There have been several severe leaks for several products in past months. Most notably, the Ixalan rare sheet and the contents of most of the dragons Commander 17 deck. These are not the worst leaks to have come about, but they're still fairly large.
I personally think leaks are a bad thing.
When the dragon deck was leaked, people's expectations were set by what they saw. They saw cards for previous uncarded characters and then believed that each deck will have all previous characters.
This caused a lot of animosity towards WoTC to come out on this site when the other legends were spoiled and they weren't all previous characters.
This was similar when the waste symbol and Kozilek, the Great Distortion was leaked. People got confused about how it worked and wanted to know, but Wizards didn't reveal it until they had planned to, creating frustration about this new symbol people didn't understand.
Now we have the Ixalan rare sheet leaked. I haven't seen any fall out from that one yet, but I bet it's coming.
There is a lot of anti-WoTC sentiment on this site, some of it deserved, some of it not, but I think that these leaks just help to facilitate the dislike of WoTC, while giving very little benefit to anyone.
People have asked why WoTC don't release the leaked information to confirm it when it gets leaked. I think that's a ridiculous idea. WoTC would then be at the mercy of any person who decided a little theft of IP was in order.
Disclaimer: I don't like the way WoTC has been doing spoilers in the past few years. One week of cards doesn't do anything for me and it's too much information to process in a short time. I want it to go back to cards being revealed well before as a taste of the set to come.
TL,DR: Leaks are bad because people get angry when the set doesn't live up to the expectation set by said leaks.
First of all, leaks aren't a good thing. One thing you didn't mention is story spoilers, which weaken quite a bit of the impact that otherwise shocking developments should have. There's a very good reason why actors have their hands tied, contractually speaking, when it comes to the details of their unreleased movies and series.
Secondly, the blame for this kind of backlash falls upon the player community just as much as on the leakers or WoTC, whose own flaws are covered in minute detail elsewhere. The expectation management of many of the people on this site is, quite frankly, horrible. Those people fixate so much on what they want that they pay zero attention to reality. As a result, they scream the loudest when that $50 reprint they need to be so much cheaper materializes in a low-impact masters product or masterpiece run instead of a high-impact standard set, in spite of the fact that Wizards swore off that particular strategy after they saw what happened with Thoughtseize in Theros. I'm not saying that everyone is like this, but a loud minority was behind many of the OP's examples as well.
You'll notice that had little to do with the actual topic of leaks because the point I'm trying to make is that players don't need leaks to be outraged. Leaks do play a role in these kinds of incidents, but who needs them when people speculate that the upcoming Dominaria block will send the game 20 years into the past?
I recall that during Onslaught block they leaked the entire set afew months early. They did not seem to impact sales, if anything it helped people figure out decks and become better drafters quicker. Leaks are a good thing for the community they build hype about great product and allow us to walk away from bad ones. As long as your set is amazing, a leak can only help you. Leaks are only bad if your product is bad, Product amazing leaks will lead to more presales, more ordering and product getting sold.
Leaks are not good as such, but they are better than how absolutely terrible WotC's own preview approaches are. The extremely short window of previews, the tendency to heavily frontload the vast majority of interesting reveals to cover for how few exciting cards most sets actually contain, the sanctimonious attitude toward negative player feedback, all of it, often leaves players enjoying leaks and unofficial spoilers more than the official process. WotC needs to tighten up their procedures to limit leaks, sure, but they also need to work on how official spoilers are released.
Leaks are inevitable. Love them or hate or neither or both. As long as the whole community isn't part of the development process, leaks will be a reality.
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They just couldn't put 7th edition into Modern because of the card borders? Seriously? Count me out.
The leaks really aren't the problem. The big issue is wizards designing sets really poorly and then hiding the entire thing behind marketing hype. They love to show the few good cards they have in the set, get everyone rushing to pre-order boxes, and then as release day approaches finally unveil the rest of the set to show how abysmal it really is. Kaladesh was probably the last set I got really excited over because it actually deserved excitement. Even now, it is probably the strongest set in standard alongside Aether Revolt and is really only being suppressed by hate cards.
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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!
I'm inclined to agree that leaks don't hurt sets if the sets themselves are good.
