Idea for a MTG format

>>52216765
How do you handle lands.

If I build format oppressing deck in highest tier, can I just remove some lands and go down to a lower tier as well?

>>52216790
I was thinking "by price", as the default.

I suppose you could just use cheaper and slower lands to lower it in tier.

Is that a bad thing or a good thing? And why?

Your super high tier deck is never going to fit in the $10 deck weight class, though.

>>52216790
Do you think Mana sources should be tracked separately?

Price doesn't always correlate with power. Sol ring and skullclamp are insanely powerful but only a couple of bucks. Balancing this would be difficult.

Having a format balanced by the secondary market means decks can be forced out by the impact of other formats. This leads to decks being unplayable in what would be the appropriate weight class for their power, due to prices inflated by an external force.

That being said, I like deckbuilding with different restrictions. Were you thinking a linear correlation of secondary market price, or price point tiers? E.G. <$0.5 = x points, $0.5-$2 = y points.

If someone optimizes their deck by using all of their points budget, then they're at the mercy of small fluctuations in price pushing them up a tier. Having to regularly rebuild will shit people off.

>>52217961
I was thinking based on a 1-1 correlation, updated 2-3x a year, based on average price over several months in several markets. How granular the matchup would be, I'm unsure, but if a computer was handling it it could be rescaled if it was too granular or not granular enough.

It's true secondary market isn't always an indicator, but it does correlate. It also means if you're running a 2k deck, you're not facing the scrub with a $30 deck with him thinking he's got a good shot.

And there was a reason I suggested the higher of a set point value or price.

If something comes up too strong, then you bump the point value up.

The point isn't an immediately balanced format, the point is better balance than no guidelines at all.

Also, to allow you to make weaker weight classes for a cheaper decks.

The cheaper ones would also have less fast mana, so people could gravitate towards the weight class that matches the type of match they want to play.

It's also true that if you left yourself no wiggle room, you could find yourself priced into the next weight class.

>>52216765

Hmmmm. Would it still have a minimal amount of cards?

Cause I could, in theory, find a cheap tactic, make a weird 16-card deck and fill it with just enough fetches and lands to make it work.

>>52216765

Question. How would you set up the base points?

I get the different "weight classes" idea, but wouldn't we need a "base deck" to decide how many points a decent deck should have?

>>52219069
Presumably still 40 for limited and 60 for constructed, at least in non Singleton variants.

>>52219216
The base numbers of points would be based on the number of points for a certain budget, since the point costs would be the higher of a selected value of some kind or an algorithmically determined value based on prices.

So let's say (for convenience' sake) prices round out to 4 points per dollar, assuming a 60 card deck.

You'd have 40pt, 80pt, 200pt, 400pt, 800pt, 1200pt, 1600pt etc.

Which benchmarks to use as the standards for each benchmark would be the thing to be determined, but I'd say, price wise, you'd want:

$10/$20/$50/$75/$100/$150/$200/$300/$500

I'm unsure what weight classes you'd want above that.

The meta for each, I imagine, would turn out quite differently.

And, I'm inclined to say it would be a legacy format, in terms of sets allowed, but maybe also modern and standard variants.

>>52219069
Math-wise, hypothetically I could see allowing a 30 card deck with double-point cards, and 2x any given card, at maximum. But I would want someone with better probability understanding than me to confirm that.

What a stupid fucking idea. You can just break a card combo, play it for a while, "price" goes up, you break another combo and the cycle continues. No stability, the basis is on what? If we take card actual monetary value as indicator, it's fuckign shit show, you would have to value every single card yourself to make it balanced on actual powerlevel. Then again, good luck doing that to all cards that would be playable in this kind of format and balance that out. This just makes everything unnecessary complicated and stupid.

>>52216765
Doesn't this mostly work out so that decks are fighting the same budget-tier? Isn't this just normal magic, where both players agree not to go over $60 when building (what my friends do)?

>>52220473
It would:
>Codify price tiers for decks (for playing with randos)
>Increase the point cost of overpowered cards that are dominating a meta to address the issue without resorting to bannings.
>automatically price out your decks on a unified scale when you build them online, allowing you to check a decklist's value.

>>52220367
>No stability
What, you think all of the cards will fluctuate all over the map, when prices are averaged over several months?
A few cards will change a lot, but most of them are much more stable than that.

Though, yes, stuff tends to go down in price once it rotates out of standard, if it's not seeing frequent play in modern and legacy.

I mean, sure, you might come up with a deck that breaks your tier. If it catches on and becomes too problematic, the most powerful cards in the deck go up in point cost, and you either have to nerf your deck or move into a higher point bracket.

So, can you explain a little more clearly how this is worse than any other format? Because I'm not seeing any way this is worse.

Yes, if you max out your points down to the last, you'll have issues if any of your cards go up (quarterly, semiannually, whatever). If you leave yourself a bit of wiggle room I doubt it would be an issue.

>>52221004
It sounds like it would take a lot of monitoring from objective sources to keep things balanced. Hard to do when presumably it would be a casual format and would take some time to accrue enough players to get useful data from.

Could there be some rules that around what determines whether a card/archetype is busted and gets its points cost increased?

E.g "In the most recent data segment, more than 75% of decks are playing Skullclamp. Skullclamp's point cost has been increased by 50%"

An app or web page would be the most effective way to run this kind of thing, I think. Players will need to access a database for the point costs anyway, if you can get them building decklists in the same spot, that gives you some data to work with.

>>52216765
Looks like he's cumming fire.

>>52216765
>Point values are determined based on the higher of: a set value, or the average price of a card over a couple months period.

This seems like a terrible idea because the price of cards is determined by demand (and market manipulation, but that's for another thread) but the demand for a card is not determined by its utility in-game. Archangel Avacyn sees absolutely zero play in competitive formats, but is worth real money because angel nerds and casual players find the card attractive. Some cards have only minor utility but were printed in such small numbers that the inflation of their price is due to availability, p3k for example.

Further, what about decks that are competitive but are very cheap? Pauper affinity barely runs any expensive cards but for the eggs but there are no cards worth more than a dollar.

Why even bother with weight classes? You know the format would be composed exclusively of decks for the very top and bottom clases.

Also if the idea was to compensate for budget you probably shouldn't make a format where someone can snap ban your deck by buying out its combo pieces