This can only end badly. He was on the subreddit claiming to be new to the game and asking about the "very valuable" Black Lotus cards...and was also asking about Hasbro's intentions for the company. He's either the world's greatest troll or we'll soon be watching this guy buy out all of TCG. Would something like this actually happening make WotC reconsider the reserved list?
You have to know that this whole thing is happening for some days now.
It began with a guy (not martin) that posted facebook videos of his buyouts of Moat, Tabernacle, LED, Gaeas Cradle, and some others.
This created a huge outcry, which in turn seems to have reached dear Mr. Shkreli.
Wizards has a new CEO and hopefully for the masses he'll be able to unseat the old pharaohs maintaining Magic in the old world with the RL, because they had that thing once with Chronicles, when TCG and the pre-Internet trade were vastly different.
This kind of news is the logical conclusion of maintaining artificial scarcity because of something that happened 20 years ago.
This is one of the reasons I have started playing Pauper. The cost of the really good Magic cards is simply insane, especially once you stop and realize that you are paying ridiculous amounts of money for cardboard. Cardboard.
I was once addicted to buying the best Magic cards I could, because the best meant having the greatest value in play. Since I've made the switch to Pauper I've come to love the game of Magic much more. I'll still indulge now and then, like my promo sets of Primeval Titan & Stoneforge Mystic, but I like the feel of the Common power levels. Even Peasant introduces new avenues of play without breaking the bank.
As far as I am concerned the Reserved List is trash. It is exactly because people like Mr. Berry can manipulate the system WotC purposefully uses that Magic will not support itself in the future. Everything in life requires balance, and a cardboard game is no different. Eventually the prices of cards and their rarity will hurt the market bad enough that you will see a collapse. Something cannot exist in the extreme without returning to its opposite. Magic will not sustain itself with its current system. A reckoning will eventually come. We must simply be patient and wait for it.
In the meantime I'll be over here, enjoying Magic the Gathering at the Pauper level and loving every minute of it!
I'm thinking about getting into Pauper too. Currently I just play EDH and occasionally Limited. I'd love to play Legacy deck but I can't see that happening at current prices. I've bought various cards for EDH at what seem like excessive prices, but now the prices are even higher! It doesn't make me happy the Serra's Sanctum I bought for $25 now goes for $93 TCG mid; to the contrary, it makes me annoyed, scared, and stressed. I don't ever want to cash out of Magic, because I enjoy the game. I'd love to see the value of my EDH decks reduced to half or a quarter or less by reprints.
I don't believe in corporations or capitalism myself - the only markets are respect are truly free ones without intellectual property laws and other restrictions, which would make Magic cards virtually free - but within that logic there still should be a way to make the game both profitable for WotC and affordable for players. In theory, WotC could make a lot of money from a liberal reprint policy.
However, at this point, I don't see anything shaking up Wizards. If a guy wants to buy all of their RL most rare cards... why would they care? They clearly are not trying to support legacy and vintage anymore, the only place where these cards would see play. I can see them saying "oh well, guess nobody is gonna play legacy anymore. A pity. Now please buy our new standard product!"
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However, at this point, I don't see anything shaking up Wizards. If a guy wants to buy all of their RL most rare cards... why would they care? They clearly are not trying to support legacy and vintage anymore, the only place where these cards would see play. I can see them saying "oh well, guess nobody is gonna play legacy anymore. A pity. Now please buy our new standard product!"
Don't forget casual play (tiny leaders, Commander, Cube etc) which creates a big demand on the RL. It's not so much the competitive crowd who'll throw a tantrum at the depletion of the RL, but countless kitchen tables all over the world.
P9 is already way beyond the price 99% of MTG players are willing to pay for it. I don't care if Black Lotus costs $7000 or $70000 as I cannot afford one either way.
This is a bubble. Let it burst. It will burst within the next five years no matter what - either Wizards rethinks the reprint policy or the counterfeits will become good enough to pass for real cards from across the table. These pump-and-dump-style buyouts are only going to speed up the inevitable.
