So… this is going to be a bit of long one but follow me on this journey.
Like many people on this forum, I’ve heard quite a lot of discussion about the reserved list: Many people hate it, a few have accepted it as an inescapable reality, and a couple people wouldn’t invest in old cardboard without such a promise. I’ve heard the normal gamut of arguments that everyone has heard: that no one who made that original list is still around; that wizards acknowledges it as a mistake; that limited reprints have not killed interest in cards… the list goes on.
What I want to ask, however, isn’t whether the reserved list should be abolished or not. Rather, my question is how wizards would go about breaking the reserved list. While this may sound easy as pie (reprint reserved cards, duh!), it goes a bit deeper than you may think.
To start, there is going to be backlash. While the people who enjoy the current status quo may not be too verbal at the moment, it seems quite likely that they’ll take action if their supposedly safe investments are threatened. Whether or not you think they can win, quite a few people would try to sue Wizards. People who don’t may raise a ruckus in online communities and on social media as well. If the outrage is large enough, it may reach public consciousness and bring Hasbro negative press.
To counter this backlash, you need to build up hype with the players so that your image stays positive and so high sales can absorb any expenses the backlash creates. For this reason, Wizards is unlikely to remove the reserved list without simultaneously promoting one of those cards getting a reprint in the near future… and that reprint is likely to be more exciting than thunder spirit.
Even if Wizards gets the announcement correct, however, that just leads to the bigger question: How on earth do you actually reprint these cards? Which cards? How quickly? In what sort of product?
Think about that for a moment: If you print low-powered cards, you minimize hype. If you print high-powered cards, you limit the types of products that you can put the cards in without impacting standard/frontier/modern. If you put them in a limited-run product like eternal masters, vendors and investors may try to snap them up to keep prices high (if you reprint black lotus, for example, it would be hard to get them to the public). If you put them in as masterpieces to discourage this tactic, the difficulty in acquiring these cards may still reduce hype (even if those reprints push down the price of high tier cards by hundreds of dollars, that sort of stuff may not click with newer players). If you decide to force them into the hands of average players by printing them to hell and back… Well, that’s kind of what happened with Chronicles.
So… yeah. If you had the power to destroy the reserved list, what would be the smartest way to start printing cards from that list?
* Announce the change 2 years in advance, allow the market to respond, people to divest
or
* Offer complete 'sets' periodically containing an amount of reserved cards. Allow unlimited sales during the production window.
or
* Masterpiece-like lottery
or
* Something like the old MPR program, force people to play a lot of sanctioned events to get their bonuses in the mail. Make judge promos better too.
or
* Make new dual lands that don't have basic land types or are painlands with the types, ban old duals in legacy. Vintage can stay vintage if Wizards wants to continue a true VIP format.
- Integrate them into a very specially designed Limited format that is the Pro Tour Limited format for that season. It just contains the rare reprints, and then the rest of the whole set is designed around making them play as nice as they can with the other cards.
- Same thing, but a special block constructed format.
- Create functional reprints that say you can't include them in your deck unless you own a creature with Banding. Make the theme of the block you printed them about devolving culture that used to accomplish great things when it was more cooperative. Make the cards Standard legal, but impossible to include in your deck in Standard - but put some new Wish cards in the Standard set, so that these powerful cards can come out of the sideboard. For instance, a 3 mana 1/2 that searches outside the game for an instant if you hit a player. Maybe you don't want Ancestral Recall sometimes though!
Also print a variety of decent creatures with Banding that year in Commander or Conspiracy. Or better yet, make up a new versatile mechanic, put it in Commander or Conspiracy, and make that the thing. Put the mechanic on a GY hate card, a burn hate card, and a storm hate card, and most of the time people won't feel like they are playing with a 14 card sideboard for using the new cards.
Don't reprint it in a set to be sold. Rather, offer an exchange program. "For every 1000 cards you return to wizards, we will send you this special pack containing random cards from the reserved list."
This generates a lot of hype, especially from those disillusioned from all the trash cards they've been collecting over the years. People will feel less bad about buying new sets and finding chaff.
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"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
Abolish the reserved list and then reprint all the lands! And when I say this I'm mostly referring to the ABUR dual lands that just should never have been 100+ usd per to begin with and probably not tournament legal now that wizards has decided on what kinds of lands they actually want to print. The original dual lands sort of fall into the P9 category. Prices will crash on a ton of stuff simply because the prices are only holding due to scarcity. Volrath's Stronghold and the ABUR duals could literally be printed in commander products as I recall before the RL the stronghold was like 2-3 dollars and most duals were around shocks?
