Pioneer: Let's talk about the format's future

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Pioneer is the most controversial format in Magic: The Gathering. Born out of nowhere, it has undergone a series of very abrupt changes or the lack thereof in a confusing space of time - from the weekly banlists to the pandemic, from the eight months in which its Metagame was taken over by three combos and which culminated in the banning of Inverter of Truth, Walking Ballista and Underworld Breach, through a year where the format seemed virtually dead and gained notoriety the following year with the RCQ seasons, which were also later profaned by a competitive scene oppressed by cards like Vein Ripper + Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord and Amalia Benavides Aguirre + Wildgrowth Walker.

If Pioneer ever ceases to exist, it will be named as the format that failed and many will try to point out the reasons for its failure. But there is not just one reason: it fails due to its environment and circumstances - many of which are related to Wizards of the Coast's actions regarding its management and the launch of new products.

We can also point to other factors: the format doesn't generate as much revenue as others, its player base is notoriously more fragile and less engaged than Modern, and we can even point fingers at content creators and seasoned players for constantly criticizing and complaining about the format; sometimes with reason and other times just out of free hate.

The fact is that, without a competitive schedule for 2025, Pioneer becomes an unpopular format. There is no reason to play it, there is no support, and much less content that makes it more attractive than Modern (a large card pool with a diversity of strategies) or Pauper (an accessible format in which you don't need to spend a lot of money) or Standard (a more balanced format that now rotates more slowly). For practical purposes, it is now what Extended once was.

The “burial” mood shouldn’t last for long, but in this article I’m sharing my thoughts of the events that culminated in the decision not to include Pioneer as a format for RCs and RCQs next year and, consequently, how this could change it forever or might even kill it as a competitive mode.

Since its announcement, Pioneer has been a strange format: it met a demand that, technically, didn’t exist, but that excited many players due to the possibility of playing with staples from past Standard that they liked. The concept of an “eternal format without Fetch Lands” was also attractive and, in the first weeks, with recurring banlist updates, the format became a race between “who could build the most broken deck first”.

Over time, the Metagame stabilized, and we began to see signs of a stable and diverse format - it only took one release for everything to change: Theros Beyond Death brought Thassa’s Oracle, Heliod, Sun-Crowned and Underworld Breach - these three, combined with a global pandemic, were the core of where Pioneer went wrong.

It is no exaggeration to say that the pandemic changed the way we consume Magic: Commander exploded, MTGArena solidified itself as a competitive platform, several independent online tournaments emerged, and all formats - without exception - faced the challenge of maintaining their dedicated player bases in a time when in-person games were not possible.

Pioneer never had this solid player base to begin with because the format was too young before the pandemic and didn't have the space to take root in competitive Magic. Modern, for example, has a community built up since 2011 and people dedicated to the format in a way that its younger sibling never will - for the most part, when Modern Horizons 2 came out in the middle of the pandemic, they rushed to get their Ragavans, Elementals, and whatever other cards they needed to stay current despite the lack of tabletop play. Yes, complaining every day about MH's power creep, but still buying cards to update their decks.

On the other hand, the newer format spent almost eight months stuck in a Metagame where the three best decks in the format were combos released in the most recent pre-pandemic set and without any signs of diversity. Those who played any of them before the lockdown lost their staples, and those who had other lists were not interested in keeping up to date with the format when there were no in-person games in it and when the Challenges Metagame - the only source of information about the Pioneer competitive scene at the time - always showed an environment polarized around a few decks.

With Wizards' more incisive history of bans with Standard and which, occasionally, also came with changes to Pioneer (Balustrade Spy and Undercity Informer are examples), no one felt safe investing on it during the pandemic, especially when we didn't know when it would become relevant again, or if it would even have a future.

Post-lockdown, it's easier to count the number of times the Pioneer Metagame was polarized than the times when its environment was healthy. The first tabletop Pioneer tournaments I played post-vaccination already featured a clear best deck: Izzet Phoenix, which eventually led to the banning of Expressive Iteration.

A while later, Winota, Joiner of Forces found the cards it needed to break the format in Innistrad: Midnight Hunt and Innistrad: Crimson Vow - specifically, the combination of Tovolar’s ​​Huntmaster with Blade Historian and a dozen other humans released with efficient ETBs, such as Brutal Cathar. Again, another Metagame polarized around one deck vs. other archetypes that had some chance of beating it.

