Ah Queen – so quotable. After you've read this article, if you've been with the classic community for a long time and you read about all that's gone down with classic, you'll feel like a champion too.

One of the wonderful things about writing articles on Magic is that you get to be sort of a critic. And to quote Anton Ego (if you haven't seen Ratatouille, you should): "In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read"

And so that's what I'm going to do - because, sometimes, pointing out other people's mistakes, however easy and trite it is to write, is just good plain fun.

So without further ado, I present to you the bad mistakes WoTC made with the classic format, in no particular order.

Tying MED2 to an Ice-Age Block + Fallen Empires + Guests Theme

To explain how bad of a mistake this set's composition was, try to imagine this: There was even a small flicker of doubt at some point - when Worth Wollpert was reneging on the idea that it would have all 10 dual lands - that it might have no dual lands at all. UGH!

On second thought, that decision might have been ok, except I guess we'd all be buying $40-$50 Necropotences right now. But then we could just go on hoping for a better rate of duals in another set.

But truly, what probably began as a neat idea for the sequel to the first Master's Edition - to focus the set on balanced drafting using only cards from Fallen Empires forward (with Portal Three Kingdoms and 6 exceptions) - was a poor idea. Not because the set doesn't draft well (In fact it is a marvel that they approached a reasonable drafting formula), but because nobody actually liked any of the cards from those sets. And please, don't tell me how much you loved this card or that card. I mean, I loved Elemental Augury back in Ice Age but I have no desire to break out my dual lands and try and recreate the glory days of doing nothing for the first 3 turns. Everyone has those esoteric favourite cards, but the real favourites from that era aren't in the sets that comprise MED2. They are from the sets that were ignored.

One of big draws to nostalgia cards of Magic past is that many people never got to play with them. Up until the release of The Dark, Magic expansions were very limited in print. There were whole towns of people joining the game that had never in their life seen a Mirror Universe, or even beheld the awesomeness of Juzam Djinn. So when the first Master's Edition contained cards like these, they were a draw for people who had longed to own them and use them. MED2 really has no such cards. Not only were all the sets from Fallen Empires and forward readily available to anyone who wanted them (especially Fallen Empires – it was terribly oversold), but those sets are sparsely populated with Master's Edition eligible cards that are fondly remembered by a large faction of players.

Call put out for anyone who cares... Hello? Anyone?

Hence, the obvious work that went into balance this set for limited was mostly for naught. As I write this, draft are currently fizzling down – even with the price of duals lands very high, because people are becoming disenchanted (pun intended) with the notion of what they leave with from Master's Edition Draft. It appears in the case of Master's Edition, a fairly balanced format is no substitute for exciting and nostalgic older cards appearing a ratio that almost ensures that everyone is at least satisfied that, even if they scrub out of a single elimination draft, they've left with something they might actually enjoy. Feral Thallid and Thought Lash and the 60+ crap rares inserted into Master's Edition obviously don't cut mustard.

One can only hope that Wizards learns from this mistake with Master's Edition 3. To be honest, since it seems they've dried up their resources of all the sets Fallen Empires and forward, it would be hard NOT to make Master's Edition 3 full of the juicy cards from all the other, much more widely anticipated sets, since that's all that's left.

Waiting 18 Months between Visions and Weatherlight, and 3 Years between Mirage and Tempest

This was a real stinger that actually came back around to bite WoTC in the rear recently. I'll get to how in a bit.

Visions was released in April of 2006, about 5 months after Mirage. Now Mirage was actually not a bad release. There was a lot of excitement around the first pre-Invasion set released online, and the drafting rate was actually fairly high. Indeed, in the beginning, Mirage cards were very easy to come by, because very few people really cared about actually keeping the cards – it's not like classic had the kind of player base it has now. And while a couple PEs were firing, they were full of mostly extended decks – you really didn't need anything from Mirage to play in a Classic tourney. By the time Visions was released though – a lot of that excitement had died down. Quite honestly, Classic was pretty much dead – no PEs fired for several months, and then they were simply taken off the schedule.

At CQ, we did what we could to keep things going – namely we ran our own PEs, with, I'd say, limited success. But the problem remained that classic really had very little identity, because there simply wasn't a big enough difference in the card pool between it and Extended. And that lasted for sixteen months, until Master's Edition was released with Weatherlight following two months later (with a small repose of a hand full of Coldsnap PreCon cards) That long dry spell was a very trying time for classic fans, and looking back on it, I'm amazed we came out of that time relatively healthy and ready to start firing PEs again.

But apart from the potential damage it did to classic fans, there was another effect that waiting so long to release Weatherlight caused – we are now "behind" schedule for the release of Classic sets. This delay is the chief reason why when the powers that be at WoTC were looking to release Legacy online, the community rose up and shot the idea down. The card pool of what would be online Legacy and Classic wouldn't be nearly dissimilar enough to make the tow formats any more than a couple of decks short of each other. The only relevant cards that would be banned in Legacy but legal in classic would be Necropotence, Flash and Skullclamp.