Legacy will soon be joining Vintage as a format that virtually nobody plays. When you have cards that are valued at $1500 (Tabernacle) you can no longer justify shuffling and handling these cards. You'll be seeing these cards sealed and graded the way power 9 is, which will remove them from being playable in decks, which will serve to only drive up the value even more for the ones that are still playable.
I don't blame Craig Berry at all for what he's doing. He's made it clear he's opposed to the Reserved List and he is, in a sort of fire & brimstone way, punishing the formats that play cards on that list. This is a "burn it all down" approach. Well, maybe that's what we need.
I've advocated before for a solution to keep the existence of formats like Legacy/Vintage: ban the RL cards and print completely new cards that have equal power level.
This is great. Go Shkreli! I hope he goes through with something like that. It's about time something is done to shake up (and potentially dismantle) something as useless and archaic as the RL.
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The entire Reserved List should be banned from all formats as "unsupportable" and be done with it.
It's that or do away with it completely.
Those are the best two solutions, but there's a third. Let "collectors" vote for which cards should remain on the Reserved List, remove the rest from it, and ban what they voted for from all formats; let the collectors deal with the fallout from that. Sure, the demand drops because the cards aren't usable in any formats, but they're not usable in any formats anyway when they're sitting in a collector's shadowbox on their wall.
You get what you pay for. If you want a rare piece of cardboard to show off, you've got a rare piece of cardboard to show off. If you just wanted cards to make a deck (with a max of 1 to 4 in all serious formats), why are you dropping thousands of dollars to get 18+ copies of a $200 card? Certainly not for a deck. Certainly not to have one on your wall. It's to make money by screwing the people who enjoy the game out of playing the game because of a decision by Wizards that was not thought out for fear of upsetting a small percentage of people who only put money into the secondary market (not Wizards) and maintained for fear of upsetting a small percentage of people who only put money into the secondary market (not Wizards) for profit.
The only other solutions are banning Reserved List cards that sell for over a certain amount on the secondary market (not gonna happen) or doing nothing and letting the game fall apart because all their new players are priced out of the best of the game because it's only accessible to the wealthy and all that's left is the overpriced Standard garbage they hope you'll waste your money on every three months (most likely).
Wizards will tell you that it's about "keeping their word," but to all the players that I've met or talked to that this sort of thing came up, it's pretty unanimous that we feel that it's the only thing they've kept their word on (as far as major things go [I'm not talking about little stuff like black and red getting 2/2s for 1C ]), and even then they didn't until they decided a minority complaint required stricter restrictions on the list (see the 2010 revision), and it's the one thing that's the most unhealthy for the game. How is the thing that's hurting your product the most the one thing you grasp onto? That's not just bad business and bad game design, it's straight up silly. Don't they realize reprints mean people giving money to Wizards itself, rather than greedy collectors? How is refusing to do that a good decision?
---
Moderators - I apologize if discussing the Reserved List is something that's been deemed unspeakable (I really have not kept up on the cyclic complaining), but this is the first time I've actually posted my opinions on the topic, and making my thoughts known is worth receiving an infraction if that's what's prescribed for such actions.
P9 is already way beyond the price 99% of MTG players are willing to pay for it. I don't care if Black Lotus costs $7000 or $70000 as I cannot afford one either way.
This is a bubble. Let it burst. It will burst within the next five years no matter what - either Wizards rethinks the reprint policy or the counterfeits will become good enough to pass for real cards from across the table. These pump-and-dump-style buyouts are only going to speed up the inevitable.
I agree, this means nothing to most players since these cards are way out of the price range for most us to obtain anyways. It allows people who have been holding these cards for along time a chance to cash out.
For the first time ever, I want WotC to maintain the reserve list. Because if they abolish now, they forfeit the opportunity to abolish just after Martin buys all the cards.
