A few years ago, Magic’s Standard format was in a really bad spot, arguably worse than it is now. Currently, the format is basically unplayable for many because of the Vivi problem, but at least people still play Standard.
As the world was beginning to open up from COVID-19, Standard had been completely forgotten. It seemed that Modern and Commander were, by and large, the only ways to play Magic. Trying to draw more players to Standard, Wizards of the Coast focused on trying to alleviate Standard’s pain points.
One of the biggest hurdles to Standard is the constant need to keep up. In older MTG formats, once you buy a deck, you can generally play it for a long time, even if it’s not among the best decks in the format. While Modern Horizons sets did force rotations there, fixed Standard rotations put a predetermined lifespan on cards and decks. This made it incredibly expensive to keep up, and many players turned away as a result.
A three-year rotation change was implemented to help alleviate this issue, but in doing so, Standard has suffered immensely. Most of the problems this initially set out to solve have returned threefold, and three-year Rotation is itself the cause of it. Worse yet, in an effort to keep Standard interesting, absurdly pushed cards are now impacting multiple MTG formats.
A Broken Format
Three-year Rotation was initially introduced to Standard in an effort to let players use their cards longer. In enabling this, Standard as a whole has become much less playable. Almost all of Standard’s biggest problem decks have only been legal as a result of the three-year rotation. Vivi Cauldron combo, perhaps the worst offender of this, would be illegal if Standard kept its original rotation schedule.
If the rotation schedule hadn’t changed, Agatha’s Soul Cauldron would have rotated out already, preventing the current combo hellscape. In theory, this would give us an entirely different Standard landscape, which has a much greater variety of genuinely competitive decks. Now, we’re having to wait an additional two months until November for bans to curb this current overly dominant combo.
This isn’t the only problematic interaction that existed because of the three-year rotation. Zur, Eternal Schemer would have never been legal at the same time as Duskmourn’s Overlords, either. This, combined with Up the Beanstalk, created a very polarizing strategy that invalidated anything that wasn’t getting under it. While Zur did rotate out back in late July, before this, a whole host of cards ended up getting banned in Standard.
The funny thing is that with a two-year rotation enabled, almost all of these cards would have rotated out naturally. In fact, of all seven banned cards in best-of-three Standard, only Heartfire Hero and Cori-Steel Cutter would have remained post-rotation. This really makes it feel like the change to a three-year rotation has been fraught with unintended interaction and mistakes, but that’s not the only problem.
Selling New Sets
As a result of the three-year rotation schedule, a lot of interesting MTG cards and decks aren’t playable in Standard. Competitionally, if you’re not playing Vivi Cauldron or Mono Red Aggro, you’re near-guaranteed to lose major competitive events. Not only can this be boring to watch, but it can make brand-new sets boring too, as it becomes incredibly unlikely that new cards see play.
Standard is now at a level where only two types of cards seem to see play: new cards that make an existing archetype stronger, or cards that are so strong that they can break through in much more powerful formats. Quantum Riddler is an example of this, being the only Edge of Eternities card to be included in Vivi Cauldron. The card has also made a mark in Modern thanks to powerful Blink effects.
Because Standard’s power level is so much higher than usual, Wizards is either forced to print absurdly powerful cards or ban cards altogether to keep things interesting.
Obviously, neither of these options is desired; however, we’ve seen it time and time again already. Before Vivi, it was Cori-Steel Cutter. Zur’s era wasn’t as bad, but Standard was still dominated by a few multi-format pillars that overshadowed everything else. Nowadays, it seems Standard can’t escape from being in the clutches of an overly powerful meta-dominating force that deserves banning. Even once Vivi Cauldron gets banned, it feels inevitable that another overpowered card will rise to power.
Sadly, while power creep and card balance are obviously issues, the three-year rotation is the root cause. Longer rotations lead to higher power, which leads to more powerful cards being needed to break or shake up the metagame. This, evidently, causes balance issues as bombs are built around and broken to the point that it ruins the format. We’re almost at the point where powerful Standard cards are like Standard Horizons sets.
How to Fix it
In my opinion, there are two ways Wizards of the Coast can go about fixing Standard’s current issues. The first is to be far more proactive in banning cards. While the current ban list philosophy is far better than bans appearing out of nowhere, leaving a format untouched for months on end is just irresponsible. Unfortunately, the cause of this issue, card balance, doesn’t appear to be getting better quickly, as we’ve seen multiple ban-worthy cards in recent years.
If we’re in an era where the only way to impact MTG formats is to create incredibly pushed cards, then we need a more responsible way to get those cards out of formats if they completely take over. A massive part of the Vivi Cauldron problem is that the deck remains legal despite being a very obvious issue that, in the past, would easily have been emergency-banned. This, in my opinion, is the bad ending, though. A far more responsible solution would be to create a format where stupidly pushed cards don’t need to exist to create change.
The good ending involves Wizards of the Coast rolling back to a two-year rotation for Standard, potentially with a catch. The format, in general, needs to be streamlined to allow for more cards to make a meaningful impact, while still providing an interesting play experience. This does arguably reintroduce the problems that the three-year rotation initially tried, but failed, to solve, but there is another solution that could work better.
MTG Foundations may hold with it a real solution for Standard. This set allows players to grab cards that have a meaningful impact on the format, which will be legal for far longer than the average life cycle of a set. Creating a carefully curated baseline set that rotates at a much slower pace can allow MTG players to play their cards for much longer. Even having a window where two baseline sets are legal can allow more casual players more time to transition.
Trying a three-year rotation is admirable, but I think it’s safe to say that it wasn’t the saving grace that Standard needed. Vivi Cauldron aside, the scary reality of cards needing to be at a level that impacts multiple formats to create any kind of change is worrying. Spotlight Series Orlando’s attendance was half that of past US Spotlight Series tournaments. Players are already moving away from Standard, but there’s still time to fix it.
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