As I have responded to you many times on this, collectibility is in the eye of the beholder. Revised Underground Sea may not be a collectible in your eyes, but for the great majority of us who cannot afford a $5000 beta version, it is as collectible as we can get. We continue to go round and round on this. You only look at this through the eyes of a player with almost complete disregard to anyone who is a collector.
You think Wizards of the Coast is worried about someone suing them because a few of their several hundred dollar cards are temporarily only a couple hundred dollars, with still plenty of long-term value?
Also, as I stated earlier the artificial scarcity argument is patently false. Anyone who wants to buy these cards can do so on TCG or any other site. It isn't artificial scarcity that keeps people out of Legacy, it's price. If Wizards printed an EMA 2 with nothing but reserve list cards at $100/pack and essentially raised supply without decreasing price do you really believe that there would be a massive influx of players into Legacy?
Now who is disregarding the collectors? Also, $100 per pack would still have a pretty significant effect on price, unless it was an incredibly limited print run.
This is the world's most popular collectible card game
Depends on how you define "popular". Magic is the most played CCG, but Yu-Gi-Oh has the most cards sold.
That's a pretty small nitpick of semantics that really has no bearing on the overall argument I was making with that statement. Still, I would argue that having more players is infinitely more valuable than having more cards. More quantity does not = more collectible, right 90's comics and baseball cards?
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Legacy: TES
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
You think Wizards of the Coast is worried about someone suing them because a few of their several hundred dollar cards are temporarily only a couple hundred dollars, with still plenty of long-term value?
The point I was trying to make is that many people on this board think solely of the play-ability aspect of these cards with little to no thought on collectibility. The idea of suing Wizards has no bearing on the mindset of so many on this board. Lets set price aside for a minute and talk specifically about the collectible aspect of Magic. Can we agree that collectors play an important role in the overall scheme of the game? Second to that point, collectors want all sorts of different things. Its the reason foils came around, and now masterpieces and expeditions. There are a lot of people (myself included) that like to collect all sorts of cards from when we were young and playing for the first time. For me that was Unlimited and into revised. I have several duals from that era when I pulled them out of packs. They're severely beaten up, but I still have them. I have since bought more NM versions. I also have a bunch of random cards collected from back in the day. I still love my Rukh EggHell's Caretaker combo.
Now who is disregarding the collectors? Also, $100 per pack would still have a pretty significant effect on price, unless it was an incredibly limited print run.
I was proposing a hypothetical situation to disprove the argument about artificial scarcity being a reason people aren't getting into legacy. Again, the reason people aren't getting into Legacy is 100% price driven, not artificial scarcity. The scarcity argument is fallacy because any single person who wanted to buy into Legacy today could do so. The reason they don't is because of the cost of cards, not because they cannot be found.
I stated a $100 / pack as just a number sufficiently high to add supply while doing nothing to impact the cost of cards. I suppose a better way to have worded it would have been if Wizards created an EMA 2 set where the cost of a pack was equivalent to the EV (theoretically adding supply without decreasing card prices) of those cards in it, the problem for Legacy would be the same, as stated above.
sealteamfive: we've gone over a lot of this before, and you have several posts I want to rreply to...
1: Yes, we can agree that collectors are important. Can you agree that, if push comes to shove, WotC needs to prioritize players, who greatly outnumber collectors? Their current reprint policies create a lot of wealth for colloectors and the secondary market, but WotC doesn't see any of that money. Liberal reprints brings a chunk of that money directly to WotC in the form of pack sales. If they could create a perfect balance, great, but if they have to err, shouldn't they err on the side of "make the greatest number of people happy?"
2: Reprints do not affect collectibility. That was the point of bringing up the Alpha printings: they're collectible despite being reprinted into the ground. If you're a collector, you want the collectible version. If you don't care which version as long as you can play it, then you don't care. In this, I think the SDCC Planeswalkers and the Masterpieces are a positive thing. They create a highly-desirable version for collectors, but there are other, far more accessible versions for the players. The fact that there are millions of Mana Confluence out there doesn't stop the expedition version from being sought after. (Also, I pulled one from a pack, and it's BEAUTIFUL- but I'd get rid of it, I'm not a collector.)
3: Your example of $100 packs is ridiculous, because it wouldn't actually do anything about scarcity. Those packs wouldn't be opened heavily, and without anyone opening packs, you don't get more cards in circulation, and that means you made a grand gesture that accomplished nothing. A VMA where pack price = EV is similarly crazy, because EV fluctuates based on availability. unless you had a pack price that fluctuated constantly and was expected to steadily drop (good luck selling that to LGS's), it's unreasonable. If the pack pricve was CURRENT EV, it would be too high and lead to "nobody opens packs." If it was set where the EV was expected to settle, then you'd have "we can't keep these in stock, order more!" until saturation.
4: Just because someone says something is collectible, doesn't make it so. People can say that their Revised versions are collectibles, but that doesn't mean they are. Alphas and Betas are generally recognized as the collectible versions. i collect Seasinger I have around 150 of them, and grab them from bulk boxes whenever I can. But my say-so doesn't make Seasinger into a collectible. HOWEVER, Revised duals would still maintain a higher value than reprints (their collectibility is unchanged- see point 2).
5: Ebonclaw: You can preach as much as you like about "entitlement," but realize that it's a strawman. You aren't fighting the actual arguments, you're attacking the poster for being audacious enough to hold an opinion. It's difficult enough to hold an actual discussion about things like this without arbitrarily assigning motivations to other posters and then telling them why they're wrong for having those motivations. Unless you actually know them and can speak to what drives them, it's a waste of time to attack those points.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Just to be clear
With new mana symbol added to game,
Dual land with:
T:add 1 colorless mana.
Is considered as violating RL or not? Technicly, before change in mana symbols all lands gave this generic mana.
Did wizards said anything about something like this?
What i think: its not violating, because its different from underground river, but since i recently returned to game just to find out i missed such a big change maybe im wrong. Can someone help me in this matter?