I am glad to see that this thread hasn't derailed itself into explosive argument and bickering. Too often the mere mention of the Reserve List draws out the ire from both parties involved. There was a time when I supported the RL, I thought it was a smart business move that lead to the stabilization of the game of Magic itself. As time has gone on and I've done more research and thought deeply about it, the RL is not what has kept Magic afloat all these years; it has been the aggressive marketing and Pro Tour events.
The Reserve List exists for a singular reason; to create an artificial climate of value in which people like like Mr. Berry & Mr. Shkreli, alongside every retailer big or small, can manipulate the prices of cardboard in order to make money. But of course every retailer and Mr. Berry wants to make money, we are a capitalist society after all, so what's the issue? For me it is the artificial value of the cards themselves and the fact that WotC does not enforce standardized value of their products. From the newest set coming, Eldritch Moon, let's take an example:
Tamiyo, Field Researcher is currently on sale at Face-to-Face games for $39.99 CDN. I should point out that Eldritch Moon has not been released and the card in question has never seen actual play from its audience. Yet the folks behind FtF have decided to jack the price up of a card that's never been used to almost forty dollars. A single, unused & untested piece of cardboard. Why? Because they, like every MtG retailer, does not have an enforceable governing body which ensures that prices either remain stable or are otherwise 'fair'. They operate within a curious vacuum which does not enforce itself and can be manipulated and twisted for those with the money to make more money while depriving those who wish to play the game from using the 'best' cards because they simply can.
The Reserve List, in addition to WotCs poor reprint policy, is what is hurting the game of Magic, but the company seems so addled that they cannot understand that a poor decision they made twenty years ago is slowly destroying the credibility of the game. No, WotC does not make money off the secondary market, but it is exactly because of WotC poor reprint and set releases that the general public turns to that exact secondary market. Yes, Magic is a game of chance random packs, but why on earth would the average person want to crack a pack from the newest set when they need that Snapcaster Mage for their latest Izzet deck? If WotC reprinted more cards that people want in more set I and others would have far more reason to support Magic directly instead of being nearly forced to use the ungoverned, Wild West Secondary Market. I don't shop the secondary market because I want to stick it to Wizards, I shop the SM because it's the only place I can reliably find the cards I want/need though the prices are as varied and untamed as the wind.
I wish that WotC would admit their faults and move on to correcting the problem. Either ditch the Reserve List and reprint more heavily or enforce standardize prices on their products and individual cards so that every Jane Average can come into the game without feeling like they have to sell off a kidney. Standard is a joke, not to mention the other Eternal Formats. Even Casual is tough because of the inane prices of cards and products. As someone who deeply loves the game of Magic it makes me sad to see the game becoming what it has been slowly turning into for decades; a stock market where only the wealthy can afford to play and rest of us beg for scraps. It absolutely would not surprise me to learn that twenty more years from now Magic is only played by the wealthy and elite as a casual hobby stolen from the common peasants and used as a distraction from their millions of dollars.
The Ux dual lands are also disappearing; I haven't checked all the duals yet. They're still ones in bad condition, but there are definitely less than there were earlier in the week.
This is the event people have been dreading for so long. I'm calling it now. We've reached the inevitable end of the Reserved List.
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~~~~~
About those buyouts...you...you people realize that European markets like Magic Card Market still exist and TCGPlayer/other American markets aren't the only ones, right...
...right?
Good point. I wasn't thinking about how long it will take for those markets to catch up.
Okay. Good news, we have about a day, maybe the weekend at most to jump on the markets before price inflation hit them (and ours even harder).
I am glad to see that this thread hasn't derailed itself into explosive argument and bickering. Too often the mere mention of the Reserve List draws out the ire from both parties involved. There was a time when I supported the RL, I thought it was a smart business move that lead to the stabilization of the game of Magic itself. As time has gone on and I've done more research and thought deeply about it, the RL is not what has kept Magic afloat all these years; it has been the aggressive marketing and Pro Tour events.
