There’s both risk aversion and irrationality at play here. People dumb more money into Standard over time but justify it because it seems cheaper at the time- kind of like taking out a loan.

The risk aversion comes from both paying for a Vintage deck and generally higher entree fees- you can definitely make some scratch winning pieces of power at tournaments, but $100 buy-ins are a big turn off for a large percentage of the player base. There are certainly middle-aged well to do Magic players, but college-aged and younger folk generally can’t justify that type of buy-in.

The VMA set is just the new high dollar prize on the block. High dollar prizes are what Vintage is about and have been about for years even with unlimited proxies and the numbers aren’t there. It will always be a step below being a PTQ or GP or Pro Tour Format, and a new shiny prize won’t change that. I agree that V4 and cost are barriers with cost being the ultimate reason that it will never be a relevant format. If it was maybe people would be more willing to buy in and play the format online, but we may never know.

The fact they pushed that large patch last week is still so dumb. It causes me to DC from 3 different vintage champs qs. It’s just beyond me why they’d screw so many people this way, I never even got a good shot to qualify :(.

I think that the major barriers are the cost of playing the format and that a number of players jumped ship when V4 launched.