Is Premodern the best home to avoid Universes Beyond?

In my previous article, I mentioned the possibility of a format focused on Universes Beyond and the challenges that this scenario could have in being established. One of the factors that I intentionally did not mention was “public resistance”.

While there are many people who do not care about Universes Beyond and/or who favor ​​crossovers with Magic: The Gathering, there is also a portion of players who loathe the idea of ​​Magic losing its sense of identity by sharing too much space with other brands and franchises. These are people who, regardless of recent events, prefer and miss Magic in its roots — or at least a Magic that is set only in the various planes of the game's Multiverse.

There is no value judgment to be made about each person's preferences. Magic is for everyone: from those who looked at the Final Fantasy Starter Kit and decided to start playing it, and to those who are so old school that they saw a Black Lotus opened in a booster pack.

As long as we can be kind and respectful to others — a challenge in the age of social media, I know — it doesn’t matter if we prefer to play Spider-Man at our Commander tables, or if we want to avoid consuming that type of product and prefer “traditional Magic.”

The demand for a place without Universes Beyond is there. Let’s face it, Wizards is not interested in listening to this demographic commercially, and I’ve often said in our videos that if the idea of ​​Universes Beyond seems inconceivable to you, the moment they entered Standard was the point where you should reconsider your relationship with Magic and evaluate whether another card game can offer you the same value in terms of gameplay (I, personally, recommend Flesh and Blood to anyone who misses Magic’s roots).

But humans are complex. Not every decision is as abstract as “if a game no longer meets my expectations, I’ll stop playing it”. Magic has been around for 30 years, and there are people who have been passionate about this TCG for over a decade, maybe more than two. Abandoning a “relationship” of such a long time because “I don’t recognize the game anymore” is difficult, and perhaps people don’t want to abandon it, they just want to find their place in it.

A space without Universes Beyond. A place where Hasbro’s whims aiming to maximize profits don’t have as much impact on your enjoyment of the game, a space where the consumer has more control over what they want to consume or not, where power creep isn’t so discrepant, and the absurdity is limited only to the lore of Magic: The Gathering itself. There’s a reason why there are so many alternative formats that try to exclude Universes Beyond or Horizons sets.

Among them, there is one that, according to the many comments we received on our YouTube videos when we discussed Universes Beyond, seems to be the best possible space for those who want to play without crossovers and remove Wizards of the Coast's market decisions from the equation: Premodern.

There are several alternative formats in Magic. From Oldschool 93/94 where players can only use cards from that era, to Commander variants like Conquest or versions based on the cost of the decks, as well as formats that try to exclude things that have substantially changed the game: “Horizonless” Modern is an example of such formats, but the talk about a “Pioneer without Beyond” has been around since the first day Wizards announced that crossover sets would be Standard-legal.

Since none of these formats are official, players can do whatever they want with them. They’re not unlike the idea of ​​gathering around a Commander table and deciding on a bracket for everyone to play, an agreement among the participants of what’s desirable and enjoyable for a game. But that same agreement can sometimes lack charm: most of these formats that try to exclude certain sets without any specific purpose other than “I don’t like this, so I don’t play it,” which is no different from the person who refuses to sit at a Commander table because they “don’t like Commander X that player Y is using” — that doesn’t seem appealing to a wider demographic since it comes across as childish or selfish.

This is where Premodern sets itself apart. In case you’re not familiar, Premodern is a format where only cards released between Fourth Edition and Scourge are legal, and any sets after Eighth Edition — when Magic changed its frame — are not legal. In addition, it has an extensive list of banned cards:

Despite encompassing and having received more attention from the community due to Wizards' recent decisions, it is not in the genesis of the format to be a creation of "who doesn't like X or Y" — it has its own purpose: to allow players to use the old cards, which predate the change in the game's frames that occurred with Eighth Edition. A place to revive your Psychatog, play with that famous Madness deck, test Goblins and Elves, among a dozen other possibilities. Excluding Universes Beyond is a consequence, not a purpose.

One of the biggest attractions of playing Magic is discovering new ways to use cards. Despite Premodern restricting the number of legal cards, the format is extremely diverse, with no deck among the most famous reaching more than 10% average in the Metagame.

Obviously, like every competitive scenario, Premodern has its range of best decks, or most popular choices among players due to ease of access to cards, ease of playing with the list, or even mere nostalgia.

This also opens up a lot of room for innovation, exploring areas that don't yet exist, and looking for a list for your Metagame or, who knows, for the next "Tier 1" — the idea of ​​mixing Terravore with Oath of Druids to improve the consistency of Terrageddon was a recent innovation compared to other archetypes, and there may be a lot more to discover beyond these interactions.

