vintage masters for non online players it the only think we need... more vintage players, more legacy players, 2 "old but new" formats, more players, more players that would play also standard because they like the game etc etc
but wotc is so jewish that will never happen so we should just let magic die. it is already dead if you think about it
Public Mod Note
(cryogen):
Warning for inappropriate language
Standard is even worse in terms of cheap card replacement. At least in modern you can play Scooze, Jotun grunt, and a couple other cards in the strong 2drop slot. Standard is bad because the limited card pool makes cards strictly better, and not just sidegrades.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Legacy
Death and Taxes Pauper
UB Teachings
Tortured Existence
Murasa Tron Modern
Pod (RIP)
Bloom(RIP)
Merfolk
1. Wow. So I'm not playing an actual game because the most expensive card in my manabase is Rugged Highlands. That is such amazing snobbishness its not funny. My deck is a 50/50 deck, which is the goal here, and never once have I lost because I used a Rugged Highlands instead of a Wooded Foothills/Cinder Glade. Which brings me to:
You're playing a game, but if you're playing bad cards simply for the sake of being different you're playing a fundamentally different game than your opponent is. You probably have lost but you just don't recognize why. Let me give you an example in Standard, you're on the draw and I'm playing Atarka Red. Your first and third land drops come in tapped. That means on turn 4 (assuming we both make every land drop) you'll have spent 4 mana to my 10 which puts you at a severe disadvantage. If you're on the play you'll have spent 7 to my 10. Those CIPT lands come at such a cost that you don't even gain any tempo by going first, you might as well be giving your opponent a free extra turn in every single game.
2. I find the concept of the pricey manabase extremely overrated. To be a GP winner, its absolutely necessary. To have a few good games at FNM? Its absolutely not necessary, and I know that from experience. Like, for crackling doom- optimally, you may need 10 of each color, but to cast it, you only need one, and there are plenty of ways to get yourself three colors that don't cost $30 a pop. Evolving Wilds, for one. Lifelands. Multidorks. Its a decent sized list. And while they aren't optimal, the goal here, AGAIN, is not complete optimization, but simply being serviceable. For Whisperwood Elemental, you need two forests and three whatevers. That's not hard to get into play, even if you're not playing monogreen. People love to overcomplicate stuff up the yin-yang, but in the end, it all boils down simply: it all taps for one mana. A Plains, a Mountain, and an Island pays for a Mantis Rider just as well as two Flooded Strand-fetched Prairie Streams and a Shivan Reef.
You say you only need one to cast your Crackling Doom but that's not true, you need to find those lands, that's why you need a certain number in your deck. If that Evolving Wilds finds you a red, it cannot function as a blue and that means (in Modern) it can't cast your Cryptic Command or assist with Snapcaster/Path to Exile. Whisperwood Elemental requires 14 green lands and tangolands require 18 basics. That means that without proper dual lands your deck doesn't have consistency unless it's a 2 color deck.
3. You're treating Magic like a gambling addict treats a Casino. You gotta go in making a profit or else the nights a complete failure! No its not. Its a $5 buy in for constructed, and that pays for a night of fun and social interaction, and far more cheaply than a night at a restaurant and a bar. Five bucks is a cost, not an investment, and going in expecting a return (espcially if you're playing a budget deck) is the height of foolishness. If you're on a budget, you have a $5 buy in, and maybe you can buy 1-2 boosters a week to help grow your collection and get tradebaits (or, y'know, actually get nice cards, cause that does actually happen), or conversely buy some cheap rares in lieu of the boosters. That's $10-15 a week. Hardly bank-breaking. But if you're going to FNM with the goal of earning a profit, then my god do I feel sorry for you.
The cards inside of packs average out to $2.20/pack and after rotation lose 90% of their value to 22 cents. If you're buying two packs and paying for an FNM without getting anything out of it you're spending $15 to grow your collection by $0.44. Now, just speaking for myself who actually does play the game on a $15/week budget (that's all I can afford), it takes a long time to assemble a deck at $15/week, that means I need the format to remain viable for a lot longer than 6 months and I need to not lose value on things like packs and entry fees. I'll say it again, if budget is your concern unless you can break even on your entry fee or better, it's better to skip an event and buy cards than attend something. If you don't mind throwing the money away, then you shouldn't mind throwing it away on something that will actually win or hold value.
And no, trading does not work. At 2 packs per week with pre rotation values that's $4.40 per week, at an 18 month rotation that limits you to a maximum deck value of $343.20 if you're able to trade off everything. In reality a large part of that $2.20 per pack consists of cards that hold a retail of $0.50 to $1.00 but are functionally worthless for the purposes of trading. So really you'll get about half that at $170 to build 3 different decks (since rotation will completely change viability every 6 months). That simply doesn't work, and is a really poor idea considering you'll have spent $624 to acquire those cards.
so wizards doesn't want more modern players? or legacy or vintage... doesn't want any non rotating format to get too big. hmmm. only if standard booms will modern see any staple reprints? that just sounds like a dirty little secret.
it's sad that there's cards very playable in the eternal formats that will never be reprinted, left to disintegrate no matter what sleeves, or end up playing with toploaders lol or even just proxies. what is its what's left.
I like the idea of new arts on reprints. originals would stabilize, still collectible, and more fun playing for a larger player base. some which would still play standard or even take it up after learning to play with friends'/relatives' collections.
newness will always be more popular than antique, wizards need not worry legacy or the others will dominate the player base. plenty of people chase promos, foils, and other new mtg products to support the whole that is magic. why doesn't wotc see this?
They probably don't. I've written about this here before but despite what Wizards claims Modern is pretty much a worst case scenario for them. Because of collector values they can't adequately reprint several cards, the format is more popular than Standard which is taking away from that attendance and viewer numbers, and it's virtually impossible to design for because of power creep. On top of that it is proving itself to be a far more economical choice than Standard. Last season which was a cheap Standard was still more expensive than a year of Modern, and this Standard is way more expensive. Even Legacy was holding it's own to the point that they had to drop support because of card supply issues they can't fix.
Modern being as popular as it is, is hugely problematic for them. One of the big issues is the PT which has forced several bans they otherwise wouldn't have had to make.
You seem really entrenched in your position. It is not a case of reprinting every eternal staple within a short period of time so the game collapses vs never reprinting eternal staples ever. Most people are just asking for more liberal reprints so the most expensive cards average $50 or so instead of hundreds of dollars (note this is just an example as some cards may be worth more obviously). Like any market it can't keep rising forever. Like housing, why do people always seem to think it is pretty much god given that prices will continually rise forever? People just want to be able to play legacy without needing to be part of the 1% or forgoing a downpayment on a house. Is that so difficult for you to understand? Also, didn't prices actually rise on many of the cards reprinted in the first Modern Masters? If so, what does that suggest? That the numbers of players entering the format grew perhaps? More people = More Money! The key then to avoiding reprints collapsing the format in a short period of time is reprinting staples in a set like Modern Masters (yet more liberally than Modern Masters 2, which largely sucked from what many people on this forum have been saying), but doing so in small batches until the price reaches something more reasonable on the secondary market and/or WOTC statistics show Modern (or whichever format the reprinted staples are in) no longer increasing in the number of players (or increasing at a more normal rate). Also, added benefits of reprinting staples for WOTC is zero design costs and guaranteed profits (WOTC knows a staple will sell). If they want to keep things unique and help maintain value of older cards WOTC could use new art on all reprinted staples. This would cost some money, but make collecting more enjoyable and desired. Once again the options are not only reprinting every eternal staple within a short period of time so the game collapses vs never reprinting eternal staples ever.
The secondary market prices and people wanting to play non-rotating formats at lower costs are the easiest parts to understand, which is why I didn't even mention them directly in the post, instead stating why Wizards are so cautious about balancing the popularity of formats because of the game decay that happens if non-rotating formats become the most popular format of the game.
Like I before said, the processes you described here (more people = more money) lasts longer in the Standard trap than in non-rotating formats without the threat of design decay to them.
Also, it's easy to say "When the prices reach more reasonable and Modern is no longer increasing in number of players (or at a normal rate)", but in reality, as the first Modern Masters has shown, that when prices go down (they did initially), all it does is escalate the number of players drastically (causing the prices to spike back up). Wizards is scared by the first Modern Masters to do this even more liberally because they're afraid the backlash will be even greater (basically put, escalate the number of players in non-rotating formats even more), which to them, is not a good thing (because of the reasons in the earlier post).
Basically put, a more liberal reprint doesn't actually decrease prices, because it will attract more attention to the format than Wizards would want. I'm saying Wizards doesn't want too much attention drawn to non-rotating formats, which is why they are so stingy with the reprints - that decision has nothing much to do with the Secondary Market from their point of view.
Yes, I'm entrenched in this position because as a player I would want what you state to happen, but since I'm arguing from the view of the other side, I guess I have to be extra-stubborn to not be swayed by my own player's desires, so if I were to take both point of views, Wizards have overdone the "scaling down the power", because if they didn't, the occasional reprint of staples in Standard sets would just solve the problem somewhat without drawing attention to the format itself (nice example will be Theros Thoughtseize). It isn't happening now because the root problem is Standard is too "weak" that Modern Staples simply become "Absolute" Standard Staples as well, which draws too much attention as well.
Even if you are playing devil's advocate, your argument relies heavily on a lot of conjecture you stated as fact. What source do you have to back up WotC's dislike of an expanding Modern player base? Also, these arguments make it seem like reprinting 'solves' a customer, and they no longer buy product. It also makes it seem like there's a cap on new Modern players. Have you met a Magic player that was content with 1 deck all their life?
Standard isn't the cash cow we think it is, either, it's just a model that's worked that way for a very long time. 2 years of lackluster, boring Standards is just as damaging to the game as the perpetually rising cost to enter Modern. The absolute last thing you want is the power rift between those two formats to become so wide that it becomes, "once you go Modern, you never go back'...it's on Wizards to provide an exciting Standard, not to turn Modern into a millionaires club. That just shooting themselves in both feet. Where they once had Standard and Limited both based around the same current product, they have the unique ability to grow Modern as a secondary revenue source that can be both tied directly to and have products separate from Standard blocks.
