You can't blame the Reserved List for this when they're counterfeiting cards like Tarmogoyf. There's a whole host of issues with the secondary market.
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These days, some wizards are finding they have a little too much deck left at the end of their $$$.
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I'd love for you to explain the reasoning behind that. Why would they give such a huge price cut and undercut for what would necessarily become the lead product?
Limited is the ONE format that is least touched by counterfeitting, and if high quality counterfeits became commonplace, Limited would be the only be the only tournament format you could run that doesn't have that spectre and associated extra work of scouting the players cards.
If anything, those reprint packs would be the cheaper ones... because out of the necessity of keeping the entire field legitimate, you'd need to have it be based on a card pool you have complete control over. Which means Limited, not constructed.
i am a chinese player,
i think this is the source(maybe one of them?),this fake card made big shock in our community as well,the message would help it?
sorry for my poor english.
actually in the chinese social network have found the factory that start all this story already. this is the link of the alibabas online shop: Link Removed. -Galspanic
Anyone harping on the reserve list is pushing an agenda. A highly flawed one. These fake cards are being sold for 1-3c each. You could reprint until the cows came home and nothing on that list would ever approach that price point. Arguing this has anything to do with the reserve list is ridiculous.
Anyone happy because soon you can play any legeacy/modern/standard deck you want for $25 (as one poster above seems so joyous about) you are extremely naive and shortsighted. If that actually happens no store could stay open. When gaming stores start closing (we already arent exactly doing great as a whole) in rapid numbers wizard losses the majority of its outlet for new product the game just dies.
MTGS is not helping. Deleting posts etc is helping keep this in the dark. The way to destroy villainy is to shine as much light on it as possible as bright and as often as you can. In my opinion every deleted post HELPS the counterfeiters.
Its up to the community to band together in order to combat this problem. Unfortunately the financial inability to get into certain formats have left some so bitter that they think this is somehow a good thing. How very saddening.
Anyone harping on the reserve list is pushing an agenda. A highly flawed one. These fake cards are being sold for 1-3c each. You could reprint until the cows came home and nothing on that list would ever approach that price point. Arguing this has anything to do with the reserve list is ridiculous.
Anyone happy because soon you can play any legeacy/modern/standard deck you want for $25 (as one poster above seems so joyous about) you are extremely naive and shortsighted. If that actually happens no store could stay open. When gaming stores start closing (we already arent exactly doing great as a whole) in rapid numbers wizard losses the majority of its outlet for new product the game just dies.
MTGS is not helping. Deleting posts etc is helping keep this in the dark. The way to destroy villainy is to shine as much light on it as possible as bright and as often as you can. In my opinion every deleted post HELPS the counterfeiters.
Its up to the community to band together in order to combat this problem. Unfortunately the financial inability to get into certain formats have left some so bitter that they think this is somehow a good thing. How very saddening.
Yeah, it's like how because you can get Chess sets really cheap that it's impossible to have a Chess tournament because stores can't be supported solely by Chess, so they close, and it is physically impossible to play Chess in other locations.
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#define ALWAYS SOMETIMES
#define NEVER RARELY
#define ALL MANY
-=GIVE US SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN=-
I'm nerd enough to link my WoW Armory Though I'll put it in a small font.
Yeah, it's like how because you can get Chess sets really cheap that it's impossible to have a Chess tournament because stores can't be supported solely by Chess, so they close, and it is physically impossible to play Chess in other locations.
No, it's more like
- If you want Chess to be a constantly evolving game with hundreds of playtested and balanced new pieces coming out every year, you need a healthy cash flow going to the company responsible for developing them.
- If you want Chess, a game that has existed for only 20 years (and maybe 10 years as a well-functioning game) to increase its user base, you need a healthy cash flow going to the company responsible for marketing.
Look, if you're happy with playing kitchen table Magic with your friends and your Tempest cards until the end of time, there's no reason for you to care about this debate. But if you want Magic to grow and keep evolving, this is the worst news to come out in years. And the causality behind it all is *really* simple to understand, so your faulty analogy is extremely embarassing for you.
MTGS is not helping. Deleting posts etc is helping keep this in the dark. The way to destroy villainy is to shine as much light on it as possible as bright and as often as you can. In my opinion every deleted post HELPS the counterfeiters.
No posts have been deleted.
I have access to the edit log of this thread, and the only mod action that has taken place was merging a doublepost.
Yes. That's excellent quality. Troubling. I remember when Pokémon first came out, it was easy to spot counterfeits. You looked at the coloring of the card as well as the feel of the cardboard. These look like the genuine article. Fortunately I got my premium Domri from a blister pack.