Just to be clear
With new mana symbol added to game,
Dual land with:
T:add 1 colorless mana.
Is considered as violating RL or not? Technicly, before change in mana symbols all lands gave this generic mana.
Did wizards said anything about something like this?
What i think: its not violating, because its different from underground river, but since i recently returned to game just to find out i missed such a big change maybe im wrong. Can someone help me in this matter?
It does violate the reserved list.
There was an issue when reverberate was printed since its basically fork.
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pucatrade
big receipts
alpha mox emerald
beta time walk
4 goyfs received
3 liliana of the veil
4 karn liberated
3 force of will
4 grove of the burnwillows
snapcaster mage
3 horizon canopy
2 full art damnation
Just to be clear
With new mana symbol added to game,
Dual land with:
T:add 1 colorless mana.
Is considered as violating RL or not? Technicly, before change in mana symbols all lands gave this generic mana.
Did wizards said anything about something like this?
What i think: its not violating, because its different from underground river, but since i recently returned to game just to find out i missed such a big change maybe im wrong. Can someone help me in this matter?
This violates the silly "spirit of RL" thing, but even if it didn't, it will have a 0% chance of seeing print. Printing this will remove all design space around dual lands, ever, in addition to obsoleting just about all existing dual lands.
Technicly, before change in mana symbols all lands gave this generic mana.
No, they didn't. There is nothing in the game that will add generic mana to your mana pool. There is a distinction between generic mana (part of a cost) and colorless mana (added to your pool, or occasionally part of a cost in OGW), and that distinction has existed since Alpha, even if the terminology has shifted. The only thing novel about OGW in this area was assigning a distinct mana symbol to colorless mana (when generic costs and colorless mana previously shared the same symbol), and creating a few cards which require colorless mana to be spent on them.
Just to be clear
With new mana symbol added to game,
Dual land with:
T:add 1 colorless mana.
Is considered as violating RL or not? Technicly, before change in mana symbols all lands gave this generic mana.
Did wizards said anything about something like this?
What i think: its not violating, because its different from underground river, but since i recently returned to game just to find out i missed such a big change maybe im wrong. Can someone help me in this matter?
This violates the silly "spirit of RL" thing, but even if it didn't, it will have a 0% chance of seeing print. Printing this will remove all design space around dual lands, ever, in addition to obsoleting just about all existing dual lands.
I disagree with your statement. If Land like that would be printed in non modern legal set, it would be perfectly fine. Its not removing design space, because we already have ABUR duals. Its just complementary stuff. Its better than original duals obviously, but does it break RL policy? I dont think so. They could add other abilities that would interact with other things like planeswalkers etc. There is a LOT of design space here, but printing it with colorless mana is probably the best we could get.
Another thing is spirit of RL. If that would be the case, all dual lands would break that so called "spirit". And after brief search i see Canopy Vista. Where is spirit of RL? If they can print cards that are strictly worse than cards on reserved list, then they can print cards that are strictly better.
No, they didn't. There is nothing in the game that will add generic mana to your mana pool. There is a distinction between generic mana (part of a cost) and colorless mana (added to your pool, or occasionally part of a cost in OGW), and that distinction has existed since Alpha, even if the terminology has shifted. The only thing novel about OGW in this area was assigning a distinct mana symbol to colorless mana (when generic costs and colorless mana previously shared the same symbol), and creating a few cards which require colorless mana to be spent on them.
Sorry, it was my wrong use of words. But since they decided to retroactively change how colorless mana is represent, AND add cards that specifically use it, then there is now a possibility to print cards that works just like these on that bad list.
Another thing is spirit of RL. If that would be the case, all dual lands would break that so called "spirit". And after brief search i see Canopy Vista. Where is spirit of RL? If they can print cards that are strictly worse than cards on reserved list, then they can print cards that are strictly better.
Another thing is spirit of RL. If that would be the case, all dual lands would break that so called "spirit". And after brief search i see Canopy Vista. Where is spirit of RL? If they can print cards that are strictly worse than cards on reserved list, then they can print cards that are strictly better.
But dual lands with basic land types, that have no chance of coming into play tapped, are unlikely.
Yeah, my point exactly. Sure, untapped duals are hard to imagine riggt now, but so was lightning bolt in modern. Or tarmogoyf or jace, the mind sculptor. These cards are waaaay over curve in terms of power, and yet they were printed and legal for a long time.
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Decks:
EDH: :symbw::symuw::symub:Merieke Ri Berit:symbw::symuw::symub:
Archenemy EDH: Reaper king
Really? And that "mistake" was legal as long as it was selling boosters... Business today is merciless. And make no mistake, magic IS Wizards business. If there is a profit in printing dual lands, we WILL get dual lands, Reserved List or not. Thats how real life works. They don't want to back on their word? Fine. Lets print something thats even better. Shocklands were just a first step, checklands second (and they suck) but the market was tested. Now they can print even better duals, that are much more similar to originals, or even better. It WILL happen.
There is, of course a future where we will be flooded by "Proxy" duals in mint conditions ;). Each new print of these so colled proxies is better than last one. They pass even rip test these days. HOW long Wizards can maintain trust in value of their original product? Two years? Three?
Last thing: we all need to remember that Reserved List may have some real life consequences under US law, but thats it. US laws do not apply in MEXICO or European Union or Russia or China etc. Sure, there are some acts that most countries use to protect customers interests, but you must remember that if someone is registered in US and pays taxes in US and is called HASBRO, then it doesnt mean its the same company as HASBRO in Spain or Deutchland. For sure, they are part of a large group called HASBRO, but they not necessarly may be considered as the same company.
My point is: HASBRO can print and sell cards from reserved list everywhere where its legal. And if they can, then they will.
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Archenemy EDH: Reaper king
Something like Nether Void or Moat would take a much larger hit. Something like Gaea's Cradle would probably be on par with FoW/Wasteland as far as drops go.