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Two year's notice: the RL will be abolished, and there will be a supplemental printing on Vintage masters in paper, with the special rarity downshifted to normal Mythics. This will be an ongoing product, alternating years with Modern Masters.
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Why is a reprint of the reserved list needed? They allready did it in the most elegant way, by printing it online, so they dont attack paper prices. If you want to play vintage or legacy, but you want to do it on a budget, you can play online.
Because playing paper magic, in my opinion, is far more fun and rewarding than playing online. By your logic, I should just get Xmage then I can play every deck in every format for free. Yet here I sit with 2 paper legacy decks complete because I, like many other, prefer paper magic to playing online against some faceless opponent.
As far as how to remove the reserved list, I think they announce it a year in advance, reprint everything into a masters set, but leave the power nine at a rarity in those packs similar to masterpiece level.
Huh... thanks for all of the answers everyone. I've seen people decrying the reserved list for years but I never hear people talk about the logistics of doing away with it.
Lots of interesting ideas, though "announce it well in advance and use masterpieces" seems to have some consensus.
I would start the effort by unbanning all gold border cards from tournament play and minitor how the market reacts to a bevy of available RL cards that are already in circulation. Based on the market response regarding RL cards, I would then have to decide if I were to abolish the reserved list.
Honestly? When it comes to the Reserved List, it's not the Black Lotus or Yawgmoth's Bargain or Mana Vault or whatever. Sorry. The one they would break would probably be things like Thunder Spirit which have an obvious place in limited if not for the Reserved List.
There are ways around it. Color-shifting is acceptable. But reprints (including functional reprints and strictly betters) are not. So, using Thunder Spirit, a 2/2 with first strike and flying for 1WW can't be done. Nor can a 2/2 with first strike and flying for 2W or WW. Nor can a 2/2 with double strike and flying for 1WW or a 3/2 with first strike and flying for 1WW. But a 2/2 with first strike and flying for 1WU or 1WB or 1UR or 1RW can be done.
I've been hoping for a red Cadaverous Bloom, even though I doubt it'll happen for powerlevel reasons.
What grinds my gears is people who think new Magic cards are an "investment", as if the Reserved List still adds new cards.
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Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
Strictly betters are allowed. Only functional reprints are disallowed (which is considered to be same rules text and a different name or creature type).
A 5 year announcement on cards that have less than $10 value.
A 10 year timing for everything else.
Prices would drop, then creep back up.
You'd have to be careful. People have these things in vaults, basing their retirement off of them. It isn't good for a company to be untrustworhty to their market.
And even after they are allowed to be reprinted. Bring particular things in slowly.
Reprint them like master pieces/burried treasure (from zendkar) and don't tell anyone, print em to look like the old ones and tell people they bought em from the private market.
Ähm no. There is the "spirit of the reserved list" that seems to forbid things like legendary or snowcovered dual lands.
Basically this. It's the most vexing aspect of the entire reserved list and it's the reason we don't see things even remotely like Volrath's Stronghold or the ABUR dual lands.
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1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Abolish the reserved list and then reprint all the lands! And when I say this I'm mostly referring to the ABUR dual lands that just should never have been 100+ usd per to begin with and probably not tournament legal now that wizards has decided on what kinds of lands they actually want to print. The original dual lands sort of fall into the P9 category. Prices will crash on a ton of stuff simply because the prices are only holding due to scarcity. Volrath's Stronghold and the ABUR duals could literally be printed in commander products as I recall before the RL the stronghold was like 2-3 dollars and most duals were around shocks?
Quite honestly, I clicked into this thread because I saw your name and expected an entirely differet, yet insightful, answer than this.
Abolish the reserved list and then reprint all the lands! And when I say this I'm mostly referring to the ABUR dual lands that just should never have been 100+ usd per to begin with and probably not tournament legal now that wizards has decided on what kinds of lands they actually want to print. The original dual lands sort of fall into the P9 category. Prices will crash on a ton of stuff simply because the prices are only holding due to scarcity. Volrath's Stronghold and the ABUR duals could literally be printed in commander products as I recall before the RL the stronghold was like 2-3 dollars and most duals were around shocks?
