Hasbro has done extensive market research on this. They aren't going to make as much money if they do what you propose. Ultimately, this game is about making money. It's a business: they're not making Magic cards for your personal happiness. Part of the appeal of CCGs is rare, collectable cards. Exclusivity breeds value in the human psyche: the cards I mentioned wouldn't be nearly as cool if everyone could get them for $5. Without cool exclusives, people wouldn't bust packs, and if people don't bust packs, the game dies.
Magic is only a card game: it's not a multimedia franchise like Pokemon. Nintendo can make most of their $ on the video games, the anime, the toys, and the Pikachu-stamped underwear, and sell the cards at a lesser profit margin. In contrast, Magic has very little multimedia: all we have is a crappy Steam game and a series of poorly sculpted statuettes where Gideon is the wrong race.
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
These days, some wizards are finding they have a little too much deck left at the end of their $$$.
MTG finance guy- follow me on Twitter@RichArschmann or RichardArschmann on Reddit
They do print playable commons and uncommons. Delver, Young Pyro, Treasure Cruise, Bloodbraid Elf, and Lightning Bolt just to name a few. The problem is they have to design around Limited, so making a lot of strong commons will make the environment something they don't want.
The uncommons weren't amazing, but they weren't total chaff either. Have to save some stuff for MM2016, I suppose. We don't want to go full Yugioh and ruin the value of everything in the format so LGS owners can no longer afford their rent and medical bills.
We've listened to these excuses for too long and it's becoming very apparent that they are not in line with reality and are in fact just that: excuses.
MMA, Power Cube, Vintage Masters, MM15 and Tempest Remastered would have been absolute flops if printing powerful cards at common and uncommon was noxious for the limited enviroment. Instead they keep making these products because surprise! They sell like hot-cakes because people actually want those cards and the draft enviroments are so fun they are a prize on it's own.
They don't design extremely underpowered cards to fill standard sets because they want to keep limited healthy. They do so because they have discovered that they can print sets with 5 good cards at mythic/rare, 5 rare lands, make the rest chimney imps, and the set will still sell because standard players need those 10 cards to compete and stores need to open boosters to get them.
As for saving stuff and not wanting to be Yu-Gi-Oh!, once again, lies we've accepted as truth. YGO and pokemon sell very well, they have equal or greater space dedicated to them at most stores including Wal-Mart and Target. There are LGS that run entirely on YGO money and I don't know about your local scene but around here I keep seeing these kids get iPads, iPhones, 3DS and other expensive stuff as 40-people torunament prizes while we get boosters for the Gideon/Expedition lottery potentially going home with a prize worth less than your entry fee.
Notthing bad would happen if Tarmogoyf was Rare in SOI to anyone but the most reckless and self-sabotaging dealers/stores. Anyone worth their salt has their active assets tied to ***** that's in constant production like boosters, sleeves, mats, snacks and standard singles. Not a card that may linger in the binder for months, because the rent is not gonna linger in the mail untill you sell that Goyf.
And reprinting him now won't stop us from buying MM16 either. Lightning Bolt has been around from day one and we still love opening one in a booster. Nobody complained about seeing Swords or Brainstorm in Duel Decks or Commander and then seeing them again in Conspiracy and nobody felt cheated by a second promo printing of Wasteland, Vindicate or Path to Exile.
Good cards are always welcome, they don't have to "save them for the next set". All that spells is the ****ers running the business side of WotC expect Magic to die soon and to need an incentive to bring players back. Maybe because they're purposedly running the product as a bad pyramid scheme.
There is an simple (but unfortunate) answer for why.
WotC makes most of its money off of two formats, Standard and Limited. Limited requires fresh packs and Standard requires a quickly rotating collection of current cards (from fresh packs). From a corporate point of view, this is all that matters, as it is what makes the most money (WotC has not been a game for the players for a long, long time now, the people with the real power there are all pointy-haired bosses & accountants).
Modern, Vintage and Legacy make WotC almost no new money, so they do as little as possible to support it. Sure they offer pro tours, etc. with them, but that support is less and less every year, and its just enough to keep interest in the overall game. There is absolutely no incentive to add any additional support or a large & cheap influx of cards, because anything they do could (and would) steal away from Standard or Limited play (and ultimately profit).
Imagine an environment where Modern/Vinatge/Legacy decks average $300 or less and those tourneys are filled with two or three times the amount of normal players that attend them now. Sure the exposure & support for these formats would grow, but all these cards being used were sold long ago, and make absolutely nothing for WotC now. Even if the did support it with a bunch of new cards, because the formats do not rotate, once people have a good base of 1-4 decks they tend to stop buying additional cards. Or worse they only new a few new cards here and there to fill out their current decks. Either way they can continue playing in one of the formats with a limited amount of additional funds for as long as they like. So any way you look at it, there is no way for WotC to make as much money as pushing Standard and Limited does (which is why they don't).
Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE for a proper Modern Masters or Vintage/Legacy Masters set with nothing but quality cards to lower the prices overall (where an average high card would be $20-25 at max.), but it will never happen. Standard and Limited would have to be... abandoned for that to happen and people (however much they hate it) support those formats as they have to if they want to participate in fairly regular play.
It does suck, I will fully agree with that. As someone who loves to build lots of decks, I hate that there are so many cards I would like to build around, but will not buy due to the insane costs.
I wish there was a way for them to make money (hey why not), yet still have easily accessible cards for everyone. I'd also like to win the lotto, but that hasn't happened so far...
Hasbro has done extensive market research on this. They aren't going to make as much money if they do what you propose. Ultimately, this game is about making money. It's a business: they're not making Magic cards for your personal happiness. Part of the appeal of CCGs is rare, collectable cards. Exclusivity breeds value in the human psyche: the cards I mentioned wouldn't be nearly as cool if everyone could get them for $5. Without cool exclusives, people wouldn't bust packs, and if people don't bust packs, the game dies.
Magic is only a card game: it's not a multimedia franchise like Pokemon. Nintendo can make most of their $ on the video games, the anime, the toys, and the Pikachu-stamped underwear, and sell the cards at a lesser profit margin. In contrast, Magic has very little multimedia: all we have is a crappy Steam game and a series of poorly sculpted statuettes where Gideon is the wrong race.