Even then the old ones wouldn't drop much. I mean, city of brass has 9 printings and there are a bazillion of them. You can get a playset for ten bucks. It sees pretty minimal use competitive formats. Oh, you want an Arabian Nights copy for your pimped-out EDH deck? That'll be $100, and by the way, it's a bit beat up.
Reprint Nether Void and new copies will be a hell of a lot cheaper than old ones, but the old ones won't drop much.
Something like Nether Void or Moat would take a much larger hit. Something like Gaea's Cradle would probably be on par with FoW/Wasteland as far as drops go.
Even then the old ones wouldn't drop much. I mean, city of brass has 9 printings and there are a bazillion of them. You can get a playset for ten bucks. It sees pretty minimal use competitive formats. Oh, you want an Arabian Nights copy for your pimped-out EDH deck? That'll be $100, and by the way, it's a bit beat up.
Reprint Nether Void and new copies will be a hell of a lot cheaper than old ones, but the old ones won't drop much.
Even if you reprint those cards (esp Moat) vendors will snatch them up immediately and sell the for close to the current price, the power level is up there that even new printing will demand a premium. The only saving grace there is that they're not auto stables in decks.
Even if you reprint those cards (esp Moat) vendors will snatch them up immediately and sell the for close to the current price, the power level is up there that even new printing will demand a premium. The only saving grace there is that they're not auto stables in decks.
ehhh, maybe. They'd be artificially inflated for sure, but how much depends a lot on numbers. An arabian nights city of brass can command $100+ because there were only about 20,000 total copies printed and it's a fair bet that over half of those are lost, destroyed, graded, or sitting in a display case, and probably 90%+ of the remainder are owned by people uninterested in selling. There are literally only, at any given time, a few hundred (sometimes only a few dozen) copies in the entire world for sale. The same is true of a handful of the crazy-priced cards of that era like moat, candelabra, void, the abyss, ect. The numbers for sale are just staggeringly small (and in those cases, they weren't even reprinted).
Print runs (even "limited" ones) today are bigger, and even a tiny run would increase liquidity enormously. I'm not saying new copies of Moat would be $10, but it would be under $100.
ABUR dual lands are an exception. Instead of 20k copies, there are 350k copies, and a hell of a lot more of them were retained, since by the time revised came out MTG was a thing. On top of that, duals are needed everywhere, where most RL cards aren't. You could print a lot of new duals and they'd still be expensive.
I just love how there are people who are seriously still backing a policy which for all intents and purposes is over 20 years old. A policy which is actually part of a company worth 12 billion dollars. What is more astonishing to me is that Wizards of the Coast takes their own reserve list so seriously. ITISAJOKE.It appeases a bunch of nerd investors who cried foul during a time when card trading was a thing. And not just collectible cards, I'm talking baseball cards, basketball, movies card, all of that stuff. It had its bubble and that bubble burst in the late 90s.
<It's actually remarkable that Hasbro hasn't fired everyone in wizards for the lack of intelligence when it comes to running a business. The reprint policy is actually a horrid business move in terms of capitalism. You are self limiting yourself because 3rd party sellers are angry they can't make money off your product? Really now, come on. It's time to grow up and stop being so naive Hasbro. Obviously I'm in favor of removing the list completely as it doesn't serve any real purpose anymore. Wizards of the Coast proved long ago (new face change on the cards) that they don't really care what people think about what they do.> When you sit down and really think about it, TRL just tells wizards of the coast, no please don't print 100.00 bills in packs. We don't want the money. The amount of sheer volume of units they could push for YEARS off just the dual lands being in a product would be unbelievable.
And I would be ok with that, because I want THEM to have my money, not this guy:
They should just start shoving new art dual lands (originals) in these commander sets.
There are also only so many variations on the pay life for any color lands you can get before they run out of ideas. And before I get lynched by the LGS and Brick and Mortar folks, no one is walking in to drop 150.00 on your overpriced scrubland behind a glass case when they can go to tcgplayer and get it for cheaper. You all win if wizards does this. There is more demand more drive for boosters, for commander, for drafts, for prizes, for everything. That's how to support local stores through wholesale.
I just love how there are people who are seriously still backing a policy which for all intents and purposes is over 20 years old. A policy which is actually part of a company worth 12 billion dollars. What is more astonishing to me is that Wizards of the Coast takes their own reserve list so seriously. ITISAJOKE.It appeases a bunch of nerd investors who cried foul during a time when card trading was a thing. And not just collectible cards, I'm talking baseball cards, basketball, movies card, all of that stuff. It had its bubble and that bubble burst in the late 90s.
<It's actually remarkable that Hasbro hasn't fired everyone in wizards for the lack of intelligence when it comes to running a business. The reprint policy is actually a horrid business move in terms of capitalism. You are self limiting yourself because 3rd party sellers are angry they can't make money off your product? Really now, come on. It's time to grow up and stop being so naive Hasbro. Obviously I'm in favor of removing the list completely as it doesn't serve any real purpose anymore. Wizards of the Coast proved long ago (new face change on the cards) that they don't really care what people think about what they do.> When you sit down and really think about it, TRL just tells wizards of the coast, no please don't print 100.00 bills in packs. We don't want the money. The amount of sheer volume of units they could push for YEARS off just the dual lands being in a product would be unbelievable.
They should just start shoving new art dual lands (originals) in these commander sets.
There are also only so many variations on the pay life for any color lands you can get before they run out of ideas. And before I get lynched by the LGS and Brick and Mortar folks, no one is walking in to drop 150.00 on your overpriced scrubland behind a glass case when they can go to tcgplayer and get it for cheaper. You all win if wizards does this. There is more demand more drive for boosters, for commander, for drafts, for prizes, for everything. That's how to support local stores through wholesale.
The age of a policy has no bearing on if it's worth scrapping. I mean, the Bill of Rights is a decently sized list of policies and it's pretty old. Chick-Fil-A has never been open on Sundays for as long as its existed, and believe me, they'd make more money if they were. Granted, I'm sure there are policies that are both old and worth scrapping, but not on their age alone. That has no bearing on whether or not the RL is worth keeping.
