control Slaver list from what used to be Fish. A five-proxy event would benefit people that had some Power, but not much, by giving them a break, while people without Power couldn’t do much different, Fish with Power wasn’t that much better than Fish without. If you were playing a budget deck, your deck was almost strictly inferior as the creatures were much worse back then and the disruption available was significantly lacking. In Legacy, there are budget decks that are not only capable of winning games against real decks, but are actually favored against some of the best decks in the format, meaning that the barrier to actually play the format in a significant fashion is much lower than it ever was in Vintage. The lack of a deck like Affinity likely have much more to do more with the fact that it’s the first deck that many people play when entering the format and less to do with the actual power of the deck considering that there are several good players I know that groan in dread when their opponent leads with a Springleaf Drum. Proxy events ultimately disrupt the flow of the format enticing people to play unfamiliar decks at uncommon intervals so the quality of play you’re likely to see is quite low considering very few people are going to play the deck that normally would play and that it in no way prepares players for a larger, non-proxied event other than to see if they like the way the deck they built goldfishes.

Even if it came to the point where there was a significant divide between budget decks and real decks in Legacy, I think a fledgling budget scene could be viable well beyond the point of the Vintage counterpart. Using Ravnica dual lands over the Revised alternatives is acceptable for many decks in the format and is much better than not even having access to certain types of cards. It’s even possible and very even likely to supplement Duals by just playing more basic lands, a feat made rather simple by the plethora of fetches and encouraged by the prevalence of Wasteland in so many of the major archetypes, including the most common, Merfolk.

It isn’t even as though Hallowed Fountain is the only substitute available for a Tundra, I can remember back at my local gaming store, Get Your Game On, I was playing round one of a Legacy event and my opponent was playing Standard Super Friends with Swords to Plowshares, Counterspell, and Brainstorm. His Tectonic Edges did everything he needed them to and his Celestial Colonnades were incredibly difficult to deal with. His Jace Belerens came down to menace me a full turn before I top-decked my Jace, the Mind Sculptor and the only way I was able to beat him was due to misplays on his part. My friend played him in a later round and lost in a match for top 8 because he had learned more about the format as the event wore on.

The other significant difference between Vintage and Legacy, and the one I plan to spend more time talking about, is that Vintage has always been very difficult to influence with new cards since the framework of the format is so locked in. On the other hand, Legacy as a format saw significant changes from every set in Scars of Mirrodin and is still well within the realm of influence of new sets, and that’s great news for everyone. Why? Because that means that new cards can change the face of Legacy in important ways: Cards can be designed for Legacy.

Need Dual Lands? Blame Wizards of the Coast

Blocks over the last six years.

Scars of Mirrodin – Artifact theme, few colored cards, increasing need to play multiple colors.

Zendikar Block – Land themed, makes playing multiple colors much easier.

Shards of Alara – Multi-colored theme.

Lorwyn – Tribal theme, multicolor subtheme and then Shadowmoor – Multi-colored theme.

Time Spiral Block – Many themes, lots of color-bleed.

Ravnica Block – Multi-color theme.

Three of the last six blocks have had multi-colored themes and yet there are only 17 cards printed or reprinted in a standard Legal set since Mirrodin was released that have the word nonbasic on them. The trend has been somewhat obvious since the success of Ravnica Block—people love playing with multi-colored themes. It gives players the maximum ability to play and combine traits they like from every color for their deck. It adds a lot to the game, but at the same time it puts stress on people to play with all of the best cards possible or lose relevance in being competitive, especially considering that with some degree of consistency, since this multi-colored theme started, the only viable mono-colored strategies have been pure aggro strategies and are generally Red.

This struggle to stay relevant in the competitive scene puts a strain on mana bases, especially in Legacy when it is entirely common to see decks splash a full set of an off-color Dual to accommodate four or fewer cards in the deck (Case in point being Tarmogoyf.) This happens because there is so little in the way of incentives to play anything but Blue, and when you’re going to play Blue you only want to play the most efficient creatures possible because the rest of your high impact deck can compensate for the redundancy that non-Blue decks need. The trend is even obvious for non-blue decks, you only play the best and if the color you want to play is significantly lacking in one department, you play another color. Multi-colored cards are a great expression of what happens when two colors mix and when you include it into the equation in Magic, it can be a lot of fun for deck building, but ultimately the toll of this kind of thinking has caught up to us as the surge in Legacy popularity has kept up. If the trend of multi-colored sets keeps up, this will eventually be a problem for every Eternal format, especially Commander, unless better and better lands are printed to keep up with the demand.

Now, you may be saying to yourself that there aren’t too many Gold cards seeing play in Legacy, how can they really impact the format how I’m suggesting? Even though there is only a large handful of truly playable multi-colored cards from these new sets, there is a methodology that goes into designing nearly every other card in the sets and that’s the concept of splashability. Splashability is how easily you can play a card in decks that aren’t singularly that one color. (e.g., Ball Lightning is going to be difficult to fit into a deck that isn’t strictly or at least heavily Red while Lightning Elemental can be played in even a five-color due to its low Red requirement.) Since R&D has been supporting people playing more colors it’s natural to make the cards that aren’t explicitly multiple colors cards that can be played easily in decks of different colors with ease. Dark Confidant costs instead of to encourage the card’s use in decks other than simply black decks, something we definitely see in Legacy and to a lesser extent the Extended seasons Dark Confidant was legal for. Whereas Cryptic Command was priced at to restrict its play to only decks that were mostly Blue—an experiment that failed in a large way for the Standard that Cryptic Command was legal for. However, even if the mana bases weren’t so friendly during that time, the idea that only Blue decks are going to play Blue cards is absurd because the incentive to play Blue is so strong, it offers you the tools to stop the opponent’s worst-case scenarios from occurring and allows you to smooth your draws, which means that when building a deck with blue in it, even if the cards aren’t mostly Blue, the mana is nearly always skewed toward Blue-producing lands so that you can always take advantage of these cards. Cryptic Command clearly would have been a much larger problem if any deck could have played it, but the effects of restricting the cost of Blue spells is really muted when compared to the effect of placing restrictive costs on other colors if you’re still going to have some of the most powerful cards loaded up with colorless mana symbols.