Let me ask you what cards WERE ment to be 100+ USD? that is a steep road to go down, Why $100 why not $3 (the price of a pack ) or even less since we may give value to commons/uncommons? I mean at that instance why not print whole sets for resale at 0.23 cents per card in the set (but you get the whole set) thats about what a card averages to from pack price.
Abolish the reserved list and then reprint all the lands! And when I say this I'm mostly referring to the ABUR dual lands that just should never have been 100+ usd per to begin with and probably not tournament legal now that wizards has decided on what kinds of lands they actually want to print. The original dual lands sort of fall into the P9 category. Prices will crash on a ton of stuff simply because the prices are only holding due to scarcity. Volrath's Stronghold and the ABUR duals could literally be printed in commander products as I recall before the RL the stronghold was like 2-3 dollars and most duals were around shocks?
Let me ask you what cards WERE ment to be 100+ USD? that is a steep road to go down, Why $100 why not $3 (the price of a pack ) or even less since we may give value to commons/uncommons? I mean at that instance why not print whole sets for resale at 0.23 cents per card in the set (but you get the whole set) thats about what a card averages to from pack price.
Okay, we're going down the rabbit hole again.
Going to repost what I put in the frontier thread that is relevant to this (even though I was actually being a little snarky in my original post)
The secondary market is basically a death spiral for the game and any cards that enter it because of how the trading of cards works. The truth is price memory is a myth. What really happens is that a seller runs out of a card, so they put a buylist up to get the cards. Players who bought the card expect a certain amount of value back from the card, so the seller has to set their buylist price high enough to get people to sell them the card. Once the seller gets the card, they have to sell that card at a profit so they increase the price accordingly. Once they run out of cards again the pattern repeats with having to rebuy the same card back from the people they likely sold to. This just keeps repeating constantly until a dollar Sensei's Divining Top reaches 20+ usd or a Chalice of the Void reaches 60+ usd.
Then wizards does a reprint. Well, two things happen:
1) Some sellers start panic selling their cards off asap before people know about the reprint (and usually fail)
2) Others plan on buying up as many cheap copies as they can in an effort to manipulate the market and keep the prices high. This is especially true of mythics since they have a limited supply and with a deep enough pockets and credit rating it is totally possible to do it.
Originally, there was a third party that would also buy up a significant amount of sealed product to sit on since the promise of lotto tickets and high value cards will lead to the box value rising steadily over time, but ever since the Eternal Masters debacle and mass box printings that market has cooled significantly.
So how do you stop this from happening? Easy, you reprint the cards regularly to keep prices in check. Does wizards do this? Technically, they are doing it with modern masters and other masters sets, but the trouble is they aren't doing it for the purpose of market stabilization. Wizards is doing it more so to profit off of the slow perpetual death cycle. It's basically like the plot of Crow Fall: They are the visitors to a dying world gathering resources before the darkness consumes the realm and the lands are fallow.
So then we have the RL. Well, we got the death spiral pattern happening except wizards can't actually reprint the card, so even if the demand is only such that people need maybe one per deck, because they can never reprint them and people who have them have the cards super glued to their bodies, the asking price is huge on the cards.
So at the end of the day, I can't even tell you what a card should be worth and neither is the secondary market. The one who SHOULD be telling people what a card is worth is WoTC given they are supporting standard and modern, both of which are constructed formats. However, they don't and instead leave the pricing to the worst people imaginable like SCG and Channel Fireball. And the reality is this is all because they don't want to spend the money to build a first party support structure for constructed deck building and gameplay. They are far too busy doing cost cutting as is evident with HOU singles and packaging, as well as underpay their employees and force them to pay out of pocket for benefits according to various company reviewing sites, leaving the fate of constructed to the secondary market, which is just hilariously bad in the paper game due to lack of controls.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
The only reason to abolish the RL is to drive down prices. The ideas like "10 years notice" and "reprint them as Masterpieces" miss the entire point. If you do that, you might as well not abolish the RL at all. If you don't want the RL gone, just say so and don't give "solutions" that don't solve anything. If WotC wants to abolish the RL, then the best thing for them to do would be to do it ASAP, and reprint enough to keep the market value on them at a place where they are still in high demand. I think that Modern Masters has shown them that a high-demand reprint, at Mythic, can both sell packs and still not tank the value of them (ensuring they continue to sell packs in the future.)