The Reserve List exists for a singular reason; to create an artificial climate of value in which people like like Mr. Berry & Mr. Shkreli, alongside every retailer big or small, can manipulate the prices of cardboard in order to make money. But of course every retailer and Mr. Berry wants to make money, we are a capitalist society after all, so what's the issue? For me it is the artificial value of the cards themselves and the fact that WotC does not enforce standardized value of their products. From the newest set coming, Eldritch Moon, let's take an example:
Tamiyo, Field Researcher is currently on sale at Face-to-Face games for $39.99 CDN. I should point out that Eldritch Moon has not been released and the card in question has never seen actual play from its audience. Yet the folks behind FtF have decided to jack the price up of a card that's never been used to almost forty dollars. A single, unused & untested piece of cardboard. Why? Because they, like every MtG retailer, does not have an enforceable governing body which ensures that prices either remain stable or are otherwise 'fair'. They operate within a curious vacuum which does not enforce itself and can be manipulated and twisted for those with the money to make more money while depriving those who wish to play the game from using the 'best' cards because they simply can.
The Reserve List, in addition to WotCs poor reprint policy, is what is hurting the game of Magic, but the company seems so addled that they cannot understand that a poor decision they made twenty years ago is slowly destroying the credibility of the game. No, WotC does not make money off the secondary market, but it is exactly because of WotC poor reprint and set releases that the general public turns to that exact secondary market. Yes, Magic is a game of chance random packs, but why on earth would the average person want to crack a pack from the newest set when they need that Snapcaster Mage for their latest Izzet deck? If WotC reprinted more cards that people want in more set I and others would have far more reason to support Magic directly instead of being nearly forced to use the ungoverned, Wild West Secondary Market. I don't shop the secondary market because I want to stick it to Wizards, I shop the SM because it's the only place I can reliably find the cards I want/need though the prices are as varied and untamed as the wind.
I wish that WotC would admit their faults and move on to correcting the problem. Either ditch the Reserve List and reprint more heavily or enforce standardize prices on their products and individual cards so that every Jane Average can come into the game without feeling like they have to sell off a kidney. Standard is a joke, not to mention the other Eternal Formats. Even Casual is tough because of the inane prices of cards and products. As someone who deeply loves the game of Magic it makes me sad to see the game becoming what it has been slowly turning into for decades; a stock market where only the wealthy can afford to play and rest of us beg for scraps. It absolutely would not surprise me to learn that twenty more years from now Magic is only played by the wealthy and elite as a casual hobby stolen from the common peasants and used as a distraction from their millions of dollars.
*sigh*
Back to Pauper...
I just can't get on board with this. <90% of Magic is played right now without these cards. Most of what is played with it is EDH. Don't get me wrong, the guys who are screwing with the markets should be dealt with, but to say that the game will only be played by the wealthy and stolen from common peasants? Come on, that's just wrong.
The entire Reserved List should be banned from all formats as "unsupportable" and be done with it.
So, to save a couple of formats, you destroy them? Interesting approach. Let's start doing our surgeries with grenades!
Ok, now seriously, is it not better to let SOME players play the formats they like than NO players at all ? As much as I want the reserve list gone and more players to be able to join these formats, I want them to be able to join THESE formats. Not some other completely different ones.
This is a false dichotomy. What is best is to let all players play a format that is only slightly different than the format that "SOME players" want to play. We replace them with new formats that achieve the same goals, with new cards designed to replace the cards removed.
Vintage, for example, is all about insanely broken mana acceleration, free spells, and sometimes winning on the first turn. It is completely within the power of Wizards to create new cards that accomplish this.
I mean, look. Vintage needs a broken card draw spell, right? So we get rid of Ancestral Recall, and replace it with something like this: U
Instant
As an additional cost to cast ~, discard 2 cards from your hand. Draw cards equal to the number of cards in your hand.
And that's just one of many possible ways to try to replace that card, I'm not saying the above is the only solution (that was literally about 10 seconds of thought in card design). Just trying to point out that there is a path Wizards can take to supporting a Vintage-like format that everyone can play. You can do the same for Legacy.