A few months passed and Winota was banned. The Metagame was safe again - except it wasn't - in the confines of a visually diverse environment, Pioneer had essentially three top archetypes: Izzet Phoenix, Rakdos Midrange, and Mono Green Devotion. Yes, there was room for other decks, but there was also a perception that these three were way ahead of the rest of the format.

It took another broken deck - Four-Color Discover - to make Wizards look at Pioneer again and realize that there was something wrong with it beyond the obvious aggressor of the Metagame at the time. The result was the banning of Geological Appraiser for the speed with which its mechanics won games and the banning of Karn, the Great Creator for the ease of access to the toolbox it offered.

But players didn't even have the opportunity to enjoy a different Metagame for a long time: Amalia Benavides Aguirre had already started to grow and push all Aggro away from the competitive Metagame due to her ability to gain absurd amounts of life. In fact, the unban of Smuggler's Copter, which generated a lot of hype at the time, ended up not making much of a difference in these archetypes because it was not possible to compete with an infinite life combo.

Two months later, Murders at Karlov Manor was released and, with it, another combo took over Pioneer: Rakdos Vampires with Vein Ripper, a card that many overlooked during the spoiler season, but which won the Pro Tour in the hands of Seth Manfield and showed how, sometimes, all it takes is a creature big enough on the third turn to virtually win, even if it still takes two or three combats to close the game.

Once again, Pioneer went from February to August without any direct interventions, with Wizards only pointing out that they were keeping an eye on Abzan Amalia while she, along with Rakdos Vampires, polarized things to levels similar to those we saw with Inverter of Truth - in some Challenges, Vampires had over 60% share in the Top 32. The format was broken, and it took a long time for Wizards to take action.

Now, the results of this turbulent history appear: Pioneer is not a popular format. On MTGArena, it, in its Explorer variant, is less popular than Historic and Timeless despite having the same advantages as Standard of being a competitive environment where players can train on the digital platform for their tabletop tournaments - and without the constant need for investment in wildcards that Standard, due to its rotating nature, offers.

This doesn't happen overnight. There was poor management of the format, and it's not going to be fixed any time soon. And, of course, we can point the blame entirely at Wizards of the Coast, but is that all?

We can blame Wizards of the Coast for all the poor management of competitive formats. We can even consider how the company adopted a policy of keeping certain cards from a set legal for some time in formats, despite them presenting troublesome patterns due to the “longevity” of the product released.

Some cases are so extreme that they require quick interventions: Geological Appraiser and Nadu, Winged Wisdom are good examples of these situations - cards whose advantage in the game is so absurd that keeping them in competitive play is an offense to the formats. On the other hand, there are cases like Amalia Benavides Aguirre, whose combo presented terrible gameplay experiences in the competitive scene and, even so, remained in Pioneer for almost a year.

We can hold Wizards accountable for these bad decisions that directly affected Pioneer, just as we can hold them accountable for taking too long to take action and/or not releasing cards considering the format's health - they just come in, do their damage, and get banned later. If this logic has been avoided for Standard because it breaks player's trust in the format, the same applies to Pioneer.

Unlike Standard, however, things only change through bans. If a Vein Ripper breaks the Metagame with Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord, it will remain broken until more efficient answers come out, until the next more broken thing comes along, or until Wizards takes action. And unlike in the past, players are not willing to wait.

There was a time when Standard was the competitive format. If you wanted to play at your local store, win tournaments, and participate in bigger things, you had to play Standard, and that logic is, by all accounts, the best possible for competitive Magic.

Standard is the showcase format of Magic: The Gathering. For decades, everything was about it, and consequently, it helped balance the game's ecosystem. Today, Modern Horizons and Commander products have different mechanics to the eternal formats, but for Pioneer, that relationship still applies, and it benefits from Standard being the Pro Tour format and even the RCs - but that shouldn't leave it stuck in limbo. But it does, and there's not much that can be done about it.

If Wizards decides to cut Standard, it's going against its primary goal of selling products to players. The game then starts to designate more cards to impact non-rotating scenarios, power creep increases and Magic's design starts to resemble that of other TCGs where power creep is a common cause of bans and unhealthy Metagames on a monthly basis - for the sake of the game's ecosystem and even if it is no longer popular on paper, Magic needs Standard.