The format also has a lot of room for nostalgia, or for exploring archetypes that, when you started playing, no longer existed. A common example is the Madness deck: many started playing Magic in the last decade, and therefore had no contact with one of the archetypes that, today, is one of the most accessible in the Metagame if you don't run Survival of the Fittest, while sharing all the tools that made it a real strategy in the 2000s.

Psychatog, which consecrated Carlos Romão as world champion in 2002, also has its place in the format and, even though it is not as competitive as a Stiflenought, its accessibility allows you to build it and experiment with the deck, making changes according to the needs of your scenario.

In a way, this stage of Premodern today reminds me of when I first discovered Pauper. At the time, Magic Online Challenges already existed, and the format was on the rise in Brazil due to a mix of the beginning of the country's financial crisis combined with the desire to play a “cheaper” Magic.

While Mono Black Control was the most popular deck for a few years, the expansion into a scenario gradually narrowed the Metagame, but there was still plenty of room to innovate in various ways, as we saw for years as cards like Battle Screech and Palace Sentinels gained more traction, or when Faeries started to make a splash to Skred and Lightning Bolt, and a dozen other changes that occurred throughout the years, both through downshifts and the opportunity to explore old cards.

With Premodern growing in popularity, there is likely to be a chance for players around the world to find new ways to explore cards and interactions, making it an excellent space to innovate at this time.

This growth comes with a challenge: when I started in Pauper and when I organized events for the format, one of my biggest rhetorics to convince players was how cheap the format was. Today, Pauper is still technically cheap, but cards like Snuff Out, Dust to Dust, or anything that gets played a lot now cost more than half of what I was saying eight years ago, which is what you need to build an entire deck.

As Premodern becomes more popular, it has become common to see this movement around it in the market: in addition to old frame cards going for three times or more the price of a more recent version of it for mere aesthetics, there are several cards that have never been reprinted outside their original release and that can go up or have already gone up in price for playing in a deck of the format, even if it is a Tier 2 or 3.

The singles market in Magic is turbulent, especially for old stuff. The Reserved List has its prices for a reason — the list itself was created for this reason — and it is natural that other staples with low availability in the market end up facing

However, one relevant point when considering the costs of Premodern is how comparable they are to, say, playing Standard. With six releases per year, the cost of keeping a Standard deck up to date has increased considerably, and the increased value of Universes Beyond products has caused singles prices to skyrocket to levels previously only seen for specific staples like Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, or cards from the Modern Horizons series.

Depending on your deck of choice, it will certainly be cheaper than playing Standard, but the same may not be true if your deck of choice includes a lot of cards from the Reserved List. Staples like Survival of the Fittest or Phyrexian Dreadnought are some of the main examples of pieces from Tier 1 or widely known decks that can be very difficult to acquire even in their gold-bordered version, which are technically legal in the format — Perhaps, the Greed meme shouldn't be applied only to Wizards of the Coast.

The argument that is often heard in the Legacy community also applies to Premodern in these cases and should be considered: is it better to invest in a Sheoldred, the Apocalypse set and have it lose value two years after its release, or use this cost to buy a timeless staple that will retain its market value because there is no reprint of it?

Personally, I'm very critical of seeing card games as investment in this way, but this is the reality we've been living in since Chronicles, so ingrained in the genesis of the community and the game itself that we'll hardly be able to change this reasoning — and in this world of card games as it is and how communities like to see the hobby as financial buffers or investments, the logic that "Reserved List retains value" is applicable.

Whether you're a Final Fantasy fan who considers MTG x FF the best set of all time, or someone who says that "Magic has become Fortnite" (it's closer to Funko), Premodern has something for you: an interesting Metagame, a coherent way to create an alternative format, and a broad creative landscape begging to be explored.

But it certainly has a special place for you if you don't agree with Magic's most recent changes and Wizards of the Coast's attitudes: the company has no power over the format, and it would hardly be in its commercial interest to turn Premodern into an official format like they did with Pauper. It doesn't sell products, and if it does, it will have to be in a reprint set that, let's face it, would help the community more than it would hurt in any other way.

The format is immune to anything that might happen. It is timeless while maintaining a sense of identity that is unique to it and goes far beyond "I don't like playing this." It has charm, the games are challenging, the decks are fun, and its challenges — mostly financial — are a natural consequence of the culture that the Magic community itself has created over three decades. And these, with the right agreements, can be addressed in creative ways by each local community.

I sincerely hope that Premodern is a successful format, and who knows, in a few years we might be able to imagine several scenarios and national championships taking place around the world in a format that embraces anyone willing to learn and admire Magic's history.

If you want to know more about Premodern, we have a guide to the format's staples and a 2024 Tier List. We also have some cheap decklists for those who wish to start in the format.

Thanks for reading!