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Comment by gsk22 | Hacker News Reader

> It’s been impossible to take the game seriously from a competitive standpoint for about the past decade where they’ve continued to move further and further from the block-core annual release cycle.

What does the set release cycle have to do with the health of competitive Magic? I mean, sure, there's no yearly core set anymore, but so what?

- Reprints (actual or functional) of staple cards still get made in every set.

- There is still a diverse metagame in standard.

- I don't draft much, but I've heard positive things about several of the last sets' limited environments.

- New formats like commander have created new competitive environments.

- Arena and digital formats like alchemy bring new players to the game and competitive scene

Feels to me like, despite Wizards doing everything possible to screw things up, competitive Magic is in a pretty good spot at the moment.

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Paper standard mostly has a player count problem as people move to Arena or into eternal formats, especially commander. This is because people don't actually seem to like standard and the constant rotation (and likely never did). Why own paper, of which 99% you'll never play again. ONE seems to actually tackle one of the issues, with 5+ special versions of supposed chase cards the price of a typical standard decklist could finally be reasonable again.

> Reprints (actual or functional) of staple cards still get made in every set.

Taking away new design space and diluting the game overall. Instead of creating limited environments that are totally fresh (save a very small # of reprints historically) with an annually-reserved slot for revisions, everything gets sloshed together.

> There is still a diverse metagame in standard.

There better be, in standard the meta game is basically designed in a lab and prescribed to the player base. Other formats have done worse, we’ll see how many years they can keep modern interesting before it falls to the same power creep issues the old extended format did.

> New formats like commander have created new competitive environments.

Commander is a casual format, it’s not competitive nor meant to be. Arena has no on-ramp to serious competitive MODO play, the interfaces and economies are entirely different.

> There better be, in standard the meta game is basically designed in a lab and prescribed to the player base.

The sheer number of bans in standard the past few years proves this isn't the case. That might be the image Wizards' designers like to project, but it is clear they are not able to predict how players will use the cards they print.

> Commander is a casual format, it’s not competitive nor meant to be.

There is literally a competitive commander format (cEDH), and the "hell queue" in historic brawl on Arena shows that there are other very competitive commander-based formats.

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