Fixing the Reserved List, what do you guys think?
I think I start rolling my eyes reflexively whenever anyone trots out a "WotC wants to kill old formats because lol $$$" argument because it's dopey and ignorant. That said, Seth's a smart guy and his analysis of the categories of reserved cards is pretty spot-on.
I think the bigger issue here is that WotC already made efforts to pare back the Reserved List, and somebody
reacted to that by forcing them to close loopholes and avoid even hinting in the direction of the Reserved List. If anyone at WotC figured out a way around
that I'm pretty sure they'd just eliminate it altogether.
Abandoning them by creating yearly booster sets devoted to them? And adding cards to supplemental products that were stated to be meant to shake up eternal formats, like Dack Fayden? Wizards is doing more to support non-rotating formats now than they ever have past the early years of the game.
Yeah, this idea that WotC wants to get rid of older formats is really fundamentally ignorant of their business model and how they expect to make money off their customer base. The point of non-rotating formats (and Commander fills a lot of this role now too, in addition to pure tournament formats like Vintage) is to keep the active player base up even when people get off the purchase treadmill. These formats keep the number of people playing Magic -- especially long-time players who can mentor newbies and might dip into draft or supplemental sets sometimes -- high and gives people who hate a current Standard environment an alternative to just quitting completely. The very existence of Modern speaks to WotC's understanding of this -- they created it because Legacy wasn't able to fulfill the role very well anymore thanks to Reserved cards and they needed something in that spot.
MaRo clarified that this isn't happening anytime soon.
Also Maro knows jack shit about competitive formats so assuming his comments are in any way informative about their plans on this sort of thing is pretty ridiculous.
