What is Frontier?



So what does that mean exactly?



How did it happen?



So.....what are people's thoughts on this new emerging format? Does anyone think it actually has legs, or is this going to feel a bit like Extended all over again for the next few years until a large enough back-log of M15 Bordered cards gets built up? Nobody in my area even seems to know that this format exists.

It'll matter if Wizards makes it matter. It'll fizzle out like so much Tiny Leaders if they don't.

No initial banlist sure seems to make it smell like Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time will make blue dominant until they start applying a banlist.

Wizards will only be interested in making it matter at this stage if it is fun to play. It's too shallow of a card pool so far to be anything more than Standard+. I don't see Wizards making a call one way or the other until there's a lot more sets and buy-in from players. They are not yet ready to abandon Modern.

Hah, Wizards doesn't care if it's fun to play, they care if people want to play it (and can turn that want-to-play into money).

Which will often be driven in part by if it's fun, but it'll also be driven by people wanting to go back to playing their CoCo and Siege Rhino decks.

"Fun to play" means that it can be marketed easily. If the format is just "Remember how much you hated CoCo and Rhinos? Well it's that plus all the other top Standard decks you hate." like Extended was, then it doesn't have legs to stand on and will need a much larger influx of cards before it becomes viable enough to market for real.

It was started to give newer people a chance at a non rotating format. Though that seems self defeating because in a few years the starting point of this will get expensive if it gets any traction and then they will need Frontier 2, newer and cheaper for you newer new people.

ultimately it has many of the same problems as modern (and by extension, legacy and vintage) in not being inherently sustainable

it also competes too much with standard right now, but something like this will inevitably replace modern

The underlying problems remain unaddressed. Unless WOTC dramatically shifts their stance on reprinting cards for nonstandard formats, this will follow the sad trend of its predecessors.
Like Golgari Spy said, there's not much separating this from standard right now. In a few years though, it will make a lot of sense. It's a good cutoff point. M10 works better presently, but "since they started doing the latest card frames" is pretty digestible.

My biggest issue is "frontier" is a terrible name. (well, really a good name that doesn't fit)
Contemporary does make more sense.

Other than that, yeah, what most others have said. The card pool is too small.

the real issue here is that their model is designed on standard being the premier constructed format (and thus selling booster packs for that format), and a real competitor is a threat to that

the only reason frontier is even relevant is because stores have cards that don't fit in modern that they want more inventory turnover on

Personally, I believe that magic formats should exist to fill niches. Standard fills a niche of being the format defined by new cards, which means that it's easy to pick up for newer players who don't want to learn/collect a bunch of older cards, and the forced rotation of cards gives wotc a lot more control over what the format looks like, because older cards don't stick around to define it (for example, if wotc wanted to make the format that encouraged 1-2 color decks, they could do it in standard by printing weak or conditional duals, but they couldn't do it in modern because players could just play the old ones). Vintage exists for people who want to play with every card ever printed. Legacy exists for people who want to play with cards from throughout magic's history, without the format being defined so heavily by the most powerful ones. And modern exists to provide a non-rotating format composed exclusively of sets made with a modern design philosophy (e.g. no dark ritual, no counterspell, no brainstorm, no hymn to tourach), and without the playerbase cap imposed by the B&R list.

So what role does "frontier" fill? Right now, it fills the "only recent sets" role of standard, and the non-rotating role of modern. But after a couple of years, it won't fill the first role, becoming just "another modern", with an arbitrarily different cutoff, and there's not really room for both. So that means one of them is going to have to go. If Frontier phases out, it will have been just another extended format. And if modern phases out, then we have to assume frontier will also be phased out in a few years when someone makes the next frontier-type format, meaning that, again, it was just another extended. It all comes down to the simple truth that you can't have your cake and eat it too: you can't expect a format to exist where the people who started playing before you did aren't allowed to play their cards, but the cards from when you started playing never rotate.

Seems bad? Likely to have the flaws of both standard and modern

I think what I would consider is a 5 year format,

Anybody remember Extended?

Painfully.

