The State of Competitive Magic

Welcome Magic lovers!

While many of the Magic: the Gathering players reading this are very likely to spend much, if not all of their time engaging with the game we love on the Magic Arena client, tapping and casting digital representations of cards, the reality is that the vast majority of high-level competitive play still occurs elsewhere; either face-to-face in card shops and convention centers across the globe, or on the archaic Magic Online client. This is primarily due to one main factor.

Of the six constructed formats currently available on the Magic Arena client, only one is an officially sanctioned, competitive format: Standard.

The others are casual, pseudo-formats that vaguely resemble some of the major sanctioned formats, but only exist on Arena and have no competitive circuit to speak of. Are these formats fun to play? Absolutely! However, do they matter with regard to the competitive Magic scene? Not at all!

One may argue that the Explorer format is getting close to becoming actual Pioneer, but with Wizards of the Coast deliberately dragging their heels with regard to putting the rest of the cards in that format on Arena, it doesn't look like we're going to be getting there anytime soon (having only a few of the decks in the Pioneer metagame be complete on Arena doesn't turn Explorer into Pioneer). 

Once or perhaps twice a year there will come a weekend where one of these unsanctioned formats becomes relevant for competitive Arena players, as Wizards of the Coast continues to push things like the Arena Championship, but the reality is that the vast majority of the time, Timeless, Historic, Alchemy, Explorer and Brawl simply don't matter to most competitive players. This often means that many Magic Arena players are engaging with the game in a sort of casual bubble, mostly oblivious to the state of competitive Magic outside of the Arena client, causing them to wonder about things like why the Standard rotation was increased to three years, or why favorite card got banned or digitally nerfed. This also means that, while casual and competitive players alike can all tune in and watch the same stream of the Magic Pro Tour live on Twitch, many players won't understand the implications of having the Modern or Legacy metagames consist primarily of a single, broken deck (like we saw in Pro Tour Amsterdam), what that means for the game in general, and how it will trickle down to affect them.

For example, many players don't realize the Alchemy format itself wouldn't even exist without the sins of the Standard metagame that came before it.

To that end, today let's go over what's happening in the wide world of Magic outside of Arena, because honestly, it doesn't look good.

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Unfortunately, as of this writing, the vast majority of competitive players consider three of the four major sanctioned formats to be nigh-unplayable. Legacy is being dominated by the Grief Reanimator deck, which picked up new Modern Horizons 3 powerhouse, Psychic Frog, to cement itself as head-and-shoulders above everything else in the format. Attendance for Legacy events on Magic Online is down and offline tournaments are struggling to fire. If that weren't enough, Legacy also continues to be plagued by the release of cards with casual, multiplayer Magic mechanics like Initiative, which has already caused cards like White Plume Adventurer to be banned in the format. No one knows when the next random, casual Commander card will be released into Legacy to upturn the format. This format almost certainly needs a rule put in place to exclude any future Commander or Universes Beyond cards from its ranks, but currently that's not as pressing an issue as it's actually the Modern-legal cards that are wreaking havoc in Legacy.

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Of course, in Modern it's a similar tale, as Nadu Combo decks have the format in a stranglehold. Players don't want to invest the time and money into a deck that will almost certainly have its namesake card banned from the format. That means attendance is down for Modern events as well, with $5000 prize pool tournaments being cancelled recently due to lack of attendance. The release of Modern Horizons 3 has effectively acted as an artificial format rotation, leaving many players with no top-tier deck to play unless they risk investing in something that may get banned very soon. This has many players lamenting the cost of getting into something that has been billed as an 'eternal' format, only to have the majority of one's Modern cards not matter any longer after every couple of years.

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With the Pioneer Regional Championship Qualifier season in full swing, one would think competitive players would be happily grinding this relatively balanced format, with plenty of different archetypes represented in its metagame. However, the consensus is that Pioneer is exceedingly stale, as the top decks haven't changed at all since the last Pioneer Pro Tour all the way back in February, and even there, the Izzet Phoenix decks still made up the majority of the field while also carrying the highest win-rate; a dangerous sign. Especially when one considers that Wizards of the Coast has gone on the record and said:

Although we recognize that there are several other powerful card-draw spells in the format, notably Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time, we currently believe that delve spells contribute to blue decks in Pioneer having a unique identity among Eternal formats.

It's clear that Treasure Cruise isn't going anywhere, and that means Pioneer's metagame remains in the same, stagnant rut that it's been in for ages now. With all that being said, the question becomes: how can these formats be fixed?

Pioneer may be the easiest fix, if WOTC would only rethink their position regarding the powerful delve draw spells, in particular, Treasure Cruise. The card pool in Pioneer is much smaller, and thus doesn't suffer from the same issues that its older and larger siblings, Modern and Legacy, do.

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In the older formats, banning something from the deck that's clearly dominating is, of course, something that Wizards of the Coast will certainly do. However, that's just treating the symptom and not the disease. As we've seen countless times in Modern already, banning the most powerful card in the format simply allows the next-most-powerful card to ascend the throne. Ban Nadu, Winged Wisdom and we go back to The One Ring dominating the format. Ban the ring, and it may be Necrodominance or Ruby Medallion that becomes the boogeyman. This cycle of bans never really addresses the underlying issue with Modern and Legacy: the vast card pool provides too many ways to enable and break every pushed card that gets released into these formats.

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For example, every powerhouse creature that comes out in a new set can immediately be fetched up with cards like Chord of Calling, from Yawgmoth, Thran Physician to Nadu, Winged Wisdom. Just like any new artifact that came down the pipeline made a card like Karn, the Great Creator even more busted.

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While Karn has since joined the pantheon of other banned enablers such as Ponder, Violent Outburst, Faithless Looting and Mox Opal, there are still far too many powerful tools in the format which only get better with every new legendary creature or powerful artifact that gets printed. In fact, it seems like WOTC is going backward, as they just introduced a whole cycle of new enablers to Modern, the medallions, one of which wasted no time in becoming the backbone of the long-dormant Storm deck, which is capable of killing on turn two.

Yet, as the Modern and Legacy card pools get larger and larger, we continue to see the power level of individual cards get pushed higher each set, while simultaneously witnessing the number of bans each year steadily increasing. It's clearly unsustainable, as using the ban hammer as a solution comes with significant negative consequences. The financial cost alone of having one's deck banned after spending hundreds or even thousands on it is to cause many would-be competitive players to turn away from these formats entirely. In addition, when it feels like the company responsible for producing the game pieces we use to play competitively is more concerned with short-term profit than properly curating their major competitive formats, it erodes players' faith in the people steering the ship, and consequently, the future of the game itself.

Ultimately, there is no easy solution, as Magic: the Gathering has expanded exponentially into the bloated mass that it is today, with dozens of ways to play both casually and competitively, both in paper and online. Many have commented that the newest set, Bloomburrow, which releases in a couple of short weeks, seems powered down compared to the run of powerful sets we've seen drop just this year. While that may or may not be true, it appears that there are still many powerful cards scattered throughout the set.

Will Wizards of the Coast rethink their design philosophy in order to get some semblance of control over the major competitive formats, or will they continue to push increasingly powerful Commander cards in every set, despite the risk to format stability that they pose, in order to continue to appeal to more casual players?

What do you think is the solution to the current sorry state of competitive Magic outside of Standard? Because right now, almost all of the major formats are seeing a decline in players and tournament attendance due to how poor the gameplay feels, especially when compared to the cost of entry. Emergency surgery is necessary.