An argument presented against leaks, however, was how they potentially affect the people who actually put work into the official marketing of the products. The argument was that such effort is wasted if the leaks undermine the hype that the official previews and announcements would cultivate. I'd argue though that investing resources into building hype might be part of the problem because they don't let the sets speak for themselves, so to speak.
The leaks really aren't the problem. The big issue is wizards designing sets really poorly and then hiding the entire thing behind marketing hype. They love to show the few good cards they have in the set, get everyone rushing to pre-order boxes, and then as release day approaches finally unveil the rest of the set to show how abysmal it really is. Kaladesh was probably the last set I got really excited over because it actually deserved excitement. Even now, it is probably the strongest set in standard alongside Aether Revolt and is really only being suppressed by hate cards.
After having 3 of its cards banned in Standard, Kaladesh block might not be the best example of something that people should get excited over.
While hype has never influenced how much product I buy, it does influence how much I think and it talk about something. Leaks make hype at the wrong time. A few weeks ago I couldn't stop talking about the dragon deck, but when official spoilers started I couldn't care less. I was crazy hyped for Mesoamerica world when Ixalan was first previewed, then the rare sheet came out before Hour was done and it killed the hype. Not because I saw anything bad, but because so much was spoiled. If they had let us have "Bolas mind @#$% Jace and now he doesn't remember who or where he is" instead we got "Jace doesn't know who or where he is, I guess Bolas mind @#$% him in next week's episode"
Leaks are bad, they do screw up the marketing efforts of WOTC. It's totally wrong to steal something from a company and release it on the internet. It's a simple question with a simple answer.
The other issues surrounding why people do it are valid. I think WOTC needs to make changes in how they promote upcoming sets. It might lessen people's need to leak things.
If theres something good in them, pre-Orders go up tremendously.
For Ixalan my LGS already takes Pre-Orders , without any spoilers you wouldnt know ANYTHING and pre-Ordereing in the blind is terrible.
----
If a set is value wise as terriblea s Amonkhet , spoilers show that and bad decisions snow-ball hard.
Colorless mana symbol was a terrible idea and it just created the Eldrazi nightmare and still keeps it alive.
Changing all the old cards to a new mana symbol is also bad (especially as i dislike the shape of it).
Its all crap if you change things just to change things, without a real need to do so.
Right now they go super wild in sets , often way over the top with changes and "new" stuff.
Double sided cards proved to work, but the Embalm/Eternalize tokens in Amokhet are TERRIBLE alternatives to that, these cards "could" have been transform cards, but they decided to do it different.
Aftermath design on cards looks horrendously terrible too, could have been done more like a split card with flashback.
But they want to do something "new" every time, instead of exploring existing mechanics more, they want new mechanics, which are similar but still do it different, for the sake of doing it different.
I hate that, they could keep magic simpler by using existing mechanics , its not really cool to use new mechanics in every set, if it doesnt need to (especially not in that frequency).
Sets are big to fail if design is that drastic and changes that visual , the cards art and aesthetic are something that a bunch of people really really like.
It would even be cool to some form of time-shifted cards in boosters, just to have a "old-school" version of the cards in old-borders etc. (they could do way more in terms of foils and premium version, different artwork on much more rare version etc. etc.).
All of that would promote a set much more and seeing such things is good.
Seeing it early allows players to talk about it.
If something is badly done, its just badly done, knowing about that earlier helps, you can plan your life and avoid sets that do not cripple your inner jonny (plenty of Timmy around, Jonny isnt happy ... ).
If what's leaked is good, people will save money to purchase more of it than they would have otherwise. If what's leaked is *****, you should go to the bathroom, step on the toilet and flush yourself out instead of complaining that evil people in the internet made your ***** look like the ***** it is.
So, spoilers to tv shows or Movies are also good, right?
Because a bad conclusion can destroy a show or movie, so if you know the end is good, its good to know that in advance?
I mean, none of such spoilers would change the show or movie, and if its a good movie, its all right, isn´t it?
This is so very, very apples to oranges. The payoff of MtG sets isn't exclusively in the narrative/story. When advance knowledge enhances you experience (being better equipped to engage in the gameplay aspect because you've had time to absorb mechanical implications), spoilers can have a positive effect. When knowing about the thing IS the whole, or majority of, the experience (the narrative of a movie/show), knowing it ahead of time can disrupt the desire to experience it further. These aren't the same thing.