In such an ecosystem, Pioneer plays an essential role: to encourage players to invest in Standard because, at the end of the day, they can later use most of these staples in another format. Gone, over the years, are the days when the discrepancy between the older Pioneer sets caused the format to be “old cards + some new cards”, and today it is more common to combine “new cards + old staples”.

Just look at Standard from the last two seasons. Decks like Rakdos Midrange in Pioneer had more in common with Standard from that season than they did with archetypes from years before the format's inception, with staples like Bloodtithe Harvester and Sheoldred, the Apocalypse.

The same goes for the current Prowess versions of both formats that rely on Heartfire Hero and Slickshot Show-Off - and in other tiers, the Mono Black Slasher that has been growing in Pioneer has a two-card combo that is currently legal in Standard!

We also have the range of strategies that run through this rule, basically composed of Pioneer staples that haven't been in Standard for many years, but the relationship between the individual power level of the most recent cards compared to the new ones tends to create smaller discrepancies between the most recent archetypes and the ones that have been established for many years, thus creating a mutually beneficial relationship between those who invest in Standard and those who want to play Pioneer - both for those who migrate from one format to another and for those who want to sell their cards after the rotation.

Standard has been going through a revitalization that involves several changes to make it competitively relevant in local stores. The main reason for this need is the fact that Magic Arena meets all the needs that a player of this format has while being potentially free to play - in short, the format suffers from the same tendency that the gaming industry has suffered with the “as a service” genre, where there are more advantages for players who dedicate a few hours to the game and earn free rewards (in this case, coins to play drafts or purchase boosters) than for players willing to spend money on a product like AAA video game titles in the $60 range or, for the same amount, Magic: The Gathering singles and boosters to build their Standard decks.

The motivation, therefore, needs to be external. Increasing the longevity of cards was a first step in this direction because it increases the security of players in buying the most recent set to play the format, but it’s not the only insecurity that players have - they need an environment to play in. Stores need to be interested in Standard, and you can’t build that interest without giving people a reason to play a format - RCQs have that purpose, Pro Tours have that purpose.

It’s a distant memory now, but every Magic player from the last 20 years used to watch the Pro Tour of the current expansion - most of the time in the Standard format - closely to see what new things the pros were bringing with the cards in the set. Archetypes like Aristocrats and Caw-Blade were originally born from this trend.

Today, with the advent of social media, this practice almost no longer exists because the “secret” of a decklist is very difficult to keep when the concept of the hive mind has expanded to the point where everyone is a mass communicator.

Now, in a post-pandemic world where the foundation of Standard has collapsed because there were no tabletop games and many decided to permanently migrate to MTGArena, Wizards is trying to rebuild the format's castle and put it back at the core, but this naturally comes at the expense of Pioneer because the measures to keep Standard interesting go through releases and capitalizing on them in the competitive scene.

In this universe where a rotating format matters and remains at the core of competitive play, Pioneer stops competing with it and returns to its origins as the place where Standard players can use the cards that rotate, but starts competing with another format in a war that it has no chance of winning.

Modern has everything Pioneer lacks in every sphere: a solid player base for over a decade, a strong competitive scene that is attractive to North American, European and Japanese audiences, references or legality to some of the most beloved cards in the history and, of course, a category of products dedicated to it that make it financially profitable - and due to the high financial investment to enter the format, players are very loyal to Modern.

It is also the favorite format for many content creators and its controversies, usually caused by Horizons sets, are less frequent than those that occur with Standard releases, although these also cause occasional headaches in the Metagame.

In this sense, which non-rotating scenario seems more attractive? For a while now, I've seen many people mention that Pioneer was a more inviting format than Modern, but for every one of them, there were two who claimed that it was the worst competitive format in Magic because it lacked diversity or because the format is too stale.

The explanation is that many archetypes in Pioneer tend to stay at the top for a long time. And they're not wrong: Izzet Phoenix is ​​the best deck since Expressive Iteration, Rakdos Midrange remained at the top of the Metagame for almost two years until it suffered a recent decline, and Mono Green Devotion was at the top until Karn, the Great Creator was banned - the Magic audience, which previously valued this stability in competitive play, no longer finds it an attractive plus.

