I've been playing on and off since... checks wiki 2005, but I've only really started to pay attention to competitive formats for the past two years or so. I play a good bit of Commander as a casual hangout format. I've also bought into Modern this year with Tron and I've been having pretty decent success with that. I'd have to double-check my notes to be sure but I think I've been slightly above average at my store and got pretty lucky in the side events of the last MagicFest I went to.
I'm reasonably optimistic about Pioneer as a format. I think their decision to start with nothing banned but fetches is correct. For one, having all these broken cards back is exciting and for two, some of these cards were broken because there were no good answers to them at the time. Smuggler's Copter never actually faced Abrade, Emrakul didn't run into graveyard hate, and they only printed cards that removed counters from players after Energy was banned six feet under.
Also I think that Pioneer is better off than Frontier was. Frontier was an attempt by stores to create a similar format but it was started in 2016 with its first set released in 2014, so it was basically like Historic now: The just-rotated Standard. Pioneer being 2012 to 2019 means that there's been enough time to miss these cards and I think that's part of why most articles I've seen focused on resurrecting old Standard decks or porting Modern strategies over and not upgrading the most powerful decks of the Standard that just rotated out.
I'm reasonably optimistic about Pioneer as a format. I think their decision to start with nothing banned but fetches is correct. For one, having all these broken cards back is exciting and for two, some of these cards were broken because there were no good answers to them at the time. Smuggler's Copter never actually faced Abrade, Emrakul didn't run into graveyard hate, and they only printed cards that removed counters from players after Energy was banned six feet under.
Also I think that Pioneer is better off than Frontier was. Frontier was an attempt by stores to create a similar format but it was started in 2016 with its first set released in 2014, so it was basically like Historic now: The just-rotated Standard. Pioneer being 2012 to 2019 means that there's been enough time to miss these cards and I think that's part of why most articles I've seen focused on resurrecting old Standard decks or porting Modern strategies over and not upgrading the most powerful decks of the Standard that just rotated out.