Leaks that reveal actual sensitive information which could endanger lives are bad. Sloppy publicity stunt leaks like the Ixalan leaks are harmless but really lame.
Leaks are not good as such, but they are better than how absolutely terrible WotC's own preview approaches are. The extremely short window of previews, the tendency to heavily frontload the vast majority of interesting reveals to cover for how few exciting cards most sets actually contain, the sanctimonious attitude toward negative player feedback, all of it, often leaves players enjoying leaks and unofficial spoilers more than the official process. WotC needs to tighten up their procedures to limit leaks, sure, but they also need to work on how official spoilers are released.
I really agree with this comment here. I know the staff
at WOTC get disappointed by the leaks stealing their thunder, but they've had 25 damn years to figure out better ways of doing hype and they can't get it right.
The Mirrorpool leak is the one that really bugs me. There was an amazing amount of hype and buzz going around for the new colorless mana symbol (which I love), and they just let the arguments rage on, creating strife in the community that really didn't need to happen. They could have easily embraced the hype and made it their own.
I don't agree with the dude stealing the uncut sheet, or the people that released the godbook, but nor do I think of leakers as puppy-kicking baby-eaters either.
Leaks are not good as such, but they are better than how absolutely terrible WotC's own preview approaches are. The extremely short window of previews, the tendency to heavily frontload the vast majority of interesting reveals to cover for how few exciting cards most sets actually contain, the sanctimonious attitude toward negative player feedback, all of it, often leaves players enjoying leaks and unofficial spoilers more than the official process. WotC needs to tighten up their procedures to limit leaks, sure, but they also need to work on how official spoilers are released.
I really agree with this comment here. I know the staff
at WOTC get disappointed by the leaks stealing their thunder, but they've had 25 damn years to figure out better ways of doing hype and they can't get it right.
The Mirrorpool leak is the one that really bugs me. There was an amazing amount of hype and buzz going around for the new colorless mana symbol (which I love), and they just let the arguments rage on, creating strife in the community that really didn't need to happen. They could have easily embraced the hype and made it their own.
I don't agree with the dude stealing the uncut sheet, or the people that released the godbook, but nor do I think of leakers as puppy-kicking baby-eaters either.
You actually believe that sheet was somehow 'snuck out'? Publicity stunts man. Do you really think that WotC cares that the colorless symbol was leaked? Or that the community was in a 'crisis' over it? They don't care what you think, only that you are talking about it. Free advertising. All you need to do is upset a handful of vocal whiners and Boom!... Buzz. This is all 'Shady Marketing 101', and people continue to lap it up. What's next? Poor Wizards can't control leaks so its time to lock down intellectual property on the internet? Marketing and posturing is all this is.
If there was a leak showing that a highly-wanted card was in an upcoming set, that wouldn't take anything away from the set. "Hey, the enemy fetches are returning in Dominaria! Gonna buy some of those, then!"
Leaks hurt when 90% of any given set is Limited fodder, things that you aren't excited to put into a Limited deck, let alone Constructed. Nobody gets excited about a set that isn't exciting. There's still a lot of hype about Ixalan, because the set hits a lot of things players want to see, especially kitchen table players. Dinosaurs, pirates, treasure? Yes please, people are going to buy this set.
Hype can help sell sets, but making quality sets to begin with not only sells sets, it produces sets like Innistrad that become beloved over time. Every block gets such a crazy amount of hype, but that doesn't last. if they want more than just a burst of sales in the first few weeks, they have to make sets that are good enough to stand on their own without the hype, and that's where they've been hit-or-miss for some time. Leaks can't hurt a set whose sales are based on being a good set, instead of being based on just being new and hyped.
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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.
Odd "Mtgsalvation.com" would not exist without the leaks... And I started coming to the website because of the leaks!
I do feel that wizards is doing the spoiling thing wrong. What they should do is spoil the new set two months before the actual release date. They would then know what cards the players like, what card could be broken and/or what card needs to be adjusted. They could make any last minute adjustment within the 30 days and start printing the set.