Make no mistake about it - it doesn't water down one over the other, it's a good problem to have. It's the way they're handling it that's atrocious. Also, tying reprints more heavily into sets reduces design decay AND power creep. If Remand is the strongest countermagic Standard will have available in this block, then you design around that, support, etc, AT THAT THRESHOLD. The big problem is you get Expedition Lotteries where the enemy fetches should have been a given, and/or Goblin Guide, mix in some old and new Landfall creatures, etc...this should have been stupid easy to design, and instead you get a piss-poor set with 1-3 overpowered mythics so far above the rest of the food chain, it's ridiculous. The sets become top heavy, the format becomes centered around them, the rest of the cards pale in comparison, etc. And you get what we have now.
Even if you are playing devil's advocate, your argument relies heavily on a lot of conjecture you stated as fact. What source do you have to back up WotC's dislike of an expanding Modern player base? Also, these arguments make it seem like reprinting 'solves' a customer, and they no longer buy product. It also makes it seem like there's a cap on new Modern players. Have you met a Magic player that was content with 1 deck all their life?
Standard isn't the cash cow we think it is, either, it's just a model that's worked that way for a very long time. 2 years of lackluster, boring Standards is just as damaging to the game as the perpetually rising cost to enter Modern. The absolute last thing you want is the power rift between those two formats to become so wide that it becomes, "once you go Modern, you never go back'...it's on Wizards to provide an exciting Standard, not to turn Modern into a millionaires club. That just shooting themselves in both feet. Where they once had Standard and Limited both based around the same current product, they have the unique ability to grow Modern as a secondary revenue source that can be both tied directly to and have products separate from Standard blocks.
Make no mistake about it - it doesn't water down one over the other, it's a good problem to have. It's the way they're handling it that's atrocious. Also, tying reprints more heavily into sets reduces design decay AND power creep. If Remand is the strongest countermagic Standard will have available in this block, then you design around that, support, etc, AT THAT THRESHOLD. The big problem is you get Expedition Lotteries where the enemy fetches should have been a given, and/or Goblin Guide, mix in some old and new Landfall creatures, etc...this should have been stupid easy to design, and instead you get a piss-poor set with 1-3 overpowered mythics so far above the rest of the food chain, it's ridiculous. The sets become top heavy, the format becomes centered around them, the rest of the cards pale in comparison, etc. And you get what we have now.
First let me clarify, yes indeed that anything about WotC's motivation is purely conjecture, not fact - because marketing would obviously not allow them to put their motivations (which is driven that MTG is first and foremost a business than a game) on the forefront for us to use as fact.
Let's put it this way - reprints don't solve the customer, but it does reduces the amount of product they will buy in the future. It's easy to respond with "All they have to do is provide good design at the appropriate power level equal to reprints to sell", but can you prove they can actually do it? Can you prove that it makes more money than top-heavy sets with even more lottery aspects stacked on it to make the new customers marketing has attracted spend more?
All this dismissal of potential issues for the business in the long run as "good problems" is pretty much as good as conjectures on the assumption that Wizards can fix the problem because "it's on them" when it comes to arguing it should happen because players want it to.
And honestly, if they did want to make the game more accessable- cheapen the mana base. The problem with that is that it's going to lead to a ton of screaming from everyone who's ever dropped $80 on a Scalding Tarn, but at the same time, the idea you need that much for freaking mana is ridiculous.
I'm not entirely fussed about it. I'm the kind of guy who'd happily play Rugged Highlands and enjoy his point of life. But I suppose it'd be nice occasionally to not have to wait a turn to use a dual land once in a while.
MaRo talks a lot about people not actually wanting what they think they want. I've always though easy access to mana was one of them. People see mana as such a simple thing that should be available to them, but it really shouldn't. If there's nothing prohibiting running 3+ colors, then running fewer just puts someone at a disadvantage. There HAS to be a disadvantage to playing multiple colors. The reason standard is so expensive right now is because there is so much fixing available. Every standard deck has to be 3 colors at this point or else it's just doing something wrong. Even mono-red is splashing. Because of that every deck needs the same cards just to be able to play their cards. Lands are expensive because everybody needs them. And because they let everybody play 3 colors, it means the best cards go in more decks, which makes those cards more expensive.
Honestly, if you want a cheap format, you want less access to mana, not more.
1. Wow. So I'm not playing an actual game because the most expensive card in my manabase is Rugged Highlands. That is such amazing snobbishness its not funny. My deck is a 50/50 deck, which is the goal here, and never once have I lost because I used a Rugged Highlands instead of a Wooded Foothills/Cinder Glade. Which brings me to:
2. I find the concept of the pricey manabase extremely overrated. To be a GP winner, its absolutely necessary. To have a few good games at FNM? Its absolutely not necessary, and I know that from experience. Like, for crackling doom- optimally, you may need 10 of each color, but to cast it, you only need one, and there are plenty of ways to get yourself three colors that don't cost $30 a pop. Evolving Wilds, for one. Lifelands. Multidorks. Its a decent sized list. And while they aren't optimal, the goal here, AGAIN, is not complete optimization, but simply being serviceable. For Whisperwood Elemental, you need two forests and three whatevers. That's not hard to get into play, even if you're not playing monogreen. People love to overcomplicate stuff up the yin-yang, but in the end, it all boils down simply: it all taps for one mana. A Plains, a Mountain, and an Island pays for a Mantis Rider just as well as two Flooded Strand-fetched Prairie Streams and a Shivan Reef.
3. You're treating Magic like a gambling addict treats a Casino. You gotta go in making a profit or else the nights a complete failure! No its not. Its a $5 buy in for constructed, and that pays for a night of fun and social interaction, and far more cheaply than a night at a restaurant and a bar. Five bucks is a cost, not an investment, and going in expecting a return (espcially if you're playing a budget deck) is the height of foolishness. If you're on a budget, you have a $5 buy in, and maybe you can buy 1-2 boosters a week to help grow your collection and get tradebaits (or, y'know, actually get nice cards, cause that does actually happen), or conversely buy some cheap rares in lieu of the boosters. That's $10-15 a week. Hardly bank-breaking. But if you're going to FNM with the goal of earning a profit, then my god do I feel sorry for you.
If everybody thought the same way you did, I could agree with you, but the problem is too many players, even at an FNM, are willing and able to get $200 mana bases to win as often as possible. I don't care how much you say it isn't true, at a certain point losing just isn't fun, and losing is what you do if you play on a strict budget.
They probably don't. I've written about this here before but despite what Wizards claims Modern is pretty much a worst case scenario for them. Because of collector values they can't adequately reprint several cards, the format is more popular than Standard which is taking away from that attendance and viewer numbers, and it's virtually impossible to design for because of power creep. On top of that it is proving itself to be a far more economical choice than Standard. Last season which was a cheap Standard was still more expensive than a year of Modern, and this Standard is way more expensive. Even Legacy was holding it's own to the point that they had to drop support because of card supply issues they can't fix.
Modern being as popular as it is, is hugely problematic for them. One of the big issues is the PT which has forced several bans they otherwise wouldn't have had to make.
I had never thought of this point of view before. In your opinion, would bringing back the extended format and making it a featured format help? It would allow for more diversity than standard and cards would stick around longer, without actually being a non-rotating format and requring a constant, yet less harsh, buy-in.
What exactly are all the people collecting and speculating on magic cards going to do when the game crashes, btw?
LoL...I have been reading internet forums about MTG since about 2003, and in all that time one thing never changes- someone is always righteously and confidently foretelling the death of Magic. All things end, but MTG has weathered a lot of blow hard doomsayers in the time I have been paying attention.
With the way the Hearthstone community devours streaming content, it's embarrassing that WotC hasn't stepped it's game up. I've watched Magic Online deck techs, and it's just painful. The GUI is horrendous, the online presence is only maybe 1/10 of the playerbase (I'm probably being generous), and it's stagnant.
There is a lot wrong with the way WotC has managed MTGO and it could do a lot better, but MTG is never going to be the draw for online viewers that Hearthstone is. A person who has never played Hearthstone can jump in and follow the game state pretty easily with only a brief explanation of the game because it is a vastly simplified card game. I have played for years and if I pull up a stream of a Legacy game or even a Standard game during a period that I am not paying attention to that metagame I can easily get lost as to who is in control of the game, and the potential impacts of the cards in hand.
No bright colors, no animations.
Praise be to WotC for that! Hearthstone looks like fantasy farmville, IMO. I don't want to ever see a MTG game that looks like that. Animations are utterly pointless and simply detract from the experience. It is all smoke and mirrors.
Even the way spoiler season is handled is plain stupid. Announce a set, not show 1 damn card for it? Trickle information over months, and only at trade shows or conventions? Wait until the last 2 weeks before slowly giving the set away, framed so that initial buzz is high, then bait and switch a lousy, top-heavy set after the preorders have taken place?
this is one area that WotC are almost objectively correct on. They have had lapses in security that have given them experience in what happens when they don't very carefully control the release of information about a set. It has always resulted in a generally more negative and restrained response from the player base.
This argument is utterly falacious and I'm tired of seeing it. It's either complete ignorance of the distribution chain, or just another excuse taken as truth.
You cannot vote with your wallet if you expect to have a place dedicated to play and buy MtG because we're not the primary consumer, we're tertiary at best.
The primary consumer is distributors, they take orders from stores who are the secondary consumer.
To make WotC feel out discontent by "voting with your wallet" we have to bankrupt our LGS so that the distributor doesn't buy as many cards from WotC and they see a drop in their assets.
I think you have no clue how sensitive WotC are to market response data. People have voted with their wallets before, and it has had lasting affect on the game. Remember Kamigawa? You know how much of a chance there is that wizards will do anything that smacks of Kamigawa again? If you said zero then you would be correct. No LGS were bankrupted from Kamigawa. When JtMS was in Standard all it took was a noticeable reduction in people showing up for FNM over multiple geographical regions for them to do something that is extremely rare - ban cards in Standard.