A Proposal

Now that’s an impressive creature! In the future, people may glance back at this article and think I’m previewing this card. We’re actually here to look at all of those black-mana symbols. The incentives to play a deck that can support heavy black restrictions reaches all the way down into Legacy where mono-black and B/w decks have been seen using this impressive beast. My real question is, why is Black the only color that has a single color strategy supported with such an impressive card? Giving a card a more restrictive mana-cost is one of the drawbacks that allows powerful cards to be printed at affordable levels, but it’s a function that we seldom see and I think that if we saw more, it could change Legacy in a positive way.

Printing cards that focus on a mono-colored strategy that have the ability to impact Legacy means that no old archetypes should be obsoleted and that most cards will maintain value, yet there would be a vein of new cards and strategies available to build competitive decks for the environment. It’s far more practical than reprinting old Legacy staples such as Force of Will and Duals in a box set that can be purchased for $39.99 because it actually presents a creative solution to the problem isn’t simply appeasement to whining. From a business perspective, integrating Legacy designed cards into new sets is still going to contribute to sales of an existing product meaning that you don’t need to test, market and release a special set. From a flavor aspect, there is even an opportunity to increase the appeal of multi-colored spells when you consider that there are so many spells that are alien or prohibitive to that strategy either in the same sets or in the previous block.

Increasing the viability for single-color strategies can be done in several different ways, pushing the value of basic lands in a form that either punishes non-basics or grants bonuses for playing basics is a great way. Cards that stipulate if you control X or more of a basic land type they grant an ability that can compensate for playing with mostly basic lands. An example of this could be an enchantment that as long as you control 4 or more basic Plains, creatures you control have Double Strike at a cost of 1WW or small creatures that give you huge bonuses for basic lands much like Dragonmaster Outcast for having any lands.. In the same vein we could even see Affinity for basic land types, cards like Razor and Spire Golem were good enough to see Legacy play for quite some time, it certainly would not be too difficult to template newer cards that could have an impact. Speaking of cards that are stronger versions of existing cards, it would be really interesting to see aggressive effects like Skyshroud Elite or Dryad Sophisticate that perhaps have stipulations that they only work if you control only basic lands. Both of the cards in the previous example were Green and it makes a lot of sense to me for Green to have cards that punish non-basics in such a harsh fashion

Playing on the strengths of colors over their enemy colors rather than bonding them together can really go a long distance to correcting this as well. Such a change could be an aggressive uncounterable creature that is sacrificed when you control an Island or an impressive burn spell that deals less damage if you control a Plains. These cards contrast with things like Thrun, the Last Troll and Lightning Helix nicely and give strong incentives to playing decks with allied colors rather than enemy ones, if there is any splash at all. A bit more specifically, I’d like to see more colored mana symbols on cards, to see cards printed at or that have a huge impact on the game the way a card priced at does (see: Necropotence).

Case Study: Affinity

Affinity is likely the cheapest, competitive Legacy deck, the mana-base for the deck is nearly entirely commons and even most of the fearsome cards run under two dollars. Scars of Mirrodin, like Mirrodin before it, wanted to push the idea of playing a mono-artifact deck, even if that deck had colors in it, and to support this strategy there needed to be strong synergies and some impressive creatures to support what, in large, had been an impossible task before. The lands needed to be so good that players wouldn’t want to use many of the non-basics not associated with the archetype to support the deck. Furthermore, the creatures that were there needed to provide enough incentives to encourage players to play an artifact deck despite how easy the deck was to attack. While the execution was a bit of a mistake in Standard, the deck flows well in Legacy. A mono-colored deck wouldn’t need nearly the same amount of push to make a deck for it viable since every color has several thousand cards printed in it.

Conclusion

I feel strongly that the best way to counter the rising Legacy prices is with new cards, not reprints. I think there is more than enough design space left in the game so that new cards can be implemented without totally obsoleting many of the cards or strategies from the recent past and certainly not those viable in Legacy. The demand for Duals is going to rage on until it either happens or the game dies, but I would be rather frightened if that did in fact happen: There was a post on the mothership quite some time ago about how reprinting the Power Nine was a sign of the end of the game. It seems to me that reprinting Duals is very much along the same path as it indicates an end to creative solutions. I think we’re far from the day where that needs to happen and I’m actually fairly excited about the prospect of Instated being horror themed, perhaps we’ll see a theme of xenophobia form the colors that encourages the kind of modeling that I’d like to see. Well, this has been my thoughts on the matter, and while I may be biased I think it’s a pretty good set of realistic ideas. What do you think are feasible solutions to this increasing problem short of reprinting dual lands?

~ Christopher Walton in the real world

im00pi at gmail dot com

Master Shake on The Source

@EmperorTopDeck on Twitter