What Was the Point of Creating the Pioneer Format?
General forum
Posted on March 29, 2020, 9:36 a.m. by DemonDragonJ
Pioneer is the newest non-rotating format in this game, but I am wondering why it was necessary to make such a format, when this game already has vintage, legacy, and modern for its non-rotating formats. Modern was supposed to be a lighter version of vintage and legacy, a non-rotating format that did not have the powerful and expensive cards that vintage and legacy had, so pioneer is merely a lighter version of modern.
I have no intention of supporting pioneer as a format, and I really hope that the majority of other players do not, either, because, if WotC realizes that they can get away with creating a new format every several years, they shall do so indefinitely, creating a new format whenever the previous format becomes too powerful or expensive.
What does everyone else say about this? Why did WotC create the pioneer format, and will they continue to create new formats indefinitely?
Pioneer gives people a chance to play with their past Standard staples, and is a format where playing Standard or drafting Standard sets can give you powerful cards that you can play in a nonrotating format. It obviously depends on your deck choice but I think it's safe to say that on average Pioneer decks are less expensive than Modern decks. Even with the bannings they have made, the meta of Pioneer looks to be enjoying a healthy churn of top decks and it doesn't seem like people are having problems finding games, not having fun, or worse not being interested at all.
Frontier was created at the wrong time with too small a card pool to get people to want to buy into it without mothership support, while Pioneer started with a much more expansive card pool and was timed so people had a chance to miss their old cards. Not to mention the full WOTC support with Pioneer events almost immediately getting added to MagicFests.
Maybe they will create new formats indefinitely but I really don't see the issue with Pioneer. About as much time between Modern's creation and Pioneer's creation as had between Legacy and Modern and there was a need for an in-between format as Modern had grown away from being a place where you could use old Standard staples.
March 29, 2020 11:44 a.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #4
gnarlicide, I really hope that WotC does not phase out legacy and vintage, since that would be terrible for players who have been playing this game since the very beginning and, thus, likely play those formats extensively.
March 29, 2020 1:45 p.m.
Too bad for me as Innistrad is one of my favourite sets and it's just out of the reach of Pioneer and makes most of my modern decks feel useless just for wanting to play that set (because no one plays modern for fun anymore). I like smaller card pools for sure, but pioneer is a bit of a miss on me just for that
March 29, 2020 6:57 p.m.
Flooremoji says... #6
IlLupo643: I play modern for fun...
Pioneer was made to help booster sales. People didn't want to buy booster boxes when they only format the cards were any good for rotates. Pioneer will help fill that hole for a considerable amount of time with proper bannings.
March 30, 2020 2:20 a.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #7
Flooremoji, are you saying that modern, legacy, and vintage were not helping to sell booster boxes?
March 30, 2020 7:56 a.m.
Flooremoji says... #8
DemonDragonJ:Not at the rate WoTC wanted. The amount of standard cards that make it into modern legacy and vintage is usually pretty low, with some recent exceptions. Players such as myself would rather buy singles because we really only need 1-2 cards. In pioneer though, the amount of playables you can get in a booster box is signifigantly higher. Probably still should buy singles, but it is still a better investment than buying a boosterbox for your modern deck.
March 30, 2020 2:32 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #9
Flooremoji, I really hope that WotC does not allow legacy and vintage to die out by ceasing support for them, as that would upset many long-time players, who are equally as important as are newer players.
March 30, 2020 2:41 p.m.
Flooremoji says... #10
DemonDragonJ: Oh I wouldn't worry about that :)
WoTC seems perfectly content keeping those formats alive, and I think they are pretty popular on MTGO.
March 30, 2020 2:46 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #11
Flooremoji, I am very glad to hear that, since I have been playing this game since 2003, before modern was established.
March 30, 2020 6:06 p.m.
xtechnetia says... #12
No nonrotating format can remain "the place to play your Standard cards after rotation" forever. Even ignoring the absurd design mistakes of 2019 onwards, nonrotating formats invariably accumulate honest design mistakes and open room for broken interactions with cards from long ago. Underworld Breach may be a fine card in Standard right now, but is completely broken in tandem with Lion's Eye Diamond - a card from roughly 20 years prior.