I mean, look. We can't make 100% of the people 100% happy, but we can make 100% of the people happy beyond some threshold, which is better than having 10% of the people 100% happy and 90% of the people 100% unhappy.
I realy hope we see the reserve list go away some day and I do think wizards would benefit from limited reprints of at least some of the most need cards such as the dual lands. But I have little hope for the near future. Wizards has shown what can only be an intentional policy of avoiding meaningful reprints in most products for some time now, and even when neaded ones occur in products such as MM and EM they are rarity shifted as to put the minimal amount into the card pool.
Wizards understands if they reprinted Goyf or Snapcaster in the next block set they would make more money, and these cards arnt even on the reserved list, yet wizards dosn't, why? Because Wizards actual customers arnt you and me, they are card shops, distributors, and online sellers like card kingdom and channel fireball. Go on a large card selling website and see how many pricy format staples they have on hand, most keep large amounts of cards like Lili, Force of Will, Snapcaster, ect in stock and charge above market price because they KNOW the price of these cards is unlikely to drop. But if Lilian were reprinted, that stack of 40 of them waiting to be sold would lose significant, possibly thousands of dollars, of value. Many long time players and collectors also own a large array of old, valuable cards, how many FoW do you think LSV has. Thered the argument that local card shops would be hurt aswell but I don't buy that. The booster pack sales and value rares opened would more than make up for lost value of case cards.
In short. Wizards isn't going to break the reserved list because it matters to the demographics they care about most. Bulk Buyers and longtime players/collectors. While having cards of significant value isn't inherently bad (I like knowing my cards are also assets) the need for format staples such as dual land must come first, but I highly, highly doubt they will do anything about it.
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"Of course you should fight fire with fire. You should fight everything with fire." —Jaya Ballard, task mage
I used to seriously stress about the price of magic until I realized that when you pay for cards, you're paying for their tournament legality. I'm never going to play in a non-limited tournament, so there's no reason for me to buy real cards. I do maintain a cube and a couple EDH decks to play with my friends, and anything more than a few dollars I proxy. It isn't difficult at all to print high quality proxies in your own home. For the purposes of playing at the kitchen table, a proxy in a sleeve is no different than a real black lotus. I highly recommend implementing proxies with your friendly matches.
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I used to seriously stress about the price of magic until I realized that when you pay for cards, you're paying for their tournament legality. I'm never going to play in a non-limited tournament, so there's no reason for me to buy real cards. I do maintain a cube and a couple EDH decks to play with my friends, and anything more than a few dollars I proxy. It isn't difficult at all to print high quality proxies in your own home. For the purposes of playing at the kitchen table, a proxy in a sleeve is no different than a real black lotus. I highly recommend implementing proxies with your friendly matches.
I actually want to start doing this. I don't think I can justify carrying nearly $10,000 worth of cards in my backpack, even if the area does seem safe, anymore.
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Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander - Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build) (dead format for me)
I don't think anyone who is for the RL realizes just how damaging the RL has always been. Nothing printed after cronicles should even be on the list. A majority of the casual played cards were printed after with the exception being duals. Duals not being available to edh players is a shame and being over $100 should be a crime. I get the the hoarders are golddigging but the cash grab has got to stop. Yeah there are more than 5 million edh players. But there is not enough supply to ever reach demand. Reprints would never hurt any market if printed in large quantities. Duals especially due to intrinsic value. A value set by overall playablity vs demand. Use tarmogoyf as an example, its original print run at rare exceeded every dual land ever printed added together. And retains a value over 135$. Demand will always dictate and retain value of high demand cards. Another example are odesey fetches vs khans. Stating in anyway that reprints would be bad is literally incorrect and has been proven on multiple cases and markets. Pokemon is an example of original print runs vs new. Where a 1st charizard is black lotus range.