Odd "Mtgsalvation.com" would not exist without the leaks... And I started coming to the website because of the leaks!
I do feel that wizards is doing the spoiling thing wrong. What they should do is spoil the new set two months before the actual release date. They would then know what cards the players like, what card could be broken and/or what card needs to be adjusted. They could make any last minute adjustment within the 30 days and start printing the set.
There is no way they could make changes like that. The set has to be printed and shipped well before 30 days. As automated as life is becoming printing hundreds of thousands of cards and shipping them isn't as simple as loading a file and pushing a button.
Odd "Mtgsalvation.com" would not exist without the leaks... And I started coming to the website because of the leaks!
I do feel that wizards is doing the spoiling thing wrong. What they should do is spoil the new set two months before the actual release date. They would then know what cards the players like, what card could be broken and/or what card needs to be adjusted. They could make any last minute adjustment within the 30 days and start printing the set.
If you think you could get even a single card changed 30 days before a set is supposed to release, you live in a fantasy land. There is a reason there are cards that get errataed before prerelease happens
W may only be paid with white mana. U may only be paid with blue mana. B may only be paid with black mana. R may only be paid with red mana. G may only be paid with green mana. C may only be paid with colorless mana. 1 may be paid with white, blue, black, red, green, or clolorless mana.
Leaks are a good thing for the community they build hype about great product and allow us to walk away from bad ones. As long as your set is amazing, a leak can only help you.
This is fundamentally wrong on so many levels.
1) there is solid, objective, unarguable proof from 70+ years of commercial activity & advertising that there are good and bad ways to reveal products. Leaks are unmanaged, incoherent and don't build hype in a clear or directed way. It's just a sudden splurge of material, usually fairly randomly selected, with no basis to present it to the public. Compared to a carefully crafted build-up of ideas and media from a rehearsed advertising campaign (which is what spoiler seasons are) a leak is just a garbage fire. There's no attempt to capture an audience, no attention paid to scientific and proven methodologies in terms of audience excitement and investment into an intellectual property. Leaks are actively damaging and there's no two ways about it. If you honestly think that a random, criminal leak of intellectual property can achieve (or is somehow an improvement over) the gains from a proper PR campaign, you are sadly deluding yourself and there's no softer way I can break this news to you.
2) some individuals cite the idea that leaks build interest anyway (and it's true, they do in a vacuum generate some interest), so wizards is still getting public engagement to the same effect. This is a kind of logical fallacy. You *have to* compare the type of interest, retention of interest, sales data and community engagement to how it would be with a full-blown PR campaign that's already been paid for months in advance. If your criminally-obtained leak doesn't significantly pay back (with significant interest) on the money that's been wasted on a now-ruined ad campaign and carefully crafted spoiler season, then it can be said that the leak in question was damaging economically.
3) leaks constitute reputational damages as well as financial ones. Wizards loses more than just money when leaks like this happen. This is without mentioning the additional time and resources wasted on legal proceedings and staff recruitment or disciplinaries when they are fired, criminal charges are pressed, investigations undergone and/or disciplinary processes are gone through. You can't ignore this serious aspect of leaks, even if you want to.
4) whether a set is good or not (in your opinion, because it's subjective) has no bearing whatsoever on whether leaks are or aren't damaging. A good product will generate more interest with a proper ad campaign and a bad set will also generate more interest with a proper ad campaign. You can't go "this good product got hype with a leak and this bad product bombed with an ad campaign" because it frankly doesn't make any logical sense. It has to be relative.
5) what happens to all the work hours lost designing and fleshing out a huge campaign of storytelling, world-building, carefully timed reveals, hints, tension and hype development etc when a leak happens? You can't reasonably say leaks are a good thing when so much effort and time is instantly written off and denied to fans and the community.
6) the argument that leaks make people better drafters (seen in this very thread) is false. People would be just as good at drafting with the set, but they'd just have to learn along with everyone else (oh no, what a shame). Giving some people an unfair advantage over others because of awareness of an illegal leak isn't good or smart, doesn't help the community in any way and just serves to create conflict in the playerbase. Nothing good comes of it besides satisfying people's vague curiosity because they're impatient.
