Why don't I play Standard?

 This is a legitimate question. So instead of reflecting on it in hopes of coming to a personal answer, I'm going to write down my train of thought then post it on twitter for clout.

 The first thing that comes to mind is the most recent standard RCQ season. Due to a lack of cards, standard formats are often homogenized towards midrange strategies. Additionally, cards are so unfocused and do too many things, even playing against aggressive decks feels like a midrange mirror match. I don't like playing creatures. I hate this stupid design choice we've had since maybe a year after I started playing the game where every good creature went from being either/or to having it all. I don't like stapling spells onto creatures that cost less than five or six mana. I don't want my creatures to have modality; if I am going to commit something to the board, I want that card to be slotted into my deck as a commitment, not as something that can do two or three other things. I don't want my aggressive creatures to function as a topdeck. I want my control bomb to be bad early. Not every creature needs to float. Every creature feels like it draws cards. And we keep getting creatures like this:

You may notice one GLARING omission from the list. Where is Sheoldred, the Apocalypse?! Well... she's fine. She doesn't really draw cards. She has good stats for the cost. I'm fine with an ability that allows her to trade well, she does cost four mana. Her ability is strong, but pushes us to finish games, while also acting as something which either top-ends aggro decks, stretching removal, or a decent card in midrange, or as a thing for control to protect for however long it takes to get there. It doesn't create card advantage. It dies to removal, easily. It doesn't even get a trigger if its a control mirror, and it's legitimately difficult to turn into a 2-for-1. This is what I want my pushed four drop to look like. What about Atraxa, Grand Unifier? Sure, I mean the card draws cards, but it also costs seven. I'm cool with people drawing a bunch of cards of their stabilizer on seven. It might be a bit too much if reanimator was better... but combo decks suck.

 I like combo. I don't even necessarily want to play it. I think combo decks are good at targeting overrepresented archetypes and beating them to even out formats. For example, we see Green in Pioneer, which targets midrange decks while being worse (still broken pls ban, but worse) against aggressive decks and control strategies. In Legacy, we see Reanimator, which can be modally designed to target whichever archetype we find necessary. In modern, combo is a bit worse since the advent of scam, but we still see decks like Yawg that target midrange/control decks, and decks like Creativity, which prey on aggro and midrange. I think standard needs combo to balance it out, or else you never play any concession cards, and instead just jam the best creatures on curve in your aggro deck, or jam some amount of removal that costs one or two mana and the best creatures that cost 3-6 mana in your "control" (midrange) deck. The lack of concessions or accounting for people's individual game plans because we are all playing midrange soup is so damn boring. I want to cast cards like Memory Deluge and not feel like I should have played Fable of the Mirror Breaker and drawn effectively as many cards with the same amount of selection. I think cards like Invoke Despair are really sweet when they're playable, but feel way worse when they're at the top end of a midrange mirror, and whoever draws more of this one card just wins.

 I do think things have improved recently. Over the past five years or so we've gone from cards that are just straight up broken in eternal formats, to formats inundated with two-for-ones on curve, to the present, where we have cards that make more sense. The newest adventures are much less egregious than previous ones; most of them are not tempo-positive enough on the spell side to really feel stupid, or in the case of the enchantment ones, do not outright generate value by themselves. When I look at a deck like this one:

 I think I am happy with this kind of list. Maybe happy isn't the right word. I am not immediately turned off. Sure, its that midrange soup I was talking about, but the cards don't look EXTREMELY swingy, and most of the deck seems powerful without looking ridiculous. I am legitimately concerned that most of the sideboard appears to be mainboard cards that we are just going to change around the numbers on, which will lead to games that feel identical. I recall the standard formats I previously played; formats whose lists were unimaginably broken compared to this one. If anything, this reminds me of those Abzan Midrange decks from 2014-2017 which I hated. Not because their play pattern was awful, but just because nothing about that deck ever seemed to change in those four years. When recalling some of the standard formats I have played since this deck is really the best deck, and seems much cooler. Here's a list of some of the previous years top standard decks. I have bolded the lists I found either outright too powerful, or maybe a bit too mechanically pushed/long lasting.

2017 - GUx Energy, Ramunap Red, Temur Energy ft. Scarab God, UW Gift

2018 - Grixis Energy, GB Snek, RWx Vehicles, RB Aggro, Wx Weenie, Izzet Drakes/Phoenix variants

2019- GU Midrange, Field of the Dead midrange/control/combo/Golos Fires, UG Nexus, Red Frenzy

 Perhaps I just have a bad taste in my mouth because of the standard format I last played  following the release of Throne of Eldraine, Guilds, and WAR. Hydroid Krasis is, in my opinion, one of the most egregiously pushed cards of all time, and rendered control almost completely unplayable until the advent of Field of the Dead, which in turn rendered non-field control decks unplayable. Energy was clearly a problematic mechanic, as it largely would not play new cards except the most pushed possible busted mythics. I actually liked the vehicles and Ramunap Red and Steam-Kin Red decks, as they all play very fair magic, and were malleable to crush any of the other decks. I haven't even mentioned the homogenization resulting from the banned cards such as Oko, Thief of Crowns or Once Upon a Time. I was thinking about making a list of "egregious staples" from 2019 similar to those cards, but I think that it is just so much more obvious which cards are more broken, and I don't need to relive the Oko experience.

 I'm going to play this format. The fact is, I have ambitions of making the Pro Tour again (and again, and again). But I just... I dunno, man, I just have so much fun playing the other formats comparatively, I don't know if I'll even be able to find standard fun enough to jam like I jam modern, or even how I play pioneer (which, when you aren't playing a game with monogreen in it, is usually fun). Arena feels like complete dogwater to build decks in, standard leagues rarely fire on mtgo. I definitely want to be the best magic player that I can, but I've been burned by standard so often before, not even by rotation, but by outright bans, dumb cards, and strategies invalidating my deck. It's been almost a 6 months since I've played a standard deck and I STILL feel tired of it, I strictly played a few RCQs for San Diego, and played some sides at that event after missing qualification, and I just don't know if I have it in me to really get good at the format again.

 As for the article by Billy Jensen, I see that WOTC is making an effort. I will applaud any positive change Wizards makes with the goal of making competitive magic a better place to be. And I recognize that these are the first steps in what is hopefully a long process which also affects card design... but as someone who plays an awful lot of paper magic, I just don't know if this is going to be enough. I personally feel like losing a format is usually the result of a vicious cycle, and what needs to happen is there needs to be some reason for people to pick up and play cards in standard in paper in order to make their friends play standard in paper. I just don't know how you sell that to a playerbase right now. I will say if Standard was cheaper than ever, I would get that, but it really isn't. It seems pretty close, the things really keeping that GB deck from being sub $200 is just Sheoldred, basically.  The massive amount of alternate printings and full art treatments and yugioh rarities have given us an abundance of a lot of the cards we would need for standard and importantly, rare cycles of lands for less than $2 each. I think event decks would be an excellent thing to put out, especially considering the rotation, they would probably a good way to inject the format with some new players and give them a starting point.