Format Inertia
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Reading the most recent articles by Joe Dyer @volrathxp on mtggoldfish.com about Vintage and Legacy you see a theme emerge.
The best performing decks are still the best performing decks. Players are not really overcoming these decks and when given the chance to play any deck and any card the using the Mythic tokens players are just choosing the "best" decks in the format.
This was predictable but also avoidable. One of the core reasons players stay with a deck or just play the winning decks in a format is inertia. The other reason is that innovation is very hard. See previous conversations about that here.
I'd like to discuss inertia in the format and why players tend to stick with the same stuff for so long.
The main reason to stick with any deck is that it wins. The other reason is that is interesting to the player. As I look at the current decks there is also another reason and that is cost. Once you buy into a deck it is not easy to change and the rental services on MTGO were supposed to fix that but that is no longer the case.
What does this mean for the format? It means that players play decks that win, and have interesting play lines but won't play other decks because it cost too much.
I could be wrong but based on the various Challenge results and Prelims I do not appear to that far off base.
Inertia hurts the format by making it so players get bored, or newer players won't buy into the format because it looks like it's all 1 or 2 decks (see 2016 for reference).
I have gone on a hiatus because the format just got boring to me. I am waiting for the next new set. I played some when Neon Dynasty came out and it was fun messing around with the new cards but I played against the same decks.
Is inertia an issue? That is really up to the player base. Do we need something to change? I have no idea, and I'll wait for the New Capena to try the format out again and see if it shifts.
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I think the main thing is that there are more Spikes in magic than any other type. People want to win, period. Therefore they play the best decks. There are a lot of Timmy's and deck-builder types, but Spike is 60%+ of MtG...so the statistics bear that out.
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It's definitely a shame if a stagnant metagame is pushing creative decks out of the format, I love to see variety at a tournament. I can't speak for the newer generation of MTGO Vintage players but a lot of older planeswalkers really LIKE the inertia, it's the appeal of the format. In my circles, when the power level of Standard changed such that every new set had a dozen Vintage playables, Vintage play leveled off and interest in fully static formats like Old School and Middle School shot up.
There's no SHAME in wanting an inertia-free format. Standard is an inertia-free format, it's much more popular than Vintage (even at stores where Vintage is free-to-play), there's a bigger online community for it, more strategy content available, better tournament support at every level of play, and people at Wizards are actually paid to figure out how to make it better. If you want it there's no reason you can't have it right now, and there's absolutely nothing about playing more Standard that's going to take away from your Vintage experience. But maybe you can learn to love format inertia, too?
Inertia is the ability to enter a tournament on the weekend and fully engage in the game without having to research the metagame. It's the ability to make long-term investments in time, attention, and cardboard. Inertia is the ability to write a meaningful primer, learn from and become an archetype-specialist or craft a battle-tested rogue deck. Format inertia is the thing that Chess has that an abandoned MMO doesn't, the thing a novel has that a tweet doesn't.
It's funny that you mention rental services as a possible solution to format inertia that failed. I think maybe that's backwards. Format inertia is a possible solution to the problem of rental services. For a lot of people, Vintage is or was appealing as a format for people who want to own things. This is true for cardboard, but it's just as true when you're playing for free with your friends. A 10-year-veteran workshop pilot owns their deck in a way a standard player cant', even if none of the cards are real.
If you get bored playing the same matches every week, don't play the same matches every week! Play another matchup! Maybe play a little standard or draft or invent your own format, or get dinner or write a poem or build a bookshelf. And if you get the itch to play Vintage later, it'll still be there when you want it. That is, as long as there's enough format inertia.
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@brass-man I think there is a healthy amount of inertia and an unhealthy amount of inertia.
I play a lot of Modern, mostly in paper, so I bought a lot of MH1 and MH2 cards. I like having a variety of decks to chose from when I play. I tend to build a few "mainstream" tier 1 decks and a few odd ball decks that are playable.
My issue with Vintage isn't that there are top tier mainstream decks, it is that most people only appear to be playing the top tier mainstream decks. Based on the articles that I referenced this becomes an issue once it crosses a certain threshold.
Anyone that has listened to SMIP will know that @Smmenen uses the gini simpson index to look at format diversity and to some extend format health. I am not sure if we have enough diversity right now but I usually do not do the math so I may be wrong.