As far as "appeasing nerd investors?" No, you have no CLUE why the RL came about if this is your real opinion.
When Magic first started getting popular, Wizards was not a very big or experienced company. They underestimated and underproduced Legends, and getting cards from it was hard and (relatively) expensive. Still, the game was hot and fun, and people chased them down, spending $20 on Killer Bees and the like. They put a lot more effort into getting the cards back then not because anyone forsaw duals being worth more than $12, but because they wanted to play the game. If investors and collectors were really responsible for this over players, you'd see a LOT more Legends cards in pristine condition. In any event, a lot of people went to a lot of trouble to get these cards, and then suddenly, they all got reprinted en masse in an unprecedented manner. You have to remember that at that time, outside of the core sets, reprints had never happened yet. ABUR weren't seen so much as "reprints' as they were just more prints of the same "core" game to get more pieces out there, that was pretty understandable- you got more players, you need more game pieces and no one would expect wizards to not produce more of the "core" sets- but expansions had never seen a reprint and suddenly these cards everyone had chased so hard were reproduced in a massive overprinting. This made people understandably very upset- they wanted the cards to play with primarily, but also expected that if they were going to spend that much money to play the game, their investment in the game would be sound and people saw Chronicles and got very worried about their $75 Alpha Moxen and $100 Black Lotuses. The concept of a "collectible card game" was also brand new, and people weren't very clear on what "collectible" meant. For that matter, neither was WotC. You have to remember, this was before the internet was mainstream, and there was a substantial disconnect between what WotC thought collectible meant and what people thought collectible meant. I think, to WotC, in those days "collectible" meant to "collect game pieces to play with" and their audience it meant "game pieces that were also collectible." During the 90's, everything seemed to be collectible, from comics, to baseball cards, to Beanie Babies and I think this is where the lines got blurred. So people were kind of pissed off when their collectible game pieces suddenly got as reprint. WotC thought they were making the game pieces more collectible by allowing more people to collect them, but what they actually did was make the game pieces much LESS collectible to the players at that time and they were understandably upset. Why would I sink $20 into a single card, if it's not going to be collectible at all and could get reprinted overnight? Why don't I just wait till the cards I want get reprinted and buy them when they're cheap? From a player's perspective, why would I go through the trouble of tracking down specific cards and paying big bucks for them or having to open them out of packs only to have all that effort negated at the whim and will of Wizards? Screw that.
And so, alienating both the people who appreciated the "collectible" and those who appreciated the "game" part of your CCG invention is not a good way for a fledgling company and so the reserve list was born. Players felt safe buying game pieces for $20 again, and collectors felt safe about acquiring cards again. Back in those days though, there was not a huge difference between a collector and a player, and investing was unheard of. The game was too new, and again, the internet didn't really exist yet, so acquiring large quantities of a specific card was not an easy task.
As the game grew and the company matured, and the card prices eventually started climbing and the internet came around, the RL stopped being about a protection for players and more of a protection for the crucial third party market- game stores. The reserve list protects stores who have substantial capitol tied up in RL cards and serves the secondary function of actually making people who have the cash to spend feel ok with buying $200 game pieces. You know how you can "go to tcgplayer" and get it cheaper? Who, exactly, do you think you're getting it from? That's right, a local game store somewhere. If you think high dollar cards don't move, you're wrong- expensive cardboard moves everyday through ebay at just slightly lower prices, there's no doubt that plenty of high dollar merch moves through TCGplayer as well. The prices would not be what they are if people weren't willing to pay them.
Ultimately, the unanticipated success of the game is what's resulted in the RL causing the massive prices of the most desirable and collectible pieces of the game. I don't think the RL would have been invented if these prices could have been forseen, but guess what? It was. And here we are. If the RL was really killing magic, dual lands would be a lot cheaper because no one would be interested in them. They are incredibly common and unremarkable for a "collector" standpoint.
Revoking the RL would show that WotC is willing to reprint anything. We can speculate on the outcome, but once you start printing dual lands again.....where do you really go from there? Once you sell your billion booster packs to hungry commander and legacy players.....what can you do to really innovate? Print better dual lands? Print a Tabernacle that makes you pay 2 for every creature? And didn't you just obsolete and kill every single dual land you just printed in the last set people bought? And every land you come up with in the future?
There's no telling what the impact would be on the various formats of the game, the impact on LGS's, and the impact on sealed product once all the dust settles. Sure, you'd sell a ton of product for a while and make a bunch of money real quick, but that's not sustainable, not long term. You just made your long term plans waaay harder because now you've got to print cards even more alluring than dual lands to get people to buy them. And who did you end up benefiting? You made some people's commander decks better and got some more people into legacy. You helped out any LGS whose inventory you didn't just completely devalue overnight.
Or you could leave everything the way it is. It's been working so far, the game keeps growing. Yeah, maybe Legacy will eventually die, but probably not, and even so it will take forever for it to. It just won't really grow. And some commander decks will never be truly "optimal". But people will keep buying standard, you'll keep finding new ways to get players excited about the new set and what it might mean for your modern deck, and the game will keep growing until you print another Jace or Smuggler's Copter mistake, which you'll ban and move on like before. Stores continue operating their inventory the way they have been. While I am a big proponent of innovation, there is also something to be said for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". The economy that has been built around Magic is stable, even growing, and larger than it ever has been. Innovation continues with every set printed. And the only cost is that some commander players can't fetch duals and not everyone can play legacy. Breaking the RL would have unforeseen consequences that would impact pretty much every player. Short term numbers might look great. Long term? That's way too risky to ruin something that is working perfectly well. Breaking the RL completely changes the way that the game would be designed, marketed, and sold as well as the way that LGSs do business. You're not fixing anything by breaking the RL, you're making a quick buck and destabilizing everything on a fundamental level. If you're breaking the RL with the goal of supporting legacy, that's a terrible reason to do so. You'll have destabilized the entire market to revitalize a singular format that doesn't even make you any money. And if you introduce duals etc to standard/modern? Well, congrats, you've pretty much wrecked the game at that point. Modern would then truly be a watered down version of legacy and standard...well, talk about power creep. You've also really wounded your design space because dual lands in standard would be a tough act for the next set to follow.