However, supposing the scheduled releases of classic sets hadn't taken a major delay between Visions and Weatherlight, and a minor one between Weatherlight and Tempest. Where would we be right now? Here is what I could have seen happening:

If we had this already, we'd have Legacy too.

As you can see, if they'd released just 2 sets a year from when they began Mirage, we'd probably be looking at an Urza's Saga release instead of a Tempest release this year. Even if you think that schedule is a little ambitious, and you attribute the Tempest delay to v3, we'd still be looking at an Urza's Saga release early in 2009.

Most of you probably get where I'm going with this, but for those of you who aren't on track, go to the WoTC Legacy Banned and take a look at the cards from Urza's Saga. Yeah – Yawgmoth's Will, Tolarian Academy, Windfall. The first two are generally regarded as two of the most broken cards ever released after the Alpha/Beta/Unlimited, and Will itself is generally regarded as the most powerful card in Magic. Not to mention Oath of Druids would also already be online from Exodus, and we'd be on the cusp of also having Yawgmoth's Bargain, Tinker, Memory Jar, Metalworker & Frantic Search. Instead we are getting Earthcraft, and on the cusp of Hermit Druid, Dream Halls and getting Oath of Druids later on. The difference is simply huge in terms of we could have had by this point.

Without a big difference in the formats, unleashing Legacy on Classic would fragment the eternal player base. Maybe not in a large way, but I would think even a small to moderate amount of people choosing one format over the other would severely weaken both formats. More than likely, Classic would suffer as a result of moving a lot of people into Legacy, which I believe would become more popular by way of it having the name of a paper format (even though it wouldn't come close to the same experience as paper Legacy for some time) .

So if you were a fan of the idea of getting Legacy online (and I think many still are), you can look no further than the huge delays between classic releases as to why online Legacy will be delayed.

Intentionally Being Vague with Respect to the Ultimate Fate of Eternal Formats Online

To be honest, this is the one that bugs me the most, because it has caused and continues to cause no end of arguments amongst the classic community. Let's look at some of the past, important quotes on the matter:

IntoTheAether: I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering: Is this a one shot deal, or are you going to do other old sets?
JZ: We'll call it a one shot deal for now. If things go well, I could envision releasing sets moving forward from Mirage.

IntoTheAether: There you have it! If you read between the lines, I think it's pretty apparent that Wizards is willing to release other sets, filling in between Mirage and Invasion, if the MTGO community wants it.

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/bs15

So at first glance, Mirage was a one-shot deal that maybe would go further. I think Bennie caught on to the idea that wasn't really the case (what a clever man) but even so – it doesn't seem like there is a grand plan here:

RandyB: We talked a fair amount about the general question of how to reprint sets. Should we reprint them as they were or extract a Chronicles-style "Greatest Hits" set from each block? Did we need to skip over cards that were too hard to code? Would we really print cards that we knew needed to be banned if our experiment is successful and it comes time for the Urza-block?

My point here is that we didn't talk specifically about whether development needed to revisit Mirage, but instead we focused on what precedents we might be setting that would affect potential future releases. It turns out there are no cards that are "too hard" to code, so we weren't forced to go the greatest hits route. In the end, we decided we really wanted to recapture the full experience of playing with these blocks. We wanted long-time players to be able to revisit old draft formats and we wanted to give new players the chance to fully experience these blocks the way they were originally released. That means that if/when we do Urza's Saga, people will be busting open booster packs that contain cards that development now acknowledges as "mistakes," but at the end of the day that's better than trying to rewrite history.

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/bs20

And here Randy Buehler is already talking about Saga Block. Oh Bennie – it seems you caught onto their little plan and they gave up pretty quickly on Mirage being a "one-shot deal" even before it was released

RandyB: I'm not sure exactly what the long-term fate of that format will be. It's nice to have a format where you can play with every card ever released online, but it's also nice to have a format where broken stuff doesn't happen. My best guess is that we'll eventually start restricting cards in Classic (making it the online equivalent of "Type 1"), but first we'll watch the format and ask around to try to figure out what players actually want.

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/bs20

And in the same interview, Randy pretty much gave everyone the idea that Classic ~ Vintage.

Much later on, we got more or less confirmation of that from Aaron Forsythe:

Now that Classic is a tournament format in Magic Online, the DCI has to start maintaining it. The big decision was whether to have a banned list, like Legacy, or a restricted list, like Vintage.

We settled on being more like Vintage than Legacy because philosophically, Vintage and Classic perform similar roles, even if the power level of Classic's decks is more in line with Legacy. Classic is the last bastion of playability online—if a card were to be banned there, it wouldn't be legal in any of the traditional 4-of-limit, 60-card-deck formats, which is not something we want to happen.

