Thursday, April 26, 2018

3 Pillars

Standard has been in a lot of trouble lately; this isn't news to anyone who's been following Magic. It's one of the reasons-if not the biggest reason-that the hype train for Dominaria has been built to the level it has. Despite a general feeling of the ship being righted, the audience has been exhausted by Standard's lack of engagement.

Standard's quality doesn't impact me too much, though: I play casually and I like to mix and match my stuff to the point where I am playing Legacy. On the other hand, Standard is the cauldron where WotC gets to test formats.

A good Standard format can be a template for building good Modern, Legacy and even Commander formats. I think it could even be argued that the improved quality of Standard resulting from sets like Ravnica and Innistrad has helped contribute to better formats in Modern and Legacy and sometimes very rarely, even improving Vintage.

So out of all the articles talking about what makes for a good Standard, I really appreciate this perspective from Brian Braun-Duin about what makes a healthy format. He takes examples from multiple formats under each point and talks about why those are important and speaks to qualities that others have cited as relevant and says why, for him, those don't matter.

The impact of this is that it isn't just about Standard. There's nothing pithy like 'if Baneslayer Angel is good then your environment is good' because that doesn't actually mean anything in 80%+ of Magic's formats! The holistic approach to a healthy format means that the lessons can be applied anywhere and that's far more useful, in my opinion, than focusing on Standard itself.



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