(I wrote this a few months ago, but for some reason never finished/posted it. Here it is now in all its incomplete glory.)

Have WotC’s hands been tied by the fact that Modern has been so successful that people will lose their collective minds if they were to introduce a new format? Modern was introduced in 2011 and has sets going back to 2003, so eight years worth of sets. It is now 2018, so seven years. The Modern card pool has approxomately doubled in size since the formats introuction.

One of the driving forces behind the creation of the format was the cost of building a deck in Legacy. At that time, building a Legacy deck cost about $1000, which was prohibitively expensive for many people plus the reserved list imposed a tax on the coast of some Legacy essentials (principly dual lands, but also Lion’s Eye Diamond and City of Traitors among other things). How did Wizards attempt to solve this problem? Well, Extended existed as a sort of landing pad for your rotating Standard cards, but no one wanted to play it as by the end it basically encapsulated some Standard formats that no one enjoyed.

So how much does a Modern deck cost today? If you said “about $1000” then give yourself a pat on the back. Why is this relevant? Well, Wizards solved the cost problem for playing Legacy by creating Modern, so why wouldn’t they solve the Modern cost problem by creating another new format? On a couple of occassions Mark Rosewater has said on Blogatog that a new format will happen.

I think Wizards intention with the Masters formats has been not to drive down the price of Modern, but rather to keep it acheivable at least until such time as they’re ready to introduce another format. So what might that timeline look like? Well, if you think that cards are getting too expensive now then you should probably hang on to your hats. My assumption is that they’d want a similarly large card pool as they had when creating Modern, so about 8 years. My other assumption is that they won’t want the format to include fetch lands. Fetches have some unpleasant properties in that they take a lot of time up due to all the shuffling and they feed the graveyard too efficiently (Delve says ‘Hi!’) so they won’t want to include them in any new format.

The last time the fetches were legal in Standard was Khans block in 2014. That makes the likely first set of a hypothetical new format to be Magic Origins from July 2015. You could probably also call Fate Reforged a dark horse candidate for the first set since it was a small set designed to be drafted with Dragons of Tarkir, but I think it’s unlikely that they’d include only part of a block.