Even if you are playing devil's advocate, your argument relies heavily on a lot of conjecture you stated as fact. What source do you have to back up WotC's dislike of an expanding Modern player base? Also, these arguments make it seem like reprinting 'solves' a customer, and they no longer buy product. It also makes it seem like there's a cap on new Modern players. Have you met a Magic player that was content with 1 deck all their life?
Standard isn't the cash cow we think it is, either, it's just a model that's worked that way for a very long time. 2 years of lackluster, boring Standards is just as damaging to the game as the perpetually rising cost to enter Modern. The absolute last thing you want is the power rift between those two formats to become so wide that it becomes, "once you go Modern, you never go back'...it's on Wizards to provide an exciting Standard, not to turn Modern into a millionaires club. That just shooting themselves in both feet. Where they once had Standard and Limited both based around the same current product, they have the unique ability to grow Modern as a secondary revenue source that can be both tied directly to and have products separate from Standard blocks.
Make no mistake about it - it doesn't water down one over the other, it's a good problem to have. It's the way they're handling it that's atrocious. Also, tying reprints more heavily into sets reduces design decay AND power creep. If Remand is the strongest countermagic Standard will have available in this block, then you design around that, support, etc, AT THAT THRESHOLD. The big problem is you get Expedition Lotteries where the enemy fetches should have been a given, and/or Goblin Guide, mix in some old and new Landfall creatures, etc...this should have been stupid easy to design, and instead you get a piss-poor set with 1-3 overpowered mythics so far above the rest of the food chain, it's ridiculous. The sets become top heavy, the format becomes centered around them, the rest of the cards pale in comparison, etc. And you get what we have now.
First let me clarify, yes indeed that anything about WotC's motivation is purely conjecture, not fact - because marketing would obviously not allow them to put their motivations (which is driven that MTG is first and foremost a business than a game) on the forefront for us to use as fact.
Let's put it this way - reprints don't solve the customer, but it does reduces the amount of product they will buy in the future. It's easy to respond with "All they have to do is provide good design at the appropriate power level equal to reprints to sell", but can you prove they can actually do it? Can you prove that it makes more money than top-heavy sets with even more lottery aspects stacked on it to make the new customers marketing has attracted spend more?
All this dismissal of potential issues for the business in the long run as "good problems" is pretty much as good as conjectures on the assumption that Wizards can fix the problem because "it's on them" when it comes to arguing it should happen because players want it to.
As much as I get what you're saying, you're still using a false premise. Why/How does reprinting for one format dictate what a customer buys in the future? I've been a Modern player for years, I still have a Standard deck for FNM. I'm still a consumer of Commander and Conspiracy product. Yes, after a while, I'll have what I need for Modern, and then Modern Masters 2018 isn't a product geared towards me. But I'm the exception, not the rule. I've been a good, loyal customer for years. If Wizards is offering a quality product in Standard, then I'm a buyer. My loyalty is 'rewarded' by the fact that I don't often need to replace cards in that one, single format...but that's the point of an eternal format. If you're going to create one, then you need to cultivate and build that market for new players, not me (although I'm a sucker for alt art & promos, so the occasional new art reprint would once again make me a buyer).
Speaking of that loyalty, where the hell is it? I show up at every big tourney in my city, Game Day, FNM, I buy into 4 different formats and play a draft now and again. Player Rewards were awesome. Gateway promos were neat. Stupid little things like textless cards made me want to squeeze one more event in before the cutoff date.
And I have to disagree with you. I don't think that you build up 1 product for years on end, then suddenly be able to split it in two, basically doubling your revenue streams, have a fanbase hungry for new product, and call that a bad problem. That's not conjecture, it's common sense. It'd be one thing if it somehow taxed or costed one over the other, but they've basically gone from vanilla to vanilla and chocolate, and everyone loves both flavors. How is it conjecture that new revenue streams are good thing for business?
EDIT: I specifically did not address the question as to whether Wizards could actually make more money. The only thing I can say is they've never tried it. But I can't imagine that taking control back from the secondary market would somehow hurt their bottom line.
As much as I get what you're saying, you're still using a false premise. Why/How does reprinting for one format dictate what a customer buys in the future? I've been a Modern player for years, I still have a Standard deck for FNM. I'm still a consumer of Commander and Conspiracy product. Yes, after a while, I'll have what I need for Modern, and then Modern Masters 2018 isn't a product geared towards me. But I'm the exception, not the rule. I've been a good, loyal customer for years. If Wizards is offering a quality product in Standard, then I'm a buyer. My loyalty is 'rewarded' by the fact that I don't often need to replace cards in that one, single format...but that's the point of an eternal format. If you're going to create one, then you need to cultivate and build that market for new players, not me (although I'm a sucker for alt art & promos, so the occasional new art reprint would once again make me a buyer).
Speaking of that loyalty, where the hell is it? I show up at every big tourney in my city, Game Day, FNM, I buy into 4 different formats and play a draft now and again. Player Rewards were awesome. Gateway promos were neat. Stupid little things like textless cards made me want to squeeze one more event in before the cutoff date.
And I have to disagree with you. I don't think that you build up 1 product for years on end, then suddenly be able to split it in two, basically doubling your revenue streams, have a fanbase hungry for new product, and call that a bad problem. That's not conjecture, it's common sense. It'd be one thing if it somehow taxed or costed one over the other, but they've basically gone from vanilla to vanilla and chocolate, and everyone loves both flavors. How is it conjecture that new revenue streams are good thing for business?
EDIT: I specifically did not address the question as to whether Wizards could actually make more money. The only thing I can say is they've never tried it. But I can't imagine that taking control back from the secondary market would somehow hurt their bottom line.
Your example of being an exception to "not a customer of Modern Masters 2018" will hold true for more and more people as more and more Modern (Masters) products get printed. As more and more people obtain the cards for all the Modern decks they want, they will eventually be not interested in products catered to Modern.
You say you'll continue to support standard even when playing Modern, but can you prove that your action is the rule, not the exception when majority of the player base have access to Modern? It's not easy to make a rotating format as diverse as a non-rotating format (this should be obvious), so without being more powerful than older formats, Standard will always be weaker - even during a "great" Standard period like Innistrad-Return to Ravnica, the format is still less diverse and weaker than Modern, because the natural size of the formats in comparison.
What's more is that they cannot even assure that Standard can maintain the "great" standards. What happens when they make a mistake and Standard ends up being low-powered? People buy less products because Standard isn't interesting and since majority of the player base have access to Modern, they focus on that. Problem is, when this scenario happens further in the future when most players have Modern cards already, they don't need to spend more on Modern, so they don't spend as much on the game anymore. Standard may not be the cash cow we think it is, but it ultimately definitely makes more money than Modern products over in a long run.
It's also easy to assume that people playing Modern will jump back to Standard when it gets interesting again and citing that you will do it yourself, but what assurance can you give that majority of the players will do that when it happens? With no assurance, it becomes a risky prospect. Yes, no risk no gain, but I can assure you when you work for a large company like Hasbro, you are a lot less inclined to take risks on behalf of the company (I think the reasons behind that are obvious).
You say they should see Modern as a new product (or a split product) that has potential for "new product" in the future, stating the profits and diversity, but once again, you didn't raise the cost of "new product" for modern. I'm not talking about reprints (that's technically not new), I'm talking about new cards designed with the format in mind - that space is quite limited in reality. Yes, it's not conjecture but common sense to know that printing for Modern creates profits and possibly diversity, but it's also common sense to know Standard has less diversity by default, they can't keep producing "stellar" Standards, because for something to be considered good, there must be some comparison. If it keeps going from good to better to even better, the most likely culprit is power creep, because how many ways can Standard keep producing diversity that's different from what's already in Modern to render it interesting enough to the majority of players?
Wizards have never controlled the secondary market (because they requires literally selling singles), they have only influenced it through reprints. This scenario is more of a case they don't want to "lower the secondary market" because they can't guarantee the quality of new products would be stellar, which means if they aren't, when combined with a lowered secondary market, it will actually hurt their bottom line. They're basically keeping a "costly secondary market" as an insurance against risk people will decide to contribute to their bottom line regardless of quality.
Bluntly put: They can now do poorer design with less risk to loss to the bottom line because high secondary market prices are regulating money flow towards sealed products instead. They have not seen their bottom line not hit target enough to consider the need to put reprints to put a buffer in time while they figure out what is wrong with design that's causing new products to not meet bottom line profits. It's more of question on risk than profit.
What exactly are all the people collecting and speculating on magic cards going to do when the game crashes, btw?
LoL...I have been reading internet forums about MTG since about 2003, and in all that time one thing never changes- someone is always righteously and confidently foretelling the death of Magic. All things end, but MTG has weathered a lot of blow hard doomsayers in the time I have been paying attention.
With the way the Hearthstone community devours streaming content, it's embarrassing that WotC hasn't stepped it's game up. I've watched Magic Online deck techs, and it's just painful. The GUI is horrendous, the online presence is only maybe 1/10 of the playerbase (I'm probably being generous), and it's stagnant.
There is a lot wrong with the way WotC has managed MTGO and it could do a lot better, but MTG is never going to be the draw for online viewers that Hearthstone is. A person who has never played Hearthstone can jump in and follow the game state pretty easily with only a brief explanation of the game because it is a vastly simplified card game. I have played for years and if I pull up a stream of a Legacy game or even a Standard game during a period that I am not paying attention to that metagame I can easily get lost as to who is in control of the game, and the potential impacts of the cards in hand.
No bright colors, no animations.
Praise be to WotC for that! Hearthstone looks like fantasy farmville, IMO. I don't want to ever see a MTG game that looks like that. Animations are utterly pointless and simply detract from the experience. It is all smoke and mirrors.
Even the way spoiler season is handled is plain stupid. Announce a set, not show 1 damn card for it? Trickle information over months, and only at trade shows or conventions? Wait until the last 2 weeks before slowly giving the set away, framed so that initial buzz is high, then bait and switch a lousy, top-heavy set after the preorders have taken place?
this is one area that WotC are almost objectively correct on. They have had lapses in security that have given them experience in what happens when they don't very carefully control the release of information about a set. It has always resulted in a generally more negative and restrained response from the player base.
