Wizards actively banning cards from all events, venues, and any other Official Thing after two years at the absolute most in print.
My brother sold a collection he'd spent several years and thousands of dollars curating simply because Wizards decided to terminate his format in tournaments and switch to solely their Limited/Most-Recent-Set-Rotation structure. because getting to use your cards you spent tons and tons of money on for longer than a few months at a stretch is anathema to Wizards' rampant profiteering on their trading crack game.
My 5e material is good for as long as I want to use it. Magic cards I bought twenty minutes ago are already liable to be rotated out, deprecated, and effectively transformed into nothing more than oddly nostalgic campfire fuel.
No, Wizards does not get a gorram pass on M:tG, and the fact that nobody ever calls them out on their bullshit frustrates me to no end.
I think you might be misunderstand the various formats WotC does for MtG. WotC doesn't ban cards from events; you can still rock up with your ten year old deck and play some games at the open tables. However, each event will run different combinations of formats:
Limited - This is where you turn up with nothing but some cash to pay to enter. You will acquire cards as part of the format and make your deck then and there. Limited is great for accessibility and for people who don't want spend time learning the meta. You just pay to enter and zip zap zoom:
Draft - You draft (hence the name) from 3 booster packs and make your 40 card deck
Sealed - Your given 6 boosters and make a 40 card deck from that
Constructed - This is where you build and refine your deck beforehand and bring it with you. It's also where the secondary market comes in
Standard - This might be the format where you're getting the 'two years at the most' bit from. This is a rotating format where you can make a deck and bring it with you, but only using cards from the last 3 (I think) most recently printed sets. This can span a year or two's worth of cards.
Modern - This is the most popular constructed format and is non-rotating. You can use any cards printed after a certain set (Shards of Alara I believe, ages back). It's a highly competitive and expensive format, but you don't have to worry about your cards getting rotated out.
Legacy - This is the silly stuff right here; almost anything goes, multi-thousand dollar decks, etc. Your Black Lotuses, your Power Nines, this is where you'll find them
Most events will run some combination of limited and constructed tournaments. Wizards does push Standard because its the big money format and the most accessible one for constructed, but Modern still dominates. I've yet to see an event that doesn't have some modern or legacy side tables.
It's a shame your brother sold off his collection rather than say going into Modern play. But to say you can only use your cards for two years at most really isn't accurate. You can only use your cards competitively for two years if you only play standard. You're not gonna get kicked out of an event for turning up with a non-standard legal deck to play some casual games.
Oh, and there's Commander too, a non-rotating, multiplayer format that's hugely popular. Like the only popular multiplayer format on a large scale.
And if you bought magic cards twenty years ago, you should check their value. Some might be valuable to Modern players (like I said, it's the most popular format, a non-rotating one at that, and drives the secondary market).
That's what it was. I couldn't recall the precise terminology because the nearest place to play any sort of hobby game to my current location is over fifty miles, haven't had an FLGS for almost eight years...but Modern is the one I remember them discontinuing. Somehow, some way, they decided Modern wasn't allowed anymore at most/any events, and that was the format my brother specialized in. It was the last straw for him. And frankly, the whole Standard thing of "buy a few hundred boosters for the latest set, then spend a couple large on the secondary market to get the rest of what you actually need to play at any level beyond School Cafeteria Derpgirl, then repeat the process when we release our next set three months later or kindly stop playing please" can fly off a cliff and die.
I love trading card games. I grew up on TCGs. I was at one point a top 1000-rated Pokemon TCG player, at least according to their public ranking website thingus in Ye Olden Paste. I played some Yu-Gi-Oh, as awful as that game is, just to get more. I played the World of Warcraft TCG, which is what would happen if the rules for M:tG were good. I've played half a dozen jank weirdboi start-ups just to see if they'd work out. I could spend entire afternoons/weekends as a kid happily tweaking a new deck, trying to get the mix juuuust right. Please believe me when I say that I am speaking from a place of extensive (if not recent) experience and abiding love for the concept when I say that Magic: the Gathering is both the lifeblood of the entire TCG concept and also the poison in its veins that ensures no other game is ever allowed to live. While utterly tangential to the whole thing of Wizards making M:tG D&D crossover books, I can't help but protest any attempt to save M:tG.