I dunno why you'd fire the staff of WotC for being incompetent. I mean, it's not like Magic isn't bigger than it's ever been. Ever. I mean, sure they make mistakes (Affinity, Jace, etc), but overall, they've made magic an extremely successful, HUGELY popular game, much more than it was at the reserve list's inception. And it keeps growing. And those players that are growing it? Most of them don't play Legacy or Vintage. I love legacy. I would love to see more people be able to play it, even if it hurt the value of my collection. But I'm not willing to damage the game to accomplish that. Breaking the RL would not be all roses and sunshine. If it were, it would have been done long ago. You wanna fix something to let people play more legacy? Fix the MoTL client. That's something completely doable and would ONLY benefit everyone and then you can have Legacy be as popular as you want it to be. If we had a good MoTL client, this entire discussion would be a moot point and we'd all be playing BUG delver on MoTL right now instead of complaining about how we can't build Miracles on paper because Volcanic Island is $250.
You know, for a long time I hated the RL and investors. I thought MTG would be much better if they would just reprint all the Legacy and Commander staples. I was talking to other players who wanted to get these cards. Then I began watching a bunch of investment videos on youtube, and reading a few articles. Getting the other side of the story was interesting. Alpha Investments is the first that really comes to mind as an interesting view point from that side.
Overall I still wish that these cards where easier to get, or that a few cards could be taken off. But I understand why it is there, and why it will most likely remain in place. Any sort of movement on the RL damages a massive portion of Wizards buyers. To loose these people would be damaging for the company. While you would gain quite a few actual players, or get current players to buy more, you would be trading your high rollers to do so. Wizards does not sell directly to the player base, but to stores and investors who aim to make money off these products. As crappy as it can be, Wizards does need to take care of this community to a degree to keep the game going. This is why Legacy was left in the dust for Modern, relaxing the need for the RL cards and shifting some of that demand to reprintable cards while keeping the Investors happy.
I largely agree. Look what happened to Beanie Babies in the 90s! But I was looking into to it just to get another prospective. It's hard to have a decent position when you only understand one side of the equation.
Wizards has been screwing with their investors recently, with the late release of the second wave of Eternal Masters and the extremely short print run on the newest Commander release. From what I've gathered there was a short period when investing in Magic was amazing. But now it's hard to do and profits come from volume of sales over large dollar single sales.
I largely agree. Look what happened to Beanie Babies in the 90s! But I was looking into to it just to get another prospective. It's hard to have a decent position when you only understand one side of the equation.
Wizards has been screwing with their investors recently, with the late release of the second wave of Eternal Masters and the extremely short print run on the newest Commander release. From what I've gathered there was a short period when investing in Magic was amazing. But now it's hard to do and profits come from volume of sales over large dollar single sales.
On screwing investors, I think WoTC is more interested in they themselves making money, which is by selling new product and reprints like Modern masters.
Ultimately that means not letting investors and market manipulators have their way.
If you wanna make money off magic, invest in the reserve list. Otherwise, let people have the cards so they can play.
If you wanna make money off magic, invest in the reserve list. Otherwise, let people have the cards so they can play.
If you wanna make money off magic, open an LGS. Otherwise, you're being silly.
While true, there are other people who literally make their money of the reserve list. I wish I could find the link of a guy who did a buyout on Moat. He also claims to do buyouts on other things, and was interested in flip Jace from Magic origins.
Just an example of the kind of people I was talking about.
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You think Wizards of the Coast is worried about someone suing them because a few of their several hundred dollar cards are temporarily only a couple hundred dollars, with still plenty of long-term value?
Now who is disregarding the collectors? Also, $100 per pack would still have a pretty significant effect on price, unless it was an incredibly limited print run.
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That's a pretty small nitpick of semantics that really has no bearing on the overall argument I was making with that statement. Still, I would argue that having more players is infinitely more valuable than having more cards. More quantity does not = more collectible, right 90's comics and baseball cards?
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
The point I was trying to make is that many people on this board think solely of the play-ability aspect of these cards with little to no thought on collectibility. The idea of suing Wizards has no bearing on the mindset of so many on this board. Lets set price aside for a minute and talk specifically about the collectible aspect of Magic. Can we agree that collectors play an important role in the overall scheme of the game? Second to that point, collectors want all sorts of different things. Its the reason foils came around, and now masterpieces and expeditions. There are a lot of people (myself included) that like to collect all sorts of cards from when we were young and playing for the first time. For me that was Unlimited and into revised. I have several duals from that era when I pulled them out of packs. They're severely beaten up, but I still have them. I have since bought more NM versions. I also have a bunch of random cards collected from back in the day. I still love my Rukh Egg Hell's Caretaker combo.
I was proposing a hypothetical situation to disprove the argument about artificial scarcity being a reason people aren't getting into legacy. Again, the reason people aren't getting into Legacy is 100% price driven, not artificial scarcity. The scarcity argument is fallacy because any single person who wanted to buy into Legacy today could do so. The reason they don't is because of the cost of cards, not because they cannot be found.
I stated a $100 / pack as just a number sufficiently high to add supply while doing nothing to impact the cost of cards. I suppose a better way to have worded it would have been if Wizards created an EMA 2 set where the cost of a pack was equivalent to the EV (theoretically adding supply without decreasing card prices) of those cards in it, the problem for Legacy would be the same, as stated above.
1: Yes, we can agree that collectors are important. Can you agree that, if push comes to shove, WotC needs to prioritize players, who greatly outnumber collectors? Their current reprint policies create a lot of wealth for colloectors and the secondary market, but WotC doesn't see any of that money. Liberal reprints brings a chunk of that money directly to WotC in the form of pack sales. If they could create a perfect balance, great, but if they have to err, shouldn't they err on the side of "make the greatest number of people happy?"