This argument is utterly falacious and I'm tired of seeing it. It's either complete ignorance of the distribution chain, or just another excuse taken as truth.
You cannot vote with your wallet if you expect to have a place dedicated to play and buy MtG because we're not the primary consumer, we're tertiary at best.
The primary consumer is distributors, they take orders from stores who are the secondary consumer.
To make WotC feel out discontent by "voting with your wallet" we have to bankrupt our LGS so that the distributor doesn't buy as many cards from WotC and they see a drop in their assets.
I think you have no clue how sensitive WotC are to market response data. People have voted with their wallets before, and it has had lasting affect on the game. Remember Kamigawa? You know how much of a chance there is that wizards will do anything that smacks of Kamigawa again? If you said zero then you would be correct. No LGS were bankrupted from Kamigawa. When JtMS was in Standard all it took was a noticeable reduction in people showing up for FNM over multiple geographical regions for them to do something that is extremely rare - ban cards in Standard.
Cards from Kamigawa block look pretty sweet compared to what is in BFZ ... just saying. At least there is a good handful of modern (and legacy) staples at all rarities including common. If Oath is more of the same crap in BFZ people are not going to buy. They will scrape by with Dragons and Origins hoping and praying that Shadows over Innistrad will return some stability back to the power level.
Your example of being an exception to "not a customer of Modern Masters 2018" will hold true for more and more people as more and more Modern (Masters) products get printed. As more and more people obtain the cards for all the Modern decks they want, they will eventually be not interested in products catered to Modern.
You say you'll continue to support standard even when playing Modern, but can you prove that your action is the rule, not the exception when majority of the player base have access to Modern? It's not easy to make a rotating format as diverse as a non-rotating format (this should be obvious), so without being more powerful than older formats, Standard will always be weaker - even during a "great" Standard period like Innistrad-Return to Ravnica, the format is still less diverse and weaker than Modern, because the natural size of the formats in comparison.
What's more is that they cannot even assure that Standard can maintain the "great" standards. What happens when they make a mistake and Standard ends up being low-powered? People buy less products because Standard isn't interesting and since majority of the player base have access to Modern, they focus on that. Problem is, when this scenario happens further in the future when most players have Modern cards already, they don't need to spend more on Modern, so they don't spend as much on the game anymore. Standard may not be the cash cow we think it is, but it ultimately definitely makes more money than Modern products over in a long run.
It's also easy to assume that people playing Modern will jump back to Standard when it gets interesting again and citing that you will do it yourself, but what assurance can you give that majority of the players will do that when it happens? With no assurance, it becomes a risky prospect. Yes, no risk no gain, but I can assure you when you work for a large company like Hasbro, you are a lot less inclined to take risks on behalf of the company (I think the reasons behind that are obvious).
You say they should see Modern as a new product (or a split product) that has potential for "new product" in the future, stating the profits and diversity, but once again, you didn't raise the cost of "new product" for modern. I'm not talking about reprints (that's technically not new), I'm talking about new cards designed with the format in mind - that space is quite limited in reality. Yes, it's not conjecture but common sense to know that printing for Modern creates profits and possibly diversity, but it's also common sense to know Standard has less diversity by default, they can't keep producing "stellar" Standards, because for something to be considered good, there must be some comparison. If it keeps going from good to better to even better, the most likely culprit is power creep, because how many ways can Standard keep producing diversity that's different from what's already in Modern to render it interesting enough to the majority of players?
Wizards have never controlled the secondary market (because they requires literally selling singles), they have only influenced it through reprints. This scenario is more of a case they don't want to "lower the secondary market" because they can't guarantee the quality of new products would be stellar, which means if they aren't, when combined with a lowered secondary market, it will actually hurt their bottom line. They're basically keeping a "costly secondary market" as an insurance against risk people will decide to contribute to their bottom line regardless of quality.
Bluntly put: They can now do poorer design with less risk to loss to the bottom line because high secondary market prices are regulating money flow towards sealed products instead. They have not seen their bottom line not hit target enough to consider the need to put reprints to put a buffer in time while they figure out what is wrong with design that's causing new products to not meet bottom line profits. It's more of question on risk than profit.
And this is where reprints can actually fix things in Standard. The way New World Order works is to completely forget how it used to work...when Magic was still rising in popularity, as opposed this 'year of stabilization' that seems to involve shrinking somehow.
See, Counterspell was always Counterspell. Why? Because it did what blue wanted to do. Lightning Bolt, same story. Terror. Swords to Plowshares. Dark Ritual. Power Sink. They didn't try to reinvent the damn wheel every set. Some parts of Magic just worked right. Individual sets enhanced, worked around, or exemplified those traits, giving each color a very distinct identity, as opposed to the blurred lines we have now. (Mono Blue did just have an aggro deck not that long ago...) Modern is thrilling because it's power level and diversity is due to the absolute best of those examples.
Every block in recent memory has given major contributions to Modern's landscape, save for the last 2 years. It's been dismal design that's made for a boring Standard. Design isn't drying up for Modern, the rift between power levels is so astronomically different now, only 1-2 cards at the top of their game have something to offer, and it rarely comes from the 'bomb' $45 mythic. Gideon is a house in Standard, but he offers Modern very, very little, if anything...and that's fine. The devil is in the details with pieces that make it into Modern. Look at Abrupt Decay, or Sphinx's Revelation from RTR. The utility kill spell that costs a hard Black and Green, and it's an all-star card in the format. In Standard, it was a $3 kill spell at one point while we were spoiled with good removal. The big bombs that move to Modern are usually utility, like Keranos, Jace AOT, Craterhoof Behemoth...oh, crap look at that...I didn't even mean to, and I used examples that shared a Standard with that Jace. Design lately is just crap. We can't even get the crummy 2nd-tier stuff we were using before Theros rotatated. No Lightning Strike or Doom Blade.
Basically: Reprinting isn't as risky as failing to listen to the consumer. The secondary market put up a wall between Wizards and their customer base in the eternal formats. Couple that with inept design on the rotating format, you have a recipe for disaster. Both can be fixed by learning how Magic grew popular in the past with it's design, and using reprints from the past to prop it up.
@sephx: first, modern is not an eternal format, please stop calling it that. In the eternal formats, cards from sets like commander are legal. Thats not true for modern.
Also, eternal formats allow cards from all regulary printed sets (wich dosnt include unglued, for instance), thats why they are called eternal, because you can play all your alpha cards in it (unless its banned).
Thats also not true for modern.
For what it's worth, Eternal only means that cards don't rotate out of the format. It doesn't have anything to do with hoew far back the format extends, just that the legal cards are 'eternal' and don't disappear due to rotation.
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Modern: G Tron, Vannifar, Jund, Druid/Vizier combo, Humans, Eldrazi Stompy (Serum Powder), Amulet, Grishoalbrand, Breach Titan, Turns, Eternal Command, As Foretold Living End, Elves, Cheerios, RUG Scapeshift
I had never thought of this point of view before. In your opinion, would bringing back the extended format and making it a featured format help? It would allow for more diversity than standard and cards would stick around longer, without actually being a non-rotating format and requring a constant, yet less harsh, buy-in.
I don't know, I know I wouldn't have any interest in it and the last time extended was around it didn't have any interest either. I'm not actually sure why that is, but I think psychologically I would just prefer to play formats where my cards are going to hold value, and that's not what extended is. Extended offers no benefits to me over Modern or Legacy.
I think the game needs the allure of non rotating formats because it causes cards to actually hold value long term and that's a good thing for a game that's trying to bill itself as being collectible. I just think Wizards promoted Modern a bit too much. Clearly there's some real financial risks to them if Modern does well. The format would be better off without a PT, and the reprint issue is really tricky. But, people want to see Modern. There's a myriad of reasons, which I can only name a few of but it's a very popular format. I think a big part of the allure is that it's a Legacy that doesn't have card availability problems.
People want to play older high powered formats, partially because Wizards hasn't made that experience available anywhere else. Theros, Khans, and BFZ have all existed in their own low power topsy turvy world where threats are better than answers. But people like the gameplay of answers being better than threats. Standard has this issue where your answer needs to line up perfectly with your opponents card and it leads to poor games that revolve around the idea of jamming your threats until they can't answer one. It's just the opposite in a format like Modern or Legacy. In those formats the answers are broad and powerful, it becomes a game of maneuvering into a position where your threat is good against powerful answers. It's a style of play they've been removing from the game. Draft no longer has it, Cube no longer has it, Standard no longer has it, and it's even starting to vanish from Modern as new creatures enter but new removal doesn't.
My deck is a 50/50 deck, which is the goal here, and never once have I lost because I used a Rugged Highlands instead of a Wooded Foothills/Cinder Glade. Which brings me to:
2. I find the concept of the pricey manabase extremely overrated.
This is a quaint way of looking at the game. Good landbases are expensive for a reason; they are that much better than budget alternatives.
Relying on lands that come into play tapped to fix your mana is an enormous burden. Oftentimes you will be playing behind your opponent by a virtual turn. While they continue to curve out perfectly thanks to their Fetch-Tango manabase, you played a Rugged Highlands and passed the turn. By playing budget lands, you often hand opponents a free Time Walk and, as any Magic player knows, that's a back-breakingly powerful effect.
And this disparity in power between the haves and have-nots tends to make people a little upset. And it doesn't just apply to lands...almost every staple effect in this current Standard has a "best-in-slot" that's a chase Rare or Mythic (and in Modern/Legacy even Commons and Uncommons can be seriously pricey due to being long out of print) and often times any substitutes for these cards are borderline unplayable garbage.
3. You're treating Magic like a gambling addict treats a Casino. You gotta go in making a profit or else the nights a complete failure! No its not. Its a $5 buy in for constructed, and that pays for a night of fun and social interaction, and far more cheaply than a night at a restaurant and a bar. Five bucks is a cost, not an investment
Five bucks only buys a night of fun if you have a deck you can have fun with or the right environment to have fun with a budget brew. If your LGS tends towards the competitive or Spikey side and you don't have a tiered deck (or good cards in a rogue brew), that five clams is only going to pay for some bad beats.
