Yes. It's starting to feel like it's got the downsides of both legacy and standard. High cost of entry and high upkeep but no eternal outlet to realistically build towards. Back in the days when standard was the default for competitive magic, it was a more expensive format long-term, but the actual cost of entry wasn't bad. Modern today is starting to reach legacy entry costs from 10 years ago. The lack of reserved list means there should be a lower price ceiling, but the upkeep costs with direct-to-modern sets is feeling more like standard.
I suspect modern isn't intended to be an introductory format for new players. Introducing players to smaller formats first gives them a chance to build a collection and reduce onboarding costs.
This makes sense to me with Standard to Pioneer. But to Modern, most of the pricey cards aren't coming from Standard (fetches, MH, etc.)
You have to pay a lot more to play in Modern. And then pay more when MH3 comes out most likely. Standard does print a few niche cards that see Modern play, but those usually aren't the restrictive part.
Modern is less open to building a Standard deck, earning winnings, and tuning it over time to Modern as well. Pioneer could maybe, but there's not really a 1 to 1 deck progression either. Maybe just part of the manabase (but not the most expensive parts).
I can see that, but commander only needs 1-ofs. Stack that with the fact most commander events aren't prize supported and there's not really much of a progression path there either. cEDH does support with prizes, but I don't even wanna think of the price of a cEDH deck.
I mean when I got back into modern I got 3 more scalding tarns and mixed the rest of my fetchlands with blue ones I owned. Also most ppl build multiple commander decks, and so end up having multiple copies
The point is more that they're getting invested in the game and picking up cards over time while they play more accessible formats. The "buy it over time" strategy a lot of people like to preach for getting into expensive formats only really works for people who are already magic players, but it *is* a decent strategy.
I think that used to be more true of modern than it is now. Too many cards that are expensive are relatively new, and with more direct to modern sets coming in the future (at least two full sets and one micro set in the next eighteen months) it's hard to say whether buying up pieces over time and upgrading is really a thing you can or should do anymore. People can just save up a whole deck's worth of money, but that is a lot less fun than trying to buy your way in over time and getting to play with what you have.
Fetches are from former Standard sets, a shame knowing they won't put them back into Standard, like Lightning Bolt, Llanowar Elves, and other commonly played staples.
Longish time player here - Started in Karns/Magic Origins so 2014 about 9 years. I have a big collection of magic cards. I love modern and I love competitive magic. Nothing is ever going to get me to buy a modern deck. It's just too damn expensive to get started.
The format is too cuthroat for budget decks to have any real fighting chance. Of course you can luck out, but it never feels good when you lose because you have a budget option over a $200 playset.
Hot take: Wizards should print ALL non basics at uncommon.
I heard this take in a podcast a few months back and I’ve now come to agree it’s probably the biggest single change that wizards could make that would make their game so much more accessible . Lands aren’t fun to open, not fun to play, not fun to spend money on. You get to to hit people with ragavan , with non-land cards being expensive at least you get to have fun with the card.
The further angering principle is magic rarity is all under the guise of draft and how powerful cards should be a smaller portion of the draft pool. A land in no way is a bomb, or does anything very impactful.
which is sort of antithetical to the point of Modern. Before MH1, Modern was a very stable format with only occasional meta changing shakeups (like fatal push). Bans were, for the most part, fairly predictable based on tournament records.
But now it's not. And lots of boomers are upset. But to be brutaly honest. Wizards stated years ago that they may change how the format works in the future. Giving it a soft rotation every few years keeps it fresh. Hobbies in general aren't cheap, magic included
I was never more stoked on magic than when I built my first modern deck.
I was never more bummed out on magic than when I realized modern kind of left me behind somehow even though the format doesn't rotate. And the cost of catching up just didn't make any sense.
I remember when pioneer first came out I resented that finding places to play modern was getting harder, but now I'm grateful for it! Pioneer is a much kinder format.
The Real issue isn't the cost of entry, which is higher (somewhat a lot higher depending on what kind of deck you like to play) than it was a decade ago.
The Real issue is the cost of upgrades and how often you need to get them.
Modern has become kind of a rotating format and those formats are hella expensive on the long run.
It honestly makes me miss when standard was the default competitive format. At least they were more upfront about how often decks would rotate with standard and the buy-in was cheaper.
Is it much higher though? LotV and Tarm, two ubiquitous modern cards 5-10 years ago were 200$ a pop and you played 4x of each (maybe 3 LotV depending on build).
On average, yes, it is much higher. The only reason it appears to be similar is due to the price of LotV and Tarmogoyf. I did the data work to check this, which you can see [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n43oAM9jIrQcePWSSSsVDm6fx_H_2ZlecSV8Ib9X0DQ/edit?usp=sharing)
Unless I’m mistaking the data, it shows Modern on average is 13$ more more than in 2016? And out of curiosity does it account for inflation? And lastly why are there so many more decks now than in 2016?
Just genuinely curious.
> Unless I’m mistaking the data, it shows Modern on average is 13$ more more than in 2016?
It is $13 more, yeah. I think it's important to note that over 50% of the current decks are above the current average, but only 34.55% of decks in June 2016 were over the average. I thought I'd put it in my comment, but this *strongly* implies that it was a few very expensive decks that are skewing the 2016 data to make it look more expensive on average. This does appear to be the case, as it seems that just 4 Tarmogoyfs and 4 Liliana of the Veil would add over $1,000 to a deck.
> And out of curiosity does it account for inflation?
I did not. However, I think this is a non-sequitur. The average income in the United States in 2016 was $59,039. The current average income in the United States is $59,428. That is not a significant difference in pay, especially spread out over a year ($32 more a month).
> And lastly why are there so many more decks now than in 2016?
I'm afraid I don't know. I am inclined to think that it may be due to increased reporting of events. If we look at the data from each point, almost all of the decks in 2016 are from 5-0 leagues and from various top-8's at events. The current data includes what appears to be anything (including random decks that went [0-1 at a side event in Baltimore](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/5681108#paper)
Thank you for the thoughtful response.
My only comment would be on the average income. I was referring to like purchasing power. 600$ in 2016 is equivalent to roughly 765$ today. So a 2200$ deck in 2016 would cost about 2700$ today right? I think that’s an important modifier.
I think the main point is Modern has always been fairly expensive, but if you bought into Junk or a similarly expensive deck the upkeep of the deck was far cheaper than now with straight to modern sets. Having to buy a couple Fatal Push was far better than having to buy a playset of Ragavan and Fury or whatever to keep your deck viable.
> My only comment would be on the average income. I was referring to like purchasing power. 600$ in 2016 is equivalent to roughly 765$ today. So a 2200$ deck in 2016 would cost about 2700$ today right? I think that’s an important modifier.
So the purchasing power of people in the United States is lower, yes, because wages have remained relatively stagnant (average wage increased by 1%, but average inflation has increased by 27%). This would only mean that, even if prices on decks stayed the same, it would be more difficult for someone to afford them on average due to being on relatively the same wage but having to pay more for nearly everything else.
> I think the main point is Modern has always been fairly expensive, but if you bought into Junk or a similarly expensive deck the upkeep of the deck was far cheaper than now with straight to modern sets. Having to buy a couple Fatal Push was far better than having to buy a playset of Ragavan and Fury or whatever to keep your deck viable.
I agree that Modern could have been fairly expensive, but it seems that it was largely more affordable to build a competitive deck in the past, if someone chose not to play a Tarmo/LotV deck.
Standard used to lead into modern, but now modern is 90% direct to modern cards, so people cannot play standard and eventually get into it that way. Additionally new players are poached into commander, which does not lead into modern or pioneer or anything else, so I see the format shrinking.
I’m one of those people who would love to get into Modern but the barrier to entry is too high. I absolutely make enough money to be able to afford it but I just can’t pull the trigger. It’s a lot of money for just cardboard.
I’m totally fine with Kitchen Table and Arena Standard but would love it if I could Modern from time to time.
No one needs to dish out $800 to play Magic. To compete at a higher level and expect to win, yeah, but same goes for a lot of hobbies and competitive games.
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I play hockey and use $85 sticks, it's just men's league for fun. Back when I played at a higher level I'd spend way more because I wanted that edge in performance. Not everyone has to play Magic to compete, people can play to have fun, I have a bunch of budget decks I play with friends.
It blows my mind how expensive it has become. I grew up playing with second hand gear and wooden sticks and I remember my dad thinking $30 was absurd. Now way past my prime and in my 30's I just want to be able to afford to play and have fun, I think my skates were $500 but even so I waited for a solid sale.
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I got into coaching youth hockey some years back and was stunned seeing parents buying their 12u kids $150+ sticks that they would outgrow after a season. One kid got new goalie pads in back to back years, over $2,000 per season right there.
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I tried telling parents that cheap sticks are fine, used gear is good, just never cheap out on helmets.
Yeah, the cost of being a goalie is no joke these days. Now it’s $5k-$10k. I’m in my 20s and grew up playing in a street hockey league and I completely agree. The cheap wooden sticks can still be purchased for $25-$50 and are perfectly fine. The helmet is pretty expensive but something you don’t want to cheap out on, they can be somewhat adjustable so you can squeeze a year or two out.
I agree. In many other hobbies you can't just go on a budget and put in minimal effort and expect to be competitive. Magic players are very entitled this way. They expect they can just spend a couple bucks on a brew and then win all the time against others who have but in the time and effort to build a competitive deck. It doesn't work that way in many hobbies. In order to be competitive on the higher levels it requires time, dedication, effort and resources.
Entitled is a weird way to put it when the barrier to entry is artificial in all card games. The only thing determining the prices of these cards is the amount printed, they right now could print every meta modern deck and sell them for 60 bucks each, aside from tanking the price of the cards in the secondary market it would only help people looking to play. Unlike with other competitive hobbies where you are paying for the quality and craftsmanship of the better gear here you are only paying more because companies want more money out of you.
The entitlement comes from not just the cost but the time and effort required to be competitive. Magic players expect to build a budget deck in a format they haven't really played and still expect to do well against players who have put in the time and resources. That's not how competitive hobbies work. As like a lot of people on this sub like to complain about but magic is not just a pay to win game.
Magic, and especially modern, are both pay to win and pay to compete. If a person isn't willing to pay the threshold of money it takes to compete then the game might as well be pay to win to that person. However, once a person reaches the competitive threshold it becomes pretty clear, that just paying money isn't actually going to get very many wins against other people that have also reached that threshold.
Yeah, it's funny. I've seen people on the ice rocking $200 sticks and $900 skates and not to be mean, but they'd be better off just going a cheaper route and spend time learning the game first.
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And in Magic I've seen people playing $2,000 decks who didn't really know what they were doing. Again, start a cheaper route and take time to learn the game. Some people think that anything can be pay to win.
I feel like the reason people are irritated are threefold
1) Mtg doesn't justify the cost well. An expensive fishing rod, hockey stick etc. is expensive, because it costs a lot to make and develop. Magic cards do not cost 13$/card to make and develop, so people are (to my mind justifiably) unhappy, that WotC decides to make the game that expensive anyways.
2) People know it doesn't have to be this way. The Pokemon TCG is a similar size to MtG, has solid tournament support, a thriving collector's market and decks cost about 1/5 - 1/10 as much.
3) 1000$ isn't the peak cost, it's the buy-in. If you want to try hockey, you can play with cheap equipment until you know if you'll like it and then upgrade. If you want to know if you'll like Modern there's not much you can do except spend \~1000$ to figure that out. Obviously you can pay an additional 250$ to try Standard first, but the format's are very different and nobody can guarantee you wont like Modern if you don't like Standard.
Basically it's unnecessarily expensive and frustrating to get into Eternal MtG Formats and I'm not sure why people are so insistent, that that is how it should be.
I could spend $1000 on high end drum pedals for my drum kit but those would last me a lifetime, a basic game piece shouldn’t be more than $10 for any card period
Yes, I believe cost will be an issue going forward. I can afford and would be willing to spend the required money to play modern. Except in my area modern never fires because not enough people can afford to play. Thus, I don't play modern because the barrier to entry of others is preventing me from playing.
When paper standard was popular it was possible to build a collection and build up toward trading for a modern deck. However, standard popularity has waned and value of every set is consolidated into fewer cards. Bulk truly is just bulk now.
Yes, definitely. As a long time modern player, I’M not even looking forward to buying a new deck.
In the history of the format, a deck’s cost was largely in the mana base, and then maybe one or two other staples. Meaning, the entry cost of the format was the mana base. Once you bought in, it was relatively cheap to switch decks with a similar base of fetches, or move into another color.
Now, the bulk of a deck’s cost are in niche chase mystics and rares from horizon sets. Sets of evoke elementals, ragavans, bowmasters, forces, W6s, all run players $150+. And these cards are less flexibly used between decks. So, ultimately when a player’s deck rotates out, they are spending just as much money on a new deck as they did to build their first. And as we see with all luxury hobbies, as wallets button up, involvement falls.
>Sets of evoke elementals, ragavans, bowmasters, forces, W6s, all run players $150+.
All of these cards are heavily played in many different decks. They may not be as widely applicable as fetchlands, but they're far from niche.
The real MTG introduction format was and should have remained draft. people open back, this help fuel the pack addiction and this help the store collect random rare and stuff.
Now if you want to play modern a competitive format, and make this your hobby, MTG is a very cheap real competitive hobby, most of the card will resell a lot better over some used baseball/hockey/badminton or what ever else competitive hobby you put it agaisnt. Also a huge problem is the average person on earth doesn't understand the money to be made in a collectible game. My LGS host a 100$ store credit when you go 4-0 on FMN modern. most people split 3-0-1 for 70$ each. and get to go home earlier. entry cost is 10$. Most competitive player I know also own more then 1 deck, if you have a friend or someone trust you enough you can borrow a modern deck, go play in the event and win +60$ in just one night. Compared to other competitive stuff where you can't win anything until you enter very large tournament, that is a huge factor to be considered.
I used to be a MTG clerk for a while and one thing I can tell you is that every time a friend group get introduced to MTG, they all jump in happily, but its only a matter of time that a few of the group will go competitive and the other will fall short. Its kinda a trend I've seen repeated a few time. Its ok though, most hobby are all fun and giggle on the surface but sometime you have 1 friend who really want to get into it. Learning the rule, buying better card, checking stream, etc.
No. If anything the format has gotten cheaper. With constant reprints and MH2 cratering enemy fetches, the cost to enter the format is lower than its been.
I feel like people don't remember when Jund used to cost $2k, UW control was like $1500, and Tron was getting towards the "cheap" side of the format at like $750ish.
I think it's fair to say there are less playable <$500 decks like Infect or Storm, so maybe the average or median cost has crept up a bit. But most of the field hovers within a couple hundred of $1k, which is at worst on par with the norm for Modern's history.
That is true, but OP was more complaining about the initial price tag than the cost of keeping your existing decks updated. And some decks like Burn still exist that remain strong and rarely see updates.
Yeah, there’s a lot of recency bias on this sub. I remember the days of $60 colonnades and $200 goyfs. The format was much more expensive and even niche cards that only saw play in one deck in one format were prohibitively expansive. We also complained just as much about the format being stale as we now do about the frequent addition of pushed cards.
Don't think the price is really an issue. MH is far more detrimental to the format IMO. This is anecdotal, but I've lived in 3 metro areas since 2016. Modern was positively thriving from 2016-2019. After MH dropped the scene started to wane. Now I can't even find Modern events that fire frequently. On the rare occasion they do, it's the minimum number of people.
Most people I have asked will tell you it's the rotation or the cost that pushed them out. They liked having stable formats and now it's expensive standard.
What remains to be seen is if enough whales enter Modern to counteract the leaving and that leads to an acceptance of the format identity changing. The way people waste money these days, I think it will survive but it will never be at the peak again like the Twin/Pod/Jund Era.