You are correct in your assessment of the older formats. Vintage and Legacy have an eternal place in Magic formats, as they are the formats where you can play with anything in Magic's history, with a select few cards banned (Legacy) or restricted to a 1-of (Vintage). Modern, prior to the introduction of Pioneer, was supposed to be the nonrotating format free of RL shackles, and in theory thus remaining accessible to the majority of players.
We all know this isn't true, of course. (Insert tired rant about fetch prices.) But even if fetches were all $1 cards, we'd still be looking at the harsh reality that Modern is a fast, brutally efficient format full of accumulated design cruft since 8th. Even if competitive decks were $50 instead of $500, would that really make you feel better about playing your rotated Standard deck against Modern dredge, burn, Tron, whatever it is?
The reality is that for Modern to remain widely accessible (both in the financial sense and the gameplay sense), it needs to slowly rotate. But we actually had that slower-rotating format. It was called Extended. And it disappeared as Modern emerged, because rightly or wrongly, players seem to hate rotation and love new formats.
So here we are with Pioneer today, and here we undoubtedly will be again with post-Pioneer years down the road.
April 2, 2020 2:17 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #13
xtechnetia, to what "absurd design mistakes" are you referring?
April 2, 2020 2:39 p.m.
xtechnetia says... #14
WAR planeswalkers, Veil of Summer, Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis, Arcum's Astrolabe, Oko, Thief of Crowns...the list goes on.
The exact list is contentious and subjective (part of the reason many of them still persist across formats), but in general it's hard to argue that these cards have added to gameplay quality in any meaningful sense, whether or not they actually cross the power level line.
April 2, 2020 3:11 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #15
xtechnetia, I can understand all of those cards being overpowered, except for Arcum's Astrolabe; how is that card a "mistake," to use your word?
April 2, 2020 5:07 p.m.
xtechnetia says... #16
The short version: it makes mana fixing too easy.
The long version:
The golden rule of Magic land design is that no lands should ever be superior to basics. The ABUR duals are historically the closest Magic has ever gotten to breaking this rule - and they are broken, make no mistake - but at least those are nonbasic (hence vulnerable to Wasteland and friends, plus are limited to 4-of per deck).
The printing of so many cards that care about snow and reward its usage, without introducing cards of similar quality that punish snow, effectively turn snow basics into superior basics, breaking the aforementioned golden rule. If you are currently playing Modern or Legacy, it is simply incorrect to not use snow basics, because they offer all the advantages of basics with the upside of casting spells like Astrolabe, and no comparable drawback (e.g. a cheap "destroy all snow permanents" spell) exists.
Astrolabe in particular is particularly bad because it takes these snow basics and converts them into painless rainbow lands, for an unacceptably low cost. We have seen Prophetic Prism and never had issues with it, but 1cmc vs 2cmc is of course huge in Magic.
The color pie is central to Magic design and balance; a fundamental tenet of design is that more colors offers more power at the cost of more risk. Astrolabe essentially negates a significant portion of that risk, because your basic lands now generate all your colors, while remaining immune to the traditional nonbasic land policing.
It is difficult to see Astrolabe as "broken", I admit. Enablers often are that way - look at Sol Ring in Commander. But the effect it has on deckbuilding and gameplay is subtly insidious, causing homogenization of grindy decks into multicolor mush. If Astrolabe truly created "diversity" in Modern like some claim, we would expect to see Mardu, Naya, and Grixis decks riding Astrolabe to success - but we don't, because the ugly truth is that Astrolabe just enables UGx greed piles to deftly sidestep their traditional predators.
April 2, 2020 5:32 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #17
xtechnetia, that does make sense, so I hope that WotC is more careful to playtest their cards in the future.
Also, I do admit that I think that it is very weird that there is no card that can destroy all snow permanents, since such a card would be a useful tool against deck that use great amounts of those permanents.
April 2, 2020 9:13 p.m.