Sounds like the current model is for YOUR personal happiness to the detriment of the majority. Can guarantee if they pop a tarmogoyf at uncommon in a booster pack it would be the best selling booster pack of all time. We've endlessly refuted your notions that exclusivity opens packs. Drafts and sealed open packs, disposable income opens packs. You act like no one has ever bought a pack of pokemon or yugioh cards. It's just outrageous, you act like those two card games don't exist.
There is an simple (but unfortunate) answer for why.
WotC makes most of its money off of two formats, Standard and Limited. Limited requires fresh packs and Standard requires a quickly rotating collection of current cards (from fresh packs). From a corporate point of view, this is all that matters, as it is what makes the most money (WotC has not been a game for the players for a long, long time now, the people with the real power there are all pointy-haired bosses & accountants).
Modern, Vintage and Legacy make WotC almost no new money, so they do as little as possible to support it. Sure they offer pro tours, etc. with them, but that support is less and less every year, and its just enough to keep interest in the overall game. There is absolutely no incentive to add any additional support or a large & cheap influx of cards, because anything they do could (and would) steal away from Standard or Limited play (and ultimately profit).
Imagine an environment where Modern/Vinatge/Legacy decks average $300 or less and those tourneys are filled with two or three times the amount of normal players that attend them now. Sure the exposure & support for these formats would grow, but all these cards being used were sold long ago, and make absolutely nothing for WotC now. Even if the did support it with a bunch of new cards, because the formats do not rotate, once people have a good base of 1-4 decks they tend to stop buying additional cards. Or worse they only new a few new cards here and there to fill out their current decks. Either way they can continue playing in one of the formats with a limited amount of additional funds for as long as they like. So any way you look at it, there is no way for WotC to make as much money as pushing Standard and Limited does (which is why they don't).
Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE for a proper Modern Masters or Vintage/Legacy Masters set with nothing but quality cards to lower the prices overall (where an average high card would be $20-25 at max.), but it will never happen. Standard and Limited would have to be... abandoned for that to happen and people (however much they hate it) support those formats as they have to if they want to participate in fairly regular play.
It does suck, I will fully agree with that. As someone who loves to build lots of decks, I hate that there are so many cards I would like to build around, but will not buy due to the insane costs.
I wish there was a way for them to make money (hey why not), yet still have easily accessible cards for everyone. I'd also like to win the lotto, but that hasn't happened so far...
To be honest, I really think this is yet another myth we're accepting as truth. Look, I've seen in the major LGS's I've played with (I've bounced around a few major cities in the past decade) new players coming and going, but the old guard does it, too. Hell, there's 2 guys at our LGS that sell off their pieces and disappear from the game for months while dealing with real-life stuff and suddenly come back and buy into Commander, Standard, Modern, or all 3. Some of us don't let the 'keep it and hold it forever so it gains imaginary value' mantra control us, so they're constantly rebuilding their decks.
So, you have new players, old players buying back in. The market is there if the product is solid. Also, this argument about 'Standard and Limited pays their bills' doesn't hold water for other reasons. Limited, especially lately, is a very hard sell in some regions, like mine here in Charlotte. Some LGS's do better with it, most don't. I can't stand limited, personally, but that's more to do with crap-quality sets to draft with. You offer me M11 draft and I'm in, BFZ...not so much. Standard is in a shifting period as we go to the new block structure, and I've seen more than a few people kinda gunshy about it. They're sitting on their current deck because they can't justify $45 Gideons and $80 Jaces without knowing how fast and how hard the prices tank in this new rotation cycle.
Also, Modern is not only attracting new players all the time, it's getting new cards. Eternal does not mean buy a deck and never give Wizards a dime ever again. Wizards is using that model, not the players. We're shelling out cash to LGS's, Ebay, Troll and Toad, SCG, and about a billion others for cards that haven't been reprinted in years. That's on Wizard's, not us. It used to be that your staples like Counterspell, Lightning Bolt, and Dark Ritual were reprinted every set. New artwork for the people that have theirs, and easily accessible for those that don't. We can't even get a full set of utility staples in a block anymore (ie. no practical graveyard hate in Standard, no Doom Blade-esque cards, no 3 for 2 red instant).
So maybe the problem isn't the cash cow everyone thinks Standard and Limited are, maybe the issue is the New World Order was a catastrophe of design - it's inelegant, it concentrates value into upper rarities, it leaves a lot of dead trees on a table after draft is over, and it makes everything feel watered down. Eternal players don't need what they have to give.
Let me just throw this out there - Pernicious Deed at Mythic in Conspiracy...was anyone crying? Did it bring Magic to its knees? What if it was Wasteland? Force of Will? Crucible of Worlds? City of Traitors? At what point do the reprints 'kill magic'? When is a set 'too good' that it screws everything up? On the other side of the coin, if those cards were in there, would you and I still be cracking packs? Pretty sure the answer is yes.
Hasbro has done extensive market research on this. They aren't going to make as much money if they do what you propose. Ultimately, this game is about making money. It's a business: they're not making Magic cards for your personal happiness. Part of the appeal of CCGs is rare, collectable cards. Exclusivity breeds value in the human psyche: the cards I mentioned wouldn't be nearly as cool if everyone could get them for $5. Without cool exclusives, people wouldn't bust packs, and if people don't bust packs, the game dies.
Magic is only a card game: it's not a multimedia franchise like Pokemon. Nintendo can make most of their $ on the video games, the anime, the toys, and the Pikachu-stamped underwear, and sell the cards at a lesser profit margin. In contrast, Magic has very little multimedia: all we have is a crappy Steam game and a series of poorly sculpted statuettes where Gideon is the wrong race.
Hasbro has done extensive market research? Source? Wizard's doesn't even give us the results of the polls they put on their website. I would love to see the raw data that suggests that players want rare, collectible cards. And no, the outcry from Chronicles doesn't count, the playerbase has changed since then. For now, Wizards could use a bit more transparency because until I see actual numbers from the company I'm not trusting the "extensive market research" angle. To me it's just more of Wizards telling us what we should want. As for me I'll continue to play Legacy and Cube and treat this game like my other board games
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Listen closely as your radio plays
a program of a slightly different strain.
Tonight my listeners, a new power will rise,
unleashed upon you all in this musical disguise.
Your cities turn to ash, for the broadcast is cursed.
The signal is peaking and can't be reversed.
If you choose my children, you can try to hide.
But I strongly suggest you run for your life."
