The next set, Throne of Eldraine, will be released on October 4, 2019. That day will also mark the day of rotation, when sets released earlier than Guilds of Ravnica will be removed from standard. This will leave only five sets as standard legal (GRN, RNA, WAR, M20, ELD) which will be the status quo until sometime after the year’s end.
The first time I faced rotation, I was in high school and was upset that I would no longer be able to use lightning bolt as it was not reprinted in 5th Edition. For a student with a limited budget to spend on colorful pieces of cardboard, the entire concept of rotation left a bitter taste in my mouth. Over a decade later, I returned to magic during the first return to Ravnica era (specifically in the middle of the Gatecrash season). Playing much more competitively this time and eventually having the privilege of playing in a team of likeminded adults, I no longer looked at rotation negatively. In fact, rotation is awesome as it enables the game to restart; it resets the giant puzzle that is Magic: The Gathering so that it can be solved anew. In this article, I discuss the dynamics of rotation in the context of Everett Rogers’ innovation bell curve and compare the ability of players across different platforms (Paper, MTGO, and MTGA) to act and react within these dynamics.
The Innovation Adoption Lifecycle
This concept is fairly simple (Wikipedia Article). Every innovation begins with
someone coming up with it. After an innovation is created, those who adopt it
early typically gain more from it than those who adopt it late. However, adopting
the innovation early also carries a bigger risk than adopting it late, since it
is possible that the innovation will turn out to be inferior to other
innovations created after it. In Magic, rotation is a time when the slate is wiped clean. Decks that had been tier 1 are no longer tier 1. Entire strategies that used to work well may no longer do so. As such, rotation is “brewers’ heaven”; it is the perfect time to fully exercise one’s technical and creative prowess at deckbuilding.
The Cost of Innovation
However, there is a real cost associated with the process of innovation, at least on paper and MTGO. In order to test new decks, one must have access to new cards. However, it is typical for the time of rotation to be when card prices on the secondary market are at their highest. Any rare/mythic that has even the slightest appearance of being standard playable in the new set will be sold at a premium. For paper magic, this period is typically the only time when the contents of booster boxes would have more monetary value than the boxes’ MSRP. In addition, any card from the older sets that are speculated on to still be important staples in the new standard will also be sold at a premium. This is true for both paper and MTGO, and it makes deckbuilding at the beginning of rotation a very expensive endeavor.
The problem is that time and time again it has been shown that out of all the cards that are hyped to be the next standard staples, only a handful of them turn out to be the real deal. The rest are traps, with some being very expensive traps. Imagine spending $100 on a playset of Huatli,Warrior Poet while being high on the idea of Naya Dinosaurs as the new top dog in standard two years ago, or spending roughly the same amount of money on a set of Ral Zarek, Izzet Viceroy last year.
In contrast, the cost of innovating is much smaller on MTGA, at least if one has prepared sufficiently for it. On Arena, every card is worth the same; there is no secondary market to hype prices up. More importantly, things like duplicate protection make it possible to complete entire collections, a strategy that is too wasteful to do on paper/MTGO. In a previous article, I showed that it is not difficult to complete the nonrotating sets through a combination of limited play, pack rewards, and constructed event ICRs. With enough gems for sealed once Eldraine hits, I expect to be able to have enough cards from the set to test different decks, using wildcards as needed to fill in cards I was not able to get from sealed. As such, people in the same boat will be able to eschew the cost of innovating almost entirely.
However, this is unlikely to be applicable to the majority of players on MTGA. FTP players in particular will not have access to sealed, and while their cache of wildcards may be sufficient for building a deck or two, once they have made the decision on what to build they will not be able to go back. There are likely a good many of these players who thought vampires was a good idea when Ixalan came out and went ahead to cash in their wildcards for playsets of Sanctum Seeker, Mavren Fein Dusk Apostle, etc, not knowing that the deck would not be tier 1 until well over a year later, when M20’s Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord and Temple of Silence were finally printed just a couple of months before all the other staples of the deck would be rotating out. As such, for players who want to play magic competitively but have a limited card pool/wildcards with which to test, the best strategy would be to wait until they can identify which decks would actually work.
But do not wait too long….
Waiting too long is also a bad idea. Consistent with Rogers’ innovation adoption theory, those who wait too long will find that their gains from adopting will be much less than earlier adopters. Even worse, it is possible that by the time one adopts, a new innovation has already been created to overtake the previous one. One example of this is can be seen between the release of WAR and M20, when decks like Jeskai Walkers and 4C Command the Dreadhorde rose and fell. Imagine only deciding to build 4C Dreadhorde after M20 was released and spending all your wildcards to do it, only to start playing against all of these Scapeshift decks. In contrast, had you decided to build the deck earlier, you may have already gotten enough rewards using the deck to offset the cost of using wildcards to build it. Similarly, some people wait forever on paper to build a deck, waiting for card prices to go down, not realizing that the reason why card prices go down is because the deck’s competitive lifespan is near its end.
Wrapping up
Rotation is a critical part of Magic. It is a time of great risk and opportunity. However, the MTG Arena platform seems to have made it possible to significantly mitigate the financial risk that comes with deckbuilding. For competitive players who are looking to optimize the use of their resources, identifying the best decks to adopt and doing so at the earliest possible time are crucial.
May the shuffler be with you.
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