So the Pro Tour is back? I will admit, the pro scene in magic has confused me a lot since they ended the Pro Tour and implemented the Magic Pro League. It’s nice that it seems the PT scene is back. I don’t really like MKM draft very much but it’s cool to see Pioneer played on all three days.

Yea I think you’re right. Honestly the last time I was interested in Standard was when Theros Beyond Death came out. I bought into Selesnya Enchantments right before Covid. Since then, regardless of Covid, I have not felt any desire to get into Standard at any point. In fact it pains me to see cards like Sheoldred still around and having to still deal with those.

At this point I think it would be worse as far as consumer confidence goes if they reverse and shorten standard again. But at the same time, I honestly think they need to if they want to keep it fun, at least on Arena. Arena is just fundamentally not the same as paper games, the fact that you can play so many games on Arena affects things like a meta feeling stale much quicker.

I honestly don’t really know what they can do – they need to keep printing chase mythics to sell packs, but the shorter rotation meant that fewer people wanted to invest in standard paper cards so they lengthen standard, but a longer standard makes Arena too stale and too frustrating to play. It’s arguable if any of this will have the stated effect of increasing paper standard play.

I think the real solution here is to stop printing insane chase mythics in every set, but they can no longer do that even because they increased the cost of booster boxes so much, there needs to be a compelling reason to buy them at MSRP. If consumers stop buying them at MSRP and WoTC is forced to lower the play booster box price, then I think consumers ultimately win but it will come at some unknown price, either to the teams building the game or the game itself.

He mentions that his Twitch audience has not been growing, and in fact has been dropping off over the years. And the last 12 months in particular he said it’s been dropping lower each month. I know Twitch is giving less $ for Twitch Prime soon but that doesn’t really explain the drop off in viewers. In my opinion, as a big Twitch-watcher, I think it’s their recent advertisement push that has people watching a lot less. It’s very difficult, for instance, to channel hop because you’re constantly hitting ads before you even see content. This definitely would make growing your audience more difficult.

I think he also just makes more money on Youtube. He said he just crossed the $1 million total revenue from Youtube line, which roughly puts him at ~$200k/year from YT revenue alone.

Excellent dwarf write-up here

This is both disgusting and amazing at the same time lol. That second* game against 5c Atraxa felt so good watching Seth win. I don’t know why but I was loving every minute of it.

9 wraths in standard is a horrible mistake and 1 of many reasons why I’m not really interested in standard right now.

https://mtgzone.com/post/376725

lol I thought you were joking – here is the correct post https://mtgzone.com/post/376725

@andrew@mtgzone.com you forgot a digit in your link

inb4 “All abilities are just kicker” 😛 (TCC vid)

but seriously, I would love to see Buyback as well, I loved Whispers of the Muse and Forbid. Other than Buyback I would also love to see Spectacle come back. I feel like we don’t have enough good Spectacle cards.

I agree about the limited print runs and scalpers. Plus I really don’t like the urgency around having to buy them before they sell out, it’s very frustrating as a consumer if it’s something you’re on the fence about.

Well this sounds really awesome actually. I don’t love the Alchemy cards but I have been wanting an Arena Vintage format for a long long time.

Wow that is so frustrating. They must not have tested it in the draft deck builder 😬

Ok, I think I know what they changed. You first have to remove all copies of the card from your deck, so that it looks like this:

THEN add back only the non-styled cards to your deck. You may have to click the white arrow at the bottom of the card to expand the options.

If you click the card style card, you will have to remove all copies from your deck and re-add them I believe.

I believe they changed the interface, actually. I don’t see the original icon and you can’t seem to change styles from the deck builder itself anymore. I honestly cannot figure out how to remove the card style from any of the cards in my decks now. This COULD be a bug but I will check it out more today and see if I can figure it out.

Edit – see other comment, I think I figured it out

I do know that they introduced a new mechanism for switching card styles. There is an arrow at the bottom of the card which should allow you to see all available versions of the card. If you don’t see the button in the top right to change art style in the deck builder something must be broken, that seems like a bug. If you have time would you mind posting a screenshot.

🙌

I see what he’s saying but I think removing Standard would be a colossal mistake. They would have to replace it with some other low powered constructed format because I think that is in fact a big market of competitive players.

Not Youtube, but Jean-Emmanuel DePraz streams on Twitch in French – https://www.twitch.tv/jirock

I don’t speak French but I still watch him from time to time, especially when he streams constructed.

I’ve been waiting a long time for this one. Finally a good UW manland in Arena. It’s no [[Celestial Colonnade]] but this will definitely work well in control decks.

Is this a rare? I am having the hardest time deciphering the rarities with this set icon. It looks like a common but there’s no way this is printed common?