Ambition's Cost pt 4: What Should Wizards Do?

As the fourth and final installment of the Ambition's Cost series, we explore the 'so what?' of the high cost of entry for Modern, Legacy, and Vintage. The first three parts of this series examined the average cost of competitive entry into Standard, Modern, Legacy, and Vintage and found that the price roughly triples between each format moving from Standard, the cheapest at $340, to Vintage at nearly $13,000. Modern is about $900 and Legacy is near $2,000.  Nearly half of the cost of Standard, Modern, and Legacy is the land base, making non-basic lands the most expensive portion of every multicolored deck in these three formats. In Vintage, the non-basic lands will cost you over $1,000 on average, but since the cost of the entire deck is so high, the land price ends up being a small portion of the deck. Now, I hope you are asking the question, "So what?"

So What?

I want every major format to be competitive and see regular play because each format has its own flavor that every Magic player should be able to experience with actual Magic cards. The only way to play in a sanctioned Legacy tournament is to actually own the cards that make up your deck. Let's look at the tournament scene from Wizards in 2014.

Standard plays the biggest part of the Constructed tournament scene. I think that is correct. It is the most fluid format because the card pool is changing so much every couple of months. What is alarming to me is that the number of tournaments for Legacy and Vintage are such a small part of Wizard's overall events. They are only six percent of Constructed events and closer to two percent of the overall event schedule. If you are a Legacy or Vintage player, this should be alarming. It means Legacy is very nearly dead, and Vintage is very actually dead.

If you, like me, believe that each of these four formats needs support, then something needs to be done to save Legacy and Vintage from being relegated to the annals of history. What can we do?

Repeal the Reserve List

Wizards has the power to reprint any card. The decks in Vintage and Legacy are stagnant because the cards most heavily used in these formats were printed long ago and newer cards don't match the power level, and when they do, they get banned (hello Treasure Cruise  and Dig Through Time *wave*). There are a number of cards that, if reprinted, would open the doors to the Eternal formats of Legacy and Vintage.

I can feel the heat from some of your faces right now. The Reserve List is a hot topic sparking many a table-flipping debate in the Magic community. In my humble opinion, maintaining a list of cards that will never be reprinted while at the same time allowing those same cards in existing and supported formats, no matter how low the support, is incomprehensible. The Reserve List artificially maintains the price of a handful of cards, keeping players out of the format. It sounds like a nerd country club to me.

No Reserve on MTGO

The Reserve List does not apply to Magic Online, and many of the pricy Vintage and LEgacy staples were reprinted in a supplemental set called Vintage Masters. The reprinting of those key cards brought the format back to life online. Currently, if you want to enjoy playing Vintage, you can either pay a few hundred dollars for an online Vintage deck or $13,000 for a paper deck. I included a price comparison of the top 5 most-played decks in Legacy, Vintage, and Standard. Playing Standard online is cheaper than playing in paper, but notice how much cheaper it is to play Legacy and especially Vintage online.

It's a Different World from the Days of Chronicles

The Reserve List was created at a time when the player base for Magic was very small compared to the player base we have today. When Wizards reprinted many of the higher priced cards in Chronicles, some collectors felt betrayed after sinking a lot of cash into the expensive rares of the time. Chronicles dropped the price of those expensive rares to next to nothing, however today's collectors and players are much more selective of the cards they keep and prices for older printings tend to hold much more value even through reprints. If you look at one of those cards affected by Chronicles, Nicol Bolas, we can see that the Legends printing is easily 10 times the price of the Chronicles printing. They are the same card with the same effect. One has a white border and the other black. One is $18 and the other is $1,50. We don't need the Reserve List anymore to ensure that older printings hold value.

More Demand, Higher Prices for Older Printings

Older printings will drop in value when they are reprinted, but the floor will not drop out from under them. It is actually possible for the older printings to become even more valuable through reprinting as new players enter the format. We saw this happen to Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant when they were reprinted in Modern Masters. Tarmogoyf is worth more now than it was before the Modern Masters printing, largely due to a dramatic increase in player demand resulting from reprinting Modern cards in Modern Masters.

Something dramatic needs to be done or Legacy and Vintage will only survive in Magic Online. In order for the Eternal formats to live in paper, we need more copies of the cards to play them. Wizards must reduce or fully remove the Reserve List and reprint the staple cards in Legacy and Vintage. If they do not reprint Eternal staples, most people who want to play these formats in the future will have to log on to Magic Online.

Do you think that could have been Wizard's plan all along?