And the desire to make progress in your hobby as you pay into it is far removed from the mindset of a gambling addict. For budget players, tournament magic is no longer offers much to reward pluck and perseverance. Prize structure is weighted towards winner-take-most schemes, which rewards financially established players who have collections that include the best cards.
Look at a lot of competitive, multiplayer computer and video games. Eliding the fact that most are not nearly as pay-to-win as Magic is, they often have virtual reward structures that reward frequent play, even if they player doesn't post winning records, allowing all players a shot at new gear, unlocks, or what-have-you. I know very little of Hearthstone, but from what I understand, there are free, daily events that hand out prize packs to any player that participates, keeping the "dream" of progress alive. It would be nice if Magic had some sort of conciliatory prize like this (still; R.I.P. Player Rewards promos).
And this is where reprints can actually fix things in Standard. The way New World Order works is to completely forget how it used to work...when Magic was still rising in popularity, as opposed this 'year of stabilization' that seems to involve shrinking somehow.
See, Counterspell was always Counterspell. Why? Because it did what blue wanted to do. Lightning Bolt, same story. Terror. Swords to Plowshares. Dark Ritual. Power Sink. They didn't try to reinvent the damn wheel every set. Some parts of Magic just worked right. Individual sets enhanced, worked around, or exemplified those traits, giving each color a very distinct identity, as opposed to the blurred lines we have now. (Mono Blue did just have an aggro deck not that long ago...) Modern is thrilling because it's power level and diversity is due to the absolute best of those examples.
Every block in recent memory has given major contributions to Modern's landscape, save for the last 2 years. It's been dismal design that's made for a boring Standard. Design isn't drying up for Modern, the rift between power levels is so astronomically different now, only 1-2 cards at the top of their game have something to offer, and it rarely comes from the 'bomb' $45 mythic. Gideon is a house in Standard, but he offers Modern very, very little, if anything...and that's fine. The devil is in the details with pieces that make it into Modern. Look at Abrupt Decay, or Sphinx's Revelation from RTR. The utility kill spell that costs a hard Black and Green, and it's an all-star card in the format. In Standard, it was a $3 kill spell at one point while we were spoiled with good removal. The big bombs that move to Modern are usually utility, like Keranos, Jace AOT, Craterhoof Behemoth...oh, crap look at that...I didn't even mean to, and I used examples that shared a Standard with that Jace. Design lately is just crap. We can't even get the crummy 2nd-tier stuff we were using before Theros rotatated. No Lightning Strike or Doom Blade.
Basically: Reprinting isn't as risky as failing to listen to the consumer. The secondary market put up a wall between Wizards and their customer base in the eternal formats. Couple that with inept design on the rotating format, you have a recipe for disaster. Both can be fixed by learning how Magic grew popular in the past with it's design, and using reprints from the past to prop it up.
Actually, considering how stern MaRo is about the color wheel, they didn't reinvent the wheel every set - they just made existing color wheel effects "weaker" by increasing their costs and adding additional effects not worth the cost, or tacked on the set's gimmick on to the standard color wheel ability. Yes, I agree that they have been de-powering standard itself too much in the recent years, like you stated even 2nd tier stuff that definitely don't make the cut in Modern don't even make it in Standard/Limited nowadays.
I wouldn't deny the last two years have been more or less making a boring standard, but if you expect major meta-changing contributions to non-rotating formats every block, you're just setting up yourself for disappointment, honestly. It's not like the past 2 years didn't contribute in various ways to Modern - Theros reprinted Thoughtseize and there are potentially powerful cards waiting for someone innovate with and/or already see play in fringe decks, like Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx. Tarkir contributed the entry of the allied Fetchlands (which is a major game-changer, remember berfore Tarkir you could't play the onslaught ones in Modern), Siege Rhino and produced even two cards banned in the format (Thanks Delve...), as well as Collected Company and Kolaghan's Command, which see quite the amount of play.
Abrupt Decay itself wasn't exactly meta-changing, because Jund and Junk/Abzan Midrange decks already existed, it just added a tool to the decks in Tier 1 - not every set has to do that, to promote diversity, cards that support homebrews are the real key, and those can be left undiscovered for years (Grishoalbrand's core nonland cards literally only used cards up to Gatecrash, but the deck took long enough to surface). Arguably I'll even say Tarkir contributed more to Modern than RTR, and that was only a year ago.
BFZ is indeed largely a disappointment, but it is the first set of a new paradigm they started for Standard. Honestly speaking, the new paradigm is worse for Standard (faster rotations), but by virtue of visiting more planes a year, we can expect more goodies for non-rotating formats in the future - just don't expect them to be major Tier-1 changing cards. Like I mentioned earlier, I agree they need to kick the power level of Standard/Limited itself back the notch to the 2nd tier stuff again though.
You'll need to recognize that Wizards "listens to the consumer" by looking at sales numbers/percentages. Kamigawa can be praised to sky-high now, but because the sales percentages were abyssal, we aren't likely to ever return to Kamigawa. Ravnica showed great sales percentages, and therefore we had RTR and based on hints, we are likely to get another Return sooner than later. You can say that we don't have the data and facts, which is true, but why would designers claim a set to be popular and return to the plane for any other reason than "It sold well, so it's popular"?
It'll be more straightfoward to say the customer base built the wall against Wizards because the Secondary Market is largely driven by the customer base itself. Sure, Wizard's slow response in trying to lower down the wall is tragic, but it is noted whenever they do lower the wall (Modern Masters), the customer base just drives it back up again with greater demand. The first time they tried to quell increasing demand at one go (Chronicles), it ended with a stubborn promise we are now demanding them to remove (Reserved List), leading to more or less the sealed fate of eternal formats. (Please don't argue about the list here, there's a thread for that, but let's face it, a decade of feedback didn't change that policy, nothing now will.)
Sad to say, with the inept design of rotating formats now, their feedback is still "positive" because Lotteries are addictive and top-heavy sets fuel that. On top of that, they don't usually admit their mistakes until the set rotates out, because they don't want to impact sales negatively by "official" talk. Perhaps they would agree with what you're saying now, but if saying it now means less BFZ boosters sold, that's literally the fastest way to shoot themselves in the foot. Remember, they work two years ahead of time and they don't take immediate feedback after a set of release, they accumulate it during the set's run in the rotating format before concluding.
it's not even the casting cost increases and weaker cards that's narrowing the viable standard card pool. wizards has taken away almost all the answer cards some call feelbad cards or hate cards (control). countermagic, removal, and even burn, etc. what's left?
I'm not seeing but one artifact in a typical game, not counting Hangarback. Maybe 2 enchantments get played. Manlands are cool, but its still just another creature. There's a severe reduction in the variety of tactics available in standard.
Another thing about Extended. I always thought that was an attractive format I wanted to get into. a little bit older card base from some favorite recent sets along with nice new releases. It would be fresh, rotating along with new blocks. just a larger pool to build from.
Wizards wants to distance itself from it's past, fine. But the mechanics and strategies that attracted players to mtg in the first place are no more. Trading creatures until either player fails to draw a blocker isn't skill in building or play. Playing skill, knowing when to hold or use your counter, tap for that ability, or hold a land to discard, bluff or whatever, timing your drops to get around control strategy. that was what we lived for. Now, doesn't matter what's in your hand. your deck contains Gideon, hangarback, mantis, rhino, Jace and others. good cards, but mindless to play them. we lost discard, reanimate, permission, weenie, creatureless, so many fun strategies. to play with and against.
anyone have fun going up against burn with white weenie? any combo deck against black discard? smh. I'm a modern/legacy player at heart without the collection yet to play these formats. And wizards doesn't care there are many like me now, disappointed with standard how it's become, and WOULD spend money on reprints of older, popular cards and sets. Bring back a bigger rotating format, or give us the cards we need.
Do you think that the playerbase of those games is as long standing and varied as MTG? I don't. The number of 18-21 year olds playing Yugioh my shop I can count on one hand, and I have never seen them playing Pokemon. MTG is a more mature game and MTG players are far more likely to keep playing as they age than are the players of Yugioh or Pokemon.
I don't know, what I do know is that in my town (small college town) Yugioh tournaments get twice the people Magic gets, the college has a club for Yugioh and people play it between class, neither is true for Magic. The local shop started primarily as Magic but is now about 2/3 focused on Yugioh instead since that's where the money is.
When asked why they play Yugioh the two most common answers are that they can get almost all the cards they need to be competitive from precons, and that the game is a lot cheaper than Magic.
Magic used to be a lot bigger here but expensive formats and the now faster rotation of Standard drove a lot of people away. Our Magic events are half the size they were a year ago and a third the size they were two years ago.
there is no way for WotC to make as much money as pushing Standard and Limited does
Advertisement and entry fees are what make sports, and now e-sports, a thriving business. And that alone could make eternal events a net success, if WotC wasn't stubborn on making money only a specific way that isn't sustainable in the long run and depends on the continued influx of middle-class teenagers with dispossable income who havent been burnt out by their business practices.
You're right, I came at that from a totally wrong and illogical angle. Let me try again.
Just look at Pokemon cards, and look at Magic cards. It's like comparing the 1978 Lord of the Rings movie to the Peter Jackson movies. One looks like a childish cartoon, and the other is a serious, epic fantasy world. Why wouldn't Magic cards carry a lot more value? Do adults even play Pokemon?
Ralph Bakshi's movies are a cherished treasure of the animation industry and the Tolkien fandom. Many people prefer his Hobbit to Jackson's.
And I wouldn't be surprised if there are more people of all ages who play the actual Pokemon games than magic players of all ages. Pokemon is a cultural phenomenon, it's the second best selling video game franchise of all time only behind Mario.