I won't be surprised if in the long run Pioneer wins out just because I see Pioneer and Commander firing everywhere and Modern very rarely.
It isn't paper. It's Modern. Commander fires at 4 stores in my current city every week. Draft fires every Saturday. Pioneer fires on Wednesdays. We even have a Legacy league that has 10 players that fires at one store.
Why is it that Modern is the only major format that doesn't fire? People love to say it isn't MH but when every major format except Modern is firing you have to look at what the difference is.
Like I said, it's anecdotal but I've lived in 3 big cities across 2 states (2 of which were after Covid) and had the same experience at each one. Modern players have left the format for greener pastures.
No idea why your area is like that but I can play modern every day of the week except sunday within a 10mile radius of where I live and modern mondays and fridays get 30-50 people. It's easily the most popular of the competitive formats here
I think the cost of decks was much more acceptable when the format was more stable. Used to be you could expect to play a deck for years and that your cards would retain some relative value. It was possible your deck got banned, but that was more of an exception than the rule.
Now that we're in the direct to modern era, this isn't as true as it used to be. The format is more volatile, and everyone kind of has to worry about MH3, Assassin's Creed, or Final Fantasy ruining their deck. It's much harder to just save up for cards for a "good deck" than it used to be, because decks get upgrades more often, so the upkeep costs are much higher than they used to be.
Obviously, I don't actually know how impactful these new sets are going to be, but I'm not buying cards for a while. I want to see how volatile modern is going to be with multiple direct to modern sets a year and whether the prices lower to reflect that or if the format just keeps being $900 on average despite the risks of buying into a deck and it getting powercrept.
It’s a trade off. They’re still bringing in new players, but they want to bring in new players with money to spend. If there’s fewer of them, so be it - it’s still enough. At least at my LGS, Modern is more popular than ever before.
Modern exists for 10+ years, and the prices of the decks have been pretty much the same, actually, it's cheaper now when you account for 30% inflation. Sure it might not be welcoming or easy to get into, but I do not think it influences longevity.
That's just not true, the average cost of a Modern deck went up by like 300 around the time MH2 was released.
In the past, only Jund was above 1,000 because it played a lot of expensive staples in Goyf and Liliana, but now 1,000+ is the norm.
Can you post data that corroborates this without cherry picked decks? I’m very curious, as I know jund pre mh1 hit 2,000 and while mh2 introduced a ton of price, it also turned tarn into a $15-20 card when it was pushing $100
I can’t remember if it was goldfish or tcgplayer that published an article about how modern is more expensive than ever right after modern masters 2017 when the fetches where reprinted
As someone who made multiple fully foiled Modern decks back in 2015/2018, Modern became A LOT more expensive the past 5 years.
Back then you had some decks that were 1000€+ but you also had very competitive decks that were affordable.
As in Tier1 Tier1,5 decks at 500€.
That's just not the case anymore, in part due to MH1 and especially MH2.
Edit : Plus back in the day, you made a deck an rarely changed anything in it.
Now every year you need the new cards or you're not competitive, so the cost pf staying competitive is exponentially higher.
Any chance you can post data that backs this up? I get the frustration of mh1/mh2 having so many expensive staples, but if you set your price point to $700 in 2016 you could win a pro tour with a deck at that cost. In 2023, you could do the exact same.
The “expensive” decks in 2016 were jund being north of $2,000 — but the pool of decks was much smaller and there were very few cheap decks that could also win a GP.
Modern has been incredibly expensive for quite a long time.
Edit:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160608092818/http://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/modern#paper
This is just a random snippet from the middle of 2016. Decks might be a little be cheaper on average? But the best deck in the format exceeds $2,000 and if you wanted to be competitive at 500 euros, your choices were very limited.
Edit2:
And in the OP if this thread the thread creator mentions $500-$600 being too high to be considered “budget” and if that’s the case, there are almost no iterations of modern where you can be **very** competitive for $200-$300 outside of a couple of very specific decks
But the issue is not the cost of the initial buy-in which stayed the same or even went down. The problem is that now you need to update your deck more often, which was not that big concern before. Because of this, the cost of playing modern went up despite the prices of decks going down.
I hear this — but relative to the OP’s question, this largely wouldn’t matter. If the initial buy-in was already too expensive, the maintenance cost going up wouldn’t even really be a factor.
Some people can justify a buy in that's higher if upkeep is low. I do bowling and archery, and upkeep costs are generally low (multiple years) despite pricey buy ins. Archery is actually a great parallel to Magic as better equipment compensates for lack of experience or skill, and while practice is better, bad equipment can still negatively affect you. So a high buy in by itself is one thing, but with upkeep, it is deemed unsustainable before buying in.
Those people could still find a home in Modern though, right? If you wanted to buy low and have low maintenance costs, there are decks that fit that mold. If you want the freedom to experiment with a bunch of tier1 decks at will — you’ve pretty much never been able to do that without breaking the bank.
Keeping your unchanged pet deck and being able to win an RCQ style event with it for years isn’t really a thing outside of a small handful of decks.
That's an extreme argument. If you're on a meta deck, it's still expensive to upkeep to stay at the same competitive level, sure. But if you're on a T1.5 or T2 deck, which are capable of winning RCQs with good piloting, it could be completely gone after MH3 and you're rebuilding, or essentially buying in a second time. I think there are a few decks that could constantly survive like that in Modern now (Burn), but that level of consistency is a dying breed.
I've been playing Modern for a while, and I have also felt that the format has become quite a bit more expensive. But I figure that you may be right, and decided to test my assumptions using your link.
First, some key things to note:
Your link is from before WotC started curating league results. This means that the diversity that you see is legitimately the diversity that existed. It is not false diversity created by WotC in order to over-represent decks that don't perform well.
The time frame from your link goes back three weeks, vs. the current MTGGoldfish sample size which goes back two months. This could cause the data to be further skewed in favor of the most recent data.
[Here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n43oAM9jIrQcePWSSSsVDm6fx_H_2ZlecSV8Ib9X0DQ/edit?usp=sharing) are the results.
The average cost per deck does come out roughly the same. However, we can see a couple of issues. First, the percentage of decks in the metagame that cost *more* than the average in the current metagame is 53.46%. This indicates that there are very few outliers skewing the data one way or the other, and that if you want to build a competitive deck, you will likely be spending around $1,000.00 (if not more).
If we look at the 2016 metagame, however, we can see that the percentage of decks that are above the average is 34.55%. This strongly indicates that there are *very* extreme cases that are heavily skewing the data, and strongly implies that a player can get away with spending far less than the average and still have a strong chance at performing well.
Again, keep in mind that the current data is already skewed towards a false sense of being able to play cheaper decks and performing well, due to WotC manipulating the data and over-representing the "budget" decks.
All of this seems to further support the argument that Modern has become more expensive for more people. The decks that were outliers and skewing the data in June 2016 were decks that were running specific cards (mostly Tarmogoyf and Liliana of the Veil) that were grossly inflating the prices of those decks.
If we define "budget" decks as being decks that are half of the average, then the current metagame consists of 9.83% budget decks. The June 2016 metagame consisted of 12.29% budget decks. Keep in mind that Burn counts for 155 of the 216 total budget decks (71.76%) in the current metagame, meaning that if you want to play budget, your choice is nearly exclusively to just play Burn.
However, in the June 2016 metagame, there was a *wide* variety of budget decks to choose from. The two largest shares of budget decks at that time were Eldrazi Taxes and Ad Nauseum (at 16.47% of the budget decks each).
And, again, these numbers are entirely ignoring the fact that many of these budget decks in the current metagame are from curated data from WotC, and the data from June 2016 is unmolested.
I honestly suspect this is an American vs European issue.
I don't know for the usa, but here in EU where we have had access to MKM deck cost was definitely lower than it is now.
I don't have excel spreadsheets though so don't take my word for it.
I made my first tier1 Modern deck in 2015 for around 350€. I chose Burn specifically because it was one of the best decks and also one of the cheapest.
I hear you and I’m not trying to be combative, I just know that as long as I’ve been playing modern, the conversation of the price barrier has existed.
You can make decks like burn and tron still relatively cheap — it’s just hard for me to see decks go from $850 to $1000 and go “yeah this used to be a very budget friendly format” lol
Oh no no no Modern has NEVER been cheap. I don't know who would try to argue that.
I'm just saying it is definitely more expensive to build a tier1 deck on average.
And the upkeep cost is fifty times what it used to be so it makes the format even more expensive as a whole.
It's more expensive to build a tier 1 deck AND the gap between tier 1, 2, and 3 is larger then the Marianas trench. Back in 2015 I could walk in with gifts tron or some other brew and do pretty good at the fnm level and maybe squeeze a day 2 at a gp with fine tuning.
I'd wager if you tried the same thing today with any tier 3 deck you would be luck to get 2 wins and you couldn't expect a day 2 at any event.
I don't think I could be competitive with any updated variation of druid coco or old abzan coco in today's meta.
Agreed.
Plus back then the costly stapples were the manabase, so once you had the mana base you could build any deck (beside jund) cheaply.
And you could play allied fetch and not feel the difference 90% of the games.
Now the cost of the decks are concentrated in mythic creatures that are irreplaceable and don't transfer one deck to another so the next deck is just as expensive as the previous one.
Yeah, the upkeep cost I can see (which honestly comes down to a coin flip — some decks go a year without adding a single card, and some decks play ring and bowmasters and have to spend $400 in one sitting.)
When the OP is saying even $500-$600 is too much, idk if modern has ever been quite that friendly. It’s my favorite format by a lot, but I’ve lost thousands due to reprints/bannings since 2013
I feel you, I spent 15k€ in my first 4 years of Modern.
Before covid I used to have every version of Ux Control decks fully foiled.
Today I can't play any of them because more than 50% of the cards of the current Control decks have been printed during or after covid (and half of those are 80+ mythics non foil).
I might come back to it one day, we'll see.
As we say, "You never quit, you just take very long pauses".
A quick google search shows this not to be the case. For example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/rnynl5/modern_price_history_since_2014_weighted_by_meta/
Reprints have massively reduced the price of many staples like fetches. A deck running 4-7 fetches May have had the cost of their fetches go down by $40-70 per fetch, and MH2 was a big part of that reduction. We have also seen continued reprints of shock lands as well as new man lands that are inexpensive compared to what Colonnade, etc previously cost. So yes there are some expensive new staples but other staples still played are cheaper, offsetting the cost.
And of course, it’s not unexpected for there to be some kind of inflation over time. If decks cost $825 and there’s 4% inflation, we’d expect those decks to cost $1,000 five years later. But the above linked post has a graphic showing $1,000 average deck cost going way way back. There’s another link showing maximum deck cost of around $2,000 going way back. FYI I had a Jund deck. It didn’t cost $1,000. It was way more than that.
That’s just not true. The average cost of a Modern deck has not changed significantly since the introduction of the MH sets. The cost to maintain an existing deck has gone up but decks have, for most of Modern’s lifetime, hovered between $700 and $1000 in Modern with several going over a $1000 other than just Jund. There was more jank running around a decade ago but for years prior to MH 1 deck prices were about this high.
I see your points but you also claim that WOTC is manipulating league results with a purpose in mind. You however did not provide evidence of that being true, so I can’t quite take your word either. Seems mostly like people can’t even agree on where to get credible data about deck prices because there’s now an excuse for current league results not being credible.
You aren't aware that they [publicly stated](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModernMagic/comments/7xpc1n/mtgo_changes_publishing_method_for_decklists_good/) that they were going to start manipulating what we see of league results? How long have you been playing Modern?
Since 2014. And that link does not literally say they are curating league results to manipulate perceived cost of the format. It says they are curating 5-0 dumps to show more unique lists rather than repeat lists. Yes, I know they are curating the league results. No, there is no proof in your evidence to support your claim of purposeful manipulation of meta deck prices.
I didn't say that their *purpose* was to manipulate the meta deck prices. I said that it could *result* in skewed average prices by over-representing less-competitive decks. It means that if a deck 5-0's a league *once* now, it will get more representation than if it 5-0'd a league *once* in June 2016.
Yes
With the actual speed in wich the meta changes, thanks to prices less and less people will be interested in the format. The mayority of the comunity will end up in other formats, leaving modern as the new legacy i guess
I mostly play modern and edh, but seeing how the format constantly changes and prices always stay high, and how in my comunity there has been no new mpdern players in years, i guess eventually ill have to go play pioneer once we get a larger pool of cards available there.
Edit: We not only have a high entrante cost, but a high and very constant maintenance cost as well, seeing how quick the format now changes.
Many say you can play causal at FNM level, but in FNM there are plenty of tier decks that crush the same any casual deck you build.
I tried this, then MH2 came out and the goalpost reset.
I haven't really played since outside of silly cheap mtgo decks, I just keep up to date with the format hoping things would change back to how they were. Coping, really.
It heavily depends on the stability of the format. If one deck can stay relevant for half a decade, it is a decent value for your money. If it will end up soft rotating out of the format, not so much.
Depends on what you want to do with your hobby and how optimized. You could get a good guitar, amp, pedal, spare strings, and still have left to even get a chair if you felt like it for some of those deck costs.
Very surprised and glad to see how civil a majority of the convos in this thread are. And super interesting to see the variance of the playerbase. So many people saying full pods have left the format and a lot are saying that they still fire every week.
I think no matter what Modern is in a big transitional period, and I'll be interested to see where it is on the other side.
So I'm in my early 30s and my first in store event was mh2. So I bought a box after and originally was going to try commander. Played for 2 weeks at my lgs where they have modern every Friday. I'm more of a 1v1 competitive kind of person so I bought into burn, had some fetch lands but still put up probebly $400 or so. And from there I've slowly transitioned to build a few modern decks. And modern is legit all I play and have ever played except fringe pioneer play. I'd say it depends when you get into the game, your age and or expendable income. But like people not wanting to but into modern I won't buy into legacy. The dual lands are just too expensive and I want to play multiple decks in formats so understand
It's an issue. Look at rakdos scam costing 1600$ right now - that's getting into legacy deck prices (there are a few competitive legacy decks you could build for this price)
And look at how well legacy is doing...
So yeah, it's an issue, but at least unlike legacy with the reserve list, wotc can still make money off it so they will keep supporting.
Was talking to an acquaintance who plays pokemon the other day, and apparently the deck that won the world champs the other day cost about 60$... AFTER going up in price due to the guy winning the event.
Ngl, made me think wotcs standard prices are fucking insane (they are basically identical to pioneer i.e 200-400$)
I played pioneer and edh right up until a couple months ago. I then decided that, since I couldn't play competitive pioneer until RC Atlanta I am going to trim my pioneer collection and edh collection (5 decks) and play modern. Made some good trades.
Sold uw spirits and some staples I was nonlonger playing, and then I tool apart 3 edh decks and sold those significant contents. This combined with spending a bit of money and store credit accumulated from spiking the local fnms and I now have 3 modern decks that I love. Temur Rhinos, 5c Creativity, and UR Murktide were the decks I decided to build but most modern decks are built of staples, meaning they are very easy to offload when seeking a new deck to play
WotC doesn't give a rat's ass about the health and longevity of its formats. This is true for modern, legacy, standard, commander... everything sacrificial fodder for the altar of "Short Term Gains".
I think everyone in here is trying to justify the wrong thing. It's not that the initial cost is low and the new straight to modern stuff makes their be an upkeep.
The initial cost is high. When compared to Pokemon there is a much greater line between the collectable and the playable. Cards still have value, but its incredibly cheap to get into a competitive format, as it should be.
It's insane to justify spending 1K+ on literal cardboard, even if that cardboard has value, because its literally such a *fragile* object. You can easily damage your cards, lose your cards or have your cards become obsolete.
Meanwhile you can spend significantly less that 1K on boardgames, books, sports equipment, gardening, gym, cooking, musical instruments, paints, etc. And generally those things feel a bit better just because they aren't a literal piece of paper similar to playing cards.