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/af186

It would be nice if WoTC would play this card.

Now Bennie Smith was long gone by the time of that final quote, and I've always liked reading Bennie's Articles. I miss them on the Magic Site. And I also realize that Bennie was a staff writer paid by WoTC. Really, talk about either a huge lack of foresight or some flyweight journalism. I mean, come on – where are the heavy hitting questions?

Let's try these ones on for size:

"What about cards that were printed before Mirage block?"
"Are your plans to eventually make Classic a functionally equivalent format to Vintage? Are the P9 eventually going to be released?"
"If Classic is going to be like Vintage, do you plan on having Legacy available as well?"
"Since pre-Invasion sets are now going to exist, what about the extended rotation that will take place then – are you planning on mirroring paper with the rotation or do you have anything special planned with respect to online Extended rotation?"

Seriously, it boggles my mind how most of these questions are STILL unanswered, or only partially answered. Yes, we know we are getting Pre-Mirage cards (props goes out to Worth Wollpert here), but we are still unsure of which Pre-Mirage cards we are getting, or even when. Yes we know Legacy is on the radar – but does that mean Vintage is also the fate of Classic? Hell – no one has really even come out and flat-out told the Extended community that they had better face the facts and either go eternal or start rotating. I think they are owed at least that courtesy.

For the life of me, I don't understand all the guess-work that is going on. I don't see how leaving us guess as to the Ultimate Fate of eternal formats online is helping either the community or WoTC bottom line. And I can see many reasons why knowing this information would be beneficial.

For example, let's say you are Vintage fanatic. Now, if you love Vintage, you are probably the same type of person who likes the P9, and for that matter, you are unlikely to want to play in an eternal format where you can't start your list with SoloMox and the other power goodies. There are absolutely, without a doubt, people who are like this. I've talked to them or had other people tell me about them. These people are not going to buy into classic until they are relatively assured that at some point, maybe sooner, maybe later, every single useful card ever printed appears online. And until WoTC commits to "we are going to release every single meaningful card online", WoTC will never get their money, and we will never see these people in our community. The same goes for Legacy. If WoTC had said "we fully intended to replicate Legacy online" when they started classic, (or hell, anytime before last month), maybe more of the people who weren't willing to gamble on this happening would have bought Mirage and Visions, which might have led to a faster Weatherlight release and… well… see above mistake.

It's really impossible to tell whether WoTC is intentionally holding back this information, or they simply don't know it themselves. My guess is actually the latter, but either way, I would still like answers to those questions, even if the status changes later on. I think the lack of knowledge about what is going on with online eternal formats is doing harm to the community and possibly to WoTC's bottom line, and I am at a total loss as to what good it's doing.

The Worst Mistake: Not Starting With Master's Edition

This one mistake is more of a compilation of other mistakes. It's funny how often people have to repeat the answer to this question in chat forums:

"Why did they start with Mirage?"

This was the way to start

But apart from all that, why start with Mirage? It's a good question, because in terms of the classic format, it is a terrible block to jump start with. The number of format defining and exciting cards were few (don't forget, Flash was a crap rare and Dreadnought wasn't abusable in 2005) and it doesn't get any better with Visions and Weatherlight. When you want to start something new, you want to put your best foot forward, right? Tempest or Urza's Saga would have been a bigger blast, but that wouldn't have been putting their best foot forward (and would have made for an odd release schedule, going back and forth chronologically with pre IPA sets)

No, their best foot forward would have been to say that they are gong to release Mirage, but before they do, here is Master's Edition.

Oh – and by the way – this Master's Edition wouldn't have had the "we're waiting for v3 to release dual lands in it" excuse. In 2005, Magic was practically at it's zenith before RAV block tipped it over the edge and start it's downward spiral. This first Master's Edition would have had 10 dual lands in it as well as Force of Will. That would have shown the entire community how serious WoTC was about releasing pre-IPA cards and having an eternal format online.

What Master's Edition would have done in 2005 would have been to allow classic to quickly establish the identity it struggled so long to find, which only coalesced when Master's Edition was finally released in 2007. It could have avoided the PE drought. It could have meant more crack packing for Visions (Even if just to get those Vamp Tutors that were needed for sanctioned events). But most importantly, it could have built up classic interest in the Extended community before the decision was forced upon them. Of course, it might have actually hampered RAV sales a bit (who needs RAV lands? We have real duals), but I highly doubt that effect would have been felt.

In short, the logical place to have started the Classic format would have been to pick and choose what cards would best jump-start the format, rather than slowly drip them out through block releases.

Denouement

That's pretty much the Big Mistakes WoTC has made with respect to classic. Of course, as I said, being a critic is easy. And for that matter, hindsight is 20/20. While some of these mistakes have worked themselves out in the long run, some of them are still mistakes that need correcting, or serve notice not to repeat.

And the best thing about mistakes is that you can learn from them.