Agreed. And it's not just Modern. Cards in *Standard* have such outrageous prices that even they are attractive to counterfeitters.
Thank you for directing the topic towards modern/standard and away from legacy/reserve list discussion. I counted 82 different cards in the pictures. 23 of them are standard legal. More counterfeits from Theros (5) than cards on the Reserve List (4). They are even counterfeiting Sol Ring, which Wizards includes with every 2013 Commander Deck.
Which makes me wonder why the links to the counterfeit store are still in this thread, while MTGS usually already suspends someone for making proxies.
...talking to Sene. He got yanked aside by work and I will be clearing those out. We want to discuss this issue, but providing links to the stores does not help anything except to further the problem. Anyone posting links to the store will be moderated.
You can't blame the Reserved List for this when they're counterfeiting cards like Tarmogoyf. There's a whole host of issues with the secondary market.
I can't blame the Reserved List, sure, but I can blame the fact that Wizards of the Coast decided to only print Tarmogoyf as a mythic in a set with an extremely limited print run, which did nothing but increase the price further.
It'll kill limited and lots of stores get a good amount of sales from draft at FNM, sealed pre-release events and the like. A draft format with 12 rares and 6 mythics per person would be absolutely terrible.
Or they could, you know, design sets with that in mind.
A 40 dollar mythic rare would constitute a must have 4 of that goes in many decks.
Stats About Mythics
-Mythics are on average 40% rarer than pre-mythic rares
(old blocks about 200 rares, Mythic blocks 35+ mythics)
-They are printing more new cards a year not less
(about 665 now vs. 630 in most pre-mythic block)
-To drop the value of a rare by $1 a mythic must go up $2
-In a 3 year time span deck prices doubled. I am petitioning for the removal of mythic rarity. Sig this to join the cause.
As always, a golden middle should be the target. This thread mainly seems to represent two extremities:
1. Counterfeiters are scum, there's nothing wrong with the current prices of Magic, if you buy any of these you will kill the game etc.
2. Lel imma buy 10000 Goyfs for 500 bucks screw Wotc and SCG, greedy bastards etc.
This should be the wake-up call for WotC about their reprint/rarity policy, if they do not take action and these counterfeits will indeed flood the market, MaRo might have 2 things to cross out from the "20 things that were supposed to kill Magic but didn't" list.
The problem is how cheap it is to produce cards. If they only made mythics/rares and it costs them a few cents per card... it's really hard for wotc to compete.
The thing is:
Right now the fake is relatively easy to detect
The scale of production is still low
So it has no effect on prices or anything right now.
The thing is "printing" and things like it always get cheaper and cheaper, so what once might have cost 50,000 printer to replicate, might cost 5,000 today, and it's only going to continue. Theres no doubt that some print shops around the west probbaly occasionally make some proxies or fakes, but nothing to real scale like what China could produce.
$500 for 3 playsets of every eternal land and most staples is pretty hard to pass up for most people, even with it being full of minor flaws, just imagine if they improved some of the errors
The problem is how cheap it is to produce cards. If they only made mythics/rares and it costs them a few cents per card... it's really hard for wotc to compete.
I think the point is people are going to be much more willing to invest in making fakes when they are making $100 bills, and once you can make $100 you can make $50, $20 ect... However if $20 bills are the high mark then there will be far less insentive to do so.
Right now we have a case where Wotc is making a variety of $100 and $50 each year for the counterfeiters to copy.
A 40 dollar mythic rare would constitute a must have 4 of that goes in many decks.
Stats About Mythics
-Mythics are on average 40% rarer than pre-mythic rares
(old blocks about 200 rares, Mythic blocks 35+ mythics)
-They are printing more new cards a year not less
(about 665 now vs. 630 in most pre-mythic block)
-To drop the value of a rare by $1 a mythic must go up $2
-In a 3 year time span deck prices doubled. I am petitioning for the removal of mythic rarity. Sig this to join the cause.
The problem is how cheap it is to produce cards. If they only made mythics/rares and it costs them a few cents per card... it's really hard for wotc to compete.
...
The thing is, the prices being tossed around right now are basically manufacturing costs for the printing company in China, and those are 'per unit' costs for huge bulk orders.
Furthermore its not taking into account the costs that undoubtedly come up when it comes to shipping these things internationally, and even just the process of paying them (I doubt a Chinese manufacturing company is going to simply charge your Visa card).
Isn't it smarter to lessen Legacy support (like reduce the number of GPs) than to ban all the valuable cards? Focus on Modern instead (which is more accessible) and don't remove the value of all kinds of people's collections.