<Your arguments are so superficial, ignorant and inflationary that I'm not surprised at all you chose "investor" as your screen name. You represent the exact practices that are making this game increasingly less attractive to actual players.>
I was very specifically comparing to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and NOT his Hobbit, which my wife and I actually thought resembled what an MTG movie would look like. Definitely not at all related to the kind of work that was done with Lord of the Rings.
When asked why they play Yugioh the two most common answers are that they can get almost all the cards they need to be competitive from precons, and that the game is a lot cheaper than Magic.
Well, I would say you get what you pay for. Yugioh is a simple game with power-creep issues, and the cards are of atrocious quality. I will grant you that I am saying this as a person who played it with my son like 10 years ago over a period of several months, and then talking to him after he started playing MTG while still playing Yugioh for a couple years. Magic, as a game (not taking cost into consideration) has been an exceedingly well managed game, as evidenced by the growth. You can say Yugioh is more popular in your town, and I can say that MTG is the dominant card game in Portland, and frankly we can both be right. The only objective measure is the growth of the game, and according to the annual shareholder report MTG has been on the rise for the past two years (perhaps longer, those are just the ones I remember for sure).
I think people do still buy packs, they just use them to draft instead of to open. That's a big reason that YGO may not be a hot seller for a game store. Even if people don't want cards from a Magic set, they may still pay for 3 packs to draft. The only use for YGO cards is constructed.
I think people do still buy packs, they just use them to draft instead of to open. That's a big reason that YGO may not be a hot seller for a game store. Even if people don't want cards from a Magic set, they may still pay for 3 packs to draft. The only use for YGO cards is constructed.
that's what it's mostly like around here and how most stores sell packs, by doing drafts.
I mean events at my stores on average get more people than they've been getting before, so i's in pretty good shape in my area anyways and players in my area are really interested in getting better, so its in pretty good shape around here
I still pick up packs from time to time. It's a lottery, and a fun one at that. If my LGS has some Innistrad boosters for me, you better believe I'll buy a few. I feel that a lot of people over state how little you should be buying packs. Yes, singles are the best way to build a constructed deck, but cracking packs just to do so is a ton of fun, and to me, an essential part of the magic experience. I'll often pick up a pack or two if my LGS doesn't have a single I'm looking for, just so I still buy something on every visit. This is all coming from a guy who has spent the better part of 1.5k adjusting and tuning my Bg Devo deck, all with singles.
This site is a site for the more... hardcore players. Most casual players are still buying packs, and singles at the same time. The actions of this small percentage of the player base isn't going to massively hurt a company whom is charging for packs and matches online, stuff that doesn't cost them a thing.
If I had a little more hobby income I would probably buy more packs too. I hate Limited, and it is a terrible way to build a collection or get target cards, but it is a fun lottery. As it is I tend to at least get 9-10 packs a set, and when I can I grab a box per set. When I go into my shop the day of release it is hopping with people who have pre-ordered a box or more, and there are usually people buying them who haven't.
...and before someone says "yea, but how many are sold after that", I would say it has always been thus. By far the majority of packs are cracked in the first couple weeks of every set.
I used to buy at least one box per set, just to crack for fun and maybe get the cards I wanted, but as each set came/comes out i feel like there are fewer and fewer cards I actually want (i play modern pretty exclusively). I bought 2 Theros, 1 born of the Gods, 1 Journey to Nyx, 3 Khans of Tarkir, 0 fate reforged, (I stopped playing standard here!) 0 Dragons of Tarkir, 3 modern masters 1 Magic Orgins and then I probably bought close to 3 boxes worth of BFZ (0 expeditions! WOOOO!) I only bought BFZ for the lands and Expeditions, Origins only had Liliana, Heretical Healer I did not like Dragons or Fate Reforged, I thought Morph and Megamorph were dumb mechanics and made for bland game play. But It does feel like the amount of cards I'd like or be interested in gets smaller each spoiler season and as a result i will buy less packs. They got me with the gimmick in BFZ, but even that's left a bad taste in my mouth.
To me it seems like there is a problem when I am opening a booster pack and after looking at the contents, giving/leaving/throwing the cards away. It's nothing but jank limited chaff thats unusable outside of limited, or a janky rare.
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Mtgo Modern G Company Elves G
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but wotc is so jewish that will never happen so we should just let magic die. it is already dead if you think about it
URW PillowFort Stasis (costruction)
modern:
U Taking Turns combo
pauper:
UB Servitor Control
xenob8 : you know you are going to have a bad time when opponent starts with snow covered island
Death and Taxes
Pauper
UB Teachings
Tortured Existence
Murasa Tron
Modern
Pod (RIP)
Bloom(RIP)
Merfolk
You're playing a game, but if you're playing bad cards simply for the sake of being different you're playing a fundamentally different game than your opponent is. You probably have lost but you just don't recognize why. Let me give you an example in Standard, you're on the draw and I'm playing Atarka Red. Your first and third land drops come in tapped. That means on turn 4 (assuming we both make every land drop) you'll have spent 4 mana to my 10 which puts you at a severe disadvantage. If you're on the play you'll have spent 7 to my 10. Those CIPT lands come at such a cost that you don't even gain any tempo by going first, you might as well be giving your opponent a free extra turn in every single game.
You say you only need one to cast your Crackling Doom but that's not true, you need to find those lands, that's why you need a certain number in your deck. If that Evolving Wilds finds you a red, it cannot function as a blue and that means (in Modern) it can't cast your Cryptic Command or assist with Snapcaster/Path to Exile. Whisperwood Elemental requires 14 green lands and tangolands require 18 basics. That means that without proper dual lands your deck doesn't have consistency unless it's a 2 color deck.
The cards inside of packs average out to $2.20/pack and after rotation lose 90% of their value to 22 cents. If you're buying two packs and paying for an FNM without getting anything out of it you're spending $15 to grow your collection by $0.44. Now, just speaking for myself who actually does play the game on a $15/week budget (that's all I can afford), it takes a long time to assemble a deck at $15/week, that means I need the format to remain viable for a lot longer than 6 months and I need to not lose value on things like packs and entry fees. I'll say it again, if budget is your concern unless you can break even on your entry fee or better, it's better to skip an event and buy cards than attend something. If you don't mind throwing the money away, then you shouldn't mind throwing it away on something that will actually win or hold value.
And no, trading does not work. At 2 packs per week with pre rotation values that's $4.40 per week, at an 18 month rotation that limits you to a maximum deck value of $343.20 if you're able to trade off everything. In reality a large part of that $2.20 per pack consists of cards that hold a retail of $0.50 to $1.00 but are functionally worthless for the purposes of trading. So really you'll get about half that at $170 to build 3 different decks (since rotation will completely change viability every 6 months). That simply doesn't work, and is a really poor idea considering you'll have spent $624 to acquire those cards.
They probably don't. I've written about this here before but despite what Wizards claims Modern is pretty much a worst case scenario for them. Because of collector values they can't adequately reprint several cards, the format is more popular than Standard which is taking away from that attendance and viewer numbers, and it's virtually impossible to design for because of power creep. On top of that it is proving itself to be a far more economical choice than Standard. Last season which was a cheap Standard was still more expensive than a year of Modern, and this Standard is way more expensive. Even Legacy was holding it's own to the point that they had to drop support because of card supply issues they can't fix.
Modern being as popular as it is, is hugely problematic for them. One of the big issues is the PT which has forced several bans they otherwise wouldn't have had to make.
Even if you are playing devil's advocate, your argument relies heavily on a lot of conjecture you stated as fact. What source do you have to back up WotC's dislike of an expanding Modern player base? Also, these arguments make it seem like reprinting 'solves' a customer, and they no longer buy product. It also makes it seem like there's a cap on new Modern players. Have you met a Magic player that was content with 1 deck all their life?
Standard isn't the cash cow we think it is, either, it's just a model that's worked that way for a very long time. 2 years of lackluster, boring Standards is just as damaging to the game as the perpetually rising cost to enter Modern. The absolute last thing you want is the power rift between those two formats to become so wide that it becomes, "once you go Modern, you never go back'...it's on Wizards to provide an exciting Standard, not to turn Modern into a millionaires club. That just shooting themselves in both feet. Where they once had Standard and Limited both based around the same current product, they have the unique ability to grow Modern as a secondary revenue source that can be both tied directly to and have products separate from Standard blocks.
Make no mistake about it - it doesn't water down one over the other, it's a good problem to have. It's the way they're handling it that's atrocious. Also, tying reprints more heavily into sets reduces design decay AND power creep. If Remand is the strongest countermagic Standard will have available in this block, then you design around that, support, etc, AT THAT THRESHOLD. The big problem is you get Expedition Lotteries where the enemy fetches should have been a given, and/or Goblin Guide, mix in some old and new Landfall creatures, etc...this should have been stupid easy to design, and instead you get a piss-poor set with 1-3 overpowered mythics so far above the rest of the food chain, it's ridiculous. The sets become top heavy, the format becomes centered around them, the rest of the cards pale in comparison, etc. And you get what we have now.
First let me clarify, yes indeed that anything about WotC's motivation is purely conjecture, not fact - because marketing would obviously not allow them to put their motivations (which is driven that MTG is first and foremost a business than a game) on the forefront for us to use as fact.
Let's put it this way - reprints don't solve the customer, but it does reduces the amount of product they will buy in the future. It's easy to respond with "All they have to do is provide good design at the appropriate power level equal to reprints to sell", but can you prove they can actually do it? Can you prove that it makes more money than top-heavy sets with even more lottery aspects stacked on it to make the new customers marketing has attracted spend more?
All this dismissal of potential issues for the business in the long run as "good problems" is pretty much as good as conjectures on the assumption that Wizards can fix the problem because "it's on them" when it comes to arguing it should happen because players want it to.
MaRo talks a lot about people not actually wanting what they think they want. I've always though easy access to mana was one of them. People see mana as such a simple thing that should be available to them, but it really shouldn't. If there's nothing prohibiting running 3+ colors, then running fewer just puts someone at a disadvantage. There HAS to be a disadvantage to playing multiple colors. The reason standard is so expensive right now is because there is so much fixing available. Every standard deck has to be 3 colors at this point or else it's just doing something wrong. Even mono-red is splashing. Because of that every deck needs the same cards just to be able to play their cards. Lands are expensive because everybody needs them. And because they let everybody play 3 colors, it means the best cards go in more decks, which makes those cards more expensive.