2: Reprints do not affect collectibility. That was the point of bringing up the Alpha printings: they're collectible despite being reprinted into the ground. If you're a collector, you want the collectible version. If you don't care which version as long as you can play it, then you don't care. In this, I think the SDCC Planeswalkers and the Masterpieces are a positive thing. They create a highly-desirable version for collectors, but there are other, far more accessible versions for the players. The fact that there are millions of Mana Confluence out there doesn't stop the expedition version from being sought after. (Also, I pulled one from a pack, and it's BEAUTIFUL- but I'd get rid of it, I'm not a collector.)
3: Your example of $100 packs is ridiculous, because it wouldn't actually do anything about scarcity. Those packs wouldn't be opened heavily, and without anyone opening packs, you don't get more cards in circulation, and that means you made a grand gesture that accomplished nothing. A VMA where pack price = EV is similarly crazy, because EV fluctuates based on availability. unless you had a pack price that fluctuated constantly and was expected to steadily drop (good luck selling that to LGS's), it's unreasonable. If the pack pricve was CURRENT EV, it would be too high and lead to "nobody opens packs." If it was set where the EV was expected to settle, then you'd have "we can't keep these in stock, order more!" until saturation.
4: Just because someone says something is collectible, doesn't make it so. People can say that their Revised versions are collectibles, but that doesn't mean they are. Alphas and Betas are generally recognized as the collectible versions. i collect Seasinger I have around 150 of them, and grab them from bulk boxes whenever I can. But my say-so doesn't make Seasinger into a collectible. HOWEVER, Revised duals would still maintain a higher value than reprints (their collectibility is unchanged- see point 2).
5: Ebonclaw: You can preach as much as you like about "entitlement," but realize that it's a strawman. You aren't fighting the actual arguments, you're attacking the poster for being audacious enough to hold an opinion. It's difficult enough to hold an actual discussion about things like this without arbitrarily assigning motivations to other posters and then telling them why they're wrong for having those motivations. Unless you actually know them and can speak to what drives them, it's a waste of time to attack those points.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
With new mana symbol added to game,
Dual land with:
T:add 1 colorless mana.
Is considered as violating RL or not? Technicly, before change in mana symbols all lands gave this generic mana.
Did wizards said anything about something like this?
What i think: its not violating, because its different from underground river, but since i recently returned to game just to find out i missed such a big change maybe im wrong. Can someone help me in this matter?
Decks:
EDH: :symbw::symuw::symub:Merieke Ri Berit:symbw::symuw::symub:
Archenemy EDH: Reaper king
(")(")
GONZO
Genius, fast, and long eared.
It does violate the reserved list.
There was an issue when reverberate was printed since its basically fork.
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This violates the silly "spirit of RL" thing, but even if it didn't, it will have a 0% chance of seeing print. Printing this will remove all design space around dual lands, ever, in addition to obsoleting just about all existing dual lands.
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I disagree with your statement. If Land like that would be printed in non modern legal set, it would be perfectly fine. Its not removing design space, because we already have ABUR duals. Its just complementary stuff. Its better than original duals obviously, but does it break RL policy? I dont think so. They could add other abilities that would interact with other things like planeswalkers etc. There is a LOT of design space here, but printing it with colorless mana is probably the best we could get.
Another thing is spirit of RL. If that would be the case, all dual lands would break that so called "spirit". And after brief search i see Canopy Vista. Where is spirit of RL? If they can print cards that are strictly worse than cards on reserved list, then they can print cards that are strictly better.
Sorry, it was my wrong use of words. But since they decided to retroactively change how colorless mana is represent, AND add cards that specifically use it, then there is now a possibility to print cards that works just like these on that bad list.
Decks:
EDH: :symbw::symuw::symub:Merieke Ri Berit:symbw::symuw::symub:
Archenemy EDH: Reaper king
(")(")
GONZO
Genius, fast, and long eared.
And they have:
Reserved List: Call to Arms
Printed: Honor of the Pure
Reserved List: Lightning Blow
Printed: Guided Strike
But dual lands with basic land types, that have no chance of coming into play tapped, are unlikely.
Yeah, my point exactly. Sure, untapped duals are hard to imagine riggt now, but so was lightning bolt in modern. Or tarmogoyf or jace, the mind sculptor. These cards are waaaay over curve in terms of power, and yet they were printed and legal for a long time.
Decks:
EDH: :symbw::symuw::symub:Merieke Ri Berit:symbw::symuw::symub:
Archenemy EDH: Reaper king
(")(")
GONZO
Genius, fast, and long eared.
Well, Jace was a mistake.
Really? And that "mistake" was legal as long as it was selling boosters... Business today is merciless. And make no mistake, magic IS Wizards business. If there is a profit in printing dual lands, we WILL get dual lands, Reserved List or not. Thats how real life works. They don't want to back on their word? Fine. Lets print something thats even better. Shocklands were just a first step, checklands second (and they suck) but the market was tested. Now they can print even better duals, that are much more similar to originals, or even better. It WILL happen.
There is, of course a future where we will be flooded by "Proxy" duals in mint conditions ;). Each new print of these so colled proxies is better than last one. They pass even rip test these days. HOW long Wizards can maintain trust in value of their original product? Two years? Three?
Last thing: we all need to remember that Reserved List may have some real life consequences under US law, but thats it. US laws do not apply in MEXICO or European Union or Russia or China etc. Sure, there are some acts that most countries use to protect customers interests, but you must remember that if someone is registered in US and pays taxes in US and is called HASBRO, then it doesnt mean its the same company as HASBRO in Spain or Deutchland. For sure, they are part of a large group called HASBRO, but they not necessarly may be considered as the same company.
My point is: HASBRO can print and sell cards from reserved list everywhere where its legal. And if they can, then they will.
Decks:
EDH: :symbw::symuw::symub:Merieke Ri Berit:symbw::symuw::symub:
Archenemy EDH: Reaper king
(")(")
GONZO
Genius, fast, and long eared.