-The Sermon 2, The Creepshow
So... one Magic card bought a whole crap load of Pokemon cards?
That doesn't surprise me. Magic is a far superior game.
One U.S. dollar can buy a crap ton of stuff in some third world country. See what I'm saying?
I honestly can't tell if this is troll bait or not. I mean, if that's all you got from it, you either didn't read it all or didn't understand it.
But I'll bite. Superior in whose eyes? Yours? Mine? Because I can go outside and round up 10 people that think i'm an idiot for buying 60 dollar pieces of cardboard. I also can't convince my 7 year old how superior that Gideon was to the pile of packs I handed her. Plus, she busted a $20 EX card. So no, I don't see what you're saying at all.
So... one Magic card bought a whole crap load of Pokemon cards?
That doesn't surprise me. Magic is a far superior game.
One U.S. dollar can buy a crap ton of stuff in some third world country. See what I'm saying?
I honestly can't tell if this is troll bait or not. I mean, if that's all you got from it, you either didn't read it all or didn't understand it.
But I'll bite. Superior in whose eyes? Yours? Mine? Because I can go outside and round up 10 people that think i'm an idiot for buying 60 dollar pieces of cardboard. I also can't convince my 7 year old how superior that Gideon was to the pile of packs I handed her. Plus, she busted a $20 EX card. So no, I don't see what you're saying at all.
Well those 60 dollar pieces of cardboard are 80 or 100 dollar pieces of cardboard when I sell them. So I think it's your 10 people who are really the idiots.
And why are the cards worth so much? The market. Wizards doesn't decide how much they're worth, the people do.
I think the reason it's superior is because you could find someone to play Magic with in about a half hour, whereas finding someone around you to play competitive Pokemon with would take days. Just rounding up and down for illustration, but that'w what my response would be, to what investor3 is insinuating.
Maybe I'm wrong but I almost never see anyone playing Pokemon and I'm in and around numerous local game stores in the Pittsburgh, PA area. Maybe its different in bigger cities.
I think the reason it's superior is because you could find someone to play Magic with in about a half hour, whereas finding someone around you to play competitive Pokemon with would take days. Just rounding up and down for illustration, but that'w what my response would be, to what investor3 is insinuating.
Maybe I'm wrong but I almost never see anyone playing Pokemon and I'm in and around numerous local game stores in the Pittsburgh, PA area. Maybe its different in bigger cities.
Pokemon is just a game. Magic is so much more than a game by now, in the same way that Lord of the Rings is more than a book and Star Wars is more than a movie. It is a culture, a franchise. The cards at the center of it have their value enhanced by the sheer scale of the whole phenomenon. I'm sure there is a technical, mathematical way of describing what I just described as well, but that's basically how it works.
So... one Magic card bought a whole crap load of Pokemon cards?
That doesn't surprise me. Magic is a far superior game.
One U.S. dollar can buy a crap ton of stuff in some third world country. See what I'm saying?
I honestly can't tell if this is troll bait or not. I mean, if that's all you got from it, you either didn't read it all or didn't understand it.
But I'll bite. Superior in whose eyes? Yours? Mine? Because I can go outside and round up 10 people that think i'm an idiot for buying 60 dollar pieces of cardboard. I also can't convince my 7 year old how superior that Gideon was to the pile of packs I handed her. Plus, she busted a $20 EX card. So no, I don't see what you're saying at all.
Well those 60 dollar pieces of cardboard are 80 or 100 dollar pieces of cardboard when I sell them. So I think it's your 10 people who are really the idiots.
And why are the cards worth so much? The market. Wizards doesn't decide how much they're worth, the people do.
I mean...congrats? None of that has much of anything to do with what I was talking about in the OP. I was referring to the avenues other CCG's are opening up to attract their players and make them feel like they've gotten value from their dollar, as opposed to the litany of strange practices Wizard's has done to make the community feel a loss in value. Prize walls, watered-down Standard fodder, discontinued rewards programs, I mean just read the thread. This isn't a price discussion complaint, it's a value complaint.
And to be clear, I play the game. When I said '10 people' I meant people outside the game have a hard time wrapping their brains around it unless you equate it to sports cards, and even that's kind of an old-timey reference at this point. So while you're celebrating your $20 margin gain, to those people what we're doing is a silly/foreign concept. Like all collectible hobbies, I imagine.
So... one Magic card bought a whole crap load of Pokemon cards?
That doesn't surprise me. Magic is a far superior game.
One U.S. dollar can buy a crap ton of stuff in some third world country. See what I'm saying?
I honestly can't tell if this is troll bait or not. I mean, if that's all you got from it, you either didn't read it all or didn't understand it.
But I'll bite. Superior in whose eyes? Yours? Mine? Because I can go outside and round up 10 people that think i'm an idiot for buying 60 dollar pieces of cardboard. I also can't convince my 7 year old how superior that Gideon was to the pile of packs I handed her. Plus, she busted a $20 EX card. So no, I don't see what you're saying at all.
Well those 60 dollar pieces of cardboard are 80 or 100 dollar pieces of cardboard when I sell them. So I think it's your 10 people who are really the idiots.
And why are the cards worth so much? The market. Wizards doesn't decide how much they're worth, the people do.
I mean...congrats? None of that has much of anything to do with what I was talking about in the OP. I was referring to the avenues other CCG's are opening up to attract their players and make them feel like they've gotten value from their dollar, as opposed to the litany of strange practices Wizard's has done to make the community feel a loss in value. Prize walls, watered-down Standard fodder, discontinued rewards programs, I mean just read the thread. This isn't a price discussion complaint, it's a value complaint.
And to be clear, I play the game. When I said '10 people' I meant people outside the game have a hard time wrapping their brains around it unless you equate it to sports cards, and even that's kind of an old-timey reference at this point. So while you're celebrating your $20 margin gain, to those people what we're doing is a silly/foreign concept. Like all collectible hobbies, I imagine.
Magic has more players now than at any point in its history. If there is a value complaint, it seems more like a "I wish this amazing game weren't so expensive because my wallet hurts" complaint rather than a "I regret buying these cards and I don't want to buy them anymore, because they feel worthless to me" complaint.
look how bad the prize support at their sanctioned events is getting, no one wants a prize wall.
DCI sanctions it, but at the vast majority of large events the prizes are determined and supplied by the organizer. Wizards has nothing to do with it. Even if there were better sets to offer as prizes, who knows if they would even be offered.