If it ever finally ******* DIED, maybe a better game with a less abusive lootbox-centric please-give-us-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-a-year business model could take its place.
I do want to point out that the rotating standard format is actually responsible for keeping the game financially accessible. Non rotating formats lead to stagnant metas with ever growing prices on decks that completely price out newcomers. If you're lucky to buy the right cards for the dominant strategy early on when they're cheap, well for for you. But getting into such a format without a couple of grand to drop on a deck is nigh on impossible.
Rotating formats mean you can put together a competitive deck for a fraction of that (I used to build solidly competitive decks for less than £20 that won me prizes).
So yeah, jumping down wotcs throat for gouging on rotating formats might actually be missing the point. Without those formats, magic becomes the domain of the rich 1%er modern and legacy players.
In fact, you can see this in action with Yu-Gi-Oh; they refused to introduce a rotating format for the longest time, decks got more and more expensive, and the power creep got worse and worse. They even resorted to printing cards just to break certain deck archetypes. It was a hot mess, and a financially unapproachable one for most.
I know this from 10 years playing competitive magic, 5 of which were also spent working on Duels of the Planeswalkers. That game being made by a studio on a very small island, we had the densest population of pro MtG players in the UK (like, I worked with people who'd represented the UK in the Worlds Championship). So don't think me talking out of my ass here, or being some wotc apologist. I can solidly tell you that rotating formats keep the game affordable; It's modern and legacy that price people out.
Wizards actively banning cards from all events, venues, and any other Official Thing after two years at the absolute most in print.
You clearly don't understand what the word "hyperbole" means. What you are saying is an exaggeration taken to the point of absurdity, which is the literal definition of the word.
Also, Davyd makes some very good points on the advantages of a rotating format. He did miss a few things, most notably how the Standard format (newer cards only) always includes at least four and up to eight sets of cards. One set is released each quarter, so four a year (other special sets are also released that often include quite a few standard legal cards but all cards in such sets are not automatically standard legal). Every ear, any set that is over a year old is rotated out. Each set also includes at least a few cards that are reprinted from old sets and if a version of that card is in a Standard legal set then older versions are also legal so you can always use at least some of your old cards. Not long before the pandemic I built a competitive level standard deck from cards I had drafted over the previous couple months (across two sets) and added singles I bought online for about $80. To build a Modern deck on the same competitive level would cost me at least five times that much, if not ten. The newer, rotating format is far cheaper to get into and doesn't require the time investment of an online college course (and I'm serious so this is not hyperbole) to familiarize oneself with all of the possible cards and deck types that can be expected to pop up in a tournament and learn the proper strategies that work against them.
The Modern format goes back to anything from the Eighth Edition (released in 2003 so almost 20 years) and includes thousands of cards. It has absolutely not been retired as a format and is still regularly played in tournaments. Official modern events are still played as part of the big official super touernament events and at FLGS FNM events with prize support, though they tend to have lower turnouts because, as Davyd pointed out, few new players even try to play in the format because of the learning curve (thousands of cards to understand and dozens of high level deck archetypes) and the price tag for buying rare singles on the secondary market to build a deck (and again, WotC does not get money from the secondary market, though some large retailers just buy massive amounts of sealed product to build up their supply) with most competitive decks costing at least $500 if not a thousand or more for those sixty cards. WotC introduced the Pioneer format about a year and a half ago which goes back to the Return to Ravnica block (2012) so that players who didn't have twenty years of collected cards could get into a larger non-rotating format without as much of a learning curve. Modern events are still played, and generally more than Pioneer.