TriusMalarky says... #18
xtechnetia I personally believe that people put a lot more stress on good fixing than they should, especially as in most formats it's not hard to play so many colors, but I do agree that Astrolabe is what's making Snow viable. Without it, the primarily basic land package is so much worse. It was banned in Pauper, and should have been. It needs some more restriction, or some formats will be not worth playing.
Onto the thread.
Magic economy requires a flow to function correctly. If a card has no place to go, then there is absolutely no need for it to exist. Unfortunately, most cards are dead and get caught on the Limited ledge.
Now, the economy(and I don't mean IRL currency, I mean the ability to use your cards and enjoy them) goes something like this:
Limited --> Standard --> Pioneer --> Commander/Modern --> Legacy, etc.
Cards come in from Limited and other pack-cracking activity, get used in Standard, then retain value in Pioneer. Many cards will also get picked up by Modern and EDH, where they will continue to curate value. Some cards will also be used by players of Legacy and such.
However, without Pioneer, we had a gap. It was a bottleneck, and it was called Modern. It's hard enough to get people to go from spending a few bucks for random Standard cards to building high quality Standard decks anyways, let alone getting people to make the jump from Standard to Modern. Modern was just too far away, and it would have created a bottleneck.
Standard --> EDH --> Pioneer --> Modern
The above path shows how many new players can and should go through the game. Standard gets you interested, but is ultimately unbalanced garbage that you need to leave. EDH and Pioneer get you into buying older cards, and soften you to the idea of higher priced cardboard. Then Modern, hopefully, is a great, fairly balanced format that you can always enjoy.
The reason Pioneer exists is because we need an in-between home for cards and players. We need some place for people and cards to go when they are no longer interested or used in standard, and EDH, while fun, can only do that so well. Which is why Wizards is promoting EDH -- it's easy to get into and helps more cards hold value. In fact, EDH and Pioneer drive a lot of the market right now, far more than Modern or Legacy do.
I hope Wizards won't keep making new sets, but if the game lasts for 10-20 more years they may need a new inbetween format. Something to fill in the gap between Pioneer and Standard. It's a problem that can only be fixed by Wizards going heavy on reprints, which is bad for longterm profits. I mean, seriously, if Wizards would just reprint everything into oblivion we wouldn't need these fixes. But no, they have to let cards hold value so that someday they can make a few more dollars off of whales buying into slightly altered versions of absurdly priced cards. coughSecret Lair Ultimate editioncough cough.
April 29, 2020 5:42 p.m.
xtechnetia says... #19
Good mana fixing exists in multiple formats, but those formats usually have mechanisms to prevent multicolor greed piles from being the objectively best thing to do, e.g. Wasteland. It's not that we don't ever want to let a 4c deck be viable, it's that we don't want a 4c deck to be unilaterally better than a 2c deck just because extra colors is now unpunishable via the traditional means.
But we seem to be in agreement wrt Astrolabe.
April 30, 2020 5:17 p.m.
TriusMalarky says... #20
xtechnetia Agreed. Having more colors should never be automatically better than just 1 or 2. It makes the game harder to get into, especially because you want to be running a lot of high price lands that you might not be able to afford without buying convincing fakes.
That said, we shouldn't be all that mad with the ability to run tons of colors -- it's only bad when you can't run a decent budget deck with good results. Like in modern -- if 8-rack, stompy, etc can't win games, then the format's too broken. But as long as I can do well with time spent instead of budget spent, then it's a fine format.
I do wish Wizards would print fetches and shocks into oblivion. I even bought some shocks recently, but only for a couple decks that really need decent mana. If they'd somehow print fetches and shocks into some uncommon or common slot in some masters set or other, the game would be a lot better. People could even get into Legacy without as much trouble! I mean, Lurrus Delver would only be $600 of you cut the lands. I mean, even at $700 if you count Wasteland would be so much better than $3k. And shaving a few hundred off every modern deck would be much appreciated.
April 30, 2020 6:21 p.m.
xtechnetia says... #21
I don't think budget should be a consideration in game balance.