No LGS I know has ever gone under from Yu-Gi-Oh's (or Pokemon's) reprint policy.
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.
In fact all the LGSs I know still carry those games
My card shop has several cases full of magic singles, not to mention the cards they have in storage and in binders, and it has exactly zero for Pokemon or Yugioh. They make a significant portion of their income from MTG singles and could not be the premier play location that it is if all it sold was sealed product.
Sounds like the current model is for YOUR personal happiness to the detriment of the majority.
How do you know you are the majority? At least he is using the argument that WotC has a better grasp on the larger MTG player base than any of us do, and that means you too. How self centered would a person have to be to think that their view is the majority in the face of customer and market research?
Wizards has a vested interest in the results of "popular opinion" skewing towards a particular option, and they don't release any of this supposed data that reflects that opinion, so forgive us if we don't just automatically take them at their word that most people would prefer to draft Battle for Zendikar over something like Modern Masters 1.
Well, even without data, their statements tell us the things we need to know - when they say "New Set" is the best selling set of all-time, they're basically saying the current formulas for making more money is working.
If it isn't making money, that's when they will start taking action. All the complaints and suggestions to "make the game better" don't matter as long as their tested formulas are working, because to them, your suggestions are hypothetical, which means they don't take them at the word that reprinting Legacy staples will not harm their current formulas.
They do print playable commons and uncommons. Delver, Young Pyro, Treasure Cruise, Bloodbraid Elf, and Lightning Bolt just to name a few. The problem is they have to design around Limited, so making a lot of strong commons will make the environment something they don't want.
It's a matter of as-fan.
Take Mercadian Masques, a medium-power set that is not remembered overly fondly. Look at the commons there. Many of them were constructed staples or at least niche role players.
The uncommons had a few legitimately good cards and a few cards that never got there but looked playable to many people (Lumbering Satyr, Coastal Piracy, Intimidation)
Then the rares also had actual good cards (Misdirection, Port), cards with apparent but unrealised potential (Clear the Land, Monkey Cage), niche playables (Crumbling Sanctuary) and actual chaff (Corrupt Official).
But the as-fan of Constructed cards in a pack was as high as 5 or 6.
Contrast to BFZ where at a stretch it's 0.5-0.7 and that's including some dubious cards (Rolling Thunder isn't a Spike card in Constructed but it will excite some people into trying it, ditto Desolation Twin, I'm counting both of those cards).
Pokemon is just a game. Magic is so much more than a game by now, in the same way that Lord of the Rings is more than a book and Star Wars is more than a movie. It is a culture, a franchise. The cards at the center of it have their value enhanced by the sheer scale of the whole phenomenon. I'm sure there is a technical, mathematical way of describing what I just described as well, but that's basically how it works.
I'll be honest (and no offense to you), I was mentally laughing when I read this, especially when you said Pokemon is just a game and went on to say Magic is a franchise, which implies Pokemon isn't one. I can say with confidence Pokemon is a greater franchise than Magic can ever be...
Firstly, the core game types of Magic and Pokemon are different - Magic's core is a trading card game, and it is because of the nature of the trading card games and the devotion of the players that the cards have value, not because of "phenomenon". Pokemon, on the other hand, has its core in the video games - the reason its TCG is still selling on shelves is because of the phenomenon brought upon by the video games (and arguably the anime). I know you admitted you didn't get the technical terms right, but you literally listed the opposite scenario in this case.
The strength of a franchise's culture is dependent on the non-core aspects of the franchise - to dismiss Pokemon as a just a game because it's TCG is weaker than MTG is like saying MTG is just a game because Duels of the Planeswalkers is weaker than the mainstream Pokemon games.
Just to hammer my point that Pokemon as a culture/franchise is stronger:
Magic has just started with the board game, the movie-in-the-works, FUNKO figures and the other action-figure series I already can't recall the name about, plus Magic Online and Duels of the Planeswalkers
Pokemon, on the other hand, has an anime, over sixteen movies, Nendoroid figures (the technical Japanese equivalent of FUNKO in my opinion), plenty of plushies sold in Official Pokemon Centers opened across the world. Digital-wise, there are side-games like Pokemon Colosseum, Pokken Tournament and even their online TCG services are probably better than MTGO. I haven't even got to the aspects that don't even relate to direct sales, like Pokemon-decorated airplanes and Pokemon themed-cafes.
Pokemon is just a game. Magic is so much more than a game by now, in the same way that Lord of the Rings is more than a book and Star Wars is more than a movie. It is a culture, a franchise. The cards at the center of it have their value enhanced by the sheer scale of the whole phenomenon. I'm sure there is a technical, mathematical way of describing what I just described as well, but that's basically how it works.
I'll be honest (and no offense to you), I was mentally laughing when I read this, especially when you said Pokemon is just a game and went on to say Magic is a franchise, which implies Pokemon isn't one. I can say with confidence Pokemon is a greater franchise than Magic can ever be...
Firstly, the core game types of Magic and Pokemon are different - Magic's core is a trading card game, and it is because of the nature of the trading card games and the devotion of the players that the cards have value, not because of "phenomenon". Pokemon, on the other hand, has its core in the video games - the reason its TCG is still selling on shelves is because of the phenomenon brought upon by the video games (and arguably the anime). I know you admitted you didn't get the technical terms right, but you literally listed the opposite scenario in this case.
The strength of a franchise's culture is dependent on the non-core aspects of the franchise - to dismiss Pokemon as a just a game because it's TCG is weaker than MTG is like saying MTG is just a game because Duels of the Planeswalkers is weaker than the mainstream Pokemon games.
Just to hammer my point that Pokemon as a culture/franchise is stronger:
Magic has just started with the board game, the movie-in-the-works, FUNKO figures and the other action-figure series I already can't recall the name about, plus Magic Online and Duels of the Planeswalkers
Pokemon, on the other hand, has an anime, over sixteen movies, Nendoroid figures (the technical Japanese equivalent of FUNKO in my opinion), plenty of plushies sold in Official Pokemon Centers opened across the world. Digital-wise, there are side-games like Pokemon Colosseum, Pokken Tournament and even their online TCG services are probably better than MTGO. I haven't even got to the aspects that don't even relate to direct sales, like Pokemon-decorated airplanes and Pokemon themed-cafes.
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?