Enter Modern Horizons: a series of expansions made exclusively for the eternal formats without affecting Standard, with a higher power level to impact scenarios that already have, by nature, a very strong card pool. Modern Horizons 3, like its predecessor, is quite emblematic of this process because it completely changed the format's Metagame: archetypes like Rakdos Midrange, Izzet Murktide and Cascade were gone, in favor of several variants of Eldrazi, Boros Energy and, until it was banned, combos of Nadu, Winged Wisdom and control lists based on Necrodominance or Wrath of the Skies, not to mention the number of staples for multiple decks that were introduced: Galvanic Discharge, Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury, Ajani, Nacatl Pariah, Psychic Frog, among others.

While there is a vocal minority that claims “Modern Horizons ruined Modern”, the majority of players saw the changes as an opportunity to get interested in the format again. The number of people coming into their local stores to compete in Modern events quickly outnumbered those in Pioneer—slowly, stores that had Pioneer as a weekly event began replacing it, on demand, with Modern.

Players have left a message, and it’s very clear: “We like new things.”. Gone are the days when having a Tarmogoyf play set and a base of cards like Dark Confidant and other cards to build Jund was a safe and mostly timeless investment, but the benefit of the “forced rotation” created by these sets is that the formats remain fresh, fun, and innovative—a price most are willing to pay to enjoy Magic: The Gathering at its core as a game of constant change. The machine is working as well as it has ever been.

Universes Beyond makes 2025 an important year for Modern

Magic is a product to be sold, regardless of the personal feelings players have about the game. The choice to increase Modern seasons was not thoughtless: Universes Beyond will have two of its biggest releases in 2025 with Final Fantasy and Marvel. While the fate of the Marvel set is still uncertain, everything indicates that Final Fantasy will receive the same treatment as Lord of the Rings, with Modern-legal booster sets, Commander decks, and other products.

Promoting competitive Modern at this time is, consequently, promoting marketing and hype around the upcoming Universes Beyond products. Perhaps even making them alongside Horizons sets, an annual release window for eternal formats, in addition to being a decision strongly approved by both a significant portion of the general Magic community and by influencers and content creators who, for the most part, use Modern as the main source for their videos and articles.

Finally, if there is no competitive mode planned for 2025, would this be a good time to try to fix Pioneer once and for all? Wizards can take advantage of the next year to make specific and surgical corrections to archetypes to balance the Metagame in attempts to make the format more popular and well-regarded by the community.

There is no ideal suggestion of where to start this change or even if it will happen. Pioneer, like every format, has archetypes with troublesome cards that, due to other archetypes with equally problematic cards, are put in check and their natural ecosystem is maintained that way - but if this environment is not inviting, what is the purpose of keeping it?

Today, it is proven that Pioneer only matters to most players during RC seasons. In Magic Arena, it is one of the least popular formats and Magic Online does not have the best metrics to define adherence in in-person games or planning for large events. Pauper, for example, is a popular format on paper and online, and this does not make it a competitive modality worthy of a Pro Tour or RC season.

To make Pioneer relevant, I believe that Wizards will need to make a series of bans or even unbans to align its expectations with those of the format they are trying to promote in 2025, Standard. This means that some decks will need to be banned once or twice, some play patterns will need to be abandoned, and the company will need to make more assertive changes in a short time frame to avoid long-term broken Metagames.

In addition, it will also be necessary to level the playing field between what is acceptable and what is not. Just as Modern is a scenario where it is ideal that games do not end before the fourth turn, what is the ideal of Pioneer? What goal and play pattern does Wizards want to promote with it? What attraction, besides “being a home for the post-rotation”, does the company intend to establish?

Without these goals, Pioneer will continue to fail, and I don't imagine it surviving for a season of RCs or Pro Tour in 2026 if there are no changes in the format's philosophy - its fate will be the same as the late Extended, also extinct after a series of questionable decisions and whose coffin was closed when Modern was born.

Now, by receiving more targeted support, Modern could suppress Pioneer and lead it to extinction due to a mix of public disinterest, lack of constant news and a Metagame perpetually unbalanced by any new release, leaving it up to Wizards - and the players and content creators who give it enough support to keep it alive - to decide what future they want for the format and if it has any space in the gears of the huge machine that makes up Magic: The Gathering as it heads into the next decade.

Thanks for reading.