Statistically the single most popular MtG format, meaning the one that more people play and do so more often, is Commander. Commander is a format designed with multiplayer games in mind (usually four, but it can be played with at least two and theoretically no upper limit but turn order gets tedious after a point and if you have six players it's probably more convenient to break into two three player games). Commander is not a competitive tournament set and includes cards from every Magic set ever printed. It has a singleton rule (no more than one of any particular card in a deck except for basic lands) and has a deck size of one hundred cards that makes the sort of super-specialized builds that dominate other formats unviable. There are some staple cards that are found in many different decks and you can still drop a grand on a deck but because of the massive card pool and the singleton rule preventing consistent easy abuse of any particular card/combo you can build a perfectly functional deck with some powerful cards between $50 and $200 that you can take to literally anywhere magic is played (GLGS, conventions, large MtG specific tourney events, the high school cafeteria, etc) and not be cripplingly outclassed (the multiplayer angle also means that of one player in a four headed game does have a deck full of mythic rarity $20-$50 cards, the other three can agree "Okay, let's gang up on them first"). At my FLGS the majority of people playing Magic at any given time are usually not in a tournament but folks that pay the store a $5 table fee to use the space and play pickup games of Commander for the afternoon/evening (they have Commander-specific tables reserved all day Saturday and a lot of people play). Commander players eventually tend to build more decks and buy more cards to tweak existing decks, but many start out with either a $50 premade, out of the box deck or one that a friend built for them for about the same price, then slowly purchase a few singles to swap out and customize.
Also worth noting, nobody ever gets lured into playing MtG under some false pretense that a single small investment will be all that's needed to play forever. If you want that you can buy a pack of traditional playing cards and a Hoyle rulebook for a few dozen games because that's the biggest variety you'll get in gaming for a single low price investment. One of the primary attractions to all collectible TCGs is the consistent addition of new cards that get added to the game and the variety those new cards bring. If you get everything all in a single package and can't add anything, then that card game is neither collectible nor tradeable and guess what the "T" in "TCG" stands for? Any TCG is going to represent a continued investment of some degree based on the intrinsic reasons players are attracted to the game to begin with. Are we going to start raging about MMOs that "force" and "extort" players to pay monthly subscription fees to continue playing and access their characters, loot and content that they've "already paid for?" Not if we expect the game developers to maintain the servers people play on and produce new content for the games, we aren't. Magic, like all other TCGs, is something that players determine their own level of investment in, be that playing Commander at a friend's kitchen table once a week or spending thousands of dollars on twenty year old, out of print cards needed to compete in massive tournaments with big cash prizes. Just like D&D players decide if each new book release is, in their opinion, worth the price to add that content to their games. It is not as if either product doesn't come with clearly labeled price tags and there is plenty of freely available information on what you'll be getting with even dozens, if not hundreds of guides, tutorials, and shopping lists posted on blogs, forums, and YouTube by active players.
I've moved this thread into its own discussion as there are some interesting opinions relating to rotating formats in card games, but I don't want to clog up the actual discussion
I think you might be misunderstand the various formats WotC does for MtG. WotC doesn't ban cards from events; you can still rock up with your ten year old deck and play some games at the open tables. However, each event will run different combinations of formats:
Most events will run some combination of limited and constructed tournaments. Wizards does push Standard because its the big money format and the most accessible one for constructed, but Modern still dominates. I've yet to see an event that doesn't have some modern or legacy side tables.
It's a shame your brother sold off his collection rather than say going into Modern play. But to say you can only use your cards for two years at most really isn't accurate. You can only use your cards competitively for two years if you only play standard. You're not gonna get kicked out of an event for turning up with a non-standard legal deck to play some casual games.
Oh, and there's Commander too, a non-rotating, multiplayer format that's hugely popular. Like the only popular multiplayer format on a large scale.
And if you bought magic cards twenty years ago, you should check their value. Some might be valuable to Modern players (like I said, it's the most popular format, a non-rotating one at that, and drives the secondary market).
