Fan-made format, meant to be a "companion format" to Premodern "Extended 2.0"

[JLewis89]

Hey everyone,

I was recently made aware of the format Premodern in my search for alternative formats to play, as I'm not really in a spot financially to get BACK into Legacy (played it before, but sold most of my staples, like a dunce), and Modern jist doesn't now, and never has honestly, done it for me.

Upon finding Premodern, I was immediately struck by how similar it is in some respects to a made-up format some friends and I have been playing for awhile that we were calling "Old Extended". To make it short, this was a format I made up due to my love for the Extended format of old (think around '07-'09 in particular), before Wizards changed it drastically into what people began to call "New" Extended, and then ultimately retiring it for Modern.

I understand the appeal of Modern for a lot of people, but right from the very genesis of the format it just wasn't one I enjoyed PERSONALLY. It has access to many of the sets/blocks I love, but none of the cards that by being legal in Extended made that format so much fun in my opinion. Couple with that the fact the available card pool goes on for quite a few years after what I'd prefer (again, I know it's called "Modern" for that reason. It's just about personal taste for me).

Where this "Old Extended" format we play is similar to Premodern is that is harbors roughly the same amount of available sets, and sort of occupies what I'd consider to be the next "epoch", or "era" of Magic history. We have Old Extended starting with the Invasion block and 7th Edition, and going all the way to Alara block and 10th Edition. With a few, small tweaks here and there, Old Extended would possess EXACTLY the same number of available sets, and occupy even moreso the next "age of Magic history". Some slight overlap with both Premodern AND Modern, which I think makes it fit quite snugly in between both, and has it offering up a format for players who are perhaps like my friends and I, who haven't quite been able to dial down a format where we feel our favored cards and deck archetypes of the past get a place to shine and see play again.

With my discovery of Premodern, and realizing that maybe we've been on to something here, I've written a sort of "format primer" for what I shall be deeming "Extended 2.0"...because "Old Extended", even though quite fitting for what the format is and the inspiration behind it, is just NOT a very flattering name 😂 It's my hope as well that by naming it such, people who aren't familiar with the Extended format of years past may look into it and find something they enjoy reading about, or researching. Researching old Magic tournaments and metas is something I've always enjoyed, I reckon many of you fall into that category as well.

If this sounds like something any of you would be interested in, I'd love to post the primer here. All I ask is that if you repost it anywhere that you give me credit for writing the primer (my name is Jonathan Lewis). It contains the legal sets and initial Banned List, as well as the reasons for and against banning certain cards and not banning others, and a little recap of why this is meant to be a sort of "companion" format to Premodern. I'd like to stress that even though I'm mentioning Premodern quite a bit, it's only to show the comparison between the sets that are legal and how I hope we've done a decent job at filling the next, logical "format gap" remaining between Premodern and Modern...it is in NO WAY meant to compete with, say people should play this over that, etc etc...I have all the respect in the world for what Premodern has become and am enjoying it myself since happening upon it!

Anyways, enough rambling lol. If anyone would like to read the primer I can post it. 👍