Community Managed Formats

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Bearscape
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Post by Bearscape » 3 years ago

Every time any kind of ban happens in any format, somewhere you will find a discussion of the community of said format wanting to take their ball, go home, and manage their own banlist since clearly they could do a better job than WotC. With how controversial the last year has been, this discussion comes up more and more, with the new factor that people want a set cutoff exlcluding all the new sets. This isn't an entirely new concept; some people have been wishing to go back to the "golden age" of Legacy pre-Innistrad, but banning every set from WAR and up is now the new hotness.

ITT I want to discuss community managed formats (CMFs).
-Do you like the idea?
-What do you think such a format should look like?
-What should the goal of the format be?
-What does the format need to become "real"?

And of course I wouldn't have made this thread if I didn't have my own hot takes on the issue. Consider the bolded parts a summary


Personally I am 100% for a CMF. I have grown very tired of the trainwreck of design mistakes that has started at WAR and doesn't appear to be stopping any time soon. Mostly, I think a CMF would, at the very least, send a very strong message to WotC. I honestly think there is already plenty of interest in a format like this, and the only thing it would need to get going is traction. Once a community has been established, the specifics about the banlist etc comes naturally. Voices for a CMF have been coming out of the Vintage, Legacy and Modern community, but I do believe a single unified CMF is needed to get enough traction. Splitting the community in different subformats with different banlist will just not do.

Next, having an established format goal is important. As discussed in the Modern Metagame thread plenty of times, the lack of a clear format goal has been one of the sources of frustration of the format. On top of that, a format goal also helps sending the message to WotC about what people are so fed up with. With that in mind, the longevity and sustainability of MtG as a tabletop game should be the format goal. With the rise of Arena and a design philosophy that seems to promote selling packs over good, sustainable gameplay, I think this in broad strokes sums up most people's current issues with the eternal formats. It also fills the gap of an eternal format with some stability, where all current eternal formats fluctuate wildly under the design mistakes of the last year.

That brings me to my last and probably most controversial point: the cutoff. The format should allow all* black and white bordered cards up until Ravnica Allegiance. Furthermore, all Reserved list cards are banned. The asterisk being weird cases like Conspiracies or any Ante or manual dexterity cards that are not on the Reserved list (although I think they all are). And yup, Reservedless Legacy. It gets brought up a lot and criticised a lot, but if the format goal is sustainability then Reserved cards have to go. Furthermore, this would give enough of a change in gameplay to promote some amount of healthy brewing at the start of the format to attract interest.

Banlist wise I do like the idea of starting with a clean plate, although cards like Mental Misstep can probably go immediately. With no influx of new cards, strategy diversity should be a top priority; not much use for a sustainable format if the gameplay gets stale. Because of this, there should not be any "untouchable" cards (i.e. Brainstorm). Reservedless Legacy would mostly just be Legacy with a stronger burn deck. And whereas blue is the well established best color in Legacy, this should not be the case in this new CMF. Testing would have to show what is and isn't overpowered.

And that's about it; my 50c on what questions need to be answered about CMFs, and my own take on it. What do you think of my concept, or CMFs in general? Did I miss an important aspect?

user_938036
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Post by user_938036 » 3 years ago

On the topic of CMFs in general. We have seen one grow to such a large group that wizards had to take notice and while not taking over said group started catering to their desires. EDH.

Your proposal of not quite a unique format but a unique ban list is only slightly different. There are a lot of problems the most significant one is uniting divergent views under a single banner because while you are correct that there is a lot of interest in such a format it is actually a lot of interest in a lot of formats that all sound similar but are usually fundamentally different. You already identified this as possibly the biggest hurdle. Honestly, this is almost certainly the wrong place to discuss this topic. Considering you want a legacy-lite format it should probably start in the legacy forums until you build enough traction to have a semifunctional banlist at which point it would be easier to recruit people who don't currently play legacy.

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