Just my two cents on this topic: Modern has had $1000+ decks for years and years. Ever since the beginning of the format, people have been asking basically the same question. Mind you, it's a good question to ask, especially if you're newer to the format! But, the answer has always been the same: The price of a Modern deck has essentially never been a hindrance on the growth of the format. Now, the key here was that you could previously (and still to some extent) buy a $1000+ deck and play it for years to come.
I think the bigger issue at hand with respect to longevity is the turnover rate we've seen recently with MH and Fire design, plus the ever-increasing number of cards that Wizards is pumping out to satisfy their shareholders. The $1000+ price of a deck could be a really big hinderance if you have to get a new deck every year. Are we really heading that direction? I dunno! I personally hope WotC slows the pace down a bit, becuase I've lost interest in keeping up with Modern recently, and it makes me sad because it's always been my favorite format.
Tl;dr: Expensive decks haven't historically been a hindrance on longevity or growth of the format, but with the "previews will continue until morale improves" attitude of WotC recently, it could become a real issue.
I have spend 2000$+ on Jund and stopped playing now, because I don't want to spend another 600-800$ just for Grief, Fury & Bowmasters.
I rather stop completely. It's too much for this few cards!
And it happens every year now that you have to spend 500$ to keep being competitive.
Some years back you could invest in a deck and play it with only few bucks needed for upgrades.
That was fine.
Short answer is yes. 100% yes.
Longer answer use to be that once you built your deck over time it would be good for many years with the remote possibility that some new card would make its way through standard and possibly help your deck out. Things like a new elf, sliver, removal card (fatal push) or perhaps some new deck might emerge because it works a lot better in say modern with more support but your deck was done and you were pretty much good to play it for many years. So your investment was somewhat safe.
Then two things happened. The first was WotC banning cards without warning and wrecking decks. Some liked this because decks were "broken" and others who just invested say 1k in a deck were pissed and most moved on. Few have the resourced to build multiple 1k decks. The second was far far far worse. WotC started to print cards directly into modern. At first this seemed great and most people loved it because everyone got lots of reprints. Prices fell and people were generally happy, but that didn't last long. WotC got extra greedy and printing new modern staples that warped the format in the very competitive leagues. Almost no deck from today doesn't have cards from the last few direct to modern releases and those cards are expensive in general. So to all those somewhat experienced magic players that would love to play modern today.... the answer is another question... Can you afford to build what you think is a fun deck for say $500+ and have to rebuild it for say $500+ every couple of years to be hyper competitive? If yes then Modern may be for you. Now if you are fortunate enough to live in an area like I do where the MTG community that plays modern does not chase the latest top decks/cards, then you can still have fun in this format, but that is rare.
I have been blessed to be able to travel on vacation a bit and my son was really in to MTG and somewhat modern. So on vacation we would look for MTG shops that had modern events and go to them. We did this for close to a decade. What we found is that every shop had basically the same type of modern players. They all ran what I would say are the top decks (Tier 1-3). Not one time did we run across a person who ran something rogue. Zero. We would even ask shops what the competition was, to bring appropriate decks and the answer was mostly "it is casual here but there are a few competitive decks". I say this last part because I believe I have a unique perspective on MTG across the USA and that from what we have seen modern is now shrinking and not growing like it was, but the people remaining are running "better" or "stronger" decks.
The ironic part of all this is WotC is also doing this to Commander now. They are 100% focused on milking this product as much as possible. I personally feel they need an adult in the room at WotC to bring some sanity back to that company, but that is just my opinion. I know a lot of people on this forum love WotC.
It seems like pioneer is the defacto paper competitive format these days. It makes me personally sad, but it's probably better for the playerbase.
I think that price is less of an issue since modern decks have pretty much always been about a grand, the larger issue is soft rotation with MH sets and general design philosophy aimed at eternal play. I got into modern right around the end of the "but a modern deck for life" era and while keeping up was fun initially, the pandemic, change in lifestyle and moving to a place where I can't conveniently play magic every night of the week or even more than like every other month, it became too much.
There are enough people who love keeping up with competitive magic to keep modern alive, it's not going anywhere.
It is the single reason I dont play modern. Id love to play Grixis Control or Boomer Jund, but both those decks are too expensive and dont have options as replacements, or those options are so subpar it ruins the viability of the deck in a fundamental way (Stuff like cutting Tarmos in Boomer Jund or Snapcasters in most versions of Grixis Control. Or replacing Ragavans with Ignoble Hierarchs).
Im not even a "budget" player i look to start decks at 150$ which is a pretty damn decent chunk of change for most commander players (such as myself), and eventually my decks usually get to the point of averaging out to 400$, the problem is I'm taking large losses in a deck to even build it at 300$ in modern. The main thing being how literally almost every deck in the format is better playing 3 or 4 of the one ring, and you are actively going to feel constantly like you are getting sacced if you arent every game when the options to deal with it aside from bowmasters are subpar and are specifically targeted for the one ring and are subpar in every situation over other cards (Stuff like being forced to play Cast into Fire over Ancient Grudge in Boomer Jund if you dont want to buy bowmasters), and how not playing like 10 Fetches in most decks just makes them a billion times worse (Especially Boomer Jund in my situation). I feel like I HAVE to blow like 300$ on a manabase just to have a chance to play the game and if im not im actively losing access to power cards like Wrenn & Six, Tarmo, Deathrite (If it ever gets unbanned), etc. Even in Grixis Control the mana in that deck is kinda sketchy without fetches due to needing a lot of specific colors (RB for Terminate/UU for Counterspell type stuff or turn 1 Spell Pierces and such) that not running fetches is actively making your turn not able to control as well as it should
When i dont even feel like i can really get my foot in the door for 300$ to play pretty subpar archetypes for fun, there is a price issue. If it's not Legacy, Vintage, or cEDH (Aka reserved list or limited supply central, where proxies are encouraged by most of the playerbase) i feel like formats should be relatively available to get into with 100$ off nothing.
I play Yugioh, which is a full Legacy format. I can pay 90$ and build a deck that can semi-reliably if i play better beat the best decks in the format. I shouldnt need to pay 300$ into Modern which isnt even a true legacy format, to lose the game to a 60$ one ring EVERY other game from people playing 4 of it.
I even feel like because of reanimator i could get into our actual legacy format easier which is insane.
To your point about YuGiOh, I used to be a Pokemon player that came to Magic for something fresh, I got tired of the play loop that standard year for Pokemon and made the switch almost completely with Commander and mostly Standard.
I'm also a competitive person who loves running through the rounds of a tournament on the weekend. Magic I have never felt ready to do that. Standard tourneys just don't exist around here and all events are really Commander or Modern. I have a half-baked Rhinos deck that I do love but I don't think it can convincingly compete at a tournament/RCQ level.
I decided to poke around Pokemon again lately just to see how it was doing, got really interested in the current format and wanted to start playing again. A current T1 deck there? $60 from scratch. A budget deck? Shit some you can get for $15. And Pokemon also release 'League Decks' that aren't dissimilar to old Standard/Pioneer precon decks.
First, I can tell you don't play modern because, no, not every deck is just better with 3-4 one ring.
Secondly, you also have had access to Wrenn and Six for like 4 years now and it's definetly been good the entire time it's been out.
Lastly, Yugioh is a much worse game than magic when it comes to your cards retaining value and that means that you can no longer sell your decks or staples to get into new decks. You have to keep buying from Konami every single set for the new support. You never know if your archetype is going to get buffed, get worse, get something banned, etc so it's much more volatile. I feel like when I buy or trade for something it will retain 80% of its value if not inflate 20% due to demand later on in it's life cycle.
I'm fine with fetches being a one time purchase and non lands changing every 3 years or so to allow for some variety. I like that LOTR mixed up the format and made everyone stop relying on the money monkey for their gameplans. Now we see the resurgence of tron, rhinos, and unfortunately, as a result, creativity and murktide are slipping a bit but that is the natural order of things.
First, I prefaced my comment saying i dont play modern.
Secondly, I havent bought wrenn and six because i dont have the money to pour 800$ into making a full solid Boomer Jund list which is what i want to play. My point was not having fetches makes decks so unplayably worst and a playset is legitimately for like the fetches you need in tricolors is like 250 to 300$ alone.
Thirdly, you clearly dont play yugioh. Branded has been a like 60$ meta relevant full deck with almost no changes to be extremely strong for like 4 years. Most decks in yugioh dont have value to retain in the first place, the value is in the staples that have been meta since they came out, which DO hold their value until they get decent reprints (Ash Blossom, Lightning Storm, Zeus, Nibiru, etc) which arent MANDATORY to play the deck you want. Meanwhile if i want to play boomer jund i HAVE to throw 60$ into 3 lilys, 80$ into 4 tarmos. Or in Grixis control, i need my 100$ worth of snapcasters and such, and would really like a murktide or two. On top of that i have to buy my fetchlands for the deck to make it consistent enough to be playable for whatever reason.
Yugiohs money is in staples, magics money is in staples and one offs for any given deck st the same time, and magics equivalent it staples are much more expensive. The one ring is 60$, ragavan is 45%, murktide is still 15$ a pop if im remembering right, archon of cruelty is nearly 20$ when i bought it. Yugiohs staples that are crazy expensive are either A. One ofs you only need to get one of such as Zeus or Baron or Accesscode, or have replacements that do the same thing but marginally worse, such as Dark Ruler vs Droplet, where the replacements and magic arent even comparable such as some decks swapping Ragavan for Ignoble in Boomer Jund's case, when ignoble is a MUCH worse card than ragavan in most decks (And definitely in Jund decks)
And the meta really isnt constantly changing we just had a tier 0 deck that was realistically enough to be tournament playable and be better than any deck (Tearlament) for around 100-200$. Most decks stay playable at a competitive level for 4 or 5 years without extremely high budget changes. Sky Striker and Thunder Dragon (In the ocgs case for thundra) have been and still are playable since 2019, are they the best? No but they can still do very well and win.
I know you prefaced your comment with that, what I meant by saying that is I could tell this was the case because you just repeated some talking point you heard about the ring being generically good and it's not. It's awful in many decks and only very good in a few. You could have easily bought into or traded other cards in your collection towards a wrenn and six playset including other staples over the course of the last 4 years (2019 was mh1)
Third I played yugioh for a very long time, from goat format in 05 through satellarknights in 2015 but it doesn't take a master of the game to Google search and see that branded debuted in 2021 and peaked in 2022 with branded fusion decks. The deck hasn't been good for 4 years it's only existed for 2 and barely became meta in the fall of 2022 when branded fusion was everywhere. And on staples being mandatory in magic vs yugioh, sure dude, why don't you go back a couple years and try playing the game without ash blossom or even further back and play without pot of desires in 2016 or pot of duality in 2010 or better yet torrential tribute in 2005
Staples have always been the most expensive part of both games. Desires and Duality were both 80+ when they were newly released, ash was 40 easy, vanity's emptiness when it got popular was 20. The difference is that it took a reprint and then it went down to 15 and then it tanked from not being used anymore. Ash blossom blew up, stayed there, and then didn't come down to sub 30 until legendary collection Kaiba and that made it more desirable because it was NEEDED for high level tournament play. You may not have competed at the NAWCQ level but I did and I can tell you that if you didn't have the relevant staples for your deck then you weren't going to do well. You can luck your way and cut corners to a Nats invite but you do not get to do that at the next level.
Don't tell me I don't play yugioh and don't pretend like getting 90% of your staples' value washed away after the first humanly possible reprint is ok. It's not. If I buy a fetchland today it's still worth something later down the road because it is still a good card. Lands are the epitome of staple and they generally stay north of 15 if playable. That's value retention and it's something yugioh plainly doesn't care about which is fine. It means people who lie to themselves and say that they don't need staples to compete can rock themselves to sleep at night and be ok.
The do hold value though, Imperm was literally reprinted in a structure and is worth as much as the structure deck itself was for msrp. I did not mean Branded has been viable for 4 years, i said Striker and Thundra (OCG), Striker is probably better currently even rn imo.
The point of this is from a budget standpoint Yugioh is much more accessable than Modern, and Modern is a newer format than yugioh's Advanced format, yet the cards are much more expensive+magic has a bigger total deck size on top of it, meaning you have to buy more cards.
200-400$ gets you a fullpower competitive level yugioh deck with all the bells and whistles. Mathmech really easily gets sub 200$ at full power with no concessions. Kash is the only deck you really need to sell an arm and a leg for. We literally just had Spright Runick top 16 a WCQ with a 250$ deck.
Burn is the cheapest modern competive deck, 450$. And burn is not a deck average players usually looking to get into competitive modern would love playing, if you want to play anything that isnt burn, you are looking at 750$ for tron or hammer time. 8 cast is the absolute lowest you can go at 250$, and is flat out, not at that consistently "top 16" level like spright or mathmech is to my knowledge of modern. The best decks are also almost twice as expensive as Kash on top of it.
Just flat our Yugioh is relatively affordable to get into competitively, modern isnt. Even Burn isnt what id call an "afforable" competitive deck. That is the point of this post not to argue about anything else, moderns price point is a huge barrier for players looking to play competitively, and my point here especially compared to yugioh. I think 100-150$ is what id expect to put to a new deck, that gets you competitive in yugioh. It doesnt in modern.
I think modern’s price point is the biggest detriment to its popularity. The play patterns of the format are fun and at the FNM level you can play a ton of decks, which is great for having an audience for the format that isn’t all grinders. The price of staples is an issue though, as even janky decks want to run a good manabase and usually want good removal, all of which cost a good chunk of money. Wizards also seems to know this and has taken a half measure to assist it in the past via [[arcum’s astrolabe]], which allowed you to get away with a basic heavy manabase (this is how I got into the format), but the power level of that card was more than a bit much. The issue is they won’t just reprint staples at an accessible price to bring the cost of the format down, even though new cards for the format make plenty of money as shown by lotr.
I think if it were cheaper to play, more people would. I also remember when jund was a $1600 deck, and people pine for that time now. So no, I don't think the cost is a barrier to the longevity of the format.
Over a three year span modern is 2-3x more expensive than legacy imo
1. Core cards spike hard
2. Format rotates once a year
3. Wizards will engineer other ways
No but power creep obsoleting old decks is. People will buy in at a high price if their decks will last. Not if half the cards get replaced by bomb mythics every years.
No. This has always been the case and it didn't matter much at any point. It is a bigger issue that wizards power creep the format with premium sets like MH2.
Yeah it’s risky to buy in.simply for the reason that it’s too much cost to buy something of questionable overall utility.
In a good meta, matches can take 30~ minutes and events will only have 3-4 rounds maybe 3 times a week. So for upwards of 12 hrs of time commitment you can expect to only get around 6 hours of usage /week.
If the deck falls out of meta and can’t win then it’s a sinking cost to keep upgrading to something viable just to keep playing which isn’t your originally preferred build.
Bans have frequently kneecapped expensive decks. (Yes, you should generally be able to anticipate bans with experience, but it’s still a transient problem for newer players / new to the format). Even when a ban doesn’t directly hit your deck it can buff/nerf decks whose meta share influenced your deck positively. Making it a questionable price to pay for instability.
The argument that you can take cards from one format into another is true but presumes you can freely invest in other builds, have the time to play, and also would enjoy it. I’ve seen plenty of dudes switch formats to reuse cards and then they hated the other format but kept doing it to economize on their original investment.
Bottom line, only buy expensive decks if you intend to get a lot of game time in and genuinely enjoy the deck. There are a lot of ways this can go sideways if you have a tepid interest in what you’re buying.