I wouldn't even say Pokemon is an inferior TCG when it does a lot of things people want magic to do. The thing holding back games like pokemon and yugioh is the age progression. Typically if you're playing a tcg at 8-12 years old it is pokemon, yugioh, or magic. At 12-18 years old it's most likely yugioh or magic. After 18 you're all but guaranteed to be playing magic at that point. We just age out of hobbies, going from 8-18 we probably go through 50 different hobbies, following what our friends do. Once adulthood starts to set we start to cement our interests and decide them for ourselves. I think a 21 year old can enjoy playing pokemon and have a desire to play it, but they don't want to play against a field of 10 year olds. And I think if magic wasn't around we would see yugioh or force of will as the adult tcg and pokemon as the teenage one. It has nothing to do with the quality of the game, just where the demographics settled because I guarantee there are plenty of people on these forums that still love the pokemon videogames, it's not a child thing it's an everyone thing, but the pokemon tcg is by environment a child's tcg though I believe the average world champion is in his late teens.
Honestly, I agree with a lot of what the OP is saying. From my perspective - I only really play legacy and vintage competitively. These 2 eternal formats represent to me what mtg is supposed to be - insane battles of the stack and rewarding to tight play. I understand that the cost is prohibitive to a lot of players to get into these formats and I'm lucky enough to live in a city with a thriving eternal scene, but to me Modern and standard are just two wrecked formats in their current state.
When it comes to modern - I think the format just flat out sucks. I think the banned list makes no sense. I think it's ridiculous that if you're playing a fair deck against an unfair strategy - if you don't draw into your postboard hate you just lose. Most of all - the barrier to entry to the format is just not worth it. There's no reason why modern staples have to be priced the way they are. Period.
When it comes to standard...I wish you could buy a competitive standard deck for $50-100. I played standard during theros-khans. (The previous time I played was during onslaught-mirrodin). I decided to buy into khans-theros because I already had a playset of thoughseizes and all the fetch lands for eternal play. I thought "cool - I might as well spend the $50 to get things like hero's downfall and perilous vault to build UB control". I had a lot of fun playing the format. One a game day, top 8d a couple of pptqs. It was a nice break from playing eternal as decision trees weren't nearly as complex and less mentally taxing. I look at standard now from a distance and I see playsets of jace costing $400 and playsets of gideon fetching $150. Give me a goddamn break. If wotc is serious about promoting standard especially to new players they will need to get their act together and do something to moderate single prices. I feel for a lot of players - they play a couple of seasons of standard. Get overburdened by cost when rotation happens and decide to quit the game. Until I can play competitive standard for under $100 I'll happily stick to eternal.
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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?
Once again, no offense meant, but you're comparing one franchise's core aspect against another franchise's extension. Anyway, Magic cards carry a lot more value because of two reasons:
1) It will be quite the shame if Magic lost at value at its core aspect to another franchise not even focusing on it, so technically it has to win by default, otherwise it'll be worth really next-to-nothing.
2) Magic has a wider range of age demographics - "serious, epic fantasy world" is not the reason for its value - "serious, epic fantasy world" caters to the more mature crowd generally speaking (which means no age cap) and that crowd is by default larger than the crowd that "childish cartoons" cater to - the demographic size is the real reason.
Magic is not "winning" over Pokemon because Pokemon is a poor game - Magic is already by default, "naturally advantaged" to be the winner, which bluntly put, there is no glory to be winning in the TCG department for MTG, but a lot a shame for losing (and the opposite is true for other TCGs).
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.>
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.
That's because sports and e-sports have advantages TCGs don't have.
Sports - The advertisements have been working to their advantage for ages, while I personally don't understand the culture around it well, it is true that running around will improve at least your physical stamina, if not health. On top of that, I think its safe to say historically it also works against e-Sports and TCGs, with people claiming that sitting around playing with a controller of cards makes you unhealthy (add on stereotypes and so on...), the effects of that is waning, but it still remains a fact that TCGs are way behind on this factor as an "advantage".
e-Sports - Suffers and recovers from pretty much the same things TCG do, but they still have one advantage - ease of access. If your friends don't like a game you play, there's always online multiplayer stacked in the game. In MTG, you'll need to make the trip down to the LGS for games. For TCGs (traditional ones like MTG, for emphasis), the offline and online aspects are two separate entities. Hearthstone is digital-only, so it's more of under the e-sport category, while Pokemon at least attempts to link the online aspect together with the offline aspect with code cards in every booster, which is at least an effort to what Magic is currently at, literally the same game online/offline at twice the price (ironically which is what the Pokemon does with their mainstream video games, but even the online trade features help salvage that to an extent.)
It's hard for TCGs to hype themselves to become the majority's approved (even e-sports are having some trouble with that) and by the nature of the game it's harder to get people to play TCGs than Video Games due to ease of access (pretty sure the video gaming community is tons larger than the TCG one, counting overlaps).
I'm not defending WotC's practices (I agree they could still do a lot better), but just pointing out your suggestions aren't as easy as they seem, even for a company as big as Hasbro.
That's not necessarily correct though; they very well could be making even more money than they currently are if they chose to support eternal formats better. If they had the option to make 10$ million dollars by doing what they're doing now, or 50$ million dollars by supporting eternal formats, clearly one decision is better than the other even though they both made a bunch of money.
Supporting eternal formats makes them more money in the short run - the only way to make more money with eternal formats in the long run is to resort to power creep, which in game design is undoubtedly the first stepping stone to the decay of a game.
Yes, there's lots more money to be made when the support for eternal formats start rushing in, causing massive booster sales and price drops. But once that settles down, what happens? When everyone has their Tarmogoyfs and ABUR Duals and are playing the game happily, what can Wizards produce to sell boosters that will generate sales as much as when the reprints started rushing in (because as a business you need to maintain more or less an increasing profit)? They need to make cards more powerful than what is existing to sell boosters - they need to make the cards everyone has redundant in comparison to the new ones so you gave to buy them. Either that or ban all those cards and functionally reprint them so you have to buy boosters. Either way, players aren't going to be happy.
Wizards is very aware of this and that is why they prefer to stick to scaling down power and concentrating on rotating formats, because that makes consistent money across the years for financial reports. When sales drop, all they have to do is put in some gimmick (cough*expeditions*cough) and it will boost sales. That is pretty much all the data they want, the projections for increasing profits over the next decade without resorting to decaying the game.
