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I have a hypothesis. It has to do with our young legacy format, and why no one is playing it. Modern two-day tournaments often have standard and team standard as the main events, with legacy sometimes tacked on as a side event, pretty much as an afterthought. Why don’t we have legacy/standard tournaments, or standard/team legacy?
Well, for one, standard formats are friendlier to newer players as the cards are easier to acquire, and as UFS is still a relatively young game, the majority of the player base is constituted of new players. Conversing with most players reveals a startling fact: something like 75 percent of the UFS players that show up two most of these tournaments don’t quite have a grasp on advanced game mechanics and theory. Some of them are fanboys with nine Ryu character cards in their deck, intent on stacking them all for the “ultimate Ryu” deck. Others use the word “broken” to refer to every other card. You know who these people are, and I mean no disrespect to them. If they’re serious about the game, they’ll catch on soon enough, but it’s mainly because of this majority of the player base that legacy doesn’t nearly have the following that standard does, I think. Legacy is the format for the top 25 percent, and most of us are on a first-name basis, a fact that is very telling of how small the group actually is. As long as legacy continues to be a side event during the main event, those players will be occupied elsewhere.
As it stands, it’s not uncommon to see players take standard decks wholesale and enter them into legacy side events, thus legacy tech has been very slow to develop. On top of that, we’ve been waiting for some time now for that legacy-exclusive ban list. You might wonder why legacy needs its own ban list. For starters, legacy is a much more powerful and power-filled format than standard. Cards like Revitalize and Olcadan are much less of an issue there, as your opponents are already breaking the game in similar, if not more powerful ways. If these cards can be played anywhere, legacy is the place.
Additionally, legacy would be a great place to try experimental restrictions, such as unbanning Strength of Purpose and/or limiting it to a single copy per deck. Naturally this and other similar procedures would be cumbersome and unfeasible for standard play, as newer players have enough to worry about without having to worry about banned/restricted lists.
Admittedly, any actions pending for legacy have to compete with the creation/playtesting of new sets, the drafting of the new set of tournament rules, and any other amount of business over at Fantasy Flight, therefore, if anything is to happen to legacy, it falls to us legacy players to make it happen, by presenting our rational cases, or simply planning events with experimental legacy formats. Before anything can happen, however, we’ll need to see a rise in legacy tournaments as main events, in order to focus the attention of the player base on its deck technology.
Before I continue, I’d like to clarify what I mean by “experimental legacy formats.” I have it in mind to organize a large-scale legacy event with a unique banned/restricted list. Naturally, this sort of venture requires the cooperation of many distinguished players in order to keep the balance of power stable, but some ideas I have to start with are to unban Erode the Human Soul, Concealed Shallow Swipe, and Revitalize specifically for that event. I would also like to allow Olcadan, in order to properly gauge his potential in a real-world setting. This concept of mine is still many months away, but I think it’s really possible to reinvigorate the format and generate a lot of enthusiasm for it all at once. The goal is to get people thinking, planning, playing, and talking about legacy. Make it so that the format can no longer be ignored by making it something important and relevant, rather than just a mere side event or afterthought.
So let’s talk about legacy, and its unresolved issues. I’ve already discussed the banned list, and hope someday to bring up old errata’s that are messy and awful, like Adon and One-Armed Maneuvers. For now, however, I’d like to stick to the subject of all the “fake” reprints, and how they’ll affect legacy in the future. I’m referring to all the cards that are printed with the exact or similar effects of previous cards, like Angel of the Evening and Devil of Daybreak. While it may seem cool and harmless to bring back classic cards in such a fashion, rather than reprinting them outright, I don’t think I would have to point out that this can allow players to run more than 4 of these specific effects in a deck. People list decks with 59 Yoga Masteries as a joke, but what happens when it actually becomes possible to do such a thing because the card was reworked so many times? So far, there don’t seem to be any immediate offenders, but we have reached a point where decks can contain 12 board reset cards (Begin Anew, Infiltrating, Start Over), so the time may be upon us where we might actually want to reprint one of the three instead of making a new one to add to the pile. Reprints for the sake of game balance is not a great evil, and can actually be quite exciting when executed properly. Obviously, UFS has unique licensing issues to consider, but this is nothing new, and reprints have been done before. The idea is to think of the game as a whole in a long-term sense. It’s not so much the question of what is good for the game now, but what will be good for the game down the road.
There’s a lot of ground to cover in legacy, and I hope I’m not putting you off by wanting to jump in head first. If something is going to happen with the format as a whole, it needs to start somewhere, and the logical thing would be to schedule the event first. I’ll keep you guys posted on that end, as I may need to get scout status first, but I don’t think I have to, as I only want to plan one event. Regardless, even if we only get this one legacy event in this year, I think it will go a long way towards creating general anticipation and demand for legacy events in the future. Hope to see you guys there.
-ceejay
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