On the Pioneer Trail

Since the release of Arena, Magic players have been clamoring for Modern, and even Legacy to be added to the platform. I disagreed, and still do. I think Wizards has sound reasons for not adding older, non-rotating formats, and calling for those formats to be added suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of Arena’s purpose as a platform - which is, and always has been primarily to enter the esports market. The Historic format was Wizards’ compromise, non-rotating format solution for allowing players to still have some value to their collections after rotation. They have even stated that a curated selection of older cards will be added to the format. Seemed like a reasonable offering.

Then Pioneer was announced, and everything changed.

The interest in Historic has been lackluster, right from the start. It’s not well supported by Wizards, and we haven’t even gotten our curated cards for it yet – granted, they’ve been delayed because more work was being done on sorely needed client optimization, and that was a great and necessary choice of prioritization on Wizards’ part. Nevertheless, I haven’t played a single Historic game on Arena, and I haven’t brewed a single deck. Until the new cards get added, it’s really just Standard Plus, which was old Extended, which was a dumpster fire of a format for good reasons. Remember how much you hated that Control/Combo/Aggro deck that just rotated? Well, guess what, now it’s not gone!

Compare to that, however, how Pioneer has been received. The Magic community at large is on fire for it. Multiple tabletop events were scheduled immediately, Pioneer communities sprang up overnight, card prices have skyrocketed, and even Star City Games has ditched Legacy as a regular part of their Tour circuit and replaced it with Pioneer. Moreover, Wizards is taking an active role in promoting and curating the format, to the point where they’re doing a banned announcement weekly.

In short, Pioneer is a runaway success. It is a better format than Historic by every conceivable metric, and Wizards would do well to ditch Historic at this point.

Adding Pioneer to Arena is much more doable than Modern. For starters, the card pool is substantially smaller. Modern includes cards starting with 8th Edition, which was released in July of 2003, that’s over 16 years ago. Pioneer, by comparison, starts with Return to Ravnica, which was released in October of 2012, just 6 years ago. That’s a total of 31 sets in Pioneer, compared to the 68 sets in Modern. Kaladesh and Amonkhet have already largely been coded for Arena, although they may take some updating and revision to bring them up to spec.

I’m not suggesting that Wizards dump all of Pioneer on Arena in a matter of weeks or months. Not only would that be prohibitively expensive and problematic in programming costs and challenges, but it’s not a financially responsible course of action from a revenue consideration. If they space it out a bit, then they’ll be able to run more events, and generate more revenue. I would suggest a three pronged approach to introducing the format.

First, sell the Challenger Decks on Arena – both sets that have been printed so far. There’s a reasonable foundation for the Arclight Phoenix deck in the most recent set, all of the decks in the first run were reasonably competitive, needing only a few upgrades to bring them up to a high competitive level, and they are composed of cards which have already been coded for Arena, many of which may be viable for Pioneer.

Second, run annual or biannual “Masters” drafts. Construct a draft set which contains around 4 decks which are performing well in Arena. Include all of the necessary cards to construct a competitive version of that particular deck. This will ensure getting the most important cards into Arena in a reasonable time frame.

Third, run regular “flashback” drafts, even if it’s only once a year. Start with Amonkhet/Hour of Devastation, and then move backward one or two sets a year, as might make sense from an available resource/programming perspective.

Even if it takes a while to get a sizable selection of the most important Pioneer decks onto Arena, that’s fine. MTGO ran for years with a very limited Legacy pool. That didn’t hurt the popularity or viability of the client. If you code it, they will come.

I know that Wizards has good financial reasons for prioritizing Standard and Limited on Arena, and I’ve defended those reasons in a previous blog post. But people aren’t going to abandon Standard play, just because you give them another option. It didn’t happen on MTGO, and it won’t happen in Arena. New players to the platform will still need to run Standard, at least for a while. New players to Magic through Arena will want to stick to Standard until they get up to speed. People playing in competitive events will focus on Standard for testing when it’s relevant, and Wizards has full control over formats in the Mythic Championships.

Limited play has always been a big part of Arena, and of Magic as a whole. Pioneer won't change that. It’s a great way to build a collection, and many people just enjoy it more, and actively will play it over any constructed format – although, Wizards needs, needs, NEEDS to get pvp drafting up and running. If Eldraine has taught us anything, it’s that some problems with the bot-draft solution can’t be solved. I love the set, but even with adjustments, ridiculous Mill decks are still quite easy to assemble, and we face them far, FAR too often. In the modern age of online play, bot drafts, and League-style drafts, Wizards can’t make Limited Mill strategies this effective or easy to assemble. But I digress...

If Wizards brings Pioneer to Arena, in the long run, it won’t hurt Standard Play. It will result in more people playing on Arena, and that benefits everyone.