I don't agree that leaks are bad, as I am perfectly fine with them. I wish I had some complex reasoning or some masterful debate about why they are needed, but I don't. Put simply I don't mind them and get more out of them being there and therefore know I have bias.
As for spoilers for other media those don't bother me either as just because you know the end doesn't mean the journey isn't worth seeing for. I learned that Han Solo died in Star Wars 7, but that didn't ruin the movie for me because it isn't all about the ending but the entire product as a whole, and I believe it is the same with Magic. Learning of a card earlier than intended doesn't ruin things for me nor does it really help me as one card isn't the whole product. With that I will say that spoilers like the New Phyrexia god book or the rare sheet from Ixalan are far more wrong as there were some illegal things going on.
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I personally think leaks are a bad thing.
When the dragon deck was leaked, people's expectations were set by what they saw. They saw cards for previous uncarded characters and then believed that each deck will have all previous characters.
This caused a lot of animosity towards WoTC to come out on this site when the other legends were spoiled and they weren't all previous characters.
This was similar when the waste symbol and Kozilek, the Great Distortion was leaked. People got confused about how it worked and wanted to know, but Wizards didn't reveal it until they had planned to, creating frustration about this new symbol people didn't understand.
Now we have the Ixalan rare sheet leaked. I haven't seen any fall out from that one yet, but I bet it's coming.
There is a lot of anti-WoTC sentiment on this site, some of it deserved, some of it not, but I think that these leaks just help to facilitate the dislike of WoTC, while giving very little benefit to anyone.
People have asked why WoTC don't release the leaked information to confirm it when it gets leaked. I think that's a ridiculous idea. WoTC would then be at the mercy of any person who decided a little theft of IP was in order.
Disclaimer: I don't like the way WoTC has been doing spoilers in the past few years. One week of cards doesn't do anything for me and it's too much information to process in a short time. I want it to go back to cards being revealed well before as a taste of the set to come.
TL,DR: Leaks are bad because people get angry when the set doesn't live up to the expectation set by said leaks.
What do you think? Do you agree or disagree?
Please keep this thread civil.
Secondly, the blame for this kind of backlash falls upon the player community just as much as on the leakers or WoTC, whose own flaws are covered in minute detail elsewhere. The expectation management of many of the people on this site is, quite frankly, horrible. Those people fixate so much on what they want that they pay zero attention to reality. As a result, they scream the loudest when that $50 reprint they need to be so much cheaper materializes in a low-impact masters product or masterpiece run instead of a high-impact standard set, in spite of the fact that Wizards swore off that particular strategy after they saw what happened with Thoughtseize in Theros. I'm not saying that everyone is like this, but a loud minority was behind many of the OP's examples as well.
You'll notice that had little to do with the actual topic of leaks because the point I'm trying to make is that players don't need leaks to be outraged. Leaks do play a role in these kinds of incidents, but who needs them when people speculate that the upcoming Dominaria block will send the game 20 years into the past?
So true.
RGTron
UGInfect
URStorm
WUBRAd Nauseam
BRGrishoalbrand
URGScapeshift
WBGAbzan Company
WUBRGAmulet Titan
BRGLiving End
WGBogles
Most Used (of many dozens) EDH Decks:
Brago, King Eternal - Stax
Grenzo, Dungeon Warden - Aggro Combo
Wort, the Raidmother - Spellslinger Swarm Control
Animar, Soul of Elements - Tempo Combo
Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder - Spellslinger
Exodia the Forbidden One:
Oona, Queen of the Fae - Combowins.dec
**Legacy**
Grixis Delver
16post
**Standard**
I'll let you know if/when i go back to Standard. I hate pulling cards i can't use.
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!
Qutoed for truth, because a simple like isn't enough to express how true it is.
"Sometimes, the situation is outracing a threat, sometimes it's ignoring it, and sometimes it involves sideboarding in 4x Hope//Pray." --Doug Linn
An argument presented against leaks, however, was how they potentially affect the people who actually put work into the official marketing of the products. The argument was that such effort is wasted if the leaks undermine the hype that the official previews and announcements would cultivate. I'd argue though that investing resources into building hype might be part of the problem because they don't let the sets speak for themselves, so to speak.