My current hope is that the masters sets mark the deathknell of the reserved list. We've had three of them now and none of them have tanked secondary market values of the cards they reprinted, which undermines any kind of reliance based theory that a speculator or hoarder might try to use in litigation. That's not to say those arguments were strong in the first place, but WotC is significantly more lawyer proof than they were four years ago.
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Link to the article.
Link to why Martin Shkreli taking interest in Magic is horrible.
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It began with a guy (not martin) that posted facebook videos of his buyouts of Moat, Tabernacle, LED, Gaeas Cradle, and some others.
This created a huge outcry, which in turn seems to have reached dear Mr. Shkreli.
Here you find the videos of the buyouts:
https://m.reddit.com/r/mtgfinance/comments/4qu5q9/lions_eye_diamond_buyout/
Here's the link to an interview about these first buyouts:
http://blog.mtgprice.com/2016/07/05/an-interview-with-the-man-behind-the-buyouts/
(I'm on my phone at the moment, sorry for the ugly layout. )
This kind of news is the logical conclusion of maintaining artificial scarcity because of something that happened 20 years ago.
I was once addicted to buying the best Magic cards I could, because the best meant having the greatest value in play. Since I've made the switch to Pauper I've come to love the game of Magic much more. I'll still indulge now and then, like my promo sets of Primeval Titan & Stoneforge Mystic, but I like the feel of the Common power levels. Even Peasant introduces new avenues of play without breaking the bank.
As far as I am concerned the Reserved List is trash. It is exactly because people like Mr. Berry can manipulate the system WotC purposefully uses that Magic will not support itself in the future. Everything in life requires balance, and a cardboard game is no different. Eventually the prices of cards and their rarity will hurt the market bad enough that you will see a collapse. Something cannot exist in the extreme without returning to its opposite. Magic will not sustain itself with its current system. A reckoning will eventually come. We must simply be patient and wait for it.
In the meantime I'll be over here, enjoying Magic the Gathering at the Pauper level and loving every minute of it!
I don't believe in corporations or capitalism myself - the only markets are respect are truly free ones without intellectual property laws and other restrictions, which would make Magic cards virtually free - but within that logic there still should be a way to make the game both profitable for WotC and affordable for players. In theory, WotC could make a lot of money from a liberal reprint policy.
However, at this point, I don't see anything shaking up Wizards. If a guy wants to buy all of their RL most rare cards... why would they care? They clearly are not trying to support legacy and vintage anymore, the only place where these cards would see play. I can see them saying "oh well, guess nobody is gonna play legacy anymore. A pity. Now please buy our new standard product!"
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Don't forget casual play (tiny leaders, Commander, Cube etc) which creates a big demand on the RL. It's not so much the competitive crowd who'll throw a tantrum at the depletion of the RL, but countless kitchen tables all over the world.
This is a bubble. Let it burst. It will burst within the next five years no matter what - either Wizards rethinks the reprint policy or the counterfeits will become good enough to pass for real cards from across the table. These pump-and-dump-style buyouts are only going to speed up the inevitable.
I don't blame Craig Berry at all for what he's doing. He's made it clear he's opposed to the Reserved List and he is, in a sort of fire & brimstone way, punishing the formats that play cards on that list. This is a "burn it all down" approach. Well, maybe that's what we need.
I've advocated before for a solution to keep the existence of formats like Legacy/Vintage: ban the RL cards and print completely new cards that have equal power level.
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It's that or do away with it completely.
Those are the best two solutions, but there's a third. Let "collectors" vote for which cards should remain on the Reserved List, remove the rest from it, and ban what they voted for from all formats; let the collectors deal with the fallout from that. Sure, the demand drops because the cards aren't usable in any formats, but they're not usable in any formats anyway when they're sitting in a collector's shadowbox on their wall.