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Cards are game pieces, and should be treated as such, easily replaceable.
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
An announcement that cards will be coming off the reserve list in X years... and the promise that it will be in masters products. I would do it gradually. They can even leave some of the dumb cards that are only valuable BECAUSE of their scarcity (i.e. Juzam Djinn, silly cards like Divine Intervention) on it.
First thing I would take off the list:
ABUR duals
Everything Ice Age and later (which should never have been on in the first place)
That hits the majority of legacy relevant cards right of the bat.
THey can also throw some casual favorite on the list that people actually want to PLAY (i.e. Gauntlet of Might and Power Artifact) which will hold some value because they're in EDH decks all over the world.
That's what I would do at least... You can make the argument that once you take a single card off the whole list becomes pointless because "consumer trust blah blah blah" but they could say we won't take a card off a list without at least X years notice most people won't whine.
You'd have to be careful. People have these things in vaults, basing their retirement off of them. It isn't good for a company to be untrustworhty to their market.
I missed this last time so here it is... oh... and it's not you. I'm just adding to your comment....
That MUST stop. Do people realize just how insane that sounds? Does no one even recall the whole Beanie Baby debacle and how completely bonkers people went over them? Anyone read over that bullet list in the first link? Any of it sound familiar?
You'd have to be careful. People have these things in vaults, basing their retirement off of them. It isn't good for a company to be untrustworhty to their market.
I missed this last time so here it is... oh... and it's not you. I'm just adding to your comment....
That MUST stop. Do people realize just how insane that sounds? Does no one even recall the whole Beanie Baby debacle and how completely bonkers people went over them? Anyone read over that bullet list in the first link? Any of it sound familiar?
Oh... that's the insight I expected from colt47.
Oh you expect ME to defend bunker hermiting of cards? I'm just defending the whole angle of "Give the poor sops a chance to cash out into real retirement / better investments". If anything, I'm the one who wants to see things printed more often and for wizards to actually build first party infrastructure to support constructed play. You know, instead of promoting the constructed formats, tossing random lotto packs to the world and letting the "savages" (all of us who buy singles) sort it out like a freaking market gladiatorial arena. We have been perpetually rebuying and reselling the same cardboard so much we have made commons like Devoted Druid worth more than most rare cards.
We are chopping our arms off, injecting the weird virus from Resident Evil Biohazard to regrow it, and then eating our own arm for protein.
And here is a psyduck. I didn't even realize this thing was an emoticon.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Announce one year in advance that the list is being abolished. This gives retailers adequate time to move their stock of duals without suffering too much of a loss and entrenched players to trade in or out of RL cards. Speculators and "collectors" will be left high-and-dry, but they're unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
Reprints should be handled similarly to the way that some cards are now, with certain ones being heavily reprinted and others handled with a bit more care.
Duals, Moat, Tabernacle, Chains, Wheel of Fortune, Power Artifact, Survival of the Fittest, and any cards that derive most of their value from player demand for game pieces should be heavily reprinted in booster pack products. Quite frankly, these cards would be perfect for Iconic/25 Masters. Players would be far more excited to crack a Tundra or a Wheel than most all non-Reserved cards and it's a shame that a shortsighted policy like the RL "forbids" WotC from placing these iconic, popular cards in packs.
I can understand handling Vintage power with a different set of gloves, however. These would be ideal Masterpieces or high-level prize cards. How cool would it be for a couple sets of power to be distributed to winners/participants of the sanctioned Vintage Championships? Can't do now though, because of the stupid List.
You'd have to be careful. People have these things in vaults, basing their retirement off of them. It isn't good for a company to be untrustworhty to their market.
I missed this last time so here it is... oh... and it's not you. I'm just adding to your comment....
That MUST stop. Do people realize just how insane that sounds? Does no one even recall the whole Beanie Baby debacle and how completely bonkers people went over them? Anyone read over that bullet list in the first link? Any of it sound familiar?
Oh... that's the insight I expected from colt47.
Oh you expect ME to defend bunker hermiting of cards? I'm just defending the whole angle of "Give the poor sops a chance to cash out into real retirement / better investments". If anything, I'm the one who wants to see things printed more often and for wizards to actually build first party infrastructure to support constructed play. You know, instead of promoting the constructed formats, tossing random lotto packs to the world and letting the "savages" (all of us who buy singles) sort it out like a freaking market gladiatorial arena. We have been perpetually rebuying and reselling the same cardboard so much we have made commons like Devoted Druid worth more than most rare cards.