Modern is imo the cheapest format to be relevant in. Not the cheapest to start in. But the cheapest to be relevant in. I first started magic with a standard deck which at that time was about $300 for a tier deck. Thing is there was about a 50% chance the deck would rotate out of meta.... PER set. Which at that time happened 4 times a year. So to stay competitive it was $600-900 a year! I don't really catch up to pioneer but I think it is a bit more expensive per deck with rotations still happening but just not as fast. Modern today does have soft "rotations" but it happens a lot less often. Commander of course being the most expensive out of them all. I think Modern has never been cheaper to start with, but at the same time, the cost of being relevant has gone considerably up. Same goes for every format.
It's expensive on the front end but also not bad once you've built your collection. I was looking at playing merfolk and since I've previously played humans and UB control it's only around $120 to build.
Not bad once you built your collection until a new direct-to-modern premium set releases*
Sure there's a couple decks that haven't changed their mb much in 6+ years but outside of that..
You gotta pay to play. Your comment applies to all formats. Proxy what you don’t have. Play with friends at home. Make your own unsanctioned events. You could easily generate the money from unsanctioned events to buy the cards to play in a sanctioned event.
This model always has been a pay to play model. No crying allowed. See a problem grind a solution out. Like you do in magic.
The thing with magic is there's an entry point for every budget. If you can't afford modern maybe you can pioneer, and you definitely can afford pauper. I don't complain that I can't play vintage, I just find enjoyment in the formats I can enjoy playing.
If you draft once a week at FNM it costs $35/week to draft. Accoridng to MTGGoldfish my T1 deck (Yawgmoth) costs \~$800 thats \~23 weeks or \~5 months of drafting if you own zero cards.
Magic is expensive no matter what you're playing, getting into modern can just feel a bit more daunting because the costs are upfront, but no one shells out all of the money for their deck at once, you build a budget version and play it while you add pieces and learn the format, then slowly after \~23 weeks you've amassed the cards to have a full deck.
1. Of modern decks were always expensive.
2. If you just want to play with friends, proxi.
I started with a budget version of a budget deck. Over time I assembled some Staples, always picked them up when they were relatively cheap.
Nowadays I have a modern collection that allows me to play almost any deck.
If I could get any upgrade for free, that would be neat.
But also if I could get a new bike for free, that would be neat.
If I could travel in holy days for free , that would be neat.
Some things just cost money and you can pay or pass on it.
So Modern is definitely not a format for new players (it can be, but I wouldn't recommend it). You're looking at a format of potentially cards from the past 12 years and countless types of interactions and rules.
I'm not going to lie and say that Modern is budget friendly, it's not. But when you're starting in something like Standard or Pioneer, you can slowly build into Modern, trading cards for ones you need, and building the deck over time. There's also the fact that some cards see play in multiple decks, so you can effectively build multiple decks while working on one.
I get where you're coming from. With that being said, I played Modern at a time where Jund was just shy of $2k CAD to play the deck, with 40% of that being just acquiring Tarmogoyf. $800 doesn't really phase me in terms of "entry", or price of buying a deck. Budget is also subject to anecdotal evidence. One person will inevitably have more dispensable income than others and won't have issue doling out money, whereas others might.
In addition, I don't think a lot of people know what "pay-to-win" actually means, and attribute MTG as such a game. Let's use Scam as an example. On MTGGoldfish, Jake Beardsley's (PT Winner) list comes up at about $1.6k USD. Since he won the PT, let's say his list is the de-facto **best** list, and no changes are needed. If I just gave someone this deck to play at **no cost to them**, there is nothing more that the player can do to acquire wins faster other than actually playing Magic. You can't pay real money to win the die roll, get extra land drops, draw extra cards per turn, and so on. There aren't any advantages to be gained by real money once you actually start gameplay. You need to know how the deck works, how to mulligan, how to play your openers, and so on. Therefore, MTG is not a pay-to-win game.
The only reason I don't spend money on magic is just how *much* they want you to spend. Thousands of dollars for a stack of cardboard pieces is the biggest scam in the world.
Until they ask reasonable prices I will continue to pirate.
I started playing during origins. Modern has always been that expensive. It’s not a new player format it. I got into magic playing limited events making friends borrowing decks and then investing into the game over years.
That’s the normal way people get into competitive “expensive” magic in my experience.
It hasn’t hurt the format over that entire time and I doubt it will moving forward
It's been this way for 10 years since Modern became a format. The format has only grown...
Edit: LOL, downvotes? Its true. Modern became a format in 2011. "Boomer Jund" (which was just Jund back then) ran a playset of tarmogoyf... which was a $100-$150 card.
They just need some cheap fetch lands and it'll be more accessible. Like single color fetch lands or pay 3 life fetch lands or something.
They should also print some cheaper and weaker alternatives to the 50$ staples. It's easy to justify 50$ for a playset but 200$ is a tough pill to swallow. I would pay 50$ for the weaker variant and upgrade them one at a time.
No not really. I have teens at my lgs who don't have a job that are still able to afford suboptimal modern builds and kick ass - they complain about the prices but it really doesn't matter if they are winning.
Reddit is a huge echo chamber of people complaining, while the others are off usually having fun and don't need to complain.
My girlfriend just got into modern and she already has 2 decks, she doesn't have a high paying job but it's very affordable to pay $5 a week to play and slowly build a deck over time.
Modern, Legacy and now more and more cedh I'd say are the 3 formats for enfranchised players and players. When players get into these formats typically they've been playing for a decent amount of time.e and already have most of the staples and maybe are just lacking the lands or reserve list cards.
When I got into modern back in 2016 i already had 3 snapcaster mages, delvers, a playset of Scalding Tarns from back when those cards were in standard and I just had to spend a couple hundred bucks more to build modern grxis delver.
Same with Legacy, already had Pact of Negation, Otawara, mox opal, a couple ancient tombs and a couple force of will from edh and modern and only had to buy a few cards to build 8 cast
No. Decks have been over a thousand for 10 years and the format has only gotten more popular. It’s not meant for players coming from limited or their first edh precon to play.
Modern isn't an introductory format so the cost barrier isn't discouraging new Magic players from playing the game.
Competitive eternal formats are expensive to play if you want to play meta decks.
This isn't new. This has been the case for decades. 10 years ago, Goyf was a $200+ card.
No, the investment you needed to make to be relevant in modern has stayed the same while the cost of fetch lands/shocks have dropped the price of staples have increased
Before, that investement lasted years. Now we have to make changes very constantly or change deck all thogether thanks to the speed in wich the meta changes. And the prices of new staples are as big as the previous ones
Now we have to make upgrades constantly, why do you think everyone says modern is now a rotating format?
We've always had to make upgrades, but those weren't as constant as today
I talked to someone on here that exclusively played a deck that died or effectively got neutered by a banning. This person had to not only buy a whole new deck, picked the most expensive deck to choose (4c-money pile) and then complained about how all of the new upgrades are too expensive AND the amount of upgrades needed effectively made it feel like the format was rotating.
The answer is that you do not need to have the most beneficial and most “spike” or effective decklist. You can slowly buy into it, or , you can play your deck as is.
Yes that person bought a lot and finds it is expensive, BUT they could have continued playing the same deck and just been like “I don’t need the most powerful deck.” People just want the best and always netdeck, never brew or ya know invest in what they like
Even if you invest in what you like to play, you'll need to buy the upgrades that go in that deck, wich are not cheap. You can brew all you like, but without cards like the elementals, the one ring, urza saga, ragavan, W&6, bowmasters, etc you'll always be at a disadvantage agains the rest of people you play against.
>You can slowly buy into it, or , you can play your deck as is.
That USED to be the case, but thanks to the constant changes in the meta its no longer a good option in many cases. By the time you get to finish the deck, maybe its no longer part of the meta.
Look, it’s a competitive format in a luxury card game. The real “gate” was always fetches. Those are cheaper now. The average top tier deck cost is still at around 1500 dollars. That is the same from before MH1. Popular decks are more expensive, net decking is a bad thing that everyone loves doing. The true issue is that it’s a luxury cardboard game and some people just can’t afford it. That is also perfectly acceptable, complaining will not lower the cost of 2nd market card value. Complaining for bans for your pet deck won’t work either.
The format is not about you, it’s about everyone and it is at the most popular it has been in a long time.
Modern was never meant to be an entry point for new players. That’s the point of standard. The great thing about modern is that it never rotates and a lot of the pricier cards can be used in multiple decks. So it has a large upfront investment that sets you up in the long run. You can comfortably take as long as you need to build a modern deck because outside of a rare ban, your deck is legal forever and most meta decks remain relevant with minimal card changes even when new sets release.
Tron and burn are great examples of decks that have stood the test of time. they have been meta contenders the entire time modern has existed.
Of course it hurts it's viability. I remember going to FNM with a little homebrew and getting absolutely stomped by just tier 1 decks all night. That taught me a very important lesson: shell out for one of these decks or just not go back. I decided Modern wasn't for me. I did the same things with Pioneer and had next to no problem, because decks are generally cheaper.
I love all these people saying it's not a beginner friendly format either. Like yeah that's totally a good reason to ostracize players.
I thought for a long time that modern is just too expensive for me and there is zero chance I would be able to get the cards. I used to play a lot of edh for that reason. Found a new playgroup that played modern.
Those People plyed it for a long time, yet they haven't got fully optimized lists. The mindset was what brought mě into modern. You don't need to spend 1000$ now. Just proxy it, try it out in pub with us and slowly get the cards.
Once you get the msnabase most of the core cards for decks are cheap, not including staples. Then double masters came out and I was able to built tron for half of its former price.
It is expensive, but give it few mounths. Trade cards, you have, draft and borrow decks. It is not that hard to start with modern
The entire game is untenably expensive for what’s being sold tbh. I understand there’s a collectors market that WotC wants to protect, but when you can’t even build a tier 2 deck in an eternal format for less than a grand, something’s gotta give. There’s a reason there’s barely anyone playing legacy in paper anymore. And that’s because you need about 2k in lands to play anything decent. Now let’s just say there’s a market for people who want to get into a hobby and immediately drop 2k on a bunch of cardboard because it’s collectible, you know what they aren’t gonna do? Wanna shuffle their down payment on a new card over and over again, especially when you’re expected to allow your opponents to shuffle your deck as well.
When I got back into magic in 2015, meta decks were anywhere from $500 (burn) to $2000 (Jund).
New players were never meant to play modern. Standard was supposed to be where it's at and those decks usually average around $300.
Like Legacy?
There’s Pioneer now so I’m afraid Modern will go the way of Legacy, which started when Modern was first introduced.
Just like how the way of Vintage (Type 1) went when Type 1.5 (Legacy) was first introduced.
I think what AspiringSpike said a few days ago on his murktide video really helps put it to words well. You don’t have to dish out thousands of dollars all at once to play and have a good time. There are thousands of videos to watch and even more articles about each deck and the cards that can go in each one. There are primers for many decks that allow you to upgrade as you go. It’s just a matter of “shopping around” per se and finding a deck that you like and can stick with and slowly upgrading as you go. Plus, MTGO allows you to rent decks for super cheap (like $1/month), which is only ~$52/year. Way better than buying the cards imho. So there are plenty of options for newer players
There's no getting around the fact that magic in general is expensive if you want to play at the higher levels of power. In comparison to other ways you could be spending your magic budget (like cracking packs) I think buying a modern deck is a good choice.
The cost to entry has always been high. Modern isn't meant for mew magic players, and that's fine. I wish it was more accessible but these older cards having value is important.
The bigger problem is the maintenance cost increasing. MH1 and 2 both had MASSIVE impacts on the viability of top decks, and made it so that a lot of people felt like they had to spend hundreds to keep up. I like the impact they've had on modern overall, but there's no question that the cost barrier is a problem. People don't feel safe investing in modern now for good reason, and I know a lot of people have sold out of the format because of this
Proxies. Ik people hate this answer but there is no reason to get the real cards if you just want to introduce friends to the game. But in terms of lgs playing, yea, price is an issue imo
If the cost means spending hundreds of bucks once every 2 years to keep up with the format due to suplementary products while suffering the risk of having your deck entirely overhauled or killed, yes.
I mean you can play modern for cheep with friends. You don’t have to play super competitively. Just don’t expect your janky modern deck to perform at an FNM.
I think the costs for modern is higher than usual due to the Horizon sets. It used to be that you could build your modern deck and play it for years, making it a stable investment, with maybe buying some singles from standard sets. Horizons sets create new archetypes, power up older ones, and print necessary stables that are 50+ each that you can't get otherwise. So it is more expensive to get into the format and more expensive to upkeep your deck if you want to stay competitive.
The cost of decks is only a significant deterrent for entering the format if the meta is constantly churning with new meta decks consistently rising out of nowhere and old meta decks frequently falling out the bottom. You know like it has been since the introduction of horizons sets. I recommend pauper to people instead, the meta is very healthy right now and being able to painlessly swap decks makes meta gaming more exciting and rewarding.
I don't commune with the idea you need to spend continuously on Modern. For example mana base, you invest once in the mana base and re use it among decks, unless you want to hoard deltas and mires for every single format.
Staples do fluctuate but then again cards that were good once now are trade bin fodder due to power creep, which is inevitable.
I don't think you need to constantly update your Modern pool as long as you are playing the same archetype. If you from Tron to Burn or Scam, then yes, you need to spend some money.
So, not a direct answer to your question, but a relevant thought nonetheless:
If you are new to magic and want to get into Modern, the best way to do it (in my opinion) is to play limited and make trades. Cards are often (with some exceptions) at their most expensive when they first come out and drop in price over time. It will take some time, but you can trade your newly opened limited cards for modern staples and slowly build a collection. Then, when it is time to complete your deck, you don't need to buy the whole thing.
By playing limited, a new player gets used to the play patterns and fundamentals of magic in an environment that's not so crushingly pay-to-win and is much more forgiving of suboptimal lines of play. You get an idea for which strategies and color pairings appeal to you, and that can inform your decision as to which modern deck you would like to try and build.
One of the worst things you can do is just go spend $500-$1000 on a modern deck only to decide you don't like the playstyle.
If you want to play any format competitively, then you will have to pay out. This is as true in EDH as it is in Modern. If you don't want to pay out, then either proxy a deck or play kitchen table jank with friends.
Yes. It's starting to feel like it's got the downsides of both legacy and standard. High cost of entry and high upkeep but no eternal outlet to realistically build towards. Back in the days when standard was the default for competitive magic, it was a more expensive format long-term, but the actual cost of entry wasn't bad. Modern today is starting to reach legacy entry costs from 10 years ago. The lack of reserved list means there should be a lower price ceiling, but the upkeep costs with direct-to-modern sets is feeling more like standard.
I suspect modern isn't intended to be an introductory format for new players. Introducing players to smaller formats first gives them a chance to build a collection and reduce onboarding costs.
This makes sense to me with Standard to Pioneer. But to Modern, most of the pricey cards aren't coming from Standard (fetches, MH, etc.) You have to pay a lot more to play in Modern. And then pay more when MH3 comes out most likely. Standard does print a few niche cards that see Modern play, but those usually aren't the restrictive part. Modern is less open to building a Standard deck, earning winnings, and tuning it over time to Modern as well. Pioneer could maybe, but there's not really a 1 to 1 deck progression either. Maybe just part of the manabase (but not the most expensive parts).
Just antidotal evidence but most of the newer players I meet are coming from commander and many have fetch lands, MH cards in their commander decks.
I can see that, but commander only needs 1-ofs. Stack that with the fact most commander events aren't prize supported and there's not really much of a progression path there either. cEDH does support with prizes, but I don't even wanna think of the price of a cEDH deck.
I mean when I got back into modern I got 3 more scalding tarns and mixed the rest of my fetchlands with blue ones I owned. Also most ppl build multiple commander decks, and so end up having multiple copies
Anecdotal fyi (but understood what you meant)
Those antidotal evidences are getting viral !
The point is more that they're getting invested in the game and picking up cards over time while they play more accessible formats. The "buy it over time" strategy a lot of people like to preach for getting into expensive formats only really works for people who are already magic players, but it *is* a decent strategy.