While I would also love to see fetches and shocks reprinted into oblivion and accessible to all, that is not the argument I'm making when it comes to color fixing. Even if fetches and shocks were all $1 each (which would be wonderful), there must be a gameplay reason (not a budget reason) to run fewer colors. Otherwise, fair decks tend to collapse into 4-5c mush simply jamming all the best cards of their colors, destroying gameplay and strategic diversity.
Budget does not directly correlate with power anyways. Burn, prowess, storm, dredge, Titanshift, and more have all been traditionally solid Modern contenders that can be put together for far, far less than something like Jund, which at many points has been inferior to some of the aforementioned decks.
As for Legacy, the barrier to entry always has been and always will be the RL, which no amount of fetch/shock reprinting really solves. Sure, cutting a potential few hundred with cheap fetches would still be helpful, but there's no getting around expensive ABUR duals, LED, Cradle, etc.
May 1, 2020 1:09 p.m.
TriusMalarky says... #22
Clarification -- if you absolutely have to pay hundreds of dollars to be able to run even a tier 2 or 3 deck, the format's unplayable. Legacy and Vintage are only fun with proxies, bc otherwise most people can't afford it.
And yes, there needs to be a gameplay reason to run fewer colors. I totally agree. Without a good reason to go mono, many colored decks overrun formats and then the format is unplayable anyways 'cos it's imbalanced.
And I get that the RL is the main point of Legacy/Vintage -- it'd just be easier to get into if you could run a fetch-shock manabase relatively cheaply. I mean, you can run shocks anyways, but it would be so much nicer if they cost less. I might get into Legacy, 'cos I can brew cheaper crap for fun. But I'm not playing a format where top tier mana is 5 times as expensive as top tier mana in modern, which is already out of my price range. I only barely afforded a decent BG manabase for Pioneer, and it's still half built without the fastlands.
And while I'm not saying the decks you mentioned weren't cheaper, $600 is still a lot. $300 is a lot. I get that the game's collectible, but it's totally possible to go tier 1 without forcing players to break their bank. Sol Ring is a perfect example -- $2-3 for a normal copy, or you can pimp out and get really fancy versions for anything from $30 to $300. I'd vastly prefer the whole game to function like that. You can build a tier deck in Modern for $100 or 2, but you can invest thousands to make it cooler. It's a win-win!
May 1, 2020 3:19 p.m.
xtechnetia says... #23
As a Legacy player myself I'd be extremely happy to see the RL revoked. I completely agree that people should not be gatekept out of any format due to financial concerns.
That being said, while I agree that $300-600 is still a ridiculous amount of money for a deck, at some point we have to throw up our hands and acknowledge that Wizards is a business and that the game may not survive if tiered Modern decks could consistently be built for $100 tops.
To make Magic more accessible, I personally focus my efforts on pushing for making proxies acceptable and normal at all unsanctioned events, including kitchen table play. I own multiple expensive staples (fetches, Snapcasters, etc), and wouldn't care one bit about proxied decks. I bought cards to play with, not to jerk off about my ability to blow money on cardboard, and I want to see that attitude adopted by the community at large.
May 1, 2020 4:34 p.m.
TriusMalarky says... #24
I get where you're coming from. Much respect, proxies should be allowed, at least for unofficial games.
Wizards is a company, and they do need to make money. I think the main group that would be hurt by lower prices is LGSs, actually. It cuts a lot out of their profit margin. But it WotC could find a way to keep the little guy in business while making it so players can access all formats without price concerns, then they should go for it.
gnarlicide says... #2
I think they created the pioneer format to squeeze legacy out. It has been slowly fading as of recently in the opens and GP's.
Pioneer is just a way to make modern the new legacy so there won't be any complaining about the reserve list. and then WotC can just print whatever they want.
Pioneer is just Frontier (yeah, remember that dumpster fire of a format?) with a new name and no fetches. It was popular for about a few weeks and then died out. I expect the same after about a year or so. Especially with all the bans they have to do.
March 29, 2020 10:32 a.m.