We are chopping our arms off, injecting the weird virus from Resident Evil Biohazard to regrow it, and then eating our own arm for protein.
And here is a psyduck. I didn't even realize this thing was an emoticon.
What? No... I botched the edit trying to quote without quoting the entire quote and.... nevermind. I was trying to refer to your last post and just botched the edit. My Win10 computer vomited... again... and I've been stuck using a phone to browse and post.
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Like many people on this forum, I’ve heard quite a lot of discussion about the reserved list: Many people hate it, a few have accepted it as an inescapable reality, and a couple people wouldn’t invest in old cardboard without such a promise. I’ve heard the normal gamut of arguments that everyone has heard: that no one who made that original list is still around; that wizards acknowledges it as a mistake; that limited reprints have not killed interest in cards… the list goes on.
What I want to ask, however, isn’t whether the reserved list should be abolished or not. Rather, my question is how wizards would go about breaking the reserved list. While this may sound easy as pie (reprint reserved cards, duh!), it goes a bit deeper than you may think.
To start, there is going to be backlash. While the people who enjoy the current status quo may not be too verbal at the moment, it seems quite likely that they’ll take action if their supposedly safe investments are threatened. Whether or not you think they can win, quite a few people would try to sue Wizards. People who don’t may raise a ruckus in online communities and on social media as well. If the outrage is large enough, it may reach public consciousness and bring Hasbro negative press.
To counter this backlash, you need to build up hype with the players so that your image stays positive and so high sales can absorb any expenses the backlash creates. For this reason, Wizards is unlikely to remove the reserved list without simultaneously promoting one of those cards getting a reprint in the near future… and that reprint is likely to be more exciting than thunder spirit.
Even if Wizards gets the announcement correct, however, that just leads to the bigger question: How on earth do you actually reprint these cards? Which cards? How quickly? In what sort of product?
Think about that for a moment: If you print low-powered cards, you minimize hype. If you print high-powered cards, you limit the types of products that you can put the cards in without impacting standard/frontier/modern. If you put them in a limited-run product like eternal masters, vendors and investors may try to snap them up to keep prices high (if you reprint black lotus, for example, it would be hard to get them to the public). If you put them in as masterpieces to discourage this tactic, the difficulty in acquiring these cards may still reduce hype (even if those reprints push down the price of high tier cards by hundreds of dollars, that sort of stuff may not click with newer players). If you decide to force them into the hands of average players by printing them to hell and back… Well, that’s kind of what happened with Chronicles.
So… yeah. If you had the power to destroy the reserved list, what would be the smartest way to start printing cards from that list?
or
* Offer complete 'sets' periodically containing an amount of reserved cards. Allow unlimited sales during the production window.
or
* Masterpiece-like lottery
or
* Something like the old MPR program, force people to play a lot of sanctioned events to get their bonuses in the mail. Make judge promos better too.
or
* Make new dual lands that don't have basic land types or are painlands with the types, ban old duals in legacy. Vintage can stay vintage if Wizards wants to continue a true VIP format.
- Integrate them into a very specially designed Limited format that is the Pro Tour Limited format for that season. It just contains the rare reprints, and then the rest of the whole set is designed around making them play as nice as they can with the other cards.
- Same thing, but a special block constructed format.
- Create functional reprints that say you can't include them in your deck unless you own a creature with Banding. Make the theme of the block you printed them about devolving culture that used to accomplish great things when it was more cooperative. Make the cards Standard legal, but impossible to include in your deck in Standard - but put some new Wish cards in the Standard set, so that these powerful cards can come out of the sideboard. For instance, a 3 mana 1/2 that searches outside the game for an instant if you hit a player. Maybe you don't want Ancestral Recall sometimes though!
Also print a variety of decent creatures with Banding that year in Commander or Conspiracy. Or better yet, make up a new versatile mechanic, put it in Commander or Conspiracy, and make that the thing. Put the mechanic on a GY hate card, a burn hate card, and a storm hate card, and most of the time people won't feel like they are playing with a 14 card sideboard for using the new cards.
This generates a lot of hype, especially from those disillusioned from all the trash cards they've been collecting over the years. People will feel less bad about buying new sets and finding chaff.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
Because playing paper magic, in my opinion, is far more fun and rewarding than playing online. By your logic, I should just get Xmage then I can play every deck in every format for free. Yet here I sit with 2 paper legacy decks complete because I, like many other, prefer paper magic to playing online against some faceless opponent.