I do play top tier decks but part of the fun of the game is play the outside the main stream decks. I have actually had some success playing a Stone Blade deck and some of my other crazy brews but I queued into 5 Bazaar decks once and I queued into 4 tinker decks and one shop deck. That is kind of hard to stomach if you are just looking to have some interesting games and want to have fun.
I have no idea if this bothers other people or not but in an eternal format it is worth a discussion every once in a while.
We had the largest format shake up in history with MH2 and I was expecting that shake up to produce more diversity and for a while we had a lot of it. Interest in the format increased and more people played in leagues.
We just appear to have reached our apex and that was going to happen and people like me take a break. I'll come back, I always come back but I thought it was interesting to discuss inertia in the format with the largest card pool and 9 months into a huge shake up.
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@marland_moore Are we not considering sunk costs? It is expensive to play new lists.
I play modern, I had a foiled out Jund living end deck I love. as of like 2 sets ago the whole format pushed Living End away from the Jund style and directly into Sultai with a whole new suite of cards, where you never see Jund played anymore. I have not been in a huge rush to change my entire list or pick up a new one any time soon because of the money it will cost and the utility I will get from it, so for now I stuck with my fringe build in hopes it comes back to the forefront.
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@marland_moore I'm not even entirely sure I agree with your premise. You can play and be competitive with a wide variety of archetypes in the current metagame. Yes Tinker is the best performing deck, so people will tend to play it more than other decks, but you can certainly have success with any of the following, all of which show up in different numbers week to week:
- Dredge
- Gaak
- Hollowvine
- PO
- Aggro Shops
- UR Murktide
- Bant/4C Archon
- RUG Walkers
- BUG
- Doomsday
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@revengeanceful You do not have to agree with my premise. When articles about Tinker being too dominate in the format start creeping up, it makes my point for me.
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@marland_moore @marland_moore To my earlier point, I don't think it's an issue with tinker being such a superior deck that nobody can play anything else...it's that it is very strong and enables wins, so a lot of people WANT to play it. That's how you get the majority of people playing the same decks.
Your premises are:
- "My issue with Vintage isn't that there are top tier mainstream decks, it is that most people only appear to be playing the top tier mainstream decks."
That's because the majority of people like to stomp face and find losing unfun. They play the tier decks because they are battle-tested and equate to lots of wins, even covering up lack of skill in some cases (yet even highly skilled players would still use it). It's like bringing a gun to a fight - why bring a knife when you can use a gun? And whether you're an expert marksman or a novice, gun still beats knife 9 times out of 10.
- "I do play top tier decks but part of the fun of the game is play the outside the main stream decks."
That's part of the fun...FOR YOU. But...the majority of people like to stomp face and find losing unfun. They play the tier decks because they are battle-tested and equate to lots of wins, even covering up lack of skill in some cases (yet even highly skilled players would still use it). It's like bringing a gun to a fight - why bring a knife when you can use a gun? And whether you're an expert marksman or a novice, gun still beats knife 9 times out of 10.
You're basically salty that a large portion of players are Spikes. You want players to play fringe decks and brews and have fun just for the sake of playing. You seem to not like the fact that 50%+ of players just want to kick your face in with cardboard as frequently and easily as possible. That's the nature of a competitive game - you'll always have competitive people that just want to win, your concept of fun be damned.
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@thewhitedragon69 I think you are mistaking a discussion for a debate. I play magic my way. Vintage is a competitive format and needs to have balance for it to have any relevance.
I did not ask if the format is balanced. I wanted to discuss why we don't see more deck diversity in the format when we have gotten so many new playable cards over the past 3yrs.
You do not have to agree with me on any points. The reason I posted here and not discord is I like discussion.
When it is time to be competitive I am very competitive, but part of the this GAME is that we all to play how we want to play.
There is no grand prize here, there are no stakes. You play your way and I play mine and if either of us want out we walk away.
Playing Modern I see a lot of deck diversity for a format with smaller card pool but a much larger player base. I think Vintage could have a much larger pool of decks and players and part of this is inertia.
Do you have any thoughts?
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@marland_moore
That seems fairly likely but the RUG delver problem may be active in vintage here, when oko was legal in legacy the fair-ish blue deck designed when tuned had a habbit of becoming RUG delver. With a number of notable centralizing points tinker, PO, thoughtcast, bazzar, null rod, saga, and pyroblast to name a few examples these cards may be good enough that the only stable(remaining similar when tuned) combinations and deck designs are the ones that have been found. No saying this is the case but some thought should be given to the idea that there are fewer stable points in the metagame than there appear to be at first glance. -
@marland_moore said in Format Inertia:
I think you are mistaking a discussion for a debate
In what way is debate not a form of discussion.
