I think this is mostly a function of bad marketing decisions by Wizards. Why not just reprint a few good Modern cards every set? Or print new ones? As in, every time a set comes out, have a few members of R&D commit themselves to getting 2-3 cards into that set that are specifically designed and tested for Modern. The resource investment wouldn’t be that huge, and there are plenty of ways they could do this efficiently. Or even just reprinting existing Modern staples to drive sales, putting them randomly into packs to increase demand. All of these ideas are on the table in future “Fixing Modern” columns and I’m excited to see where Modern heads this year.

Strongly agree with this. Without realizing the value of Modern, and without devoting the commensurate resources, Wizards is losing a lot of potential from this awesome format. There are a lot of branding decisions they could make with Modern to both justify that resource investment and get more value from it, and until Wizards starts treating it more seriously, I fear the format is still going to get treated with much less dedication than Standard or Limited.

Happy to hear you enjoyed it! It was fun to write and I hope the other articles also put into writing what many Modern players feel every day.

Totally agree that the lack of countermagic (and, more broadly, generic answers) is a serious problem in Modern. This is the foundation behind the timeless Modern complaint about high variance games, the matchup lottery, the importance of sideboarding, etc. If we had more Modern-appropriate Bolt, Decay, Path, Thoughtseize/IoK, and other policing effects, the format would be much tamer, much more interactive, and much less ban obsessed. This will definitely be something I talk about in a later column entry.

Excited to do more of these columns! I think you’re right to point to the Standard and Legacy power-gap as an importance space for Modern to fill. Unfortunately, because that divide is HUGE and because Modern is ill-defined, it’s hard to know where Modern sits between the two formats. It’s clearly in the middle, but we don’t know exactly where. Like you, I feel we are stuck with Modern as this middle format, but also feel it isn’t meeting the demand of players like us. Overextended would have been absolutely awesome, or even “Eternal”/”Unreserved” with no RL cards and a Legacy cutoff. But if Wizards really is sticking with Modern, an assumption I’m working with, there are things they can do to make it better. I’ll touch on more of those fixes in future columns!

Glad you enjoyed it! I too was really happy with Stoddard’s “definition” and wish Wizards would use it (or one like it) more. I do think creatures are an interesting element of the question, and one that isn’t covered by Stoddard’s definition or my edited one. Not sure if that’s just a means to achieving an end or actually part of the definition itself. Hopefully Wizards can just go out there and define the format in clearer terms one day. Thanks for reading and hopefully we’ll get some more video content up soon.

Amen! I do think banlist issues are huge in this “Fixing Modern” question, and your example of banning broken cards is a good one. Wizards has taken a very surgical, at best, and hamfisted, at worst, approach to bans in Modern. I know many players don’t like it, as it seems like (as I’ve argued before) an artificially induced metagame rotation when there is a deck that is only slightly better than all the rest. For me, that’s totally fine in a nonrotating format. For Wizards, they apparently want something different. Better definitions would help us figure out what to expect from Wizards so we aren’t blindsided by these changes in the future.

Although I’m definitely a fan of calling something a nonrotating format as a way to start off the conversation, I think a proper Modern definition needs much more than that. I also believe there is an unmoving definition of Modern that is independent of the specific environment Wizards or players wants to create. Or, if you are referring to the unchanging environment of Modern (kind of like how Legacy has a certain kind of unchanging environment), I would just say the concept of a “definition,” as I use it, and an “environment,” as you do, are actually the same thing. Once that gets better defined, we can start answering questions about politics, interaction, power level, etc.

I like this concept of old vs. new Magic for players who already have some intuitive grasp on what that means. But for many new players, and for even old ones with different experiences, this can still mean different things. It also doesn’t help us get out of some of Modern’s most challenging questions, especially if Modern Magic is just “modern Magic,” adding another relatively subjective definition to the already subjective duo of old vs. new. For instance, those three terms don’t really tell us if JTMS is appropriate for Modern or not. That makes them good at maybe referencing a format, but not great at describing what it should be and what purpose it should have.

For me the existence of modern has a negative impact on how many booster boxes I buy.
The reason is that I cant help but feel a little disappointed about a new set when there is no reprint that adds something to modern (like counterspell or Goblin Ringleader).
I do know that those cards just don’t belong in standard. But still…
Like with SoI: I know they wont reprint Wild Mongrel or Basking Rootwalla.
But I would like to have those in modern, so I get upset.
I think if those cards already were in modern I would be able to appreciate SoI much more for what it is. (and as a consequence buy more of it)

When I came back to Magic: the Gathering in 2013, I had a similar response to the Modern format. It looked like an easy way to unify a group of players with disparate collections and varying levels of competitive interest. Modern seemed to be the best of both worlds as far as card availability and depth of card pool were concerned.

