With the recent spike in Pauper popularity, I think it’s a good idea to take a step back and ask ourselves some questions about Magic as a whole. Namely, why do we have the formats we do? There are about 6 ‘real’ formats of magic right now, as in formats you’re likely to be able to play at most LGSes: Standard, Modern, Legacy, Draft, Sealed, and EDH. That’s a decent number of formats, but it’s not really great at providing perfect coverage for everyone. Most people in Magic have a format, but in all likelihood they’re either underserved in that they’d like an additional format to play or they’d like to play something other than the format they’re playing. So why is that? In order to answer that question, I need to answer a seemingly unrelated question.

How Useful is your Telephone?

Let’s say you had a time machine, and for some reason you took a landline back to 1848, decisively before the first telephone was invented. How useful would that phone be? Let’s pretend you could get power for it, and that you couldn’t scrap it for parts to teach people about transistors or whatever other timeline shenanigans you’d want to get into. You have a perfectly functional phone, but for all intents and purposes it’s identical to a paperweight that makes a dial tone.

Now lets say other people had phones and there was infrastructure for you to call them. If one other person had a phone, you’d only be able to call them. If two people had phones, you could call either of them and they could call each other.

Mathematically, we can model how many connections we’ll have Metcalfe’s Law, which gives us a mathematical function for how many connections you’ll have: c = n(n – 1)/2. Where c is the number of connections and n is the number of nodes. If this is making your eyes glaze over, all you need to know here is that this scales very, very quickly. In other words, each additional phone makes your phone much more useful.

So why do we care? Because this doesn’t just apply to telephones. It applies to Magic formats too. A huge portion of the value of the 6 formats mentioned above comes from the fact that you can play them in a lot of places. If you have one or more local game stores, you’re pretty likely to have an event for these formats at some point throughout the week. Even if you don’t, if you know other magic players they’re likely to have one or more of these formats sleeved up and able to play. In other words, how worthwhile a format is to you is determined pretty hugely by other people playing it.

What does this mean for new formats though? It means that early adopters often have what I’m going to call ‘First Telephone Syndrome.’ If I sleeve up a Tiny Leaders deck in a community with no Tiny Leaders players, I have nobody to play with. That Tiny Leaders deck is as useful to me as blank pieces of cardboard. There are a couple of emergent properties that become relevant at this point, but there are two big ones we care about:

1.) Starting a format is a large collective action problem.

2.) Existing formats with any level of notability have first mover advantage.

A collective action problem is just a situation where a lot of people doing a thing is way more beneficial than just one person doing that thing. We just established that buying a deck for a format nobody you interact with plays is about as useful as setting your money on fire, but if you could get even ten other people to join you it might be a very good idea to do it.

First mover advantage here is exactly what it sounds like. Regardless of quality, the first format to establish itself within a specific niche is likely to survive in some capacity, often at the expense of other formats. Mostly this is caused by a combination of Metcalfe’s Law and the fact that very similar formats are substitutes for each other. Maybe a format that is Modern + Gorilla Shaman + Carrion Feeder is much better than regular Modern for some reason, but that format can’t really exist because Modern already exists and everyone’s already prettymuch got their fill of the stuff that that other format would do by playing Modern. This is fine for Modern because it’s mostly a pretty great format, but what about for other stuff like Peasant or Tiny Leaders that might exist at the expense of a substantially nicer format?

So we have two traits that make it both very hard to create a format that people want to get into and very hard to make sure that the best possible formats thrive. What do we do about it?

Regionalization

One cheaty thing about the telephone example I skipped over until now is that there’re probably a handful of telephone numbers that’re much more useful to you than others. A phone network could have a million people on it, but if they’re all from South Korea you’re gonna need to learn a second language and get really into Starcraft to get any use out of your phone. The 20 or so people who play most at an LGS are the people a format lives or dies on at the local level. Multiply that by the number of LGSes in your state or country and you have the work you need to do to have it thriving on the local level. Realistically, you don’t really care if anywhere else plays the format you play unless you’re at that place, and the vast majority of people play much more Magic within 100 miles of their house than they do anywhere else.