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
That's what it was. I couldn't recall the precise terminology because the nearest place to play any sort of hobby game to my current location is over fifty miles, haven't had an FLGS for almost eight years...but Modern is the one I remember them discontinuing. Somehow, some way, they decided Modern wasn't allowed anymore at most/any events, and that was the format my brother specialized in. It was the last straw for him. And frankly, the whole Standard thing of "buy a few hundred boosters for the latest set, then spend a couple large on the secondary market to get the rest of what you actually need to play at any level beyond School Cafeteria Derpgirl, then repeat the process when we release our next set three months later or kindly stop playing please" can fly off a cliff and die.
I love trading card games. I grew up on TCGs. I was at one point a top 1000-rated Pokemon TCG player, at least according to their public ranking website thingus in Ye Olden Paste. I played some Yu-Gi-Oh, as awful as that game is, just to get more. I played the World of Warcraft TCG, which is what would happen if the rules for M:tG were good. I've played half a dozen jank weirdboi start-ups just to see if they'd work out. I could spend entire afternoons/weekends as a kid happily tweaking a new deck, trying to get the mix juuuust right. Please believe me when I say that I am speaking from a place of extensive (if not recent) experience and abiding love for the concept when I say that Magic: the Gathering is both the lifeblood of the entire TCG concept and also the poison in its veins that ensures no other game is ever allowed to live. While utterly tangential to the whole thing of Wizards making M:tG D&D crossover books, I can't help but protest any attempt to save M:tG.
If it ever finally ******* DIED, maybe a better game with a less abusive lootbox-centric please-give-us-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-a-year business model could take its place.
Please do not contact or message me.
I do want to point out that the rotating standard format is actually responsible for keeping the game financially accessible. Non rotating formats lead to stagnant metas with ever growing prices on decks that completely price out newcomers. If you're lucky to buy the right cards for the dominant strategy early on when they're cheap, well for for you. But getting into such a format without a couple of grand to drop on a deck is nigh on impossible.
Rotating formats mean you can put together a competitive deck for a fraction of that (I used to build solidly competitive decks for less than £20 that won me prizes).
So yeah, jumping down wotcs throat for gouging on rotating formats might actually be missing the point. Without those formats, magic becomes the domain of the rich 1%er modern and legacy players.
In fact, you can see this in action with Yu-Gi-Oh; they refused to introduce a rotating format for the longest time, decks got more and more expensive, and the power creep got worse and worse. They even resorted to printing cards just to break certain deck archetypes. It was a hot mess, and a financially unapproachable one for most.
I know this from 10 years playing competitive magic, 5 of which were also spent working on Duels of the Planeswalkers. That game being made by a studio on a very small island, we had the densest population of pro MtG players in the UK (like, I worked with people who'd represented the UK in the Worlds Championship). So don't think me talking out of my ass here, or being some wotc apologist. I can solidly tell you that rotating formats keep the game affordable; It's modern and legacy that price people out.
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
You clearly don't understand what the word "hyperbole" means. What you are saying is an exaggeration taken to the point of absurdity, which is the literal definition of the word.
Also, Davyd makes some very good points on the advantages of a rotating format. He did miss a few things, most notably how the Standard format (newer cards only) always includes at least four and up to eight sets of cards. One set is released each quarter, so four a year (other special sets are also released that often include quite a few standard legal cards but all cards in such sets are not automatically standard legal). Every ear, any set that is over a year old is rotated out. Each set also includes at least a few cards that are reprinted from old sets and if a version of that card is in a Standard legal set then older versions are also legal so you can always use at least some of your old cards. Not long before the pandemic I built a competitive level standard deck from cards I had drafted over the previous couple months (across two sets) and added singles I bought online for about $80. To build a Modern deck on the same competitive level would cost me at least five times that much, if not ten. The newer, rotating format is far cheaper to get into and doesn't require the time investment of an online college course (and I'm serious so this is not hyperbole) to familiarize oneself with all of the possible cards and deck types that can be expected to pop up in a tournament and learn the proper strategies that work against them.