As far as how to remove the reserved list, I think they announce it a year in advance, reprint everything into a masters set, but leave the power nine at a rarity in those packs similar to masterpiece level.
Modern: Mono-Red Control, Lantern Control, Eldrazi Taxes, Skred Infect
Pauper: Affinity
EDH: Gaddock Teeg Kithkin Tribal, Meren
Legacy: 8 Rack, Omnitell (Both in progress)
Lots of interesting ideas, though "announce it well in advance and use masterpieces" seems to have some consensus.
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-general/334931-what-is-the-most-pimp-card-deck-youve-seen-or?comment=5361
Commander
RGOmnath, Locus of Rage Grenades! EDHGR
UWSygg's Defense, EDH - Voltron & ControlWU
BUGMimeoplasm EDH ft. Ifnir Cycling-discard comboBUG
WBTeysa, Connoisseur of CullingBW
BWSelenia & Recruiter of the Guard suicice combo EDHWB
UBRWGO-Kagachi - 5 Color Enchantments - EDHUBRWG
Two Score, Minus Two or: A Stargate Tail
(Image by totallynotabrony)
There are ways around it. Color-shifting is acceptable. But reprints (including functional reprints and strictly betters) are not. So, using Thunder Spirit, a 2/2 with first strike and flying for 1WW can't be done. Nor can a 2/2 with first strike and flying for 2W or WW. Nor can a 2/2 with double strike and flying for 1WW or a 3/2 with first strike and flying for 1WW. But a 2/2 with first strike and flying for 1WU or 1WB or 1UR or 1RW can be done.
I've been hoping for a red Cadaverous Bloom, even though I doubt it'll happen for powerlevel reasons.
What grinds my gears is people who think new Magic cards are an "investment", as if the Reserved List still adds new cards.
On phasing:
A 10 year timing for everything else.
Prices would drop, then creep back up.
You'd have to be careful. People have these things in vaults, basing their retirement off of them. It isn't good for a company to be untrustworhty to their market.
And even after they are allowed to be reprinted. Bring particular things in slowly.
Basically this. It's the most vexing aspect of the entire reserved list and it's the reason we don't see things even remotely like Volrath's Stronghold or the ABUR dual lands.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Quite honestly, I clicked into this thread because I saw your name and expected an entirely differet, yet insightful, answer than this.
Not wrong, but I thought I knew you.
Let me ask you what cards WERE ment to be 100+ USD? that is a steep road to go down, Why $100 why not $3 (the price of a pack ) or even less since we may give value to commons/uncommons? I mean at that instance why not print whole sets for resale at 0.23 cents per card in the set (but you get the whole set) thats about what a card averages to from pack price.
Okay, we're going down the rabbit hole again.
Going to repost what I put in the frontier thread that is relevant to this (even though I was actually being a little snarky in my original post)
The secondary market is basically a death spiral for the game and any cards that enter it because of how the trading of cards works. The truth is price memory is a myth. What really happens is that a seller runs out of a card, so they put a buylist up to get the cards. Players who bought the card expect a certain amount of value back from the card, so the seller has to set their buylist price high enough to get people to sell them the card. Once the seller gets the card, they have to sell that card at a profit so they increase the price accordingly. Once they run out of cards again the pattern repeats with having to rebuy the same card back from the people they likely sold to. This just keeps repeating constantly until a dollar Sensei's Divining Top reaches 20+ usd or a Chalice of the Void reaches 60+ usd.
Then wizards does a reprint. Well, two things happen:
1) Some sellers start panic selling their cards off asap before people know about the reprint (and usually fail)
2) Others plan on buying up as many cheap copies as they can in an effort to manipulate the market and keep the prices high. This is especially true of mythics since they have a limited supply and with a deep enough pockets and credit rating it is totally possible to do it.
Originally, there was a third party that would also buy up a significant amount of sealed product to sit on since the promise of lotto tickets and high value cards will lead to the box value rising steadily over time, but ever since the Eternal Masters debacle and mass box printings that market has cooled significantly.
