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> Modern has not quite flopped, but is not all that popular considering the amount of resources Wizards has poured into it - and this is attributable to a lack of diversity of decks caused by the more restricted pool of cards.

The fact that a card like Tarmogoyf goes for $200 shows that Modern is far from unpopular.

Modern isn't as popular because it's 1) expensive and 2) complicated. To play Modern and have any hope of winning you had better be ready to throw down chunks of $1K and know the mechanics of Magic really well (a good Modern player is probably more knowledgeable than most low-level Magic judges). You also have to know which cards out of the 10,000+ can be used against you. etc. That's a big investment of time and money.

Standard format -- $20 gets you into Sealed and Draft. $500 gets you the most expensive deck in Constructed. That's a LOT cheaper and you only have to know about a couple hundred cards.

If they really wanted Legacy or Modern to be popular, the solution is really easy. Put big prizes behind winning them. Suddenly everybody will be playing Modern.

They don't want Modern and Legacy to be driving things. They don't make money from those formats. They make money selling new cards--and that's all about Standard.

> The fact that a card like Tarmogoyf goes for $200 shows that Modern is far from unpopular.

Tarmogoyf is a really poor example. It's popular in every format in existence, including Legacy and even Vintage. Modern is not solely driving its price, likely not even mostly.

Any non-rotating format is going to be more expensive than a rotating format. Modern being as "expensive" as it is is a good argument that they should've ditched the Reserved List, not that they ever will at this point.

> $20 gets you into Sealed and Draft. $500 gets you the most expensive deck in Constructed. That's a LOT cheaper and you only have to know about a couple hundred cards.

With Draft, you have to pay $20 every single time you want to play a game and the cards you come away with may well be worthless. With Standard, you have to pay that $500 every 18 months and those cards tend not to hold value well short term.

> They don't make money from those formats.

Wizards absolutely makes money from "eternal" formats. Even setting aside the products they print with eternal-only cards - which sell like gangbusters - Wizards makes money from players treating the game as a long term investment. If Standard was the only format, cards would plunge in value once they turned 18 months old.

There's also the fact that standard format is constantly changing, and that adds a huge effort in being up-to-date with the cards, the metagame, etc.

Playing Standard is actually quite demanding, while Legacy/Vintage changes in a much slower pace, making it great for people that likes to play from time to time to "the same game they already know".

I play legacy a lot but I dislike modern because WOTC have been so heavy handed with the banlist everytime an archetype gets popular they nerf it and as a result the format feels really anemic to play and makes a lot of people feel uncertain about investing in the format.

Also the "eggs" deck did a lot to kill the format. I top 8'd a PTQ (playing 5 color zoo - which was essenitally a tribal flames burn deck) this was my best result in a large tournament but was one of the most miserable days of magic due to the shear amount of time it over-ran due to all the eggs players. My friend ended up winning the PTQ (playing affinity) and we didn't get home until the very early hours of the morning it was riddiculous.

> Many Legacy-playable cards will set you back hundreds of dollars each, and a deck can hit $10,000+.

This is why Vintage is basically a dead format. You either have to have been playing from the dawn of Magic and just so happen to have acquired all of the cards you have needed through advantageous trades, pack openings or tournament winnings, or you have to be absurdly wealthy with tons of money to dump into your hobby.

This is the reason a lot of modern collectors like myself overbuy cards in more recent sets. They're doing better about it now that they're more committed to making Modern cards available for play, but I remember e.g. buying a ton of Mirrodin cards simply because the reserved list was always a threat and "how else would you get a playset of these things later".

There are quite a few good budget Legacy decks. They tend to be one-color and try to hate out the expensive non-basic lands that the expensive multi-color decks run.

There's usually something along the lines of Sligh with Blood Moon, or mono-blue control with Back to Basics. I did a decent number of local tournaments with the latter - it worked rather well, though I did have to shell out around $200 for a playset of Force of Will. Ended up being something like a $300-400 deck.