If you’re looking for good examples on how to use regionalization to make establishing a format less impossible, Frontier and Canadian Highlander are the go-to examples. Frontier is, in terms of published decklists, almost entirely regionalized in Japan, and CanLander is much bigger in Canada. Obviously.

One of the issues with this strategy is getting a format to break out of its regional constraints later is hard. It’s entirely possible that CanLander can gradually cause other stores nearby to adopt the format, because those stores likely already have players who play Canadian Highlander, but any big gap in stores makes that difficult. The middle of Canada, like the middle of the US, is pretty empty, so just spreading virally like that might not pan out. It also has a hard time spreading stateside, especially as the US/Canada border has gotten less porous. The odds of a critical mass of US players casually crossing the border frequently enough to catch the Canadian Highlander bug are going down, and if not for the extremely close proximity of Seattle and Victoria I would be highly cynical about Canlander getting any sort of substantial stateside following. And that’s with Canada being a country with very good US relations and a shared language. The regionalization of Frontier in Japan is a much harder issue to overcome.

I’m not sure how to deal with that, and honestly I’d like anyone with better ideas than me to offer advice on that front.

Big Name Support

I touched on this for a fraction of a second, but generally speaking the best way to deal with this collective action problem is to have a powerful orginization that can encourage people to buy in. Loading Ready Run supports Canadian Highlander. The Professor and CFB support Pauper. Hareruya supports Frontier. No Banlist Modern has SCG support. Even Tiny Leaders had a mix of finance people and article writers, notably including Saffron Olive early in his career.

The thing is that having a celebrity or a large business hitch their wagon to a format shortcuts a lot of that support. The Professor has access to a huge YouTube following and his posts consistently top /r/MagicTCG. CFB adding a format to sides gives people guaranteed access to that format, and the fact that GPs are important enough for people to care about traveling to means that even having an event on sides will make stores more likely to create their own events in the same format.

The one issue with this is that all of the people involved in this have limited avenues of communication with players. All of these big movers and shakers have their own perspectives on what players want or need. The Professor is pretty strongly incentivized to be responsive to player opinion, because his channel is to some extent about consumer advocacy, information dissemination, and player representation, but I’m not sure that the same is always true for big game companies. Star City adding a new format to their circuit might do a lot more good for small LGSes than it ever does for them. Even if it’s in the big TOs best interests to add one or two formats every once in a while, they’d still probably be adding fewer formats than is generally healthy for the game. Moreover, drafting and distributing complex player surveys and interpreting that data takes money, and there’s nothing even close to a guarantee that they would make back money from knowing more about what formats players want. Big entities are how we get ubiquitous formats, but there’s still a gap between what players really want and what they’ll end up getting.

Avoiding and Killing Bad First Movers

One of the consequences of formats existing somewhat at the expense of others is that not great formats that never really get big still get big enough to exhaust the ability of similar formats to exist. The existence of Frontier makes a lot of proposed formats boil down to the question “isn’t this Frontier but slightly smaller or larger?” That’s bad, because Frontier isn’t likely to grow a lot larger and it’s entirely possible that something we would think of as knockoff Frontier would be a very popular format if not Frontier.

It’s at this point we need to talk about bad first movers, and about bad faith in general. If you buy into the rumor, Frontier exists to sell Standard rotatos, Tiny Leaders exists because someone was speccing on Geist of Saint Traft, and there are Pauper people swimming in pools filled with Gushes and Wing Shards. While I think Pauper justifies its own existence (it’s cheap, it’s sweet, and it’s diverse), the other two strike me as relatively callous manipulations to sell cards. And that sucks, because there might be room for a Highlander variant or a format with CMC constraints on deck construction or a post-Modern format.

What do you do to a format that exists only because a company supports it, or one that actively seeks to mould popular perception to force its own existence? It seems like they don’t catch on, but also like they end up in a state of undeath that does lasting damage to the landscape of potential formats. Is downvoting enough? What else can we do without hurting LGSes that buy into the artificial craze?

This article has had a lot of hard questions without clear answers. Partially, that’s because I’m hoping that the community at large is smarter than me on this front. Partially, it’s because these are problems that we deal with as a planet on a daily basis. An important step in making Magic better is understanding how it could be better, and even if I can’t fix it I hope I’ve at least helped make that more clear.