So how do you stop this from happening? Easy, you reprint the cards regularly to keep prices in check. Does wizards do this? Technically, they are doing it with modern masters and other masters sets, but the trouble is they aren't doing it for the purpose of market stabilization. Wizards is doing it more so to profit off of the slow perpetual death cycle. It's basically like the plot of Crow Fall: They are the visitors to a dying world gathering resources before the darkness consumes the realm and the lands are fallow.
So then we have the RL. Well, we got the death spiral pattern happening except wizards can't actually reprint the card, so even if the demand is only such that people need maybe one per deck, because they can never reprint them and people who have them have the cards super glued to their bodies, the asking price is huge on the cards.
So at the end of the day, I can't even tell you what a card should be worth and neither is the secondary market. The one who SHOULD be telling people what a card is worth is WoTC given they are supporting standard and modern, both of which are constructed formats. However, they don't and instead leave the pricing to the worst people imaginable like SCG and Channel Fireball. And the reality is this is all because they don't want to spend the money to build a first party support structure for constructed deck building and gameplay. They are far too busy doing cost cutting as is evident with HOU singles and packaging, as well as underpay their employees and force them to pay out of pocket for benefits according to various company reviewing sites, leaving the fate of constructed to the secondary market, which is just hilariously bad in the paper game due to lack of controls.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Cards are not money, investments, or a retirement fund, and should never have been treated as such.
Wizards made a mistake caving to speculators once, and we still pay for that mistake 2 decades later.
"Entitled:" the entire ad hominem fallacy condensed into a single word. It doesn't strengthen your argument to attack motivations, it just makes you look like you don't understand the argument.
First thing I would take off the list:
ABUR duals
Everything Ice Age and later (which should never have been on in the first place)
That hits the majority of legacy relevant cards right of the bat.
THey can also throw some casual favorite on the list that people actually want to PLAY (i.e. Gauntlet of Might and Power Artifact) which will hold some value because they're in EDH decks all over the world.
That's what I would do at least... You can make the argument that once you take a single card off the whole list becomes pointless because "consumer trust blah blah blah" but they could say we won't take a card off a list without at least X years notice most people won't whine.
I missed this last time so here it is... oh... and it's not you. I'm just adding to your comment....
That MUST stop. Do people realize just how insane that sounds? Does no one even recall the whole Beanie Baby debacle and how completely bonkers people went over them? Anyone read over that bullet list in the first link? Any of it sound familiar?
Oh... that's the insight I expected from colt47.
Oh you expect ME to defend bunker hermiting of cards? I'm just defending the whole angle of "Give the poor sops a chance to cash out into real retirement / better investments". If anything, I'm the one who wants to see things printed more often and for wizards to actually build first party infrastructure to support constructed play. You know, instead of promoting the constructed formats, tossing random lotto packs to the world and letting the "savages" (all of us who buy singles) sort it out like a freaking market gladiatorial arena. We have been perpetually rebuying and reselling the same cardboard so much we have made commons like Devoted Druid worth more than most rare cards.
We are chopping our arms off, injecting the weird virus from Resident Evil Biohazard to regrow it, and then eating our own arm for protein.
And here is a psyduck. I didn't even realize this thing was an emoticon.
1. (Ravnica Allegiance): You can't keep a good esper control deck down... Or Wilderness Reclamation... or Gates...
2. (War of the Spark): Guys, I know what we need! We need a cycle of really idiotic flavor text victory cards! Jace's Triumph...
3. (War of the Spark): Lets make the format with control have even more control!
Reprints should be handled similarly to the way that some cards are now, with certain ones being heavily reprinted and others handled with a bit more care.
Duals, Moat, Tabernacle, Chains, Wheel of Fortune, Power Artifact, Survival of the Fittest, and any cards that derive most of their value from player demand for game pieces should be heavily reprinted in booster pack products. Quite frankly, these cards would be perfect for Iconic/25 Masters. Players would be far more excited to crack a Tundra or a Wheel than most all non-Reserved cards and it's a shame that a shortsighted policy like the RL "forbids" WotC from placing these iconic, popular cards in packs.
I can understand handling Vintage power with a different set of gloves, however. These would be ideal Masterpieces or high-level prize cards. How cool would it be for a couple sets of power to be distributed to winners/participants of the sanctioned Vintage Championships? Can't do now though, because of the stupid List.
What? No... I botched the edit trying to quote without quoting the entire quote and.... nevermind. I was trying to refer to your last post and just botched the edit. My Win10 computer vomited... again... and I've been stuck using a phone to browse and post.