You get what you pay for. If you want a rare piece of cardboard to show off, you've got a rare piece of cardboard to show off. If you just wanted cards to make a deck (with a max of 1 to 4 in all serious formats), why are you dropping thousands of dollars to get 18+ copies of a $200 card? Certainly not for a deck. Certainly not to have one on your wall. It's to make money by screwing the people who enjoy the game out of playing the game because of a decision by Wizards that was not thought out for fear of upsetting a small percentage of people who only put money into the secondary market (not Wizards) and maintained for fear of upsetting a small percentage of people who only put money into the secondary market (not Wizards) for profit.
The only other solutions are banning Reserved List cards that sell for over a certain amount on the secondary market (not gonna happen) or doing nothing and letting the game fall apart because all their new players are priced out of the best of the game because it's only accessible to the wealthy and all that's left is the overpriced Standard garbage they hope you'll waste your money on every three months (most likely).
Wizards will tell you that it's about "keeping their word," but to all the players that I've met or talked to that this sort of thing came up, it's pretty unanimous that we feel that it's the only thing they've kept their word on (as far as major things go [I'm not talking about little stuff like black and red getting 2/2s for 1C ]), and even then they didn't until they decided a minority complaint required stricter restrictions on the list (see the 2010 revision), and it's the one thing that's the most unhealthy for the game. How is the thing that's hurting your product the most the one thing you grasp onto? That's not just bad business and bad game design, it's straight up silly. Don't they realize reprints mean people giving money to Wizards itself, rather than greedy collectors? How is refusing to do that a good decision?
---
Moderators - I apologize if discussing the Reserved List is something that's been deemed unspeakable (I really have not kept up on the cyclic complaining), but this is the first time I've actually posted my opinions on the topic, and making my thoughts known is worth receiving an infraction if that's what's prescribed for such actions.
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BPhage the UntouchableB - BShirei,
Shadowborn Ap-Shizo's CaretakerB - RZirilan of the ClawR(W/U)Noyan Dar, Roil Shaper(W/U) - (2/G)Phelddagrif Politics(W/U) - (U/B)Mishra, Artificer Prodigy(U/R) - Karona, God of Voltron
The Reserve List exists for a singular reason; to create an artificial climate of value in which people like like Mr. Berry & Mr. Shkreli, alongside every retailer big or small, can manipulate the prices of cardboard in order to make money. But of course every retailer and Mr. Berry wants to make money, we are a capitalist society after all, so what's the issue? For me it is the artificial value of the cards themselves and the fact that WotC does not enforce standardized value of their products. From the newest set coming, Eldritch Moon, let's take an example:
Tamiyo, Field Researcher is currently on sale at Face-to-Face games for $39.99 CDN. I should point out that Eldritch Moon has not been released and the card in question has never seen actual play from its audience. Yet the folks behind FtF have decided to jack the price up of a card that's never been used to almost forty dollars. A single, unused & untested piece of cardboard. Why? Because they, like every MtG retailer, does not have an enforceable governing body which ensures that prices either remain stable or are otherwise 'fair'. They operate within a curious vacuum which does not enforce itself and can be manipulated and twisted for those with the money to make more money while depriving those who wish to play the game from using the 'best' cards because they simply can.
The Reserve List, in addition to WotCs poor reprint policy, is what is hurting the game of Magic, but the company seems so addled that they cannot understand that a poor decision they made twenty years ago is slowly destroying the credibility of the game. No, WotC does not make money off the secondary market, but it is exactly because of WotC poor reprint and set releases that the general public turns to that exact secondary market. Yes, Magic is a game of chance random packs, but why on earth would the average person want to crack a pack from the newest set when they need that Snapcaster Mage for their latest Izzet deck? If WotC reprinted more cards that people want in more set I and others would have far more reason to support Magic directly instead of being nearly forced to use the ungoverned, Wild West Secondary Market. I don't shop the secondary market because I want to stick it to Wizards, I shop the SM because it's the only place I can reliably find the cards I want/need though the prices are as varied and untamed as the wind.
