Should Brawl and Standard have separate legalities?

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CubJay
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Post by CubJay » 4 years ago

In Gavin Verhey's article today, he points out that printing new cards in Brawl's new preconstructed decks allow R&D to provide cards that Brawl needs - filling gaps in the colour-pie among standard-legal commanders, and adding role-players like mana-fixing. This seems like a good way to support the format, but it has people up in arms about printing more mechanically unique, standard-legal cards that aren't available in booster packs. The collector boosters help bridge this gap to some extent, but they will be very expensive and have a low print-run, in line with their collectible nature. How to resolve this? Here's one idea:

What if Brawl legality rotated at the same time as Standard, but was not strictly dependent on Standard legality? It could, for example, be "every standard-legal booster product, plus precons." That way they could print whatever they wanted into the precons without complicating standard legality, and without the risk of accidentally printing a hard-to-access card that's competitively viable in standard. Heck, they could even add supplemental products to Brawl if they felt it was appropriate. What do y'all think? Dumb idea, or am I on to something?

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Hawk
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Post by Hawk » 4 years ago

Seems unnecessary to me.

Part of Brawl's charm is to be "Commander with rotation" and "Commander with training wheels" and "Commander, but faster and more interactive". All of that can be fulfilled with standard-legal constraints. There's no need for them to be able to slot Sol Ring and Demonic Tutor into Brawl precons to improve the format.

As we can see on Arcane Signet, they also have tools if they do want to print something very powerful for Brawl but have it be non-functional in Standard.

To the other side of your coin, printing something that is too expensive because it's actually good in Standard...seems unlikely to me, and an absolute win for WotC if it happens so there's no incentive to avoid it.

And as for supplemental products - this format is suuuuuuuuper dead, or at least "mostly dead" in the words of Miracle Max. Maybe Precons revive it but it's a bit too soon to do a supplemental brawl-focused product; let's see if Arena + decks saves it and let it have a few years to prove itself, like Pauper, before we go nuts :p.

wildfire393
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Post by wildfire393 » 4 years ago

CubJay wrote:
4 years ago
This seems like a good way to support the format, but it has people up in arms about printing more mechanically unique, standard-legal cards that aren't available in booster packs. The collector boosters help bridge this gap to some extent, but they will be very expensive and have a low print-run, in line with their collectible nature. How to resolve this?
I mean, non-booster cards with Standard legality are hardly a new development. Buy-a-Box Promos, Welcome Deck cards, Planeswalker Deck Cards, etc. The only difference here is that the power levels are just a touch higher, maybe, but they're also focused on a multiplayer format rather than a 1v1 one so the impact shouldn't be huge.
Hawk wrote:
4 years ago
And as for supplemental products - this format is suuuuuuuuper dead, or at least "mostly dead" in the words of Miracle Max. Maybe Precons revive it but it's a bit too soon to do a supplemental brawl-focused product; let's see if Arena + decks saves it and let it have a few years to prove itself, like Pauper, before we go nuts :p.
Arena alone should skyrocket Brawl's popularity.

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