I understand that part of the push for frontier is that pros silike the rock-paper-scissors aspect of modern where every deck is beaten by another deck. Perhaps a more radical solution is required. Let's cut back the size of the sideboard and let people bring a second full deck to the tournament. Essentially, the new goal is to build two decks that between them, can beat any deck. Perhaps only the loser gets the opportunity to swap out their deck for the next round? If both people have the option, then it would just become a mind game.

Probably, one of the biggest problems in Frontier is the bell-shaped distribution of power in MTG cards.
Approximately, cards can be divided into three groups:
(~5%)A, cards that you "must" play in a given archetype AKA pushed ones (hate this concept)
(~15%)B, cards that you may play in a given archetype, but that's not optimal.
(~80%)C, cards that you "never" should really play.

In standard, there is a deficit of A cards, so when building a deck, you put them all into, but that's not enough. You must decide what B cards you will put into your deck, and that's where variety comes from.

In modern, there is an overabundance of an A cards for most viable archetypes, so variety comes from picking what of them you should put in. Also, in modern, some C and B cards find their home archetypes, where they belong to the A group. Also, the sheer number of archetypes is overwhelming, and that's good for variety too.

In frontier, there will be (or is) an inevitable phase, where the number of A cards in most archetypes is approximately equal to the number of deck slots, and there is VERY LITTLE variety in deckbuilding. This phase will be over, but only when the format will become "another modern".

In short, ~94% of cards aren't playable in perspective, and this is very sad. For as long as a format has "pushed cards", it can only be - a standart, where everyone plays same OP cards, a modern, where everyone plays a different OP cards, or a "middle-phase", that is worse then both of them.

Play casual, or homerule-ban all pushed cards.

That's a very good perspective. Are 5% of cards really constructed playable "As"?

There are currently 1240 cards (minus 6 basic lands) that show up on Gatherer as Standard. So that's about 60 cards, or ~10 cards per color (depending on how you count colorless and gold cards).

That is probably a little low I think? On mtgtop8 the 60th most played card (8%) is Kozilek's Return

In the 180-200 range you get stuff like Thing in the Ice, Goblin Dark-Dwellers, Painful Truths and, Duskwatch Recruiter -- all of which -- while not currently popular (these are in 0.7% of deck currently) -- are solid constructed cards. Beyond 200 you get also rans and one-offs (but including "almosts" like Sin Prodder and "has-beens" like Reality Smasher. Personal fav Fevered Visions is here too.

So to modify your your rubric a tiny bit:
In any given metagame there are probably only 50 A level cards (played in 10%+ of decks), but there are ~200 or so (15%!) that are Constructed PLAYABLE but generally don't fit in the current meta game.

The thing is, there is a natural tension between "stability" (i.e, modern decks don't change much) and "variety". Modern actually has LOTS of different decks, and while rock-paper-scissors might be a dumb game, it's better than "everyone plays rock" (aka Eldrazi Winter -- or even CoCo).

Really modern is only screwed up because of staples (and these are KEY cards for a deck) that cost $40+ (without even getting into Scalding Tarns).

Standard is actually pretty cheap right now but I don't ever play standard enough to even put $100 (I can't say 'invest') into a deck.

I bet you could do pretty well with a curated format. One with a very large banned/restricted list. Huh, I wonder what would you could do with a "handicap" modern tournament - where you would have some bonus for making a cheap deck (that seems bad) , or a salary cap tournament (like $400 TCGmid)

The goal of design shouldn't be to have a flat power level where everything is playable. A lot of deckbuilding is figuring out how to best build around the more powerful cards in the format. If every card is super, then no card is. If you want to play with a wider variety of cards, go play limited. It's the best format anyways.

It still kind of bums me out that so few of the cards in an average booster are constructed playable. There may be quite a few playable cards in a format, but a good percentage of them are rare or mythic. When you look at it in those terms, then grade A cards really are only 5% of the cards you buy.

Yeah, but if there wasn't a secondary market and people were somehow forced/expected to play with just what they open from packs....that would have it's own issues and....Cato's right, it would just be easier if every tournament was limited. Any other format is just playing as much as you can of the best cards available.