Yes, it's a blunt statement, but I'm pretty sure this is the truth.
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Magic is only a card game: it's not a multimedia franchise like Pokemon. Nintendo can make most of their $ on the video games, the anime, the toys, and the Pikachu-stamped underwear, and sell the cards at a lesser profit margin. In contrast, Magic has very little multimedia: all we have is a crappy Steam game and a series of poorly sculpted statuettes where Gideon is the wrong race.
MTG finance guy- follow me on Twitter@RichArschmann or RichardArschmann on Reddit
We've listened to these excuses for too long and it's becoming very apparent that they are not in line with reality and are in fact just that: excuses.
MMA, Power Cube, Vintage Masters, MM15 and Tempest Remastered would have been absolute flops if printing powerful cards at common and uncommon was noxious for the limited enviroment. Instead they keep making these products because surprise! They sell like hot-cakes because people actually want those cards and the draft enviroments are so fun they are a prize on it's own.
They don't design extremely underpowered cards to fill standard sets because they want to keep limited healthy. They do so because they have discovered that they can print sets with 5 good cards at mythic/rare, 5 rare lands, make the rest chimney imps, and the set will still sell because standard players need those 10 cards to compete and stores need to open boosters to get them.
As for saving stuff and not wanting to be Yu-Gi-Oh!, once again, lies we've accepted as truth. YGO and pokemon sell very well, they have equal or greater space dedicated to them at most stores including Wal-Mart and Target. There are LGS that run entirely on YGO money and I don't know about your local scene but around here I keep seeing these kids get iPads, iPhones, 3DS and other expensive stuff as 40-people torunament prizes while we get boosters for the Gideon/Expedition lottery potentially going home with a prize worth less than your entry fee.
Notthing bad would happen if Tarmogoyf was Rare in SOI to anyone but the most reckless and self-sabotaging dealers/stores. Anyone worth their salt has their active assets tied to ***** that's in constant production like boosters, sleeves, mats, snacks and standard singles. Not a card that may linger in the binder for months, because the rent is not gonna linger in the mail untill you sell that Goyf.
And reprinting him now won't stop us from buying MM16 either. Lightning Bolt has been around from day one and we still love opening one in a booster. Nobody complained about seeing Swords or Brainstorm in Duel Decks or Commander and then seeing them again in Conspiracy and nobody felt cheated by a second promo printing of Wasteland, Vindicate or Path to Exile.
Good cards are always welcome, they don't have to "save them for the next set". All that spells is the ****ers running the business side of WotC expect Magic to die soon and to need an incentive to bring players back. Maybe because they're purposedly running the product as a bad pyramid scheme.
WotC makes most of its money off of two formats, Standard and Limited. Limited requires fresh packs and Standard requires a quickly rotating collection of current cards (from fresh packs). From a corporate point of view, this is all that matters, as it is what makes the most money (WotC has not been a game for the players for a long, long time now, the people with the real power there are all pointy-haired bosses & accountants).
Modern, Vintage and Legacy make WotC almost no new money, so they do as little as possible to support it. Sure they offer pro tours, etc. with them, but that support is less and less every year, and its just enough to keep interest in the overall game. There is absolutely no incentive to add any additional support or a large & cheap influx of cards, because anything they do could (and would) steal away from Standard or Limited play (and ultimately profit).
Imagine an environment where Modern/Vinatge/Legacy decks average $300 or less and those tourneys are filled with two or three times the amount of normal players that attend them now. Sure the exposure & support for these formats would grow, but all these cards being used were sold long ago, and make absolutely nothing for WotC now. Even if the did support it with a bunch of new cards, because the formats do not rotate, once people have a good base of 1-4 decks they tend to stop buying additional cards. Or worse they only new a few new cards here and there to fill out their current decks. Either way they can continue playing in one of the formats with a limited amount of additional funds for as long as they like. So any way you look at it, there is no way for WotC to make as much money as pushing Standard and Limited does (which is why they don't).
Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE for a proper Modern Masters or Vintage/Legacy Masters set with nothing but quality cards to lower the prices overall (where an average high card would be $20-25 at max.), but it will never happen. Standard and Limited would have to be... abandoned for that to happen and people (however much they hate it) support those formats as they have to if they want to participate in fairly regular play.
It does suck, I will fully agree with that. As someone who loves to build lots of decks, I hate that there are so many cards I would like to build around, but will not buy due to the insane costs.
I wish there was a way for them to make money (hey why not), yet still have easily accessible cards for everyone. I'd also like to win the lotto, but that hasn't happened so far...
http://www.cubetutor.com/visualspoiler/20765
Sounds like the current model is for YOUR personal happiness to the detriment of the majority. Can guarantee if they pop a tarmogoyf at uncommon in a booster pack it would be the best selling booster pack of all time. We've endlessly refuted your notions that exclusivity opens packs. Drafts and sealed open packs, disposable income opens packs. You act like no one has ever bought a pack of pokemon or yugioh cards. It's just outrageous, you act like those two card games don't exist.
To be honest, I really think this is yet another myth we're accepting as truth. Look, I've seen in the major LGS's I've played with (I've bounced around a few major cities in the past decade) new players coming and going, but the old guard does it, too. Hell, there's 2 guys at our LGS that sell off their pieces and disappear from the game for months while dealing with real-life stuff and suddenly come back and buy into Commander, Standard, Modern, or all 3. Some of us don't let the 'keep it and hold it forever so it gains imaginary value' mantra control us, so they're constantly rebuilding their decks.
So, you have new players, old players buying back in. The market is there if the product is solid. Also, this argument about 'Standard and Limited pays their bills' doesn't hold water for other reasons. Limited, especially lately, is a very hard sell in some regions, like mine here in Charlotte. Some LGS's do better with it, most don't. I can't stand limited, personally, but that's more to do with crap-quality sets to draft with. You offer me M11 draft and I'm in, BFZ...not so much. Standard is in a shifting period as we go to the new block structure, and I've seen more than a few people kinda gunshy about it. They're sitting on their current deck because they can't justify $45 Gideons and $80 Jaces without knowing how fast and how hard the prices tank in this new rotation cycle.
