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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 8851811" data-attributes="member: 58197">IMO, the decline of Standard is the thing Wizards ought to be freaking out about.Overprinting, excessive pushing of the collectible side, those can be corrected fairly quickly and easily. Just quit doing that crap, and the problem sorts itself out. But it's not so easy to revive a dying format; and Standard is absolutely essential to WotC's long-term health.I believe the reason Standard was invented in the first place was a crucial insight by Wizards of yesteryear: Eternal formats are unsustainable over the long haul. If you want people to buy new cards, those cards have to be better than what they've already got, so the only way to keep selling cards is power creep. And if you try to keep power creep in check, you drive up the barrier to entry -- new players have to lay out tons of cash to get the older cards that will let them sit at the table with the grognards.Card rotation solves both problems. Wizards can do a kind of "endless staircase" of power creep, where the cards get stronger in one area while simultaneously weakening in another, so the power level overall stays constant. And while it has never been cheap to buy the cards for a top-tier Standard deck, the price was at least fairly stable and everyone was in the same boat -- those of us who've been playing since the '90s had no advantage over the folks who started two years ago.(And, of course, rotation also gives Wizards a way to recover from mistakes, other than outright bans. The freedom to push the envelope, knowing that if you screw up, you won't be dealing with the fallout forever, is huge.)I've grown more and more worried as WotC's focus has shifted to Commander. I like Commander, it's my format of choice -- but it was better for everybody when Wizards treated it as an afterthought and kept Standard front and center. Without a rotating format at the heart of the game, Magic will wither.</blockquote>

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