Honestly, if you want a cheap format, you want less access to mana, not more.
If everybody thought the same way you did, I could agree with you, but the problem is too many players, even at an FNM, are willing and able to get $200 mana bases to win as often as possible. I don't care how much you say it isn't true, at a certain point losing just isn't fun, and losing is what you do if you play on a strict budget.
I had never thought of this point of view before. In your opinion, would bringing back the extended format and making it a featured format help? It would allow for more diversity than standard and cards would stick around longer, without actually being a non-rotating format and requring a constant, yet less harsh, buy-in.
LoL...I have been reading internet forums about MTG since about 2003, and in all that time one thing never changes- someone is always righteously and confidently foretelling the death of Magic. All things end, but MTG has weathered a lot of blow hard doomsayers in the time I have been paying attention.
There is a lot wrong with the way WotC has managed MTGO and it could do a lot better, but MTG is never going to be the draw for online viewers that Hearthstone is. A person who has never played Hearthstone can jump in and follow the game state pretty easily with only a brief explanation of the game because it is a vastly simplified card game. I have played for years and if I pull up a stream of a Legacy game or even a Standard game during a period that I am not paying attention to that metagame I can easily get lost as to who is in control of the game, and the potential impacts of the cards in hand.
Praise be to WotC for that! Hearthstone looks like fantasy farmville, IMO. I don't want to ever see a MTG game that looks like that. Animations are utterly pointless and simply detract from the experience. It is all smoke and mirrors.
this is one area that WotC are almost objectively correct on. They have had lapses in security that have given them experience in what happens when they don't very carefully control the release of information about a set. It has always resulted in a generally more negative and restrained response from the player base.
I think you have no clue how sensitive WotC are to market response data. People have voted with their wallets before, and it has had lasting affect on the game. Remember Kamigawa? You know how much of a chance there is that wizards will do anything that smacks of Kamigawa again? If you said zero then you would be correct. No LGS were bankrupted from Kamigawa. When JtMS was in Standard all it took was a noticeable reduction in people showing up for FNM over multiple geographical regions for them to do something that is extremely rare - ban cards in Standard.
Reprint Opt for Modern!!
FREE DIG THOROUGH TIME!
PLAY MORE ROUGE DECKS!
As much as I get what you're saying, you're still using a false premise. Why/How does reprinting for one format dictate what a customer buys in the future? I've been a Modern player for years, I still have a Standard deck for FNM. I'm still a consumer of Commander and Conspiracy product. Yes, after a while, I'll have what I need for Modern, and then Modern Masters 2018 isn't a product geared towards me. But I'm the exception, not the rule. I've been a good, loyal customer for years. If Wizards is offering a quality product in Standard, then I'm a buyer. My loyalty is 'rewarded' by the fact that I don't often need to replace cards in that one, single format...but that's the point of an eternal format. If you're going to create one, then you need to cultivate and build that market for new players, not me (although I'm a sucker for alt art & promos, so the occasional new art reprint would once again make me a buyer).
Speaking of that loyalty, where the hell is it? I show up at every big tourney in my city, Game Day, FNM, I buy into 4 different formats and play a draft now and again. Player Rewards were awesome. Gateway promos were neat. Stupid little things like textless cards made me want to squeeze one more event in before the cutoff date.
And I have to disagree with you. I don't think that you build up 1 product for years on end, then suddenly be able to split it in two, basically doubling your revenue streams, have a fanbase hungry for new product, and call that a bad problem. That's not conjecture, it's common sense. It'd be one thing if it somehow taxed or costed one over the other, but they've basically gone from vanilla to vanilla and chocolate, and everyone loves both flavors. How is it conjecture that new revenue streams are good thing for business?
EDIT: I specifically did not address the question as to whether Wizards could actually make more money. The only thing I can say is they've never tried it. But I can't imagine that taking control back from the secondary market would somehow hurt their bottom line.
Your example of being an exception to "not a customer of Modern Masters 2018" will hold true for more and more people as more and more Modern (Masters) products get printed. As more and more people obtain the cards for all the Modern decks they want, they will eventually be not interested in products catered to Modern.
You say you'll continue to support standard even when playing Modern, but can you prove that your action is the rule, not the exception when majority of the player base have access to Modern? It's not easy to make a rotating format as diverse as a non-rotating format (this should be obvious), so without being more powerful than older formats, Standard will always be weaker - even during a "great" Standard period like Innistrad-Return to Ravnica, the format is still less diverse and weaker than Modern, because the natural size of the formats in comparison.
What's more is that they cannot even assure that Standard can maintain the "great" standards. What happens when they make a mistake and Standard ends up being low-powered? People buy less products because Standard isn't interesting and since majority of the player base have access to Modern, they focus on that. Problem is, when this scenario happens further in the future when most players have Modern cards already, they don't need to spend more on Modern, so they don't spend as much on the game anymore. Standard may not be the cash cow we think it is, but it ultimately definitely makes more money than Modern products over in a long run.
It's also easy to assume that people playing Modern will jump back to Standard when it gets interesting again and citing that you will do it yourself, but what assurance can you give that majority of the players will do that when it happens? With no assurance, it becomes a risky prospect. Yes, no risk no gain, but I can assure you when you work for a large company like Hasbro, you are a lot less inclined to take risks on behalf of the company (I think the reasons behind that are obvious).
You say they should see Modern as a new product (or a split product) that has potential for "new product" in the future, stating the profits and diversity, but once again, you didn't raise the cost of "new product" for modern. I'm not talking about reprints (that's technically not new), I'm talking about new cards designed with the format in mind - that space is quite limited in reality. Yes, it's not conjecture but common sense to know that printing for Modern creates profits and possibly diversity, but it's also common sense to know Standard has less diversity by default, they can't keep producing "stellar" Standards, because for something to be considered good, there must be some comparison. If it keeps going from good to better to even better, the most likely culprit is power creep, because how many ways can Standard keep producing diversity that's different from what's already in Modern to render it interesting enough to the majority of players?
Wizards have never controlled the secondary market (because they requires literally selling singles), they have only influenced it through reprints. This scenario is more of a case they don't want to "lower the secondary market" because they can't guarantee the quality of new products would be stellar, which means if they aren't, when combined with a lowered secondary market, it will actually hurt their bottom line. They're basically keeping a "costly secondary market" as an insurance against risk people will decide to contribute to their bottom line regardless of quality.
Bluntly put: They can now do poorer design with less risk to loss to the bottom line because high secondary market prices are regulating money flow towards sealed products instead. They have not seen their bottom line not hit target enough to consider the need to put reprints to put a buffer in time while they figure out what is wrong with design that's causing new products to not meet bottom line profits. It's more of question on risk than profit.
Cards from Kamigawa block look pretty sweet compared to what is in BFZ ... just saying. At least there is a good handful of modern (and legacy) staples at all rarities including common. If Oath is more of the same crap in BFZ people are not going to buy. They will scrape by with Dragons and Origins hoping and praying that Shadows over Innistrad will return some stability back to the power level.
And this is where reprints can actually fix things in Standard. The way New World Order works is to completely forget how it used to work...when Magic was still rising in popularity, as opposed this 'year of stabilization' that seems to involve shrinking somehow.
See, Counterspell was always Counterspell. Why? Because it did what blue wanted to do. Lightning Bolt, same story. Terror. Swords to Plowshares. Dark Ritual. Power Sink. They didn't try to reinvent the damn wheel every set. Some parts of Magic just worked right. Individual sets enhanced, worked around, or exemplified those traits, giving each color a very distinct identity, as opposed to the blurred lines we have now. (Mono Blue did just have an aggro deck not that long ago...) Modern is thrilling because it's power level and diversity is due to the absolute best of those examples.
Every block in recent memory has given major contributions to Modern's landscape, save for the last 2 years. It's been dismal design that's made for a boring Standard. Design isn't drying up for Modern, the rift between power levels is so astronomically different now, only 1-2 cards at the top of their game have something to offer, and it rarely comes from the 'bomb' $45 mythic. Gideon is a house in Standard, but he offers Modern very, very little, if anything...and that's fine. The devil is in the details with pieces that make it into Modern. Look at Abrupt Decay, or Sphinx's Revelation from RTR. The utility kill spell that costs a hard Black and Green, and it's an all-star card in the format. In Standard, it was a $3 kill spell at one point while we were spoiled with good removal. The big bombs that move to Modern are usually utility, like Keranos, Jace AOT, Craterhoof Behemoth...oh, crap look at that...I didn't even mean to, and I used examples that shared a Standard with that Jace. Design lately is just crap. We can't even get the crummy 2nd-tier stuff we were using before Theros rotatated. No Lightning Strike or Doom Blade.
Basically: Reprinting isn't as risky as failing to listen to the consumer. The secondary market put up a wall between Wizards and their customer base in the eternal formats. Couple that with inept design on the rotating format, you have a recipe for disaster. Both can be fixed by learning how Magic grew popular in the past with it's design, and using reprints from the past to prop it up.
For what it's worth, Eternal only means that cards don't rotate out of the format. It doesn't have anything to do with hoew far back the format extends, just that the legal cards are 'eternal' and don't disappear due to rotation.
I don't know, I know I wouldn't have any interest in it and the last time extended was around it didn't have any interest either. I'm not actually sure why that is, but I think psychologically I would just prefer to play formats where my cards are going to hold value, and that's not what extended is. Extended offers no benefits to me over Modern or Legacy.
I think the game needs the allure of non rotating formats because it causes cards to actually hold value long term and that's a good thing for a game that's trying to bill itself as being collectible. I just think Wizards promoted Modern a bit too much. Clearly there's some real financial risks to them if Modern does well. The format would be better off without a PT, and the reprint issue is really tricky. But, people want to see Modern. There's a myriad of reasons, which I can only name a few of but it's a very popular format. I think a big part of the allure is that it's a Legacy that doesn't have card availability problems.