Also, Modern is not only attracting new players all the time, it's getting new cards. Eternal does not mean buy a deck and never give Wizards a dime ever again. Wizards is using that model, not the players. We're shelling out cash to LGS's, Ebay, Troll and Toad, SCG, and about a billion others for cards that haven't been reprinted in years. That's on Wizard's, not us. It used to be that your staples like Counterspell, Lightning Bolt, and Dark Ritual were reprinted every set. New artwork for the people that have theirs, and easily accessible for those that don't. We can't even get a full set of utility staples in a block anymore (ie. no practical graveyard hate in Standard, no Doom Blade-esque cards, no 3 for 2 red instant).
So maybe the problem isn't the cash cow everyone thinks Standard and Limited are, maybe the issue is the New World Order was a catastrophe of design - it's inelegant, it concentrates value into upper rarities, it leaves a lot of dead trees on a table after draft is over, and it makes everything feel watered down. Eternal players don't need what they have to give.
Let me just throw this out there - Pernicious Deed at Mythic in Conspiracy...was anyone crying? Did it bring Magic to its knees? What if it was Wasteland? Force of Will? Crucible of Worlds? City of Traitors? At what point do the reprints 'kill magic'? When is a set 'too good' that it screws everything up? On the other side of the coin, if those cards were in there, would you and I still be cracking packs? Pretty sure the answer is yes.
They used to for a bit, but they lost the license years ago.
That doesn't surprise me. Magic is a far superior game.
One U.S. dollar can buy a crap ton of stuff in some third world country. See what I'm saying?
Hasbro has done extensive market research? Source? Wizard's doesn't even give us the results of the polls they put on their website. I would love to see the raw data that suggests that players want rare, collectible cards. And no, the outcry from Chronicles doesn't count, the playerbase has changed since then. For now, Wizards could use a bit more transparency because until I see actual numbers from the company I'm not trusting the "extensive market research" angle. To me it's just more of Wizards telling us what we should want. As for me I'll continue to play Legacy and Cube and treat this game like my other board games
a program of a slightly different strain.
Tonight my listeners, a new power will rise,
unleashed upon you all in this musical disguise.
Your cities turn to ash, for the broadcast is cursed.
The signal is peaking and can't be reversed.
If you choose my children, you can try to hide.
But I strongly suggest you run for your life."
-The Sermon 2, The Creepshow
I honestly can't tell if this is troll bait or not. I mean, if that's all you got from it, you either didn't read it all or didn't understand it.
But I'll bite. Superior in whose eyes? Yours? Mine? Because I can go outside and round up 10 people that think i'm an idiot for buying 60 dollar pieces of cardboard. I also can't convince my 7 year old how superior that Gideon was to the pile of packs I handed her. Plus, she busted a $20 EX card. So no, I don't see what you're saying at all.
Well those 60 dollar pieces of cardboard are 80 or 100 dollar pieces of cardboard when I sell them. So I think it's your 10 people who are really the idiots.
And why are the cards worth so much? The market. Wizards doesn't decide how much they're worth, the people do.
Maybe I'm wrong but I almost never see anyone playing Pokemon and I'm in and around numerous local game stores in the Pittsburgh, PA area. Maybe its different in bigger cities.
Pokemon is just a game. Magic is so much more than a game by now, in the same way that Lord of the Rings is more than a book and Star Wars is more than a movie. It is a culture, a franchise. The cards at the center of it have their value enhanced by the sheer scale of the whole phenomenon. I'm sure there is a technical, mathematical way of describing what I just described as well, but that's basically how it works.
I mean...congrats? None of that has much of anything to do with what I was talking about in the OP. I was referring to the avenues other CCG's are opening up to attract their players and make them feel like they've gotten value from their dollar, as opposed to the litany of strange practices Wizard's has done to make the community feel a loss in value. Prize walls, watered-down Standard fodder, discontinued rewards programs, I mean just read the thread. This isn't a price discussion complaint, it's a value complaint.
And to be clear, I play the game. When I said '10 people' I meant people outside the game have a hard time wrapping their brains around it unless you equate it to sports cards, and even that's kind of an old-timey reference at this point. So while you're celebrating your $20 margin gain, to those people what we're doing is a silly/foreign concept. Like all collectible hobbies, I imagine.
Magic has more players now than at any point in its history. If there is a value complaint, it seems more like a "I wish this amazing game weren't so expensive because my wallet hurts" complaint rather than a "I regret buying these cards and I don't want to buy them anymore, because they feel worthless to me" complaint.
DCI sanctions it, but at the vast majority of large events the prizes are determined and supplied by the organizer. Wizards has nothing to do with it. Even if there were better sets to offer as prizes, who knows if they would even be offered.
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.
My card shop has several cases full of magic singles, not to mention the cards they have in storage and in binders, and it has exactly zero for Pokemon or Yugioh. They make a significant portion of their income from MTG singles and could not be the premier play location that it is if all it sold was sealed product.
How do you know you are the majority? At least he is using the argument that WotC has a better grasp on the larger MTG player base than any of us do, and that means you too. How self centered would a person have to be to think that their view is the majority in the face of customer and market research?
Reprint Opt for Modern!!
FREE DIG THOROUGH TIME!
PLAY MORE ROUGE DECKS!
Well, even without data, their statements tell us the things we need to know - when they say "New Set" is the best selling set of all-time, they're basically saying the current formulas for making more money is working.
If it isn't making money, that's when they will start taking action. All the complaints and suggestions to "make the game better" don't matter as long as their tested formulas are working, because to them, your suggestions are hypothetical, which means they don't take them at the word that reprinting Legacy staples will not harm their current formulas.
It's a matter of as-fan.
Take Mercadian Masques, a medium-power set that is not remembered overly fondly. Look at the commons there. Many of them were constructed staples or at least niche role players.
The uncommons had a few legitimately good cards and a few cards that never got there but looked playable to many people (Lumbering Satyr, Coastal Piracy, Intimidation)
Then the rares also had actual good cards (Misdirection, Port), cards with apparent but unrealised potential (Clear the Land, Monkey Cage), niche playables (Crumbling Sanctuary) and actual chaff (Corrupt Official).
But the as-fan of Constructed cards in a pack was as high as 5 or 6.
Contrast to BFZ where at a stretch it's 0.5-0.7 and that's including some dubious cards (Rolling Thunder isn't a Spike card in Constructed but it will excite some people into trying it, ditto Desolation Twin, I'm counting both of those cards).
I'll be honest (and no offense to you), I was mentally laughing when I read this, especially when you said Pokemon is just a game and went on to say Magic is a franchise, which implies Pokemon isn't one. I can say with confidence Pokemon is a greater franchise than Magic can ever be...