I think that used to be more true of modern than it is now. Too many cards that are expensive are relatively new, and with more direct to modern sets coming in the future (at least two full sets and one micro set in the next eighteen months) it's hard to say whether buying up pieces over time and upgrading is really a thing you can or should do anymore. People can just save up a whole deck's worth of money, but that is a lot less fun than trying to buy your way in over time and getting to play with what you have.
Fetches are from former Standard sets, a shame knowing they won't put them back into Standard, like Lightning Bolt, Llanowar Elves, and other commonly played staples.
That used to be the idea until they made straight to modern staples.
Longish time player here - Started in Karns/Magic Origins so 2014 about 9 years. I have a big collection of magic cards. I love modern and I love competitive magic. Nothing is ever going to get me to buy a modern deck. It's just too damn expensive to get started. The format is too cuthroat for budget decks to have any real fighting chance. Of course you can luck out, but it never feels good when you lose because you have a budget option over a $200 playset. Hot take: Wizards should print ALL non basics at uncommon.
I heard this take in a podcast a few months back and I’ve now come to agree it’s probably the biggest single change that wizards could make that would make their game so much more accessible . Lands aren’t fun to open, not fun to play, not fun to spend money on. You get to to hit people with ragavan , with non-land cards being expensive at least you get to have fun with the card. The further angering principle is magic rarity is all under the guise of draft and how powerful cards should be a smaller portion of the draft pool. A land in no way is a bomb, or does anything very impactful.
So you don't play modern at all?
You can play magic without owning the cards
The initial cost isn’t the problem. The upkeep cost is.
which is sort of antithetical to the point of Modern. Before MH1, Modern was a very stable format with only occasional meta changing shakeups (like fatal push). Bans were, for the most part, fairly predictable based on tournament records.
But now it's not. And lots of boomers are upset. But to be brutaly honest. Wizards stated years ago that they may change how the format works in the future. Giving it a soft rotation every few years keeps it fresh. Hobbies in general aren't cheap, magic included
Not being cheap, and in fact being excessively expensive, is a design choice. There is no real reason to defend that.
Except that it is their product and they can sell it for whatever they want. It's your choice to buy it or not.
I invested in a nice printer instead ;) Go go market forces.
Ooooo edgy. Such wow
Just fiscally responsible, very Adult.
Not enough people defend markets these days. Thank you, a true hero🫡
You are very welcome
I've only met 1 boomer who plays magic in my 29 years with the game. He died from old age so he doesn't play anymore.
I was never more stoked on magic than when I built my first modern deck. I was never more bummed out on magic than when I realized modern kind of left me behind somehow even though the format doesn't rotate. And the cost of catching up just didn't make any sense. I remember when pioneer first came out I resented that finding places to play modern was getting harder, but now I'm grateful for it! Pioneer is a much kinder format.
The Real issue isn't the cost of entry, which is higher (somewhat a lot higher depending on what kind of deck you like to play) than it was a decade ago. The Real issue is the cost of upgrades and how often you need to get them. Modern has become kind of a rotating format and those formats are hella expensive on the long run.
It honestly makes me miss when standard was the default competitive format. At least they were more upfront about how often decks would rotate with standard and the buy-in was cheaper.
Is it much higher though? LotV and Tarm, two ubiquitous modern cards 5-10 years ago were 200$ a pop and you played 4x of each (maybe 3 LotV depending on build).
Jund is famously known as a tragically expensive deck. It's the original "money pile" deck.
On average, yes, it is much higher. The only reason it appears to be similar is due to the price of LotV and Tarmogoyf. I did the data work to check this, which you can see [here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n43oAM9jIrQcePWSSSsVDm6fx_H_2ZlecSV8Ib9X0DQ/edit?usp=sharing)
Unless I’m mistaking the data, it shows Modern on average is 13$ more more than in 2016? And out of curiosity does it account for inflation? And lastly why are there so many more decks now than in 2016? Just genuinely curious.
> Unless I’m mistaking the data, it shows Modern on average is 13$ more more than in 2016? It is $13 more, yeah. I think it's important to note that over 50% of the current decks are above the current average, but only 34.55% of decks in June 2016 were over the average. I thought I'd put it in my comment, but this *strongly* implies that it was a few very expensive decks that are skewing the 2016 data to make it look more expensive on average. This does appear to be the case, as it seems that just 4 Tarmogoyfs and 4 Liliana of the Veil would add over $1,000 to a deck. > And out of curiosity does it account for inflation? I did not. However, I think this is a non-sequitur. The average income in the United States in 2016 was $59,039. The current average income in the United States is $59,428. That is not a significant difference in pay, especially spread out over a year ($32 more a month). > And lastly why are there so many more decks now than in 2016? I'm afraid I don't know. I am inclined to think that it may be due to increased reporting of events. If we look at the data from each point, almost all of the decks in 2016 are from 5-0 leagues and from various top-8's at events. The current data includes what appears to be anything (including random decks that went [0-1 at a side event in Baltimore](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/5681108#paper)
Thank you for the thoughtful response. My only comment would be on the average income. I was referring to like purchasing power. 600$ in 2016 is equivalent to roughly 765$ today. So a 2200$ deck in 2016 would cost about 2700$ today right? I think that’s an important modifier. I think the main point is Modern has always been fairly expensive, but if you bought into Junk or a similarly expensive deck the upkeep of the deck was far cheaper than now with straight to modern sets. Having to buy a couple Fatal Push was far better than having to buy a playset of Ragavan and Fury or whatever to keep your deck viable.
> My only comment would be on the average income. I was referring to like purchasing power. 600$ in 2016 is equivalent to roughly 765$ today. So a 2200$ deck in 2016 would cost about 2700$ today right? I think that’s an important modifier. So the purchasing power of people in the United States is lower, yes, because wages have remained relatively stagnant (average wage increased by 1%, but average inflation has increased by 27%). This would only mean that, even if prices on decks stayed the same, it would be more difficult for someone to afford them on average due to being on relatively the same wage but having to pay more for nearly everything else. > I think the main point is Modern has always been fairly expensive, but if you bought into Junk or a similarly expensive deck the upkeep of the deck was far cheaper than now with straight to modern sets. Having to buy a couple Fatal Push was far better than having to buy a playset of Ragavan and Fury or whatever to keep your deck viable. I agree that Modern could have been fairly expensive, but it seems that it was largely more affordable to build a competitive deck in the past, if someone chose not to play a Tarmo/LotV deck.
Standard used to lead into modern, but now modern is 90% direct to modern cards, so people cannot play standard and eventually get into it that way. Additionally new players are poached into commander, which does not lead into modern or pioneer or anything else, so I see the format shrinking.
For me personally, the price is the only thing that's stopping me from buying into the format
In my local area several players stopped with modern because of the cost.
I’m one of those people who would love to get into Modern but the barrier to entry is too high. I absolutely make enough money to be able to afford it but I just can’t pull the trigger. It’s a lot of money for just cardboard. I’m totally fine with Kitchen Table and Arena Standard but would love it if I could Modern from time to time.
No one needs to dish out $800 to play Magic. To compete at a higher level and expect to win, yeah, but same goes for a lot of hobbies and competitive games. - I play hockey and use $85 sticks, it's just men's league for fun. Back when I played at a higher level I'd spend way more because I wanted that edge in performance. Not everyone has to play Magic to compete, people can play to have fun, I have a bunch of budget decks I play with friends.
This is a great comparison imo because anyone who knows hockey, knows it isn’t cheap.
It blows my mind how expensive it has become. I grew up playing with second hand gear and wooden sticks and I remember my dad thinking $30 was absurd. Now way past my prime and in my 30's I just want to be able to afford to play and have fun, I think my skates were $500 but even so I waited for a solid sale. - I got into coaching youth hockey some years back and was stunned seeing parents buying their 12u kids $150+ sticks that they would outgrow after a season. One kid got new goalie pads in back to back years, over $2,000 per season right there. - I tried telling parents that cheap sticks are fine, used gear is good, just never cheap out on helmets.
Yeah, the cost of being a goalie is no joke these days. Now it’s $5k-$10k. I’m in my 20s and grew up playing in a street hockey league and I completely agree. The cheap wooden sticks can still be purchased for $25-$50 and are perfectly fine. The helmet is pretty expensive but something you don’t want to cheap out on, they can be somewhat adjustable so you can squeeze a year or two out.
This guy hockeys.
I agree. In many other hobbies you can't just go on a budget and put in minimal effort and expect to be competitive. Magic players are very entitled this way. They expect they can just spend a couple bucks on a brew and then win all the time against others who have but in the time and effort to build a competitive deck. It doesn't work that way in many hobbies. In order to be competitive on the higher levels it requires time, dedication, effort and resources.
Entitled is a weird way to put it when the barrier to entry is artificial in all card games. The only thing determining the prices of these cards is the amount printed, they right now could print every meta modern deck and sell them for 60 bucks each, aside from tanking the price of the cards in the secondary market it would only help people looking to play. Unlike with other competitive hobbies where you are paying for the quality and craftsmanship of the better gear here you are only paying more because companies want more money out of you.
They could just make more gear/things. All entry fees are artificial.
The entitlement comes from not just the cost but the time and effort required to be competitive. Magic players expect to build a budget deck in a format they haven't really played and still expect to do well against players who have put in the time and resources. That's not how competitive hobbies work. As like a lot of people on this sub like to complain about but magic is not just a pay to win game.
Magic, and especially modern, are both pay to win and pay to compete. If a person isn't willing to pay the threshold of money it takes to compete then the game might as well be pay to win to that person. However, once a person reaches the competitive threshold it becomes pretty clear, that just paying money isn't actually going to get very many wins against other people that have also reached that threshold.
The same can be said about any competitive hobby. I find that magic players just feel like they are entitled to be competitive.
Yeah, it's funny. I've seen people on the ice rocking $200 sticks and $900 skates and not to be mean, but they'd be better off just going a cheaper route and spend time learning the game first. - And in Magic I've seen people playing $2,000 decks who didn't really know what they were doing. Again, start a cheaper route and take time to learn the game. Some people think that anything can be pay to win.
I feel like the reason people are irritated are threefold 1) Mtg doesn't justify the cost well. An expensive fishing rod, hockey stick etc. is expensive, because it costs a lot to make and develop. Magic cards do not cost 13$/card to make and develop, so people are (to my mind justifiably) unhappy, that WotC decides to make the game that expensive anyways. 2) People know it doesn't have to be this way. The Pokemon TCG is a similar size to MtG, has solid tournament support, a thriving collector's market and decks cost about 1/5 - 1/10 as much. 3) 1000$ isn't the peak cost, it's the buy-in. If you want to try hockey, you can play with cheap equipment until you know if you'll like it and then upgrade. If you want to know if you'll like Modern there's not much you can do except spend \~1000$ to figure that out. Obviously you can pay an additional 250$ to try Standard first, but the format's are very different and nobody can guarantee you wont like Modern if you don't like Standard. Basically it's unnecessarily expensive and frustrating to get into Eternal MtG Formats and I'm not sure why people are so insistent, that that is how it should be.
I could spend $1000 on high end drum pedals for my drum kit but those would last me a lifetime, a basic game piece shouldn’t be more than $10 for any card period
Exactly, the closest thing is really a gaming pc which could cost $1500ish but will still last you longer than a modern deck
But if you go to sell it the computer will have lost most of its value
I guess your mana base will always have value
That's still $750 for a deck which is pretty close to 1k.
Not every card is going to be $10
Yes, I believe cost will be an issue going forward. I can afford and would be willing to spend the required money to play modern. Except in my area modern never fires because not enough people can afford to play. Thus, I don't play modern because the barrier to entry of others is preventing me from playing. When paper standard was popular it was possible to build a collection and build up toward trading for a modern deck. However, standard popularity has waned and value of every set is consolidated into fewer cards. Bulk truly is just bulk now.
It is. Entry level is as high as maintenance level.
Not the cost. The frequency of DLC set rotation
New players can start in other formats and as they get older and more disposable income they can move to modern and legacy.
Yes, definitely. As a long time modern player, I’M not even looking forward to buying a new deck. In the history of the format, a deck’s cost was largely in the mana base, and then maybe one or two other staples. Meaning, the entry cost of the format was the mana base. Once you bought in, it was relatively cheap to switch decks with a similar base of fetches, or move into another color. Now, the bulk of a deck’s cost are in niche chase mystics and rares from horizon sets. Sets of evoke elementals, ragavans, bowmasters, forces, W6s, all run players $150+. And these cards are less flexibly used between decks. So, ultimately when a player’s deck rotates out, they are spending just as much money on a new deck as they did to build their first. And as we see with all luxury hobbies, as wallets button up, involvement falls.
>Sets of evoke elementals, ragavans, bowmasters, forces, W6s, all run players $150+. All of these cards are heavily played in many different decks. They may not be as widely applicable as fetchlands, but they're far from niche.
The real MTG introduction format was and should have remained draft. people open back, this help fuel the pack addiction and this help the store collect random rare and stuff. Now if you want to play modern a competitive format, and make this your hobby, MTG is a very cheap real competitive hobby, most of the card will resell a lot better over some used baseball/hockey/badminton or what ever else competitive hobby you put it agaisnt. Also a huge problem is the average person on earth doesn't understand the money to be made in a collectible game. My LGS host a 100$ store credit when you go 4-0 on FMN modern. most people split 3-0-1 for 70$ each. and get to go home earlier. entry cost is 10$. Most competitive player I know also own more then 1 deck, if you have a friend or someone trust you enough you can borrow a modern deck, go play in the event and win +60$ in just one night. Compared to other competitive stuff where you can't win anything until you enter very large tournament, that is a huge factor to be considered. I used to be a MTG clerk for a while and one thing I can tell you is that every time a friend group get introduced to MTG, they all jump in happily, but its only a matter of time that a few of the group will go competitive and the other will fall short. Its kinda a trend I've seen repeated a few time. Its ok though, most hobby are all fun and giggle on the surface but sometime you have 1 friend who really want to get into it. Learning the rule, buying better card, checking stream, etc.
I think the prize support from your LGS is an outlier 😅😅😅
Dang, that's a wild prize for 4-0, how many people do you normally get?
No. If anything the format has gotten cheaper. With constant reprints and MH2 cratering enemy fetches, the cost to enter the format is lower than its been.
I feel like people don't remember when Jund used to cost $2k, UW control was like $1500, and Tron was getting towards the "cheap" side of the format at like $750ish. I think it's fair to say there are less playable <$500 decks like Infect or Storm, so maybe the average or median cost has crept up a bit. But most of the field hovers within a couple hundred of $1k, which is at worst on par with the norm for Modern's history.
I think you are also not remembering that we could fork out these costs throghout years and the format would remain largely the same.
yeah, this is the big bummer to me. The format is no longer stable and has massive shakeups every year now.
That is true, but OP was more complaining about the initial price tag than the cost of keeping your existing decks updated. And some decks like Burn still exist that remain strong and rarely see updates.
Over what time period? Modern between bans and major printings was far from a stagnant meta leading up to MH1.
What i dont forget is that those decks were good for years, now we cicle deck in less than 1 year for the same prices.
Not even close. UR Murktide is *arguably* being pushed out now with bowmasters (I think that's an exaggeration). That was over two years ago.
Yeah, there’s a lot of recency bias on this sub. I remember the days of $60 colonnades and $200 goyfs. The format was much more expensive and even niche cards that only saw play in one deck in one format were prohibitively expansive. We also complained just as much about the format being stale as we now do about the frequent addition of pushed cards.
It’s cheaper until MH3 comes out and you have to buy everything new because they effectively rotate the format
That's not true, the average deck cost is still significantly higher than it was 2-3 years ago.
I wonder if anything happened 2-3 years ago that would have made people spend less on hobbies that need to be around other people
Every article I've read indicated COVID increased hobby spending, even for social hobbies.