I wish that WotC would admit their faults and move on to correcting the problem. Either ditch the Reserve List and reprint more heavily or enforce standardize prices on their products and individual cards so that every Jane Average can come into the game without feeling like they have to sell off a kidney. Standard is a joke, not to mention the other Eternal Formats. Even Casual is tough because of the inane prices of cards and products. As someone who deeply loves the game of Magic it makes me sad to see the game becoming what it has been slowly turning into for decades; a stock market where only the wealthy can afford to play and rest of us beg for scraps. It absolutely would not surprise me to learn that twenty more years from now Magic is only played by the wealthy and elite as a casual hobby stolen from the common peasants and used as a distraction from their millions of dollars.
*sigh*
Back to Pauper...
Helm of Obedience
Humility
Shallow Grave
Gaea's Cradle
Altar of Bone
The Ux dual lands are also disappearing; I haven't checked all the duals yet. They're still ones in bad condition, but there are definitely less than there were earlier in the week.
This is the event people have been dreading for so long. I'm calling it now. We've reached the inevitable end of the Reserved List.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
Okay. Good news, we have about a day, maybe the weekend at most to jump on the markets before price inflation hit them (and ours even harder).
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
I just can't get on board with this. <90% of Magic is played right now without these cards. Most of what is played with it is EDH. Don't get me wrong, the guys who are screwing with the markets should be dealt with, but to say that the game will only be played by the wealthy and stolen from common peasants? Come on, that's just wrong.
This is a false dichotomy. What is best is to let all players play a format that is only slightly different than the format that "SOME players" want to play. We replace them with new formats that achieve the same goals, with new cards designed to replace the cards removed.
Vintage, for example, is all about insanely broken mana acceleration, free spells, and sometimes winning on the first turn. It is completely within the power of Wizards to create new cards that accomplish this.
I mean, look. Vintage needs a broken card draw spell, right? So we get rid of Ancestral Recall, and replace it with something like this:
U
Instant
As an additional cost to cast ~, discard 2 cards from your hand. Draw cards equal to the number of cards in your hand.
And that's just one of many possible ways to try to replace that card, I'm not saying the above is the only solution (that was literally about 10 seconds of thought in card design). Just trying to point out that there is a path Wizards can take to supporting a Vintage-like format that everyone can play. You can do the same for Legacy.
I mean, look. We can't make 100% of the people 100% happy, but we can make 100% of the people happy beyond some threshold, which is better than having 10% of the people 100% happy and 90% of the people 100% unhappy.
Wizards understands if they reprinted Goyf or Snapcaster in the next block set they would make more money, and these cards arnt even on the reserved list, yet wizards dosn't, why? Because Wizards actual customers arnt you and me, they are card shops, distributors, and online sellers like card kingdom and channel fireball. Go on a large card selling website and see how many pricy format staples they have on hand, most keep large amounts of cards like Lili, Force of Will, Snapcaster, ect in stock and charge above market price because they KNOW the price of these cards is unlikely to drop. But if Lilian were reprinted, that stack of 40 of them waiting to be sold would lose significant, possibly thousands of dollars, of value. Many long time players and collectors also own a large array of old, valuable cards, how many FoW do you think LSV has. Thered the argument that local card shops would be hurt aswell but I don't buy that. The booster pack sales and value rares opened would more than make up for lost value of case cards.
In short. Wizards isn't going to break the reserved list because it matters to the demographics they care about most. Bulk Buyers and longtime players/collectors. While having cards of significant value isn't inherently bad (I like knowing my cards are also assets) the need for format staples such as dual land must come first, but I highly, highly doubt they will do anything about it.
I actually want to start doing this. I don't think I can justify carrying nearly $10,000 worth of cards in my backpack, even if the area does seem safe, anymore.
Premodern - Trix, RecSur, Enchantress, Reanimator, Elves https://www.facebook.com/groups/PremodernUSA/
Modern - Neobrand, Hogaak Vine, Elves
Standard - Mono Red (6-2 and 5-3 in 2 McQ)
Draft - (I wish I had more time for limited...)
Commander -
Norin the Wary, Grimgrin, Adun Oakenshield (taking forever to build)(dead format for me)