I've said this again and again on these forums, but the butthurt dreamers that want to play Legacy for cheap refuse to listen. Clearly, this is WOTC's policy. It is proper risk management and generates even more revenue for them.
I don't play Legacy, but I think the Reserved List whiners should wake up and smell the roses.
Isn't it smarter to lessen Legacy support (like reduce the number of GPs) than to ban all the valuable cards? Focus on Modern instead (which is more accessible) and don't remove the value of all kinds of people's collections.
This is what happens when an entire format relies on $80 uncommons and $100+ lands that can't be reprinted because 18 years ago WOTC made a promise to a bunch of people who have no idea how investing actually works in the real world.
Pretty much every avenue you can imagine - crackdown on players, shut down the company, etc. is either unrealistic, unwieldy, or ineffective. They have a choice now, to abolish the reserve list and lower the massive barrier of entry to Legacy and even Modern that has given these counterfeiters a market in the first place.
We can sit here and talk of the "consequences" of this but I must ask, did the RIAA shutting down Napster end music downloading forever? And as for the "risks" of ordering these online, I also point out that there are many illicit products which I will not name, that can be delivered to you from places which I also will not name, of which the best efforts of Federal law enforcement has not been able to stop either, which makes fake magic cards look like quite a trivial manner.
There are many ways for WOTC to react to this, and I hope they choose the right way as I have enjoyed this game for a long time and would hate to see its events turned into witch hunts and its market ruined.
Anyone harping on the reserve list is pushing an agenda. A highly flawed one. These fake cards are being sold for 1-3c each. You could reprint until the cows came home and nothing on that list would ever approach that price point. Arguing this has anything to do with the reserve list is ridiculous.
No, that is simply their manufacturing cost and profit.
You then have to ship them.
You then have to add on a bunch of money to cover the risk of going to jail for whatever criminal is planning on distributing them. People don't risk going to jail for pennies * 1000. They will for $5-10 a card probably * 1000
The cheapest card i saw in the OP at quick glance was chalice of the void, for roughly $6. Which strongly implies that for their current "business model," it probably wouldn't be worth it to them if all WOTC cards on average were around $3, or $1.
For standard, that's easy to address: Just change the booster packs as mentioned to
5C 4U 4R 2M per pack or similar, and then also sell limited packs with the same cards in
11C 3U 1R/M as normal. Price them however appropriate to their demand, and you're off to the races.
(and obviously design the cards with this in mind, for instance maybe don't make quite so many legendaries in R / MR slots)
For legacy and other formats, you also need to address it (because pissing off all the legacy players means losing a lot of standard and limited players too, etc. AND because cheap fake card legacy is a dangerous draw for players if WOTC is making no money off of it), and you should WANT to address it too, because there'd be a big profitable market for the cards (hence why people are counterfeiting them, duh). The solution is mostly similar... make "Legacy Masters" with ratios of cards in the pack based on how expensive legacy cards are (more expensive, higher frequency in the packs). Make them obviously different, like different art, so that collectibles are still collectible, but the GAME can get past the counterfeiters and move on.
Only problem in the way of that solution is the reserve list. And I get the feeling that they are legally bound to not get rid of it, somehow, based on their actions (they print reverberate then get scared and double down, as if people slapped them immediately with lawsuit threats). So I offered one roundabout solution: make equal power, but not identical cards for things on the list, print tons of those, and ban the reserve originals that they replace. Any better alternatives are welcome and would be interesting to hear.
And result is that counterfeiters have no way to make money, AND the game is healthier, because it's once again Creativity: the gathering instead of Wallets: the gathering (even for standard!), and WOTC is making all the money that the counterfeiters would have, so they stay in business.
If you do nothing, or just slap a silly hologram on stuff, then counterfeiters drive prices down anyway, WOTC makes none of the money to be made in the process, and everyone starts playing cheap legacy and stops buying sets and they go out of business.
This is what happens when an entire format relies on $80 uncommons and $100+ lands that can't be reprinted because 18 years ago WOTC made a promise to a bunch of people who have no idea how investing actually works in the real world.
Just of note, there are 0 highly-played $80 Uncommons on the Reserved list. Force of Will and Wasteland are both expensive uncommons, but both of those are not on the Reserved List.
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Agreed. And it's not just Modern. Cards in *Standard* have such outrageous prices that even they are attractive to counterfeitters.
I'd love for you to explain the reasoning behind that. Why would they give such a huge price cut and undercut for what would necessarily become the lead product?
Limited is the ONE format that is least touched by counterfeitting, and if high quality counterfeits became commonplace, Limited would be the only be the only tournament format you could run that doesn't have that spectre and associated extra work of scouting the players cards.