Even then the old ones wouldn't drop much. I mean, city of brass has 9 printings and there are a bazillion of them. You can get a playset for ten bucks. It sees pretty minimal use competitive formats. Oh, you want an Arabian Nights copy for your pimped-out EDH deck? That'll be $100, and by the way, it's a bit beat up.
Reprint Nether Void and new copies will be a hell of a lot cheaper than old ones, but the old ones won't drop much.
Even if you reprint those cards (esp Moat) vendors will snatch them up immediately and sell the for close to the current price, the power level is up there that even new printing will demand a premium. The only saving grace there is that they're not auto stables in decks.
ehhh, maybe. They'd be artificially inflated for sure, but how much depends a lot on numbers. An arabian nights city of brass can command $100+ because there were only about 20,000 total copies printed and it's a fair bet that over half of those are lost, destroyed, graded, or sitting in a display case, and probably 90%+ of the remainder are owned by people uninterested in selling. There are literally only, at any given time, a few hundred (sometimes only a few dozen) copies in the entire world for sale. The same is true of a handful of the crazy-priced cards of that era like moat, candelabra, void, the abyss, ect. The numbers for sale are just staggeringly small (and in those cases, they weren't even reprinted).
Print runs (even "limited" ones) today are bigger, and even a tiny run would increase liquidity enormously. I'm not saying new copies of Moat would be $10, but it would be under $100.
ABUR dual lands are an exception. Instead of 20k copies, there are 350k copies, and a hell of a lot more of them were retained, since by the time revised came out MTG was a thing. On top of that, duals are needed everywhere, where most RL cards aren't. You could print a lot of new duals and they'd still be expensive.
<It's actually remarkable that Hasbro hasn't fired everyone in wizards for the lack of intelligence when it comes to running a business. The reprint policy is actually a horrid business move in terms of capitalism. You are self limiting yourself because 3rd party sellers are angry they can't make money off your product? Really now, come on. It's time to grow up and stop being so naive Hasbro. Obviously I'm in favor of removing the list completely as it doesn't serve any real purpose anymore. Wizards of the Coast proved long ago (new face change on the cards) that they don't really care what people think about what they do.> When you sit down and really think about it, TRL just tells wizards of the coast, no please don't print 100.00 bills in packs. We don't want the money. The amount of sheer volume of units they could push for YEARS off just the dual lands being in a product would be unbelievable.
And I would be ok with that, because I want THEM to have my money, not this guy:
They should just start shoving new art dual lands (originals) in these commander sets.
There are also only so many variations on the pay life for any color lands you can get before they run out of ideas. And before I get lynched by the LGS and Brick and Mortar folks, no one is walking in to drop 150.00 on your overpriced scrubland behind a glass case when they can go to tcgplayer and get it for cheaper. You all win if wizards does this. There is more demand more drive for boosters, for commander, for drafts, for prizes, for everything. That's how to support local stores through wholesale.
The age of a policy has no bearing on if it's worth scrapping. I mean, the Bill of Rights is a decently sized list of policies and it's pretty old. Chick-Fil-A has never been open on Sundays for as long as its existed, and believe me, they'd make more money if they were. Granted, I'm sure there are policies that are both old and worth scrapping, but not on their age alone. That has no bearing on whether or not the RL is worth keeping.
As far as "appeasing nerd investors?" No, you have no CLUE why the RL came about if this is your real opinion.
When Magic first started getting popular, Wizards was not a very big or experienced company. They underestimated and underproduced Legends, and getting cards from it was hard and (relatively) expensive. Still, the game was hot and fun, and people chased them down, spending $20 on Killer Bees and the like. They put a lot more effort into getting the cards back then not because anyone forsaw duals being worth more than $12, but because they wanted to play the game. If investors and collectors were really responsible for this over players, you'd see a LOT more Legends cards in pristine condition. In any event, a lot of people went to a lot of trouble to get these cards, and then suddenly, they all got reprinted en masse in an unprecedented manner. You have to remember that at that time, outside of the core sets, reprints had never happened yet. ABUR weren't seen so much as "reprints' as they were just more prints of the same "core" game to get more pieces out there, that was pretty understandable- you got more players, you need more game pieces and no one would expect wizards to not produce more of the "core" sets- but expansions had never seen a reprint and suddenly these cards everyone had chased so hard were reproduced in a massive overprinting. This made people understandably very upset- they wanted the cards to play with primarily, but also expected that if they were going to spend that much money to play the game, their investment in the game would be sound and people saw Chronicles and got very worried about their $75 Alpha Moxen and $100 Black Lotuses. The concept of a "collectible card game" was also brand new, and people weren't very clear on what "collectible" meant. For that matter, neither was WotC. You have to remember, this was before the internet was mainstream, and there was a substantial disconnect between what WotC thought collectible meant and what people thought collectible meant. I think, to WotC, in those days "collectible" meant to "collect game pieces to play with" and their audience it meant "game pieces that were also collectible." During the 90's, everything seemed to be collectible, from comics, to baseball cards, to Beanie Babies and I think this is where the lines got blurred. So people were kind of pissed off when their collectible game pieces suddenly got as reprint. WotC thought they were making the game pieces more collectible by allowing more people to collect them, but what they actually did was make the game pieces much LESS collectible to the players at that time and they were understandably upset. Why would I sink $20 into a single card, if it's not going to be collectible at all and could get reprinted overnight? Why don't I just wait till the cards I want get reprinted and buy them when they're cheap? From a player's perspective, why would I go through the trouble of tracking down specific cards and paying big bucks for them or having to open them out of packs only to have all that effort negated at the whim and will of Wizards? Screw that.
And so, alienating both the people who appreciated the "collectible" and those who appreciated the "game" part of your CCG invention is not a good way for a fledgling company and so the reserve list was born. Players felt safe buying game pieces for $20 again, and collectors felt safe about acquiring cards again. Back in those days though, there was not a huge difference between a collector and a player, and investing was unheard of. The game was too new, and again, the internet didn't really exist yet, so acquiring large quantities of a specific card was not an easy task.
