Comments on: Fixing Modern: Improving Communication

By: raude

raude — Tue, 29 Mar 2016 23:15:05 +0000

Modern is where Standard goes to die, so it is Hell. We end up throwing our decks at each other to win as fast as possible. Some people think they are more clever than others and try to play controlling decks etc. They invariably ends up getting smoked by turn 4 anyway.
Modern is a fun format and should be kept as that. If I had any skill in the game I would avoid Modern as the die-roll favors the idiot. Being an idiot, I like Modern quite a bit, as it gives me the odd opportunity to wreck my opponents without much thought going into it.
Based on this, I understand why many pros (PV, Turtenwald etc.) don`t like Modern for their top tier tournaments.

Any effort to smart up Modern is futile. Bogles Vs. 8-whack!?!?

By: Martin Sahlberg

Martin Sahlberg — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 08:59:58 +0000

First let me start by saying that I appreciate the effort on your part on writing this and the previous piece on the subject of fixing modern. Im in the camp of not caring that much on what they do as long as they can give reasonble answers to why, and that they can show some consistancy and transparancy in their descisions…

Regarding the chat that never materialized i actually mailed Helene the day before it was supposed to be asking for a link and if it still was on. She did reply in the lines of “since we made the call to reinstate modern as a PT-format and various people here at Wizards been vocal on our reasons for this on twitter we feel that this chat is no longer needed”.

I tried to find the actual mail but didnt but those were her sentiment on the matter to the best of my memory.

By: sirolimusland

sirolimusland — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 00:30:58 +0000

This article really hits the nail on the head. WotC has abysmal communication. I don’t know if it is due to internal disagreements, purposeful misdirection (unlikely), or simply the difficulty inherent in communicating with a player base that has different levels of engagements and understanding. I think it’s a bit of all actually.

The fact that it has been well over 1.5 months after the last ProTour and we still have no clue what WotC is thinking of doing about Modern beyond “uh… we’ll ban something and keep an eye on fast mana from now on… uh… mmmm… yeah”

Are they going to keep the Modern PT? Are they going to ban a big card every January for purposes of “shaking up” the PT? Are they going to push the power level on cards of the set that is meant to be marketed by a modern PT? Are they going to change their reprint schedule to make the format more accessible? Where does Modern fit into WotC’s business model? What are they going to do about the fact that as the card pool expands, linear strategies keep getting better and better?

The next year is going to be a big one for our format. WotC could start moving to slowly retire it (Vintage and Legacy style, a slow death) or they will double-down and recommit to supporting it via a clear reprint schedule, a PT policy, and clear format definition. My guess is that they will continue with their awful ambiguity, which will continue to punish us as consumers. But I can hope otherwise.

By: Thomas Elfgren

Thomas Elfgren — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 22:54:57 +0000

In reply to skybluebanana. You mean like Modern Masters? :)

By: Sheridan Lardner

Sheridan Lardner — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 16:49:07 +0000

In reply to Michael Warme. Agree with everything you said. Although Wizards still wants to keep agile and not set expectations too high (or make promises they later need to break). That said, the potential benefits of a Fireside Chat far outweigh the potential costs, and I really hope Wizards sees it the same way and starts opening up communication channels on this format.

By: Thomas Elfgren

Thomas Elfgren — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 10:37:45 +0000

I think all readers should copy paste these articles and tweet them straight at Forsythe & co.

I’m amazed at the high quality of your writing and perspective. Through your articles you’ve shown a deep understanding for both the format and what the community wants. For that to go unnoticed by the people in charge would be a great loss to both the community and WoTC.

We should all thank you for doing all this work on our behalf. So, thank you.

By: skybluebanana

skybluebanana — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 08:38:50 +0000

This article is great, and highlights/addresses many of the concerns modern players have these days.
However, wizards(read: Hasbro) is probably too cheap to allocate additional resources to address a format that doesn’t “bring in revenue”, unlike standard.
It will continue on like this until wizards find a way to monetize modern like standard, probably by creating a new format or supplementary product that funnels directly into modern without going through standard.

By: Michael Warme

Michael Warme — Wed, 23 Mar 2016 17:45:05 +0000

I for one would love to see such a chat outlet–For two purposes:

1. Format management–similarly to most of your suggestions, I think having actionable statements about the format covered in one place (even if they get made elsewhere and just repeated in the monthly chat) is a valuable tool, both for marketing the format, improving player confidence in WOTC, and health of the format itself.

2. I would love to hear what WOTC has to say about the format–sure, we see their breakdowns, and we have the banlist announcements, but it would be nice to have an indicator for what conditions make a card even come up for banlist discussion–it’s fairly obvious that something like goryo’s vengeance deserves at least a quick look every ban cycle, even if just to verbally confirm with all those in the discussion that nothing significant has changed with its status. It’s not obvious whether cards like ensnaring bridge, blood moon, lantern of insight, or lightning bolt come under discussion–these cards are perennially on polls about changes to the modern banlist, though they rarely get particularly high vote ratios, but it would be interesting to know what conditions even get a card on the table for (token/procedural) discussion—clearly, there are cards that are in pretty much no danger of getting banned that certainly need to be under discussion by the ban committee, if only to establish parameters for the format (e.g. lightning bolt).