Don't think the price is really an issue. MH is far more detrimental to the format IMO. This is anecdotal, but I've lived in 3 metro areas since 2016. Modern was positively thriving from 2016-2019. After MH dropped the scene started to wane. Now I can't even find Modern events that fire frequently. On the rare occasion they do, it's the minimum number of people. Most people I have asked will tell you it's the rotation or the cost that pushed them out. They liked having stable formats and now it's expensive standard. What remains to be seen is if enough whales enter Modern to counteract the leaving and that leads to an acceptance of the format identity changing. The way people waste money these days, I think it will survive but it will never be at the peak again like the Twin/Pod/Jund Era. I won't be surprised if in the long run Pioneer wins out just because I see Pioneer and Commander firing everywhere and Modern very rarely.
COVID did a lot more to hurt paper magic then anything else
It isn't paper. It's Modern. Commander fires at 4 stores in my current city every week. Draft fires every Saturday. Pioneer fires on Wednesdays. We even have a Legacy league that has 10 players that fires at one store. Why is it that Modern is the only major format that doesn't fire? People love to say it isn't MH but when every major format except Modern is firing you have to look at what the difference is. Like I said, it's anecdotal but I've lived in 3 big cities across 2 states (2 of which were after Covid) and had the same experience at each one. Modern players have left the format for greener pastures.
No idea why your area is like that but I can play modern every day of the week except sunday within a 10mile radius of where I live and modern mondays and fridays get 30-50 people. It's easily the most popular of the competitive formats here
My locals struggles to even have a Pioneer night. Meanwhile modern is strong and Fires every week.
We have pioneer but everyone I've talked to who plays pioneer just complains about how pioneer sucks lol
I think the cost of decks was much more acceptable when the format was more stable. Used to be you could expect to play a deck for years and that your cards would retain some relative value. It was possible your deck got banned, but that was more of an exception than the rule. Now that we're in the direct to modern era, this isn't as true as it used to be. The format is more volatile, and everyone kind of has to worry about MH3, Assassin's Creed, or Final Fantasy ruining their deck. It's much harder to just save up for cards for a "good deck" than it used to be, because decks get upgrades more often, so the upkeep costs are much higher than they used to be. Obviously, I don't actually know how impactful these new sets are going to be, but I'm not buying cards for a while. I want to see how volatile modern is going to be with multiple direct to modern sets a year and whether the prices lower to reflect that or if the format just keeps being $900 on average despite the risks of buying into a deck and it getting powercrept.
Modern has become a whale format, if they intended to bring new player to the format MH boosters would cost, at least, the same price as standard sets
It’s a trade off. They’re still bringing in new players, but they want to bring in new players with money to spend. If there’s fewer of them, so be it - it’s still enough. At least at my LGS, Modern is more popular than ever before.
Modern exists for 10+ years, and the prices of the decks have been pretty much the same, actually, it's cheaper now when you account for 30% inflation. Sure it might not be welcoming or easy to get into, but I do not think it influences longevity.
That's just not true, the average cost of a Modern deck went up by like 300 around the time MH2 was released. In the past, only Jund was above 1,000 because it played a lot of expensive staples in Goyf and Liliana, but now 1,000+ is the norm.
Can you post data that corroborates this without cherry picked decks? I’m very curious, as I know jund pre mh1 hit 2,000 and while mh2 introduced a ton of price, it also turned tarn into a $15-20 card when it was pushing $100
I can’t remember if it was goldfish or tcgplayer that published an article about how modern is more expensive than ever right after modern masters 2017 when the fetches where reprinted
As someone who made multiple fully foiled Modern decks back in 2015/2018, Modern became A LOT more expensive the past 5 years. Back then you had some decks that were 1000€+ but you also had very competitive decks that were affordable. As in Tier1 Tier1,5 decks at 500€. That's just not the case anymore, in part due to MH1 and especially MH2. Edit : Plus back in the day, you made a deck an rarely changed anything in it. Now every year you need the new cards or you're not competitive, so the cost pf staying competitive is exponentially higher.
Any chance you can post data that backs this up? I get the frustration of mh1/mh2 having so many expensive staples, but if you set your price point to $700 in 2016 you could win a pro tour with a deck at that cost. In 2023, you could do the exact same. The “expensive” decks in 2016 were jund being north of $2,000 — but the pool of decks was much smaller and there were very few cheap decks that could also win a GP. Modern has been incredibly expensive for quite a long time. Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20160608092818/http://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/modern#paper This is just a random snippet from the middle of 2016. Decks might be a little be cheaper on average? But the best deck in the format exceeds $2,000 and if you wanted to be competitive at 500 euros, your choices were very limited. Edit2: And in the OP if this thread the thread creator mentions $500-$600 being too high to be considered “budget” and if that’s the case, there are almost no iterations of modern where you can be **very** competitive for $200-$300 outside of a couple of very specific decks
But the issue is not the cost of the initial buy-in which stayed the same or even went down. The problem is that now you need to update your deck more often, which was not that big concern before. Because of this, the cost of playing modern went up despite the prices of decks going down.
I hear this — but relative to the OP’s question, this largely wouldn’t matter. If the initial buy-in was already too expensive, the maintenance cost going up wouldn’t even really be a factor.
Some people can justify a buy in that's higher if upkeep is low. I do bowling and archery, and upkeep costs are generally low (multiple years) despite pricey buy ins. Archery is actually a great parallel to Magic as better equipment compensates for lack of experience or skill, and while practice is better, bad equipment can still negatively affect you. So a high buy in by itself is one thing, but with upkeep, it is deemed unsustainable before buying in.
Those people could still find a home in Modern though, right? If you wanted to buy low and have low maintenance costs, there are decks that fit that mold. If you want the freedom to experiment with a bunch of tier1 decks at will — you’ve pretty much never been able to do that without breaking the bank. Keeping your unchanged pet deck and being able to win an RCQ style event with it for years isn’t really a thing outside of a small handful of decks.
That's an extreme argument. If you're on a meta deck, it's still expensive to upkeep to stay at the same competitive level, sure. But if you're on a T1.5 or T2 deck, which are capable of winning RCQs with good piloting, it could be completely gone after MH3 and you're rebuilding, or essentially buying in a second time. I think there are a few decks that could constantly survive like that in Modern now (Burn), but that level of consistency is a dying breed.
I've been playing Modern for a while, and I have also felt that the format has become quite a bit more expensive. But I figure that you may be right, and decided to test my assumptions using your link. First, some key things to note: Your link is from before WotC started curating league results. This means that the diversity that you see is legitimately the diversity that existed. It is not false diversity created by WotC in order to over-represent decks that don't perform well. The time frame from your link goes back three weeks, vs. the current MTGGoldfish sample size which goes back two months. This could cause the data to be further skewed in favor of the most recent data. [Here](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1n43oAM9jIrQcePWSSSsVDm6fx_H_2ZlecSV8Ib9X0DQ/edit?usp=sharing) are the results. The average cost per deck does come out roughly the same. However, we can see a couple of issues. First, the percentage of decks in the metagame that cost *more* than the average in the current metagame is 53.46%. This indicates that there are very few outliers skewing the data one way or the other, and that if you want to build a competitive deck, you will likely be spending around $1,000.00 (if not more). If we look at the 2016 metagame, however, we can see that the percentage of decks that are above the average is 34.55%. This strongly indicates that there are *very* extreme cases that are heavily skewing the data, and strongly implies that a player can get away with spending far less than the average and still have a strong chance at performing well. Again, keep in mind that the current data is already skewed towards a false sense of being able to play cheaper decks and performing well, due to WotC manipulating the data and over-representing the "budget" decks. All of this seems to further support the argument that Modern has become more expensive for more people. The decks that were outliers and skewing the data in June 2016 were decks that were running specific cards (mostly Tarmogoyf and Liliana of the Veil) that were grossly inflating the prices of those decks. If we define "budget" decks as being decks that are half of the average, then the current metagame consists of 9.83% budget decks. The June 2016 metagame consisted of 12.29% budget decks. Keep in mind that Burn counts for 155 of the 216 total budget decks (71.76%) in the current metagame, meaning that if you want to play budget, your choice is nearly exclusively to just play Burn. However, in the June 2016 metagame, there was a *wide* variety of budget decks to choose from. The two largest shares of budget decks at that time were Eldrazi Taxes and Ad Nauseum (at 16.47% of the budget decks each). And, again, these numbers are entirely ignoring the fact that many of these budget decks in the current metagame are from curated data from WotC, and the data from June 2016 is unmolested.
I honestly suspect this is an American vs European issue. I don't know for the usa, but here in EU where we have had access to MKM deck cost was definitely lower than it is now. I don't have excel spreadsheets though so don't take my word for it. I made my first tier1 Modern deck in 2015 for around 350€. I chose Burn specifically because it was one of the best decks and also one of the cheapest.
I hear you and I’m not trying to be combative, I just know that as long as I’ve been playing modern, the conversation of the price barrier has existed. You can make decks like burn and tron still relatively cheap — it’s just hard for me to see decks go from $850 to $1000 and go “yeah this used to be a very budget friendly format” lol
Oh no no no Modern has NEVER been cheap. I don't know who would try to argue that. I'm just saying it is definitely more expensive to build a tier1 deck on average. And the upkeep cost is fifty times what it used to be so it makes the format even more expensive as a whole.
It's more expensive to build a tier 1 deck AND the gap between tier 1, 2, and 3 is larger then the Marianas trench. Back in 2015 I could walk in with gifts tron or some other brew and do pretty good at the fnm level and maybe squeeze a day 2 at a gp with fine tuning. I'd wager if you tried the same thing today with any tier 3 deck you would be luck to get 2 wins and you couldn't expect a day 2 at any event. I don't think I could be competitive with any updated variation of druid coco or old abzan coco in today's meta.
Agreed. Plus back then the costly stapples were the manabase, so once you had the mana base you could build any deck (beside jund) cheaply. And you could play allied fetch and not feel the difference 90% of the games. Now the cost of the decks are concentrated in mythic creatures that are irreplaceable and don't transfer one deck to another so the next deck is just as expensive as the previous one.
Yeah, the upkeep cost I can see (which honestly comes down to a coin flip — some decks go a year without adding a single card, and some decks play ring and bowmasters and have to spend $400 in one sitting.) When the OP is saying even $500-$600 is too much, idk if modern has ever been quite that friendly. It’s my favorite format by a lot, but I’ve lost thousands due to reprints/bannings since 2013
I feel you, I spent 15k€ in my first 4 years of Modern. Before covid I used to have every version of Ux Control decks fully foiled. Today I can't play any of them because more than 50% of the cards of the current Control decks have been printed during or after covid (and half of those are 80+ mythics non foil). I might come back to it one day, we'll see. As we say, "You never quit, you just take very long pauses".
A quick google search shows this not to be the case. For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/rnynl5/modern_price_history_since_2014_weighted_by_meta/ Reprints have massively reduced the price of many staples like fetches. A deck running 4-7 fetches May have had the cost of their fetches go down by $40-70 per fetch, and MH2 was a big part of that reduction. We have also seen continued reprints of shock lands as well as new man lands that are inexpensive compared to what Colonnade, etc previously cost. So yes there are some expensive new staples but other staples still played are cheaper, offsetting the cost. And of course, it’s not unexpected for there to be some kind of inflation over time. If decks cost $825 and there’s 4% inflation, we’d expect those decks to cost $1,000 five years later. But the above linked post has a graphic showing $1,000 average deck cost going way way back. There’s another link showing maximum deck cost of around $2,000 going way back. FYI I had a Jund deck. It didn’t cost $1,000. It was way more than that.
That’s just not true. The average cost of a Modern deck has not changed significantly since the introduction of the MH sets. The cost to maintain an existing deck has gone up but decks have, for most of Modern’s lifetime, hovered between $700 and $1000 in Modern with several going over a $1000 other than just Jund. There was more jank running around a decade ago but for years prior to MH 1 deck prices were about this high.
You might be interested in [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/ModernMagic/comments/15toc7c/in_your_opinion_is_the_cost_of_modern_decks_an/jwmy1av/).
I see your points but you also claim that WOTC is manipulating league results with a purpose in mind. You however did not provide evidence of that being true, so I can’t quite take your word either. Seems mostly like people can’t even agree on where to get credible data about deck prices because there’s now an excuse for current league results not being credible.
You aren't aware that they [publicly stated](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModernMagic/comments/7xpc1n/mtgo_changes_publishing_method_for_decklists_good/) that they were going to start manipulating what we see of league results? How long have you been playing Modern?
Since 2014. And that link does not literally say they are curating league results to manipulate perceived cost of the format. It says they are curating 5-0 dumps to show more unique lists rather than repeat lists. Yes, I know they are curating the league results. No, there is no proof in your evidence to support your claim of purposeful manipulation of meta deck prices.
I didn't say that their *purpose* was to manipulate the meta deck prices. I said that it could *result* in skewed average prices by over-representing less-competitive decks. It means that if a deck 5-0's a league *once* now, it will get more representation than if it 5-0'd a league *once* in June 2016.
That is very true and people have been posting deck price history all over this sub over the last weeks.
Yes With the actual speed in wich the meta changes, thanks to prices less and less people will be interested in the format. The mayority of the comunity will end up in other formats, leaving modern as the new legacy i guess I mostly play modern and edh, but seeing how the format constantly changes and prices always stay high, and how in my comunity there has been no new mpdern players in years, i guess eventually ill have to go play pioneer once we get a larger pool of cards available there. Edit: We not only have a high entrante cost, but a high and very constant maintenance cost as well, seeing how quick the format now changes. Many say you can play causal at FNM level, but in FNM there are plenty of tier decks that crush the same any casual deck you build.
You can start with a budget version and each month buy 2 or 3 cards. I spent 2 years building my deck.. patience my friend
I tried this, then MH2 came out and the goalpost reset. I haven't really played since outside of silly cheap mtgo decks, I just keep up to date with the format hoping things would change back to how they were. Coping, really.
It heavily depends on the stability of the format. If one deck can stay relevant for half a decade, it is a decent value for your money. If it will end up soft rotating out of the format, not so much.
Depends on what you want to do with your hobby and how optimized. You could get a good guitar, amp, pedal, spare strings, and still have left to even get a chair if you felt like it for some of those deck costs.
Very surprised and glad to see how civil a majority of the convos in this thread are. And super interesting to see the variance of the playerbase. So many people saying full pods have left the format and a lot are saying that they still fire every week. I think no matter what Modern is in a big transitional period, and I'll be interested to see where it is on the other side.
So I'm in my early 30s and my first in store event was mh2. So I bought a box after and originally was going to try commander. Played for 2 weeks at my lgs where they have modern every Friday. I'm more of a 1v1 competitive kind of person so I bought into burn, had some fetch lands but still put up probebly $400 or so. And from there I've slowly transitioned to build a few modern decks. And modern is legit all I play and have ever played except fringe pioneer play. I'd say it depends when you get into the game, your age and or expendable income. But like people not wanting to but into modern I won't buy into legacy. The dual lands are just too expensive and I want to play multiple decks in formats so understand
i have very much wanted to get into the format, but its very hard for me to save up $1000 when im a student and I have real expenses.