If anything, those reprint packs would be the cheaper ones... because out of the necessity of keeping the entire field legitimate, you'd need to have it be based on a card pool you have complete control over. Which means Limited, not constructed.
i am a chinese player,
i think this is the source(maybe one of them?),this fake card made big shock in our community as well,the message would help it?
sorry for my poor english.
Speaking of cards in standard a new fake spotted. Same facebook group as the fake gisela photo I scraped
Anyone happy because soon you can play any legeacy/modern/standard deck you want for $25 (as one poster above seems so joyous about) you are extremely naive and shortsighted. If that actually happens no store could stay open. When gaming stores start closing (we already arent exactly doing great as a whole) in rapid numbers wizard losses the majority of its outlet for new product the game just dies.
MTGS is not helping. Deleting posts etc is helping keep this in the dark. The way to destroy villainy is to shine as much light on it as possible as bright and as often as you can. In my opinion every deleted post HELPS the counterfeiters.
Its up to the community to band together in order to combat this problem. Unfortunately the financial inability to get into certain formats have left some so bitter that they think this is somehow a good thing. How very saddening.
Though I'll put it in a small font.
Please stop hijacking my reply box.
No, it's more like
- If you want Chess to be a constantly evolving game with hundreds of playtested and balanced new pieces coming out every year, you need a healthy cash flow going to the company responsible for developing them.
- If you want Chess, a game that has existed for only 20 years (and maybe 10 years as a well-functioning game) to increase its user base, you need a healthy cash flow going to the company responsible for marketing.
Look, if you're happy with playing kitchen table Magic with your friends and your Tempest cards until the end of time, there's no reason for you to care about this debate. But if you want Magic to grow and keep evolving, this is the worst news to come out in years. And the causality behind it all is *really* simple to understand, so your faulty analogy is extremely embarassing for you.
No posts have been deleted.
I have access to the edit log of this thread, and the only mod action that has taken place was merging a doublepost.
Yes. That's excellent quality. Troubling. I remember when Pokémon first came out, it was easy to spot counterfeits. You looked at the coloring of the card as well as the feel of the cardboard. These look like the genuine article. Fortunately I got my premium Domri from a blister pack.
Thank you for directing the topic towards modern/standard and away from legacy/reserve list discussion. I counted 82 different cards in the pictures. 23 of them are standard legal. More counterfeits from Theros (5) than cards on the Reserve List (4). They are even counterfeiting Sol Ring, which Wizards includes with every 2013 Commander Deck.
...talking to Sene. He got yanked aside by work and I will be clearing those out. We want to discuss this issue, but providing links to the stores does not help anything except to further the problem. Anyone posting links to the store will be moderated.
WUBRGPauper Battle BoxWUBRG ... and why I am not a fan of Wayne Reynolds' Illustrations.
I can't blame the Reserved List, sure, but I can blame the fact that Wizards of the Coast decided to only print Tarmogoyf as a mythic in a set with an extremely limited print run, which did nothing but increase the price further.
Or they could, you know, design sets with that in mind.
Stats About Mythics
-Mythics are on average 40% rarer than pre-mythic rares
(old blocks about 200 rares, Mythic blocks 35+ mythics)
-They are printing more new cards a year not less
(about 665 now vs. 630 in most pre-mythic block)
-To drop the value of a rare by $1 a mythic must go up $2
-In a 3 year time span deck prices doubled.
I am petitioning for the removal of mythic rarity. Sig this to join the cause.
Is this like changing $1.00 bills into $100.00 bills so everyone is rich?
The problem is how cheap it is to produce cards. If they only made mythics/rares and it costs them a few cents per card... it's really hard for wotc to compete.
The thing is:
Right now the fake is relatively easy to detect
The scale of production is still low
So it has no effect on prices or anything right now.
The thing is "printing" and things like it always get cheaper and cheaper, so what once might have cost 50,000 printer to replicate, might cost 5,000 today, and it's only going to continue. Theres no doubt that some print shops around the west probbaly occasionally make some proxies or fakes, but nothing to real scale like what China could produce.
$500 for 3 playsets of every eternal land and most staples is pretty hard to pass up for most people, even with it being full of minor flaws, just imagine if they improved some of the errors
If you bothered to read, you realize the comment if about drafting and not the vaule of cards.
I think the point is people are going to be much more willing to invest in making fakes when they are making $100 bills, and once you can make $100 you can make $50, $20 ect... However if $20 bills are the high mark then there will be far less insentive to do so.
Right now we have a case where Wotc is making a variety of $100 and $50 each year for the counterfeiters to copy.