After having 3 of its cards banned in Standard, Kaladesh block might not be the best example of something that people should get excited over.
The other issues surrounding why people do it are valid. I think WOTC needs to make changes in how they promote upcoming sets. It might lessen people's need to leak things.
If theres something good in them, pre-Orders go up tremendously.
For Ixalan my LGS already takes Pre-Orders , without any spoilers you wouldnt know ANYTHING and pre-Ordereing in the blind is terrible.
----
If a set is value wise as terriblea s Amonkhet , spoilers show that and bad decisions snow-ball hard.
Colorless mana symbol was a terrible idea and it just created the Eldrazi nightmare and still keeps it alive.
Changing all the old cards to a new mana symbol is also bad (especially as i dislike the shape of it).
Its all crap if you change things just to change things, without a real need to do so.
Right now they go super wild in sets , often way over the top with changes and "new" stuff.
Double sided cards proved to work, but the Embalm/Eternalize tokens in Amokhet are TERRIBLE alternatives to that, these cards "could" have been transform cards, but they decided to do it different.
Aftermath design on cards looks horrendously terrible too, could have been done more like a split card with flashback.
But they want to do something "new" every time, instead of exploring existing mechanics more, they want new mechanics, which are similar but still do it different, for the sake of doing it different.
I hate that, they could keep magic simpler by using existing mechanics , its not really cool to use new mechanics in every set, if it doesnt need to (especially not in that frequency).
Sets are big to fail if design is that drastic and changes that visual , the cards art and aesthetic are something that a bunch of people really really like.
It would even be cool to some form of time-shifted cards in boosters, just to have a "old-school" version of the cards in old-borders etc. (they could do way more in terms of foils and premium version, different artwork on much more rare version etc. etc.).
All of that would promote a set much more and seeing such things is good.
Seeing it early allows players to talk about it.
If something is badly done, its just badly done, knowing about that earlier helps, you can plan your life and avoid sets that do not cripple your inner jonny (plenty of Timmy around, Jonny isnt happy ... ).
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
This is so very, very apples to oranges. The payoff of MtG sets isn't exclusively in the narrative/story. When advance knowledge enhances you experience (being better equipped to engage in the gameplay aspect because you've had time to absorb mechanical implications), spoilers can have a positive effect. When knowing about the thing IS the whole, or majority of, the experience (the narrative of a movie/show), knowing it ahead of time can disrupt the desire to experience it further. These aren't the same thing.
Most Used (of many dozens) EDH Decks:
Brago, King Eternal - Stax
Grenzo, Dungeon Warden - Aggro Combo
Wort, the Raidmother - Spellslinger Swarm Control
Animar, Soul of Elements - Tempo Combo
Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder - Spellslinger
Exodia the Forbidden One:
Oona, Queen of the Fae - Combowins.dec
I really agree with this comment here. I know the staff
at WOTC get disappointed by the leaks stealing their thunder, but they've had 25 damn years to figure out better ways of doing hype and they can't get it right.
The Mirrorpool leak is the one that really bugs me. There was an amazing amount of hype and buzz going around for the new colorless mana symbol (which I love), and they just let the arguments rage on, creating strife in the community that really didn't need to happen. They could have easily embraced the hype and made it their own.
I don't agree with the dude stealing the uncut sheet, or the people that released the godbook, but nor do I think of leakers as puppy-kicking baby-eaters either.
You actually believe that sheet was somehow 'snuck out'? Publicity stunts man. Do you really think that WotC cares that the colorless symbol was leaked? Or that the community was in a 'crisis' over it? They don't care what you think, only that you are talking about it. Free advertising. All you need to do is upset a handful of vocal whiners and Boom!... Buzz. This is all 'Shady Marketing 101', and people continue to lap it up. What's next? Poor Wizards can't control leaks so its time to lock down intellectual property on the internet? Marketing and posturing is all this is.
Leaks hurt when 90% of any given set is Limited fodder, things that you aren't excited to put into a Limited deck, let alone Constructed. Nobody gets excited about a set that isn't exciting. There's still a lot of hype about Ixalan, because the set hits a lot of things players want to see, especially kitchen table players. Dinosaurs, pirates, treasure? Yes please, people are going to buy this set.