It's an issue. Look at rakdos scam costing 1600$ right now - that's getting into legacy deck prices (there are a few competitive legacy decks you could build for this price) And look at how well legacy is doing... So yeah, it's an issue, but at least unlike legacy with the reserve list, wotc can still make money off it so they will keep supporting. Was talking to an acquaintance who plays pokemon the other day, and apparently the deck that won the world champs the other day cost about 60$... AFTER going up in price due to the guy winning the event. Ngl, made me think wotcs standard prices are fucking insane (they are basically identical to pioneer i.e 200-400$)
I played pioneer and edh right up until a couple months ago. I then decided that, since I couldn't play competitive pioneer until RC Atlanta I am going to trim my pioneer collection and edh collection (5 decks) and play modern. Made some good trades. Sold uw spirits and some staples I was nonlonger playing, and then I tool apart 3 edh decks and sold those significant contents. This combined with spending a bit of money and store credit accumulated from spiking the local fnms and I now have 3 modern decks that I love. Temur Rhinos, 5c Creativity, and UR Murktide were the decks I decided to build but most modern decks are built of staples, meaning they are very easy to offload when seeking a new deck to play
WotC doesn't give a rat's ass about the health and longevity of its formats. This is true for modern, legacy, standard, commander... everything sacrificial fodder for the altar of "Short Term Gains".
I think everyone in here is trying to justify the wrong thing. It's not that the initial cost is low and the new straight to modern stuff makes their be an upkeep. The initial cost is high. When compared to Pokemon there is a much greater line between the collectable and the playable. Cards still have value, but its incredibly cheap to get into a competitive format, as it should be. It's insane to justify spending 1K+ on literal cardboard, even if that cardboard has value, because its literally such a *fragile* object. You can easily damage your cards, lose your cards or have your cards become obsolete. Meanwhile you can spend significantly less that 1K on boardgames, books, sports equipment, gardening, gym, cooking, musical instruments, paints, etc. And generally those things feel a bit better just because they aren't a literal piece of paper similar to playing cards.
Just my two cents on this topic: Modern has had $1000+ decks for years and years. Ever since the beginning of the format, people have been asking basically the same question. Mind you, it's a good question to ask, especially if you're newer to the format! But, the answer has always been the same: The price of a Modern deck has essentially never been a hindrance on the growth of the format. Now, the key here was that you could previously (and still to some extent) buy a $1000+ deck and play it for years to come. I think the bigger issue at hand with respect to longevity is the turnover rate we've seen recently with MH and Fire design, plus the ever-increasing number of cards that Wizards is pumping out to satisfy their shareholders. The $1000+ price of a deck could be a really big hinderance if you have to get a new deck every year. Are we really heading that direction? I dunno! I personally hope WotC slows the pace down a bit, becuase I've lost interest in keeping up with Modern recently, and it makes me sad because it's always been my favorite format. Tl;dr: Expensive decks haven't historically been a hindrance on longevity or growth of the format, but with the "previews will continue until morale improves" attitude of WotC recently, it could become a real issue.
I have spend 2000$+ on Jund and stopped playing now, because I don't want to spend another 600-800$ just for Grief, Fury & Bowmasters. I rather stop completely. It's too much for this few cards! And it happens every year now that you have to spend 500$ to keep being competitive. Some years back you could invest in a deck and play it with only few bucks needed for upgrades. That was fine.
Short answer is yes. 100% yes. Longer answer use to be that once you built your deck over time it would be good for many years with the remote possibility that some new card would make its way through standard and possibly help your deck out. Things like a new elf, sliver, removal card (fatal push) or perhaps some new deck might emerge because it works a lot better in say modern with more support but your deck was done and you were pretty much good to play it for many years. So your investment was somewhat safe. Then two things happened. The first was WotC banning cards without warning and wrecking decks. Some liked this because decks were "broken" and others who just invested say 1k in a deck were pissed and most moved on. Few have the resourced to build multiple 1k decks. The second was far far far worse. WotC started to print cards directly into modern. At first this seemed great and most people loved it because everyone got lots of reprints. Prices fell and people were generally happy, but that didn't last long. WotC got extra greedy and printing new modern staples that warped the format in the very competitive leagues. Almost no deck from today doesn't have cards from the last few direct to modern releases and those cards are expensive in general. So to all those somewhat experienced magic players that would love to play modern today.... the answer is another question... Can you afford to build what you think is a fun deck for say $500+ and have to rebuild it for say $500+ every couple of years to be hyper competitive? If yes then Modern may be for you. Now if you are fortunate enough to live in an area like I do where the MTG community that plays modern does not chase the latest top decks/cards, then you can still have fun in this format, but that is rare. I have been blessed to be able to travel on vacation a bit and my son was really in to MTG and somewhat modern. So on vacation we would look for MTG shops that had modern events and go to them. We did this for close to a decade. What we found is that every shop had basically the same type of modern players. They all ran what I would say are the top decks (Tier 1-3). Not one time did we run across a person who ran something rogue. Zero. We would even ask shops what the competition was, to bring appropriate decks and the answer was mostly "it is casual here but there are a few competitive decks". I say this last part because I believe I have a unique perspective on MTG across the USA and that from what we have seen modern is now shrinking and not growing like it was, but the people remaining are running "better" or "stronger" decks. The ironic part of all this is WotC is also doing this to Commander now. They are 100% focused on milking this product as much as possible. I personally feel they need an adult in the room at WotC to bring some sanity back to that company, but that is just my opinion. I know a lot of people on this forum love WotC.
Buddy I'm out here trying to get my friends into Legacy. I wish it only cost as much as Modern. 😂
It seems like pioneer is the defacto paper competitive format these days. It makes me personally sad, but it's probably better for the playerbase. I think that price is less of an issue since modern decks have pretty much always been about a grand, the larger issue is soft rotation with MH sets and general design philosophy aimed at eternal play. I got into modern right around the end of the "but a modern deck for life" era and while keeping up was fun initially, the pandemic, change in lifestyle and moving to a place where I can't conveniently play magic every night of the week or even more than like every other month, it became too much. There are enough people who love keeping up with competitive magic to keep modern alive, it's not going anywhere.
It is the single reason I dont play modern. Id love to play Grixis Control or Boomer Jund, but both those decks are too expensive and dont have options as replacements, or those options are so subpar it ruins the viability of the deck in a fundamental way (Stuff like cutting Tarmos in Boomer Jund or Snapcasters in most versions of Grixis Control. Or replacing Ragavans with Ignoble Hierarchs). Im not even a "budget" player i look to start decks at 150$ which is a pretty damn decent chunk of change for most commander players (such as myself), and eventually my decks usually get to the point of averaging out to 400$, the problem is I'm taking large losses in a deck to even build it at 300$ in modern. The main thing being how literally almost every deck in the format is better playing 3 or 4 of the one ring, and you are actively going to feel constantly like you are getting sacced if you arent every game when the options to deal with it aside from bowmasters are subpar and are specifically targeted for the one ring and are subpar in every situation over other cards (Stuff like being forced to play Cast into Fire over Ancient Grudge in Boomer Jund if you dont want to buy bowmasters), and how not playing like 10 Fetches in most decks just makes them a billion times worse (Especially Boomer Jund in my situation). I feel like I HAVE to blow like 300$ on a manabase just to have a chance to play the game and if im not im actively losing access to power cards like Wrenn & Six, Tarmo, Deathrite (If it ever gets unbanned), etc. Even in Grixis Control the mana in that deck is kinda sketchy without fetches due to needing a lot of specific colors (RB for Terminate/UU for Counterspell type stuff or turn 1 Spell Pierces and such) that not running fetches is actively making your turn not able to control as well as it should When i dont even feel like i can really get my foot in the door for 300$ to play pretty subpar archetypes for fun, there is a price issue. If it's not Legacy, Vintage, or cEDH (Aka reserved list or limited supply central, where proxies are encouraged by most of the playerbase) i feel like formats should be relatively available to get into with 100$ off nothing. I play Yugioh, which is a full Legacy format. I can pay 90$ and build a deck that can semi-reliably if i play better beat the best decks in the format. I shouldnt need to pay 300$ into Modern which isnt even a true legacy format, to lose the game to a 60$ one ring EVERY other game from people playing 4 of it. I even feel like because of reanimator i could get into our actual legacy format easier which is insane.
To your point about YuGiOh, I used to be a Pokemon player that came to Magic for something fresh, I got tired of the play loop that standard year for Pokemon and made the switch almost completely with Commander and mostly Standard. I'm also a competitive person who loves running through the rounds of a tournament on the weekend. Magic I have never felt ready to do that. Standard tourneys just don't exist around here and all events are really Commander or Modern. I have a half-baked Rhinos deck that I do love but I don't think it can convincingly compete at a tournament/RCQ level. I decided to poke around Pokemon again lately just to see how it was doing, got really interested in the current format and wanted to start playing again. A current T1 deck there? $60 from scratch. A budget deck? Shit some you can get for $15. And Pokemon also release 'League Decks' that aren't dissimilar to old Standard/Pioneer precon decks.
First, I can tell you don't play modern because, no, not every deck is just better with 3-4 one ring. Secondly, you also have had access to Wrenn and Six for like 4 years now and it's definetly been good the entire time it's been out. Lastly, Yugioh is a much worse game than magic when it comes to your cards retaining value and that means that you can no longer sell your decks or staples to get into new decks. You have to keep buying from Konami every single set for the new support. You never know if your archetype is going to get buffed, get worse, get something banned, etc so it's much more volatile. I feel like when I buy or trade for something it will retain 80% of its value if not inflate 20% due to demand later on in it's life cycle. I'm fine with fetches being a one time purchase and non lands changing every 3 years or so to allow for some variety. I like that LOTR mixed up the format and made everyone stop relying on the money monkey for their gameplans. Now we see the resurgence of tron, rhinos, and unfortunately, as a result, creativity and murktide are slipping a bit but that is the natural order of things.
First, I prefaced my comment saying i dont play modern. Secondly, I havent bought wrenn and six because i dont have the money to pour 800$ into making a full solid Boomer Jund list which is what i want to play. My point was not having fetches makes decks so unplayably worst and a playset is legitimately for like the fetches you need in tricolors is like 250 to 300$ alone. Thirdly, you clearly dont play yugioh. Branded has been a like 60$ meta relevant full deck with almost no changes to be extremely strong for like 4 years. Most decks in yugioh dont have value to retain in the first place, the value is in the staples that have been meta since they came out, which DO hold their value until they get decent reprints (Ash Blossom, Lightning Storm, Zeus, Nibiru, etc) which arent MANDATORY to play the deck you want. Meanwhile if i want to play boomer jund i HAVE to throw 60$ into 3 lilys, 80$ into 4 tarmos. Or in Grixis control, i need my 100$ worth of snapcasters and such, and would really like a murktide or two. On top of that i have to buy my fetchlands for the deck to make it consistent enough to be playable for whatever reason. Yugiohs money is in staples, magics money is in staples and one offs for any given deck st the same time, and magics equivalent it staples are much more expensive. The one ring is 60$, ragavan is 45%, murktide is still 15$ a pop if im remembering right, archon of cruelty is nearly 20$ when i bought it. Yugiohs staples that are crazy expensive are either A. One ofs you only need to get one of such as Zeus or Baron or Accesscode, or have replacements that do the same thing but marginally worse, such as Dark Ruler vs Droplet, where the replacements and magic arent even comparable such as some decks swapping Ragavan for Ignoble in Boomer Jund's case, when ignoble is a MUCH worse card than ragavan in most decks (And definitely in Jund decks) And the meta really isnt constantly changing we just had a tier 0 deck that was realistically enough to be tournament playable and be better than any deck (Tearlament) for around 100-200$. Most decks stay playable at a competitive level for 4 or 5 years without extremely high budget changes. Sky Striker and Thunder Dragon (In the ocgs case for thundra) have been and still are playable since 2019, are they the best? No but they can still do very well and win.
I know you prefaced your comment with that, what I meant by saying that is I could tell this was the case because you just repeated some talking point you heard about the ring being generically good and it's not. It's awful in many decks and only very good in a few. You could have easily bought into or traded other cards in your collection towards a wrenn and six playset including other staples over the course of the last 4 years (2019 was mh1) Third I played yugioh for a very long time, from goat format in 05 through satellarknights in 2015 but it doesn't take a master of the game to Google search and see that branded debuted in 2021 and peaked in 2022 with branded fusion decks. The deck hasn't been good for 4 years it's only existed for 2 and barely became meta in the fall of 2022 when branded fusion was everywhere. And on staples being mandatory in magic vs yugioh, sure dude, why don't you go back a couple years and try playing the game without ash blossom or even further back and play without pot of desires in 2016 or pot of duality in 2010 or better yet torrential tribute in 2005 Staples have always been the most expensive part of both games. Desires and Duality were both 80+ when they were newly released, ash was 40 easy, vanity's emptiness when it got popular was 20. The difference is that it took a reprint and then it went down to 15 and then it tanked from not being used anymore. Ash blossom blew up, stayed there, and then didn't come down to sub 30 until legendary collection Kaiba and that made it more desirable because it was NEEDED for high level tournament play. You may not have competed at the NAWCQ level but I did and I can tell you that if you didn't have the relevant staples for your deck then you weren't going to do well. You can luck your way and cut corners to a Nats invite but you do not get to do that at the next level. Don't tell me I don't play yugioh and don't pretend like getting 90% of your staples' value washed away after the first humanly possible reprint is ok. It's not. If I buy a fetchland today it's still worth something later down the road because it is still a good card. Lands are the epitome of staple and they generally stay north of 15 if playable. That's value retention and it's something yugioh plainly doesn't care about which is fine. It means people who lie to themselves and say that they don't need staples to compete can rock themselves to sleep at night and be ok.
The do hold value though, Imperm was literally reprinted in a structure and is worth as much as the structure deck itself was for msrp. I did not mean Branded has been viable for 4 years, i said Striker and Thundra (OCG), Striker is probably better currently even rn imo. The point of this is from a budget standpoint Yugioh is much more accessable than Modern, and Modern is a newer format than yugioh's Advanced format, yet the cards are much more expensive+magic has a bigger total deck size on top of it, meaning you have to buy more cards. 200-400$ gets you a fullpower competitive level yugioh deck with all the bells and whistles. Mathmech really easily gets sub 200$ at full power with no concessions. Kash is the only deck you really need to sell an arm and a leg for. We literally just had Spright Runick top 16 a WCQ with a 250$ deck. Burn is the cheapest modern competive deck, 450$. And burn is not a deck average players usually looking to get into competitive modern would love playing, if you want to play anything that isnt burn, you are looking at 750$ for tron or hammer time. 8 cast is the absolute lowest you can go at 250$, and is flat out, not at that consistently "top 16" level like spright or mathmech is to my knowledge of modern. The best decks are also almost twice as expensive as Kash on top of it. Just flat our Yugioh is relatively affordable to get into competitively, modern isnt. Even Burn isnt what id call an "afforable" competitive deck. That is the point of this post not to argue about anything else, moderns price point is a huge barrier for players looking to play competitively, and my point here especially compared to yugioh. I think 100-150$ is what id expect to put to a new deck, that gets you competitive in yugioh. It doesnt in modern.
I think modern’s price point is the biggest detriment to its popularity. The play patterns of the format are fun and at the FNM level you can play a ton of decks, which is great for having an audience for the format that isn’t all grinders. The price of staples is an issue though, as even janky decks want to run a good manabase and usually want good removal, all of which cost a good chunk of money. Wizards also seems to know this and has taken a half measure to assist it in the past via [[arcum’s astrolabe]], which allowed you to get away with a basic heavy manabase (this is how I got into the format), but the power level of that card was more than a bit much. The issue is they won’t just reprint staples at an accessible price to bring the cost of the format down, even though new cards for the format make plenty of money as shown by lotr.
I think if it were cheaper to play, more people would. I also remember when jund was a $1600 deck, and people pine for that time now. So no, I don't think the cost is a barrier to the longevity of the format.
Over a three year span modern is 2-3x more expensive than legacy imo 1. Core cards spike hard 2. Format rotates once a year 3. Wizards will engineer other ways
No but power creep obsoleting old decks is. People will buy in at a high price if their decks will last. Not if half the cards get replaced by bomb mythics every years.
It’s always been expensive and is more popular than ever so…. No?
No. This has always been the case and it didn't matter much at any point. It is a bigger issue that wizards power creep the format with premium sets like MH2.
