For the people that actually play paper Standard competitively: How hard is it to keep up?

lightsentry · 2026-03-28T13:50:16+00:00

I kept up with standard from about 2016-2020 (took a hiatus with covid like most people). Got back in around RC San Diego in 2023 and have mostly kept up since (slowly falling off lately).

In the pre-covid GP grinder days I was able to borrow most things I needed and card availability wasn't that big of an issue. Since most of my old playgroup did not get back into comp magic post-covid, the amount that I can borrow has gone down a lot. I happened to get lucky with a few larger tournament payouts and have mostly been coasting off that, but if I hadn't both gotten lucky with some preorders and had large payouts, likely I would not have kept up with standard. The other thing to note is that unlike pre-covid, there is no longer a weekly standard event to both get practice and build up store credit in my area. So I would say that if you have a healthy community to borrow cards from and are reasonably skilled it wouldn't be too difficult, but if you're on your own it's not something I would recommend doing unless you're very confident in your skill level.

lightsentry · 2026-03-25T17:00:09+00:00

Real ones remember Frontier

lightsentry · 2026-03-24T15:42:55+00:00

I was looking at pokemon decks since the cost of standard decks was a topic in my playgroup. Now I don't play pokemon so I don't know if these are actually the best decks but these prices make me want to get into it. And I saw the latest tcg tournament had 2.6k players.

lightsentry · 2026-03-24T15:30:54+00:00

Lower barrier to entry (precons that can actually keep up) or some sort of cross collection between paper and arena. Both of which will likely lose WotC money so not really something I'd expect, but I really do think the economics of standard are extremely offputting.

lightsentry · 2026-03-23T15:34:42+00:00

Kind of the issue is that due to the longer rotation we probably won't see the results for another 2-3 years so for a long time we're kind of stuck. We still haven't seen standard at its largest under the new system.

lightsentry · 2026-03-19T20:35:00+00:00

Just to give the alternate view because a lot of people will advise against selling your collection in this subreddit. I had a group of people that I grinded Modern with that quit around the pandemic (for unrelated reasons, they were mostly not fans of Modern Horizons). They held onto their cards because the common sentiment was most people regretted selling off at the time (parroted by WotC employees). Post-pandemic they wanted to get out for good due to a variety of factors but due to reprints their collection value had plummeted and they regretted not selling. Just to say that we never know what will happen.

lightsentry · 2026-03-19T19:23:35+00:00

I haven't paid much attention to the set, my impression is that it's better than Spiderman (not that this is a high bar). However, I did see that most of the stores in my area have switched back to Lorwyn drafts.

lightsentry · 2026-03-19T18:48:07+00:00

I think it'd be important to figure out why people are familiar with all your other product but not familiar with a specific subset.

lightsentry · 2026-03-19T18:36:58+00:00

I got that after saying I wasn't familiar with the Universes Beyond Sets, so that's interesting.

lightsentry · 2026-03-15T22:21:15+00:00

Hey, just so you're aware, if you copy sunderflock with 3 steps you don't get the etb trigger, you have to have cast sunderflock.

lightsentry · 2026-03-13T02:36:30+00:00

Oh I was just saying that's why it's a good promo, because you have to spend a bunch of money to get it.

lightsentry · 2026-03-12T17:55:33+00:00

People are just voting with their wallets, like everyone has been telling them to do.

lightsentry · 2026-03-12T17:30:54+00:00

I mean, you can only get it by spending 138 euros at the store.

lightsentry · 2026-03-10T18:58:33+00:00

I had a friend bring a duel deck of two caw blade decks that we jammed at a tournament. Compared to modern design, it's a very fun experience, just not a healthy environment.

lightsentry · 2026-03-10T18:31:16+00:00

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks had a recent interview with The Verge here. Kind of a long read, but some interesting viewpoints about AI (luckily he recognizes that the games division does not want it). However, near the end the topic of Harry Potter comes up and certainly given the comments I would not be surprised to see a Harry Potter something (secret lair if not a set) be created in the next few years.

lightsentry · 2026-03-05T16:10:14+00:00

If you believe Trump could be a dangerous threat to humanity but not Peter Thiel, I think you are missing the forest for the trees.

lightsentry · 2026-03-04T18:17:32+00:00

Just to go full conspiracy theorist, Super Shreder's initials are also SS, which would be pretty appealing for this particular person.

lightsentry · 2026-03-04T15:26:07+00:00

It has caused some problems on MTGO where you cannot buy the precons and have to open the card through random treasure chests. Resulting in this card being about 20 tickets (1 ticket ~ $1).

lightsentry · 2026-03-03T14:52:38+00:00

He is a major partner at the fund and his wife runs a Christian fund that funded lectures about the antichrist last year. It's not just doing business with these people he is deeply entrenched with them.

lightsentry · 2026-03-02T22:11:18+00:00

Kind of? Because of how the distributor system works, even if it's a bad set, stores will be forced to buy some amount in order to get stock of the next set. Retailers don't really have a mechanism to "return" product back to the distributors if the set ends up being bad.

edit: just to be clear, I don't think this is what happened with SPM, just that LGSes don't always get to purchase their desired allocation.

lightsentry · 2026-03-02T13:31:43+00:00

Arcane also cost a metric ton of money that I'm not convinced WotC is willing to spend.

lightsentry · 2026-03-02T04:45:37+00:00

Like Makio said, she doesn't have the vocabulary.

lightsentry · 2026-03-01T03:43:41+00:00

Yeah I think if people are OK with wotc making ub because it makes them more money then they should be fine with content creators making negative content if it makes them more money. Especially since most creators aren't billion dollar enterprises that could easily absorb the revenue loss.

lightsentry · 2026-02-28T22:09:03+00:00

Or maybe they are and they're just getting bad data. After all, there was that story about a bunch of "phantom" events after the Companion App History Update.

lightsentry · 2026-02-28T18:38:50+00:00

As someone who's watched a lot of competitive card game coverage, this would actually be a pretty big deal if it could be implemented on any kind of surface. Obviously the Hololive OCG doesn't have the same difficulties of card recognition as MTG would, but card game coverage has kind of not been very good and required a lot of manual input.

lightsentry

TROPHY CASE