Hype can help sell sets, but making quality sets to begin with not only sells sets, it produces sets like Innistrad that become beloved over time. Every block gets such a crazy amount of hype, but that doesn't last. if they want more than just a burst of sales in the first few weeks, they have to make sets that are good enough to stand on their own without the hype, and that's where they've been hit-or-miss for some time. Leaks can't hurt a set whose sales are based on being a good set, instead of being based on just being new and hyped.
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.
I do feel that wizards is doing the spoiling thing wrong. What they should do is spoil the new set two months before the actual release date. They would then know what cards the players like, what card could be broken and/or what card needs to be adjusted. They could make any last minute adjustment within the 30 days and start printing the set.
In his Second 100 days - Yawgmoth's Bargain is unrestricted in Vintage.
What is going to happen in the Next 100 days!!!
If you think you could get even a single card changed 30 days before a set is supposed to release, you live in a fantasy land. There is a reason there are cards that get errataed before prerelease happens
This is fundamentally wrong on so many levels.
1) there is solid, objective, unarguable proof from 70+ years of commercial activity & advertising that there are good and bad ways to reveal products. Leaks are unmanaged, incoherent and don't build hype in a clear or directed way. It's just a sudden splurge of material, usually fairly randomly selected, with no basis to present it to the public. Compared to a carefully crafted build-up of ideas and media from a rehearsed advertising campaign (which is what spoiler seasons are) a leak is just a garbage fire. There's no attempt to capture an audience, no attention paid to scientific and proven methodologies in terms of audience excitement and investment into an intellectual property. Leaks are actively damaging and there's no two ways about it. If you honestly think that a random, criminal leak of intellectual property can achieve (or is somehow an improvement over) the gains from a proper PR campaign, you are sadly deluding yourself and there's no softer way I can break this news to you.
2) some individuals cite the idea that leaks build interest anyway (and it's true, they do in a vacuum generate some interest), so wizards is still getting public engagement to the same effect. This is a kind of logical fallacy. You *have to* compare the type of interest, retention of interest, sales data and community engagement to how it would be with a full-blown PR campaign that's already been paid for months in advance. If your criminally-obtained leak doesn't significantly pay back (with significant interest) on the money that's been wasted on a now-ruined ad campaign and carefully crafted spoiler season, then it can be said that the leak in question was damaging economically.
3) leaks constitute reputational damages as well as financial ones. Wizards loses more than just money when leaks like this happen. This is without mentioning the additional time and resources wasted on legal proceedings and staff recruitment or disciplinaries when they are fired, criminal charges are pressed, investigations undergone and/or disciplinary processes are gone through. You can't ignore this serious aspect of leaks, even if you want to.
4) whether a set is good or not (in your opinion, because it's subjective) has no bearing whatsoever on whether leaks are or aren't damaging. A good product will generate more interest with a proper ad campaign and a bad set will also generate more interest with a proper ad campaign. You can't go "this good product got hype with a leak and this bad product bombed with an ad campaign" because it frankly doesn't make any logical sense. It has to be relative.
5) what happens to all the work hours lost designing and fleshing out a huge campaign of storytelling, world-building, carefully timed reveals, hints, tension and hype development etc when a leak happens? You can't reasonably say leaks are a good thing when so much effort and time is instantly written off and denied to fans and the community.
6) the argument that leaks make people better drafters (seen in this very thread) is false. People would be just as good at drafting with the set, but they'd just have to learn along with everyone else (oh no, what a shame). Giving some people an unfair advantage over others because of awareness of an illegal leak isn't good or smart, doesn't help the community in any way and just serves to create conflict in the playerbase. Nothing good comes of it besides satisfying people's vague curiosity because they're impatient.
As for spoilers for other media those don't bother me either as just because you know the end doesn't mean the journey isn't worth seeing for. I learned that Han Solo died in Star Wars 7, but that didn't ruin the movie for me because it isn't all about the ending but the entire product as a whole, and I believe it is the same with Magic. Learning of a card earlier than intended doesn't ruin things for me nor does it really help me as one card isn't the whole product. With that I will say that spoilers like the New Phyrexia god book or the rare sheet from Ixalan are far more wrong as there were some illegal things going on.