Why Legacy would be a terrible PTQ format

Hello again, Internet. It's been (checks timestamps) . . . 4 years, 4 months, and 20 days since I last attempted to blog. I think it was still web 1.0 back then. Anyway, I'm throwing stuff out here again. On to business.

A few weeks ago, I attended my first real live semi-high level Magic event, the Starcity Games 5K in Indianapolis. I'll do another post on the experience (short story I scrubbed out pretty fast), but for now the quick points are that I was playing Zvi's San Diego Mythic deck for Standard and the Reanimator deck from the GP a couple weeks before.

Anyway, 5th round in the Legacy event, as my opponent and I are de-sideboarding and I'm getting ready to drop at 2-3, Riki Hayashi stops by to collect our result slip and hang out for a minute to ask us how we like Legacy, where we got our decks from, and how we would feel about Legacy as a PTQ format. I didn't have very much to contribute, not having thought about it much before, but I've thought about it since then and I'd like to expound some more on why Legacy would be a terrible format for a PTQ season (although an awesome competitive format and tons of fun).

To my way of looking at it, there are four main reasons why Legacy would be a bad PTQ format, all related to each other: Cost, Availability, Diversification, and Return on Investment. Let's go through them one at a time:

Cost:

My opponent and I in that 5th round had both borrowed 80%+ of our Legacy decks, and would not have been in the event at all except that it was the same weekend/venue as the Standard event the day before. Now, my standard deck choice was hardly inexpensive - I think at the time it would have cost someone around $650 to put together buying singles. My Legacy deck was probably worth between $7-900 (I'm not as well versed in Legacy standard card prices). So, deck for deck the price is not that far off. However, I don't think these are very representative - Mythic at the time was the most expensive deck available in Standard, and is still a close second to the new Super Friends deck. The best deck in Standard until recently cost between $2-400 to put together, depending on your exact Jund list and when you bought the cards. Decks in Legacy can range up well over $1000 (again, not an expert on Legacy prices). Your average Legacy deck will probably cost 2-3x your average Standard deck. In addition, the way you get those cards varies drastically, which segues into my next reason, Availability.

Availability:

If you want to build a Legacy deck from scratch over the next few weeks/months (say you've decided to go to GP Columbus), you have three options to get the cards: buy them as singles (very expensive), find someone willing to trade them away (not terribly easy unless you have a very large pool of potential trade partners), or borrow them (entirely dependent on who you know/what they're willing to loan you).

For Standard decks, you have 5 options, almost all easier/better: buy them as singles (cheaper across the board - Creeping Tar Pit << Underground Sea, Jace TMS << Tabernacle, etc), trade for them (generally easier to do than with Legacy cards, as you're guaranteed to have more potential trade partners), borrow them (pretty much the same), crack them in a booster pack, or pick them up in a draft.

As a case example, here's how I got my playset of Jace TMS:
1 - Opened one in the two boxes of World Wake I bought.
2 - Won one in a "put the rares back and let the winners get first pick" draft that I went to.
3 - Traded a bunch of junk rares for one (yes, lucky me).
4 - Popped one out of some WWK prize packs I got at FNM.

Here's how I got my playset of Underground Seas, Entombs, and Force of Wills for that Reanimator deck:
1-12 - I borrowed them. (Thanks again, Evan!)

The main point here is, just by playing Magic on a regular basis, you're going to build your Standard card pool and have access to more decks - unless you've been playing since they were printing the older cards, which a lot of us haven't been (I started playing during Shards block), you are going to have to make a serious investment of cash or trade stock to put together a Legacy deck. It's harder to do, there's a bigger barrier to entry, and it will just straight up cost you more per deck.

Diversification:

Both the cost and the availability drawbacks get multiplied once you take into account diversification, by which I mean the metagame. It's generally acknowledged that unless you're Cedric Phillips, you're not going to win a lot if you bring the same deck to every tournament week after week and month after month. Now, in Standard, if the metagame shifts, you're more likely to have a broad selection of cards to start from if you decide you need to change decks. I may be playing Mythic right now, but if I wanted to switch to Jund for regionals this weekend, I'd only need to pick up 3 cards for the Jund list I'd want to run - (a 3rd + 4th Siege Gang and a 4th Maelstrom Pulse). If I sink a lot of time, money and effort into building Reanimator for a Legacy PTQ season, and a month into the season every deck is hating out Reanimator and people are playing decks designed to beat it, and I know that the new best deck is, say, R/W aggro of some kind, I have exactly zero cards I can port over from my "legacy collection" of one deck. All of the barrier to entry/cost drawbacks to Legacy start all over again. Obviously, if you already have a full collection of Legacy staples, this doesn't apply to you, but most of us don't, especially the flood of newer players like myself in the post-M10 era.

Return on Investment:

This one is a little strange, so hear me out. Obviously from a dollar value of your cards perspective, a Legacy deck has a better ROI - the cards don't rotate, they're not being re-printed, so the price only goes up, etc etc.

That being said, I'm not speaking from a collector/speculator's perspective here, but a player's perspective. I live in South Bend, IN - it's a small midwestern city with an infestation of Notre Dame students - we have a healthy magic shop, with two events a week that each draw about 15-30 people on an average basis. Obviously if you're in a major city, you're going to have a bigger pool of players, but we have a pretty good core here (I've been to a few other shops within an hour or two of us, and none of them draw as many players consistently). Since I've been playing Standard, I've had the opportunity to play in sanctioned Standard events twice a week every week. My Baneslayer Angels have developed slight creases from excessive play; my friend's Vampire Nocturnus' bend in the middle when he sets them down. You know how many sanctioned Legacy events I've had the opportunity to attend in the last year? Two. Three if you count the 5K. Even if you live in an area with a much more thriving Legacy community (and I envy you if you do - like I said, it's a blast to play), I still doubt that your opportunities to play Legacy are going to come close to your opportunities to play Standard.

My Standard card purchases, even if they rotate in one year or two years, are going to provide me with 1-200 opportunities to play them in a tournament. A Legacy collection will give me 5-10 opportunities to play in a tournament every year. From a "play with the cards" perspective, my Standard collection provides an exponentially larger return on investment.

None of this is to say that Legacy is a bad format or that I don't want to play it - going 2-3 at the Legacy event in Indy was one of the most fun and skill-testing experiences I've ever had playing Magic. I just know that if Legacy is a PTQ format, I'm not PTQing.