People want to play older high powered formats, partially because Wizards hasn't made that experience available anywhere else. Theros, Khans, and BFZ have all existed in their own low power topsy turvy world where threats are better than answers. But people like the gameplay of answers being better than threats. Standard has this issue where your answer needs to line up perfectly with your opponents card and it leads to poor games that revolve around the idea of jamming your threats until they can't answer one. It's just the opposite in a format like Modern or Legacy. In those formats the answers are broad and powerful, it becomes a game of maneuvering into a position where your threat is good against powerful answers. It's a style of play they've been removing from the game. Draft no longer has it, Cube no longer has it, Standard no longer has it, and it's even starting to vanish from Modern as new creatures enter but new removal doesn't.
This is a quaint way of looking at the game. Good landbases are expensive for a reason; they are that much better than budget alternatives.
Relying on lands that come into play tapped to fix your mana is an enormous burden. Oftentimes you will be playing behind your opponent by a virtual turn. While they continue to curve out perfectly thanks to their Fetch-Tango manabase, you played a Rugged Highlands and passed the turn. By playing budget lands, you often hand opponents a free Time Walk and, as any Magic player knows, that's a back-breakingly powerful effect.
And this disparity in power between the haves and have-nots tends to make people a little upset. And it doesn't just apply to lands...almost every staple effect in this current Standard has a "best-in-slot" that's a chase Rare or Mythic (and in Modern/Legacy even Commons and Uncommons can be seriously pricey due to being long out of print) and often times any substitutes for these cards are borderline unplayable garbage.
Five bucks only buys a night of fun if you have a deck you can have fun with or the right environment to have fun with a budget brew. If your LGS tends towards the competitive or Spikey side and you don't have a tiered deck (or good cards in a rogue brew), that five clams is only going to pay for some bad beats.
And the desire to make progress in your hobby as you pay into it is far removed from the mindset of a gambling addict. For budget players, tournament magic is no longer offers much to reward pluck and perseverance. Prize structure is weighted towards winner-take-most schemes, which rewards financially established players who have collections that include the best cards.
Look at a lot of competitive, multiplayer computer and video games. Eliding the fact that most are not nearly as pay-to-win as Magic is, they often have virtual reward structures that reward frequent play, even if they player doesn't post winning records, allowing all players a shot at new gear, unlocks, or what-have-you. I know very little of Hearthstone, but from what I understand, there are free, daily events that hand out prize packs to any player that participates, keeping the "dream" of progress alive. It would be nice if Magic had some sort of conciliatory prize like this (still; R.I.P. Player Rewards promos).
Actually, considering how stern MaRo is about the color wheel, they didn't reinvent the wheel every set - they just made existing color wheel effects "weaker" by increasing their costs and adding additional effects not worth the cost, or tacked on the set's gimmick on to the standard color wheel ability. Yes, I agree that they have been de-powering standard itself too much in the recent years, like you stated even 2nd tier stuff that definitely don't make the cut in Modern don't even make it in Standard/Limited nowadays.
I wouldn't deny the last two years have been more or less making a boring standard, but if you expect major meta-changing contributions to non-rotating formats every block, you're just setting up yourself for disappointment, honestly. It's not like the past 2 years didn't contribute in various ways to Modern - Theros reprinted Thoughtseize and there are potentially powerful cards waiting for someone innovate with and/or already see play in fringe decks, like Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx. Tarkir contributed the entry of the allied Fetchlands (which is a major game-changer, remember berfore Tarkir you could't play the onslaught ones in Modern), Siege Rhino and produced even two cards banned in the format (Thanks Delve...), as well as Collected Company and Kolaghan's Command, which see quite the amount of play.
Abrupt Decay itself wasn't exactly meta-changing, because Jund and Junk/Abzan Midrange decks already existed, it just added a tool to the decks in Tier 1 - not every set has to do that, to promote diversity, cards that support homebrews are the real key, and those can be left undiscovered for years (Grishoalbrand's core nonland cards literally only used cards up to Gatecrash, but the deck took long enough to surface). Arguably I'll even say Tarkir contributed more to Modern than RTR, and that was only a year ago.
BFZ is indeed largely a disappointment, but it is the first set of a new paradigm they started for Standard. Honestly speaking, the new paradigm is worse for Standard (faster rotations), but by virtue of visiting more planes a year, we can expect more goodies for non-rotating formats in the future - just don't expect them to be major Tier-1 changing cards. Like I mentioned earlier, I agree they need to kick the power level of Standard/Limited itself back the notch to the 2nd tier stuff again though.
You'll need to recognize that Wizards "listens to the consumer" by looking at sales numbers/percentages. Kamigawa can be praised to sky-high now, but because the sales percentages were abyssal, we aren't likely to ever return to Kamigawa. Ravnica showed great sales percentages, and therefore we had RTR and based on hints, we are likely to get another Return sooner than later. You can say that we don't have the data and facts, which is true, but why would designers claim a set to be popular and return to the plane for any other reason than "It sold well, so it's popular"?
It'll be more straightfoward to say the customer base built the wall against Wizards because the Secondary Market is largely driven by the customer base itself. Sure, Wizard's slow response in trying to lower down the wall is tragic, but it is noted whenever they do lower the wall (Modern Masters), the customer base just drives it back up again with greater demand. The first time they tried to quell increasing demand at one go (Chronicles), it ended with a stubborn promise we are now demanding them to remove (Reserved List), leading to more or less the sealed fate of eternal formats. (Please don't argue about the list here, there's a thread for that, but let's face it, a decade of feedback didn't change that policy, nothing now will.)
Sad to say, with the inept design of rotating formats now, their feedback is still "positive" because Lotteries are addictive and top-heavy sets fuel that. On top of that, they don't usually admit their mistakes until the set rotates out, because they don't want to impact sales negatively by "official" talk. Perhaps they would agree with what you're saying now, but if saying it now means less BFZ boosters sold, that's literally the fastest way to shoot themselves in the foot. Remember, they work two years ahead of time and they don't take immediate feedback after a set of release, they accumulate it during the set's run in the rotating format before concluding.
I'm not seeing but one artifact in a typical game, not counting Hangarback. Maybe 2 enchantments get played. Manlands are cool, but its still just another creature. There's a severe reduction in the variety of tactics available in standard.
Another thing about Extended. I always thought that was an attractive format I wanted to get into. a little bit older card base from some favorite recent sets along with nice new releases. It would be fresh, rotating along with new blocks. just a larger pool to build from.
Wizards wants to distance itself from it's past, fine. But the mechanics and strategies that attracted players to mtg in the first place are no more. Trading creatures until either player fails to draw a blocker isn't skill in building or play. Playing skill, knowing when to hold or use your counter, tap for that ability, or hold a land to discard, bluff or whatever, timing your drops to get around control strategy. that was what we lived for. Now, doesn't matter what's in your hand. your deck contains Gideon, hangarback, mantis, rhino, Jace and others. good cards, but mindless to play them. we lost discard, reanimate, permission, weenie, creatureless, so many fun strategies. to play with and against.
anyone have fun going up against burn with white weenie? any combo deck against black discard? smh. I'm a modern/legacy player at heart without the collection yet to play these formats. And wizards doesn't care there are many like me now, disappointed with standard how it's become, and WOULD spend money on reprints of older, popular cards and sets. Bring back a bigger rotating format, or give us the cards we need.
What do you think about an extended-like format?
I don't know, what I do know is that in my town (small college town) Yugioh tournaments get twice the people Magic gets, the college has a club for Yugioh and people play it between class, neither is true for Magic. The local shop started primarily as Magic but is now about 2/3 focused on Yugioh instead since that's where the money is.
When asked why they play Yugioh the two most common answers are that they can get almost all the cards they need to be competitive from precons, and that the game is a lot cheaper than Magic.
Magic used to be a lot bigger here but expensive formats and the now faster rotation of Standard drove a lot of people away. Our Magic events are half the size they were a year ago and a third the size they were two years ago.
I was very specifically comparing to Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and NOT his Hobbit, which my wife and I actually thought resembled what an MTG movie would look like. Definitely not at all related to the kind of work that was done with Lord of the Rings.
Well, I would say you get what you pay for. Yugioh is a simple game with power-creep issues, and the cards are of atrocious quality. I will grant you that I am saying this as a person who played it with my son like 10 years ago over a period of several months, and then talking to him after he started playing MTG while still playing Yugioh for a couple years. Magic, as a game (not taking cost into consideration) has been an exceedingly well managed game, as evidenced by the growth. You can say Yugioh is more popular in your town, and I can say that MTG is the dominant card game in Portland, and frankly we can both be right. The only objective measure is the growth of the game, and according to the annual shareholder report MTG has been on the rise for the past two years (perhaps longer, those are just the ones I remember for sure).
Reprint Opt for Modern!!
FREE DIG THOROUGH TIME!
PLAY MORE ROUGE DECKS!
that's what it's mostly like around here and how most stores sell packs, by doing drafts.
I mean events at my stores on average get more people than they've been getting before, so i's in pretty good shape in my area anyways and players in my area are really interested in getting better, so its in pretty good shape around here
This site is a site for the more... hardcore players. Most casual players are still buying packs, and singles at the same time. The actions of this small percentage of the player base isn't going to massively hurt a company whom is charging for packs and matches online, stuff that doesn't cost them a thing.
Cheeri0sXWU
Reid Duke's Level One
Who's the Beatdown
Alt+0198=Æ
...and before someone says "yea, but how many are sold after that", I would say it has always been thus. By far the majority of packs are cracked in the first couple weeks of every set.
Reprint Opt for Modern!!
FREE DIG THOROUGH TIME!
PLAY MORE ROUGE DECKS!
To me it seems like there is a problem when I am opening a booster pack and after looking at the contents, giving/leaving/throwing the cards away. It's nothing but jank limited chaff thats unusable outside of limited, or a janky rare.
Decks
Modern
BGR Jund RGB
BW Eldrazi and Taxes WB
BWGAbzan Company GWB
Mtgo Modern
G Company Elves G