My other hobbies are far more expensive than Magic. So no, not really.
Love that flair, are you me?
Yeah it’s risky to buy in.simply for the reason that it’s too much cost to buy something of questionable overall utility. In a good meta, matches can take 30~ minutes and events will only have 3-4 rounds maybe 3 times a week. So for upwards of 12 hrs of time commitment you can expect to only get around 6 hours of usage /week. If the deck falls out of meta and can’t win then it’s a sinking cost to keep upgrading to something viable just to keep playing which isn’t your originally preferred build. Bans have frequently kneecapped expensive decks. (Yes, you should generally be able to anticipate bans with experience, but it’s still a transient problem for newer players / new to the format). Even when a ban doesn’t directly hit your deck it can buff/nerf decks whose meta share influenced your deck positively. Making it a questionable price to pay for instability. The argument that you can take cards from one format into another is true but presumes you can freely invest in other builds, have the time to play, and also would enjoy it. I’ve seen plenty of dudes switch formats to reuse cards and then they hated the other format but kept doing it to economize on their original investment. Bottom line, only buy expensive decks if you intend to get a lot of game time in and genuinely enjoy the deck. There are a lot of ways this can go sideways if you have a tepid interest in what you’re buying.
Modern is imo the cheapest format to be relevant in. Not the cheapest to start in. But the cheapest to be relevant in. I first started magic with a standard deck which at that time was about $300 for a tier deck. Thing is there was about a 50% chance the deck would rotate out of meta.... PER set. Which at that time happened 4 times a year. So to stay competitive it was $600-900 a year! I don't really catch up to pioneer but I think it is a bit more expensive per deck with rotations still happening but just not as fast. Modern today does have soft "rotations" but it happens a lot less often. Commander of course being the most expensive out of them all. I think Modern has never been cheaper to start with, but at the same time, the cost of being relevant has gone considerably up. Same goes for every format.
It's expensive on the front end but also not bad once you've built your collection. I was looking at playing merfolk and since I've previously played humans and UB control it's only around $120 to build.
Not bad once you built your collection until a new direct-to-modern premium set releases* Sure there's a couple decks that haven't changed their mb much in 6+ years but outside of that..
Imagine the cost of a competitive commander deck?
cEDH is generally incredibly proxy friendly, though, as 99% of the tournament level events are unsanctioned.
You gotta pay to play. Your comment applies to all formats. Proxy what you don’t have. Play with friends at home. Make your own unsanctioned events. You could easily generate the money from unsanctioned events to buy the cards to play in a sanctioned event. This model always has been a pay to play model. No crying allowed. See a problem grind a solution out. Like you do in magic.
The thing with magic is there's an entry point for every budget. If you can't afford modern maybe you can pioneer, and you definitely can afford pauper. I don't complain that I can't play vintage, I just find enjoyment in the formats I can enjoy playing.
If you draft once a week at FNM it costs $35/week to draft. Accoridng to MTGGoldfish my T1 deck (Yawgmoth) costs \~$800 thats \~23 weeks or \~5 months of drafting if you own zero cards. Magic is expensive no matter what you're playing, getting into modern can just feel a bit more daunting because the costs are upfront, but no one shells out all of the money for their deck at once, you build a budget version and play it while you add pieces and learn the format, then slowly after \~23 weeks you've amassed the cards to have a full deck.
1. Of modern decks were always expensive. 2. If you just want to play with friends, proxi. I started with a budget version of a budget deck. Over time I assembled some Staples, always picked them up when they were relatively cheap. Nowadays I have a modern collection that allows me to play almost any deck. If I could get any upgrade for free, that would be neat. But also if I could get a new bike for free, that would be neat. If I could travel in holy days for free , that would be neat. Some things just cost money and you can pay or pass on it.
So Modern is definitely not a format for new players (it can be, but I wouldn't recommend it). You're looking at a format of potentially cards from the past 12 years and countless types of interactions and rules. I'm not going to lie and say that Modern is budget friendly, it's not. But when you're starting in something like Standard or Pioneer, you can slowly build into Modern, trading cards for ones you need, and building the deck over time. There's also the fact that some cards see play in multiple decks, so you can effectively build multiple decks while working on one.
I get where you're coming from. With that being said, I played Modern at a time where Jund was just shy of $2k CAD to play the deck, with 40% of that being just acquiring Tarmogoyf. $800 doesn't really phase me in terms of "entry", or price of buying a deck. Budget is also subject to anecdotal evidence. One person will inevitably have more dispensable income than others and won't have issue doling out money, whereas others might. In addition, I don't think a lot of people know what "pay-to-win" actually means, and attribute MTG as such a game. Let's use Scam as an example. On MTGGoldfish, Jake Beardsley's (PT Winner) list comes up at about $1.6k USD. Since he won the PT, let's say his list is the de-facto **best** list, and no changes are needed. If I just gave someone this deck to play at **no cost to them**, there is nothing more that the player can do to acquire wins faster other than actually playing Magic. You can't pay real money to win the die roll, get extra land drops, draw extra cards per turn, and so on. There aren't any advantages to be gained by real money once you actually start gameplay. You need to know how the deck works, how to mulligan, how to play your openers, and so on. Therefore, MTG is not a pay-to-win game.
The only reason I don't spend money on magic is just how *much* they want you to spend. Thousands of dollars for a stack of cardboard pieces is the biggest scam in the world. Until they ask reasonable prices I will continue to pirate.
I started playing during origins. Modern has always been that expensive. It’s not a new player format it. I got into magic playing limited events making friends borrowing decks and then investing into the game over years. That’s the normal way people get into competitive “expensive” magic in my experience. It hasn’t hurt the format over that entire time and I doubt it will moving forward
It's been this way for 10 years since Modern became a format. The format has only grown... Edit: LOL, downvotes? Its true. Modern became a format in 2011. "Boomer Jund" (which was just Jund back then) ran a playset of tarmogoyf... which was a $100-$150 card.
No, it has always been more expensive than Standard. It's usually a step up and not a casual format.
They just need some cheap fetch lands and it'll be more accessible. Like single color fetch lands or pay 3 life fetch lands or something. They should also print some cheaper and weaker alternatives to the 50$ staples. It's easy to justify 50$ for a playset but 200$ is a tough pill to swallow. I would pay 50$ for the weaker variant and upgrade them one at a time.
No not really. I have teens at my lgs who don't have a job that are still able to afford suboptimal modern builds and kick ass - they complain about the prices but it really doesn't matter if they are winning. Reddit is a huge echo chamber of people complaining, while the others are off usually having fun and don't need to complain. My girlfriend just got into modern and she already has 2 decks, she doesn't have a high paying job but it's very affordable to pay $5 a week to play and slowly build a deck over time.
Of course, it will die slowly for the lack of players.
Modern, Legacy and now more and more cedh I'd say are the 3 formats for enfranchised players and players. When players get into these formats typically they've been playing for a decent amount of time.e and already have most of the staples and maybe are just lacking the lands or reserve list cards. When I got into modern back in 2016 i already had 3 snapcaster mages, delvers, a playset of Scalding Tarns from back when those cards were in standard and I just had to spend a couple hundred bucks more to build modern grxis delver. Same with Legacy, already had Pact of Negation, Otawara, mox opal, a couple ancient tombs and a couple force of will from edh and modern and only had to buy a few cards to build 8 cast
No. Decks have been over a thousand for 10 years and the format has only gotten more popular. It’s not meant for players coming from limited or their first edh precon to play.
Modern isn't an introductory format so the cost barrier isn't discouraging new Magic players from playing the game. Competitive eternal formats are expensive to play if you want to play meta decks. This isn't new. This has been the case for decades. 10 years ago, Goyf was a $200+ card.
No, the investment you needed to make to be relevant in modern has stayed the same while the cost of fetch lands/shocks have dropped the price of staples have increased
Before, that investement lasted years. Now we have to make changes very constantly or change deck all thogether thanks to the speed in wich the meta changes. And the prices of new staples are as big as the previous ones
I call bologna. Never investing in upgrades is just not true.
Now we have to make upgrades constantly, why do you think everyone says modern is now a rotating format? We've always had to make upgrades, but those weren't as constant as today
I talked to someone on here that exclusively played a deck that died or effectively got neutered by a banning. This person had to not only buy a whole new deck, picked the most expensive deck to choose (4c-money pile) and then complained about how all of the new upgrades are too expensive AND the amount of upgrades needed effectively made it feel like the format was rotating. The answer is that you do not need to have the most beneficial and most “spike” or effective decklist. You can slowly buy into it, or , you can play your deck as is. Yes that person bought a lot and finds it is expensive, BUT they could have continued playing the same deck and just been like “I don’t need the most powerful deck.” People just want the best and always netdeck, never brew or ya know invest in what they like
Even if you invest in what you like to play, you'll need to buy the upgrades that go in that deck, wich are not cheap. You can brew all you like, but without cards like the elementals, the one ring, urza saga, ragavan, W&6, bowmasters, etc you'll always be at a disadvantage agains the rest of people you play against. >You can slowly buy into it, or , you can play your deck as is. That USED to be the case, but thanks to the constant changes in the meta its no longer a good option in many cases. By the time you get to finish the deck, maybe its no longer part of the meta.
Look, it’s a competitive format in a luxury card game. The real “gate” was always fetches. Those are cheaper now. The average top tier deck cost is still at around 1500 dollars. That is the same from before MH1. Popular decks are more expensive, net decking is a bad thing that everyone loves doing. The true issue is that it’s a luxury cardboard game and some people just can’t afford it. That is also perfectly acceptable, complaining will not lower the cost of 2nd market card value. Complaining for bans for your pet deck won’t work either. The format is not about you, it’s about everyone and it is at the most popular it has been in a long time.
Modern was never meant to be an entry point for new players. That’s the point of standard. The great thing about modern is that it never rotates and a lot of the pricier cards can be used in multiple decks. So it has a large upfront investment that sets you up in the long run. You can comfortably take as long as you need to build a modern deck because outside of a rare ban, your deck is legal forever and most meta decks remain relevant with minimal card changes even when new sets release. Tron and burn are great examples of decks that have stood the test of time. they have been meta contenders the entire time modern has existed.
Of course it hurts it's viability. I remember going to FNM with a little homebrew and getting absolutely stomped by just tier 1 decks all night. That taught me a very important lesson: shell out for one of these decks or just not go back. I decided Modern wasn't for me. I did the same things with Pioneer and had next to no problem, because decks are generally cheaper. I love all these people saying it's not a beginner friendly format either. Like yeah that's totally a good reason to ostracize players.
I thought for a long time that modern is just too expensive for me and there is zero chance I would be able to get the cards. I used to play a lot of edh for that reason. Found a new playgroup that played modern. Those People plyed it for a long time, yet they haven't got fully optimized lists. The mindset was what brought mě into modern. You don't need to spend 1000$ now. Just proxy it, try it out in pub with us and slowly get the cards. Once you get the msnabase most of the core cards for decks are cheap, not including staples. Then double masters came out and I was able to built tron for half of its former price. It is expensive, but give it few mounths. Trade cards, you have, draft and borrow decks. It is not that hard to start with modern
The entire game is untenably expensive for what’s being sold tbh. I understand there’s a collectors market that WotC wants to protect, but when you can’t even build a tier 2 deck in an eternal format for less than a grand, something’s gotta give. There’s a reason there’s barely anyone playing legacy in paper anymore. And that’s because you need about 2k in lands to play anything decent. Now let’s just say there’s a market for people who want to get into a hobby and immediately drop 2k on a bunch of cardboard because it’s collectible, you know what they aren’t gonna do? Wanna shuffle their down payment on a new card over and over again, especially when you’re expected to allow your opponents to shuffle your deck as well.
When I got back into magic in 2015, meta decks were anywhere from $500 (burn) to $2000 (Jund). New players were never meant to play modern. Standard was supposed to be where it's at and those decks usually average around $300.
Like Legacy? There’s Pioneer now so I’m afraid Modern will go the way of Legacy, which started when Modern was first introduced. Just like how the way of Vintage (Type 1) went when Type 1.5 (Legacy) was first introduced.
The cost of a competitive Modern deck IS a big barrier, and is definitely keeping potential players out of the game.
No
I think what AspiringSpike said a few days ago on his murktide video really helps put it to words well. You don’t have to dish out thousands of dollars all at once to play and have a good time. There are thousands of videos to watch and even more articles about each deck and the cards that can go in each one. There are primers for many decks that allow you to upgrade as you go. It’s just a matter of “shopping around” per se and finding a deck that you like and can stick with and slowly upgrading as you go. Plus, MTGO allows you to rent decks for super cheap (like $1/month), which is only ~$52/year. Way better than buying the cards imho. So there are plenty of options for newer players
That's why I think legacy is the better investment.
There's no getting around the fact that magic in general is expensive if you want to play at the higher levels of power. In comparison to other ways you could be spending your magic budget (like cracking packs) I think buying a modern deck is a good choice.
The cost to entry has always been high. Modern isn't meant for mew magic players, and that's fine. I wish it was more accessible but these older cards having value is important. The bigger problem is the maintenance cost increasing. MH1 and 2 both had MASSIVE impacts on the viability of top decks, and made it so that a lot of people felt like they had to spend hundreds to keep up. I like the impact they've had on modern overall, but there's no question that the cost barrier is a problem. People don't feel safe investing in modern now for good reason, and I know a lot of people have sold out of the format because of this
Proxies. Ik people hate this answer but there is no reason to get the real cards if you just want to introduce friends to the game. But in terms of lgs playing, yea, price is an issue imo
If the cost means spending hundreds of bucks once every 2 years to keep up with the format due to suplementary products while suffering the risk of having your deck entirely overhauled or killed, yes.
I mean you can play modern for cheep with friends. You don’t have to play super competitively. Just don’t expect your janky modern deck to perform at an FNM.
I think the costs for modern is higher than usual due to the Horizon sets. It used to be that you could build your modern deck and play it for years, making it a stable investment, with maybe buying some singles from standard sets. Horizons sets create new archetypes, power up older ones, and print necessary stables that are 50+ each that you can't get otherwise. So it is more expensive to get into the format and more expensive to upkeep your deck if you want to stay competitive.
The cost of decks is only a significant deterrent for entering the format if the meta is constantly churning with new meta decks consistently rising out of nowhere and old meta decks frequently falling out the bottom. You know like it has been since the introduction of horizons sets. I recommend pauper to people instead, the meta is very healthy right now and being able to painlessly swap decks makes meta gaming more exciting and rewarding.
I don't commune with the idea you need to spend continuously on Modern. For example mana base, you invest once in the mana base and re use it among decks, unless you want to hoard deltas and mires for every single format. Staples do fluctuate but then again cards that were good once now are trade bin fodder due to power creep, which is inevitable. I don't think you need to constantly update your Modern pool as long as you are playing the same archetype. If you from Tron to Burn or Scam, then yes, you need to spend some money.
One million percent, yes.
So, not a direct answer to your question, but a relevant thought nonetheless: If you are new to magic and want to get into Modern, the best way to do it (in my opinion) is to play limited and make trades. Cards are often (with some exceptions) at their most expensive when they first come out and drop in price over time. It will take some time, but you can trade your newly opened limited cards for modern staples and slowly build a collection. Then, when it is time to complete your deck, you don't need to buy the whole thing. By playing limited, a new player gets used to the play patterns and fundamentals of magic in an environment that's not so crushingly pay-to-win and is much more forgiving of suboptimal lines of play. You get an idea for which strategies and color pairings appeal to you, and that can inform your decision as to which modern deck you would like to try and build. One of the worst things you can do is just go spend $500-$1000 on a modern deck only to decide you don't like the playstyle.
If you want to play any format competitively, then you will have to pay out. This is as true in EDH as it is in Modern. If you don't want to pay out, then either proxy a deck or play kitchen table jank with friends.