@marland_moore said in Format Inertia:
I did not ask if the format is balanced. I wanted to discuss why we don't see more deck diversity in the format when we have gotten so many new playable cards over the past 3yrs.
You cannot talk about specific cards and strategies without discussing the overall ecosystem we play within. If the format is broken, or even if it is not, it will affect decisions people make.
@marland_moore said in Format Inertia:
When it is time to be competitive I am very competitive, but part of the this GAME is that we all to play how we want to play.
Vintage the format is one small part of the game of magic overall, and it happens to be a typically competitive one. Not every format is uniformly every thing to all people, much in the same way that EDH is mostly casual but still has a fringe competitive group.
@marland_moore said in Format Inertia:
Playing Modern I see a lot of deck diversity for a format with smaller card pool but a much larger player base. I think Vintage could have a much larger pool of decks and players and part of this is inertia.
Because you do not have gatekeeping cards in the format like that on the reserve list, you don't have baselevel decks that cost 10k+, and you have a flatter power level. You could add any number of cards to the format of vintage an unless they were demonstrably better than the stuff people already use why would they bother with them, even for casual play?
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@marland_moore FWIW, I am a brewer and hate net decks. I never play tier anything, in any format. But I also recognize I'm in the minority and by a wide margin.
Modern, while having a smaller card pool, actually has more diversity than Vintage or Legacy because of when that card pool started. ABU cards and L/AN/AQ/D cards (even Alliance/Ice Age/Urza Block) had bonkers powerful cards that aren't in Modern. Cards like Ancestral Recall are just so far superior to any other printed card, it doesn't matter that there are a billion other cards to choose from - you play it because it's the best. If you are playing blue, you play sapphire, you play lotus, you play ancestral, you play FoW, etc. If you play artifacts, you play Workshop.
There's some decks that kinda 80% build themselves because 45 of the main 60 cards are just the best cards printed and playing anything worse is just like owning both lotus petal and black lotus, yet choosing to play petal on principle. When you get to Modern, you have lots of choices of parallel effects that may fit a niche better than another: night's whisper vs chart a course vs faithless looting for example. In Vintage, you have Ancestral Recall and 40 other options that are just flat out worse in every realistic scenario.
The power level of the best cards narrow the field out of necessity to be competitive. You can choose to play faithless looting instead of bazaar of baghdad in a Vintage dredge deck, for example, but you will just lose 99 out of 100 times for that choice. When you have clear-cut bests in a format, it narrows the tiers considerably. Vintage has lots of viable deck options currently, but it'll never be remotely close to the variety of Modern for this very reason.
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@Protoaddict Most Vintage is played online and the reserve list cards are very inexpensive online. Paper Vintage is mostly all proxy at this point and I do not believe cost has much of a factor in deck construct there.
The interesting thing about cost online is that when you compare Modern to Vintage the cards that are expensive in Modern are what is pushing up the costs in Vintage. Cards like Force of Negation, Ragavan, Urza's Saga, etc...
My argument about inertia is not about old cards that people paying large sums of money it is the perception of Vintage as format.
@Thewhitedragon69 As for power level, we saw really good Eldrazi decks that were mostly unpowered back in 2016. These decks were very strong but the restrictions to put Shops in check basically killed that deck. We also used to have a "lightly" powered Standstill decks and Blue Red Delver decks that were very competitive in Vintage. And this was back in 2017!
I like watching Bryant Cook's Epic Storm channel on youtube is it very good content but I hate his perception of Vintage. There is a perception that you play the most broken cards to do the most broken things. You get Vintaged or Vintage other players.
I get it, there was an argument that when building a blue based Vintage deck everything starts to look like a Tinker or PO deck and there is a little bit of truth to that but that is not a good thing.
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@marland_moore said in Format Inertia:
I get it, there was an argument that when building a blue based Vintage deck everything starts to look like a Tinker or PO deck and there is a little bit of truth to that but that is not a good thing.
Convergence rears its ugly head?
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@marland_moore said in Format Inertia:
The interesting thing about cost online is that when you compare Modern to Vintage the cards that are expensive in Modern are what is pushing up the costs in Vintage. Cards like Force of Negation, Ragavan, Urza's Saga, etc...