Stats About Mythics
-Mythics are on average 40% rarer than pre-mythic rares
(old blocks about 200 rares, Mythic blocks 35+ mythics)
-They are printing more new cards a year not less
(about 665 now vs. 630 in most pre-mythic block)
-To drop the value of a rare by $1 a mythic must go up $2
-In a 3 year time span deck prices doubled.
I am petitioning for the removal of mythic rarity. Sig this to join the cause.
The thing is, the prices being tossed around right now are basically manufacturing costs for the printing company in China, and those are 'per unit' costs for huge bulk orders.
Furthermore its not taking into account the costs that undoubtedly come up when it comes to shipping these things internationally, and even just the process of paying them (I doubt a Chinese manufacturing company is going to simply charge your Visa card).
I've said this again and again on these forums, but the butthurt dreamers that want to play Legacy for cheap refuse to listen. Clearly, this is WOTC's policy. It is proper risk management and generates even more revenue for them.
I don't play Legacy, but I think the Reserved List whiners should wake up and smell the roses.
Spam warning -Rax
Given that Legacy already only gets a single GP per year in the US, and one in Europe... and still survives with no other support from WOTC...
I'll just point out that "reducing support" and "completely abandoning" are quite frankly the same thing.
Not even going to touch the bit about Modern's "accessibility".
This is what happens when an entire format relies on $80 uncommons and $100+ lands that can't be reprinted because 18 years ago WOTC made a promise to a bunch of people who have no idea how investing actually works in the real world.
Pretty much every avenue you can imagine - crackdown on players, shut down the company, etc. is either unrealistic, unwieldy, or ineffective. They have a choice now, to abolish the reserve list and lower the massive barrier of entry to Legacy and even Modern that has given these counterfeiters a market in the first place.
We can sit here and talk of the "consequences" of this but I must ask, did the RIAA shutting down Napster end music downloading forever? And as for the "risks" of ordering these online, I also point out that there are many illicit products which I will not name, that can be delivered to you from places which I also will not name, of which the best efforts of Federal law enforcement has not been able to stop either, which makes fake magic cards look like quite a trivial manner.
There are many ways for WOTC to react to this, and I hope they choose the right way as I have enjoyed this game for a long time and would hate to see its events turned into witch hunts and its market ruined.
No, that is simply their manufacturing cost and profit.
You then have to ship them.
You then have to add on a bunch of money to cover the risk of going to jail for whatever criminal is planning on distributing them. People don't risk going to jail for pennies * 1000. They will for $5-10 a card probably * 1000
The cheapest card i saw in the OP at quick glance was chalice of the void, for roughly $6. Which strongly implies that for their current "business model," it probably wouldn't be worth it to them if all WOTC cards on average were around $3, or $1.
For standard, that's easy to address: Just change the booster packs as mentioned to
5C 4U 4R 2M per pack or similar, and then also sell limited packs with the same cards in
11C 3U 1R/M as normal. Price them however appropriate to their demand, and you're off to the races.
(and obviously design the cards with this in mind, for instance maybe don't make quite so many legendaries in R / MR slots)
For legacy and other formats, you also need to address it (because pissing off all the legacy players means losing a lot of standard and limited players too, etc. AND because cheap fake card legacy is a dangerous draw for players if WOTC is making no money off of it), and you should WANT to address it too, because there'd be a big profitable market for the cards (hence why people are counterfeiting them, duh). The solution is mostly similar... make "Legacy Masters" with ratios of cards in the pack based on how expensive legacy cards are (more expensive, higher frequency in the packs). Make them obviously different, like different art, so that collectibles are still collectible, but the GAME can get past the counterfeiters and move on.
Only problem in the way of that solution is the reserve list. And I get the feeling that they are legally bound to not get rid of it, somehow, based on their actions (they print reverberate then get scared and double down, as if people slapped them immediately with lawsuit threats). So I offered one roundabout solution: make equal power, but not identical cards for things on the list, print tons of those, and ban the reserve originals that they replace. Any better alternatives are welcome and would be interesting to hear.
And result is that counterfeiters have no way to make money, AND the game is healthier, because it's once again Creativity: the gathering instead of Wallets: the gathering (even for standard!), and WOTC is making all the money that the counterfeiters would have, so they stay in business.
If you do nothing, or just slap a silly hologram on stuff, then counterfeiters drive prices down anyway, WOTC makes none of the money to be made in the process, and everyone starts playing cheap legacy and stops buying sets and they go out of business.
Just of note, there are 0 highly-played $80 Uncommons on the Reserved list. Force of Will and Wasteland are both expensive uncommons, but both of those are not on the Reserved List.
Currently Playing:
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