Firstly, the core game types of Magic and Pokemon are different - Magic's core is a trading card game, and it is because of the nature of the trading card games and the devotion of the players that the cards have value, not because of "phenomenon". Pokemon, on the other hand, has its core in the video games - the reason its TCG is still selling on shelves is because of the phenomenon brought upon by the video games (and arguably the anime). I know you admitted you didn't get the technical terms right, but you literally listed the opposite scenario in this case.
The strength of a franchise's culture is dependent on the non-core aspects of the franchise - to dismiss Pokemon as a just a game because it's TCG is weaker than MTG is like saying MTG is just a game because Duels of the Planeswalkers is weaker than the mainstream Pokemon games.
Just to hammer my point that Pokemon as a culture/franchise is stronger:
Magic has just started with the board game, the movie-in-the-works, FUNKO figures and the other action-figure series I already can't recall the name about, plus Magic Online and Duels of the Planeswalkers
Pokemon, on the other hand, has an anime, over sixteen movies, Nendoroid figures (the technical Japanese equivalent of FUNKO in my opinion), plenty of plushies sold in Official Pokemon Centers opened across the world. Digital-wise, there are side-games like Pokemon Colosseum, Pokken Tournament and even their online TCG services are probably better than MTGO. I haven't even got to the aspects that don't even relate to direct sales, like Pokemon-decorated airplanes and Pokemon themed-cafes.
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?
When it comes to modern - I think the format just flat out sucks. I think the banned list makes no sense. I think it's ridiculous that if you're playing a fair deck against an unfair strategy - if you don't draw into your postboard hate you just lose. Most of all - the barrier to entry to the format is just not worth it. There's no reason why modern staples have to be priced the way they are. Period.
When it comes to standard...I wish you could buy a competitive standard deck for $50-100. I played standard during theros-khans. (The previous time I played was during onslaught-mirrodin). I decided to buy into khans-theros because I already had a playset of thoughseizes and all the fetch lands for eternal play. I thought "cool - I might as well spend the $50 to get things like hero's downfall and perilous vault to build UB control". I had a lot of fun playing the format. One a game day, top 8d a couple of pptqs. It was a nice break from playing eternal as decision trees weren't nearly as complex and less mentally taxing. I look at standard now from a distance and I see playsets of jace costing $400 and playsets of gideon fetching $150. Give me a goddamn break. If wotc is serious about promoting standard especially to new players they will need to get their act together and do something to moderate single prices. I feel for a lot of players - they play a couple of seasons of standard. Get overburdened by cost when rotation happens and decide to quit the game. Until I can play competitive standard for under $100 I'll happily stick to eternal.
Legacy:
RUG(B)Lands
UWRMiracles
The grind, the durdle, the control!
Once again, no offense meant, but you're comparing one franchise's core aspect against another franchise's extension. Anyway, Magic cards carry a lot more value because of two reasons:
1) It will be quite the shame if Magic lost at value at its core aspect to another franchise not even focusing on it, so technically it has to win by default, otherwise it'll be worth really next-to-nothing.
2) Magic has a wider range of age demographics - "serious, epic fantasy world" is not the reason for its value - "serious, epic fantasy world" caters to the more mature crowd generally speaking (which means no age cap) and that crowd is by default larger than the crowd that "childish cartoons" cater to - the demographic size is the real reason.
Magic is not "winning" over Pokemon because Pokemon is a poor game - Magic is already by default, "naturally advantaged" to be the winner, which bluntly put, there is no glory to be winning in the TCG department for MTG, but a lot a shame for losing (and the opposite is true for other TCGs).
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.
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.>
That's because sports and e-sports have advantages TCGs don't have.
Sports - The advertisements have been working to their advantage for ages, while I personally don't understand the culture around it well, it is true that running around will improve at least your physical stamina, if not health. On top of that, I think its safe to say historically it also works against e-Sports and TCGs, with people claiming that sitting around playing with a controller of cards makes you unhealthy (add on stereotypes and so on...), the effects of that is waning, but it still remains a fact that TCGs are way behind on this factor as an "advantage".
e-Sports - Suffers and recovers from pretty much the same things TCG do, but they still have one advantage - ease of access. If your friends don't like a game you play, there's always online multiplayer stacked in the game. In MTG, you'll need to make the trip down to the LGS for games. For TCGs (traditional ones like MTG, for emphasis), the offline and online aspects are two separate entities. Hearthstone is digital-only, so it's more of under the e-sport category, while Pokemon at least attempts to link the online aspect together with the offline aspect with code cards in every booster, which is at least an effort to what Magic is currently at, literally the same game online/offline at twice the price (ironically which is what the Pokemon does with their mainstream video games, but even the online trade features help salvage that to an extent.)
It's hard for TCGs to hype themselves to become the majority's approved (even e-sports are having some trouble with that) and by the nature of the game it's harder to get people to play TCGs than Video Games due to ease of access (pretty sure the video gaming community is tons larger than the TCG one, counting overlaps).
I'm not defending WotC's practices (I agree they could still do a lot better), but just pointing out your suggestions aren't as easy as they seem, even for a company as big as Hasbro.
Supporting eternal formats makes them more money in the short run - the only way to make more money with eternal formats in the long run is to resort to power creep, which in game design is undoubtedly the first stepping stone to the decay of a game.
Yes, there's lots more money to be made when the support for eternal formats start rushing in, causing massive booster sales and price drops. But once that settles down, what happens? When everyone has their Tarmogoyfs and ABUR Duals and are playing the game happily, what can Wizards produce to sell boosters that will generate sales as much as when the reprints started rushing in (because as a business you need to maintain more or less an increasing profit)? They need to make cards more powerful than what is existing to sell boosters - they need to make the cards everyone has redundant in comparison to the new ones so you gave to buy them. Either that or ban all those cards and functionally reprint them so you have to buy boosters. Either way, players aren't going to be happy.
Wizards is very aware of this and that is why they prefer to stick to scaling down power and concentrating on rotating formats, because that makes consistent money across the years for financial reports. When sales drop, all they have to do is put in some gimmick (cough*expeditions*cough) and it will boost sales. That is pretty much all the data they want, the projections for increasing profits over the next decade without resorting to decaying the game.
Yes, it's a blunt statement, but I'm pretty sure this is the truth.