The Modern format goes back to anything from the Eighth Edition (released in 2003 so almost 20 years) and includes thousands of cards. It has absolutely not been retired as a format and is still regularly played in tournaments. Official modern events are still played as part of the big official super touernament events and at FLGS FNM events with prize support, though they tend to have lower turnouts because, as Davyd pointed out, few new players even try to play in the format because of the learning curve (thousands of cards to understand and dozens of high level deck archetypes) and the price tag for buying rare singles on the secondary market to build a deck (and again, WotC does not get money from the secondary market, though some large retailers just buy massive amounts of sealed product to build up their supply) with most competitive decks costing at least $500 if not a thousand or more for those sixty cards. WotC introduced the Pioneer format about a year and a half ago which goes back to the Return to Ravnica block (2012) so that players who didn't have twenty years of collected cards could get into a larger non-rotating format without as much of a learning curve. Modern events are still played, and generally more than Pioneer.
Statistically the single most popular MtG format, meaning the one that more people play and do so more often, is Commander. Commander is a format designed with multiplayer games in mind (usually four, but it can be played with at least two and theoretically no upper limit but turn order gets tedious after a point and if you have six players it's probably more convenient to break into two three player games). Commander is not a competitive tournament set and includes cards from every Magic set ever printed. It has a singleton rule (no more than one of any particular card in a deck except for basic lands) and has a deck size of one hundred cards that makes the sort of super-specialized builds that dominate other formats unviable. There are some staple cards that are found in many different decks and you can still drop a grand on a deck but because of the massive card pool and the singleton rule preventing consistent easy abuse of any particular card/combo you can build a perfectly functional deck with some powerful cards between $50 and $200 that you can take to literally anywhere magic is played (GLGS, conventions, large MtG specific tourney events, the high school cafeteria, etc) and not be cripplingly outclassed (the multiplayer angle also means that of one player in a four headed game does have a deck full of mythic rarity $20-$50 cards, the other three can agree "Okay, let's gang up on them first"). At my FLGS the majority of people playing Magic at any given time are usually not in a tournament but folks that pay the store a $5 table fee to use the space and play pickup games of Commander for the afternoon/evening (they have Commander-specific tables reserved all day Saturday and a lot of people play). Commander players eventually tend to build more decks and buy more cards to tweak existing decks, but many start out with either a $50 premade, out of the box deck or one that a friend built for them for about the same price, then slowly purchase a few singles to swap out and customize.
Most of the money
Also worth noting, nobody ever gets lured into playing MtG under some false pretense that a single small investment will be all that's needed to play forever. If you want that you can buy a pack of traditional playing cards and a Hoyle rulebook for a few dozen games because that's the biggest variety you'll get in gaming for a single low price investment. One of the primary attractions to all collectible TCGs is the consistent addition of new cards that get added to the game and the variety those new cards bring. If you get everything all in a single package and can't add anything, then that card game is neither collectible nor tradeable and guess what the "T" in "TCG" stands for? Any TCG is going to represent a continued investment of some degree based on the intrinsic reasons players are attracted to the game to begin with. Are we going to start raging about MMOs that "force" and "extort" players to pay monthly subscription fees to continue playing and access their characters, loot and content that they've "already paid for?" Not if we expect the game developers to maintain the servers people play on and produce new content for the games, we aren't. Magic, like all other TCGs, is something that players determine their own level of investment in, be that playing Commander at a friend's kitchen table once a week or spending thousands of dollars on twenty year old, out of print cards needed to compete in massive tournaments with big cash prizes. Just like D&D players decide if each new book release is, in their opinion, worth the price to add that content to their games. It is not as if either product doesn't come with clearly labeled price tags and there is plenty of freely available information on what you'll be getting with even dozens, if not hundreds of guides, tutorials, and shopping lists posted on blogs, forums, and YouTube by active players.
I've moved this thread into its own discussion as there are some interesting opinions relating to rotating formats in card games, but I don't want to clog up the actual discussion
Find my D&D Beyond articles here