As the game grew and the company matured, and the card prices eventually started climbing and the internet came around, the RL stopped being about a protection for players and more of a protection for the crucial third party market- game stores. The reserve list protects stores who have substantial capitol tied up in RL cards and serves the secondary function of actually making people who have the cash to spend feel ok with buying $200 game pieces. You know how you can "go to tcgplayer" and get it cheaper? Who, exactly, do you think you're getting it from? That's right, a local game store somewhere. If you think high dollar cards don't move, you're wrong- expensive cardboard moves everyday through ebay at just slightly lower prices, there's no doubt that plenty of high dollar merch moves through TCGplayer as well. The prices would not be what they are if people weren't willing to pay them.
Ultimately, the unanticipated success of the game is what's resulted in the RL causing the massive prices of the most desirable and collectible pieces of the game. I don't think the RL would have been invented if these prices could have been forseen, but guess what? It was. And here we are. If the RL was really killing magic, dual lands would be a lot cheaper because no one would be interested in them. They are incredibly common and unremarkable for a "collector" standpoint.
Revoking the RL would show that WotC is willing to reprint anything. We can speculate on the outcome, but once you start printing dual lands again.....where do you really go from there? Once you sell your billion booster packs to hungry commander and legacy players.....what can you do to really innovate? Print better dual lands? Print a Tabernacle that makes you pay 2 for every creature? And didn't you just obsolete and kill every single dual land you just printed in the last set people bought? And every land you come up with in the future?
There's no telling what the impact would be on the various formats of the game, the impact on LGS's, and the impact on sealed product once all the dust settles. Sure, you'd sell a ton of product for a while and make a bunch of money real quick, but that's not sustainable, not long term. You just made your long term plans waaay harder because now you've got to print cards even more alluring than dual lands to get people to buy them. And who did you end up benefiting? You made some people's commander decks better and got some more people into legacy. You helped out any LGS whose inventory you didn't just completely devalue overnight.
Or you could leave everything the way it is. It's been working so far, the game keeps growing. Yeah, maybe Legacy will eventually die, but probably not, and even so it will take forever for it to. It just won't really grow. And some commander decks will never be truly "optimal". But people will keep buying standard, you'll keep finding new ways to get players excited about the new set and what it might mean for your modern deck, and the game will keep growing until you print another Jace or Smuggler's Copter mistake, which you'll ban and move on like before. Stores continue operating their inventory the way they have been. While I am a big proponent of innovation, there is also something to be said for "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". The economy that has been built around Magic is stable, even growing, and larger than it ever has been. Innovation continues with every set printed. And the only cost is that some commander players can't fetch duals and not everyone can play legacy. Breaking the RL would have unforeseen consequences that would impact pretty much every player. Short term numbers might look great. Long term? That's way too risky to ruin something that is working perfectly well. Breaking the RL completely changes the way that the game would be designed, marketed, and sold as well as the way that LGSs do business. You're not fixing anything by breaking the RL, you're making a quick buck and destabilizing everything on a fundamental level. If you're breaking the RL with the goal of supporting legacy, that's a terrible reason to do so. You'll have destabilized the entire market to revitalize a singular format that doesn't even make you any money. And if you introduce duals etc to standard/modern? Well, congrats, you've pretty much wrecked the game at that point. Modern would then truly be a watered down version of legacy and standard...well, talk about power creep. You've also really wounded your design space because dual lands in standard would be a tough act for the next set to follow.
I dunno why you'd fire the staff of WotC for being incompetent. I mean, it's not like Magic isn't bigger than it's ever been. Ever. I mean, sure they make mistakes (Affinity, Jace, etc), but overall, they've made magic an extremely successful, HUGELY popular game, much more than it was at the reserve list's inception. And it keeps growing. And those players that are growing it? Most of them don't play Legacy or Vintage. I love legacy. I would love to see more people be able to play it, even if it hurt the value of my collection. But I'm not willing to damage the game to accomplish that. Breaking the RL would not be all roses and sunshine. If it were, it would have been done long ago. You wanna fix something to let people play more legacy? Fix the MoTL client. That's something completely doable and would ONLY benefit everyone and then you can have Legacy be as popular as you want it to be. If we had a good MoTL client, this entire discussion would be a moot point and we'd all be playing BUG delver on MoTL right now instead of complaining about how we can't build Miracles on paper because Volcanic Island is $250.
EDH: Grand Arbiter $tax, Freyalise Stompy, Mimeoplasm Death From the Grave
Overall I still wish that these cards where easier to get, or that a few cards could be taken off. But I understand why it is there, and why it will most likely remain in place. Any sort of movement on the RL damages a massive portion of Wizards buyers. To loose these people would be damaging for the company. While you would gain quite a few actual players, or get current players to buy more, you would be trading your high rollers to do so. Wizards does not sell directly to the player base, but to stores and investors who aim to make money off these products. As crappy as it can be, Wizards does need to take care of this community to a degree to keep the game going. This is why Legacy was left in the dust for Modern, relaxing the need for the RL cards and shifting some of that demand to reprintable cards while keeping the Investors happy.
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Wizards has been screwing with their investors recently, with the late release of the second wave of Eternal Masters and the extremely short print run on the newest Commander release. From what I've gathered there was a short period when investing in Magic was amazing. But now it's hard to do and profits come from volume of sales over large dollar single sales.
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On screwing investors, I think WoTC is more interested in they themselves making money, which is by selling new product and reprints like Modern masters.
Ultimately that means not letting investors and market manipulators have their way.
If you wanna make money off magic, invest in the reserve list. Otherwise, let people have the cards so they can play.
Two Score, Minus Two or: A Stargate Tail
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While true, there are other people who literally make their money of the reserve list. I wish I could find the link of a guy who did a buyout on Moat. He also claims to do buyouts on other things, and was interested in flip Jace from Magic origins.
Just an example of the kind of people I was talking about.