I mean, cards that are good in EDH also drive up the value of a card. That is not anything specific or particularly mysterious, more demand = higher value.
That being said, I think the answer here is much simpler than you realize, and it is that the new cards are not as good as the old cards most of the time. I don't just mean that for power level mind you, i mean many of the more causal cards don't really do anything compelling that cards that already existed didn't do.
I am looking at new Capena and seeing not a ton of stand out cards bluntly. The ones that I am seeing as potentially having vintage chops are honestly pretty similar to other thing. The Tri lands are similar to other CITP tapped lands. We have a more expensive abrupt decay which could see fringe play but really adds little to the format.
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@protoaddict
So your fundamental claim is we haven't gotten a new build around card since breach or PO? -
@botvinik I think that's kind of the thing. Every once in a while, you get a new card or mechanic that makes a new deck or archetype. Bazaar was a dud for the most part outside of reanimator decks until Ravnica gave us dredge. Rootwalla was a thing, but Survival played it better than bazaar....until Vengevine and Hollow One were printed.
But those are really just 1-2 new decks in the field. You need an earth-shattering printing to get 1-2 new decks. In Modern, there is such a parallel in card power that you could build 50 vastly different competitive decks. That doesn't exist in Vintage. You can build about a dozen competitive decks and another dozen tier 2 decks that are usually less likely to win than the tier 1. That's just because the power threshold is much higher on older cards.
New sets usually provide new solid payoffs (Hollow One) and answers (Force of Vigor), but most of the enablers/engines like Workshop, bazaar, oath, survival, yawg will, standstill, moxen occur pre-modern. Breach/PO are really the only engines I remember that have been printed in a very very long time that are post-RL sets.
And vintage needs engines. It has some "fair" decks like humans and Oko-bears...but the engine decks are usually the top performers and the threshold for "winning." And as I said, Spikes dominate the Vintage landscape.
So to complain about the deck diversity in Vintage, even though Spikes and engine-power barriers cause a threshold for top tier winnable decks, is akin to complaining about why the NFL doesn't have more trick plays and gimmicks in their offense...it's because those tend to get blown up more often than not by tried-and-true approaches. Every once in a while you may get a new Wildcat or West Coast offense approach, but people trying to run the triple flea-flicker play because "it's fun" will lose 99% of games. And Vintage is more for winning than playing fun, whacky things.
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@thewhitedragon69 Your argument is mostly true, but HollowVine had the cards to exist for years before someone put it together and tuned it to work.
If a deck is not "turnkey" like 8cast today, you usually will not see it come together without someone doing the work to get over the inertia.
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@thewhitedragon69 Agree with everything you just said, though I will add to it. I don't see that even something like breach or PO truly added anything new to the format, they just were of a powerlevel that made those decks possible.
You could technically play some kind of eggs bouncing deck before PO with retract and wheel cards and what not, it was just a matter of PO doing it better because it was all in one card. Breach is a new variant of graveyard storm combos that used to play Yawgs will. Different pieces, still sort of the same gimmick.
The other piece that is kinda important with all these new engine cards that get anywhere is that they are not restricted, which is why they fee like something new when in reality they are very much more in the same.
It's been a while since Vintage got a truly new archetype at all. Dredge, beyond being just a comical design mistake from day one, is one of the only moments I can think of where you actually got an archetype that did not play almost any of the same cards as existing lists and played the game in a fundamentally different way. There was a point in time where eldrazi looked promising as well in that it was incentivized to not to use staples like moxen or lotuses and had a totally different mana and creature base, but the powerlevel was just not quite there, maybe one day that could happen, and frankly I think it would be great if we could create a tier 1 pillar deck that did not require more than a few money cards like Drazi did (City of Traitors I believe was the only thing).
To me this argument is more fundamentally what is a new archetype versus variations on existing deck types. How different does a deck need to be from something else to be a new archetype, or at least enough of an innovation to take notice? There were several years here where I remember people calling their decks X,Y,or Z archetype and then when you compared the lists they were like 8 cards apart and basically just trying to win with a different creature suite. To me that is not enough for a format that has every card from the games history.
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To be fair, you CAN have any number of decks/archetypes in Vintage....they just won't win. If you want to have fun with whacky brews, you can make any deck you want. If you want to win, play the best cards ever printed for what your deck is trying to do. If you want your cake AND to eat it too, well, that's just never happening.