Does anyone else remember one of Modern’s early talking points being that the format benefited from a decade of design and development experience? In other words, it was a showcase for how Magic cards were designed in the modern day, and the overpoweredness of years past would not define or upset the new format? Perhaps I imagined this, as the sentiment isn’t present in anything cited above, but even as someone with fond memories of those older cards (I started playing in 1994), this idea was very appealing to me in regards to a non-rotating format. Given how Modern has been managed over the last few years, however, I’m not sure that was a reasonable expectation.

This article raised an important question, and was a great read. I’m looking forward to the rest of the entries in this series.

As an aside, after rereading Tom LaPille’s article, I question why the arbitrary starting point for Modern wasn’t Mercadian Masques. That was the first set free of the Reserve List, and he used the accessibility of Legacy staples on that list as a a major consideration in the format proposition. I’m still hopeful that we’ll get to play with some of those pre-Mirrodin sets in Modern one day.

having magic just be about standard is not what has brought the game to where it is today… and modern/extended hasn’t done it alone either… it’s all part of the big pie…

sadly they are watching the bottom dollar figures… and modern doesn’t impact it a ton directly… i would argue that it has pushed the brand further and the value is very much intangible… but as a player you can very much feel it… continually playing standard is just not appealing to a large swath of the playerbase…

once they realize how valuable the format is in that regard.. the format will get better… i just hope that they will eventually…

Thank you for putting in paper what fair share of players are feeling in such a meticulous way.

I know Modern is supposed to be a turn 4 format, but damned if those matches arent faster than a typical Legacy match. I feel like every Modern match is very lopsided and decided by turn 3 or 4, because even if you arent technically dead on turn 3, you could have no hope of beating what your opponent is doing. Conversely, any good Legacy storm players knows they cant just jam their combo on turn 2 in that format. Most of the game you are jockeying for position since ‘free’ counter spells can falter every deck.

Modern is, here is my game plan, try and stop me. Which, given the card pool, probably cant be stopped very easily. So, your opponent is simply ignoring your game plan and trying to fire off their own, faster. Love it or hate it, there is a reason why blue is one of the main 5 colors, and you need it to be present in all its flavor for balance as a whole.

TLDR: Modern counter magic sucks donkey balls and, whether you like it or not, the format is shit due to that.

Because of this, there is high demand for a format to bridge the gap between legacy and standard. A format for all the sweet strategies that are not good enough for legacy but not legal in standard.

Most of moderns popularity comes from this demand.
But this is due to lack of alternative and not due to how good a job modern does at satisfying this demand.
Modern is not all we want from it, but it is the best we got.
I am interested to read your views on how to fix modern so that it better fits the demand!

Personally, I would love wizards to change modern to overextended (add odyssey, invasion, onslaught blocks and 7th edition) and adjust the banned list accordingly.
This would be a rather broad change and I don’t really see them doing it. But a man can dream…

Personally, even though I’ve never played legacy, when I look at legacy decks vs modern decks I always feel modern is a very creature-centric format vs legacy being much more spell heavy.

This might be quite the oversimplification and not that important to many players but to me the importance of creatures in most modern decks is what appeals to me. And one day I know my beloved Goblins will become viable!!

P.s. love the site. Love the articles. I’d love more videos like Trevor was doing for awhile I learned a lot from them.

I’ve been playing Magic for 20+ years and always believed wizards only bans when something is BROKEN. DRS seemed broken. Pod not so much, though I was willing to look past this decision since so many others thought it was. There was absolutely nothing broken about Twin. If it had a slightly higher power level then the rest of the format, then raise the rest of the format to match, don’t cut it down. I say this as an affinity player.

I digress into banlist talk because it perfectly illustrates how I misunderstood Wizard’s format intentions. I thought they wanted Modern to be a place where inherently powerful (albeit not broken) strategies could exist and that those strategies would continue to exist as long they did not break the format.

Wizard’s vision for the format can be pieced together even if they won’t state it. Sadly, it doesn’t match what I want from a non-rotating format.

When I got into Magic, I saw two things: the “old Magic” where things were designed with some very faulty assumptions and so stuff was totally broken, and “new Magic” where there was some real thought going into the bigger picture for how to design new cards. It was basically two different games, except if you were playing New somebody could bring in their Old cards and wreck you.

When I eventually started playing in local events, I was pleased to discover that there was a format (Standard) where Old wasn’t allowed, so I could play “real” (New) Magic. But then stuff kept rotating and it got expensive to keep up. But if I wanted to play “casually” (basically, “no format”) then I had to accept people’s use of Old stuff.

“Playing Magic” always carried a sort of assumption of getting to use any of your cards, but then dodging the Old stuff that really didn’t belong in Magic at all required this little spin-off variant called Standard that came at the price of having to keep rotating.

Thus, when I was introduced to Modern, I took it to mean “Let’s just play Magic, and all that Old crap is banned”.

I have since learned to appreciate the value of Legacy as its own perfectly legitimate way to play, but I still assert that there are basically two games: the original, and the new. Thus, to me, our format is named what it is because it just means “We’re playing the modern version of Magic.”

What is Legacy? It’s old Magic.
What is Standard? It’s the latest Magic.
What is Modern? It’s modern Magic.