I've been scratching my brain on this for a while and have come up with some nutty ideas with way too many holes in them to work. does anyone have any ideas they'd like to share on this subject. I honestly feel its a question we need to answer. because i like playing paper magic at my lgs. but if card prices dont come down then i fear that online versions or hearthstone and its clones will consume the market and paper magic will die out eventually. maybe thats a bit too tin-foil hat. Still, I'd like to hear some feedback.
Card prices probably basically follow supply and demand - the reason a given card costs a given amount is because players are in general willing to pay that price. If demand goes up, and supply stays the same, the price goes up. If people stop wanting it, nobody can sell it at that high price, so the price has to go down in order to be sold.
The only way to bring pricing down is to not buy cards that you think are too expensive. As mASTERsELF said, allowing proxies is one way to make that easier.
Also, there is no sign that Magic is dying out - it in fact has been rapidly growing for years.
If everyone sells their collections there is bound to be a price drop. Unless organically through reprinting something into the ground, or the format that plays the card bans it, then it may not be so easily fixed. Obviously if the card is in the format you want to play, then it sucks that it would be banned lol.
I see a lot of this from a card getting picked up in a modern deck as a 2 of in most cases and it skyrockets for my commander community. I'm sure that happens across all formats though.
Just allow proxies at your store. It's as easy as that. Somewhere between 4x and 16x. That way you eliminate the most expensive cards in all decks.
Which is not an option, as WotC simply does not allow it and stores that arent sanctioned pretty much dont matter.
Kitchen table proxies exist since the beginning of time, and that doesnt really help the prices at all.
----
That said, prices are what people are willing to pay.
If nobody buys a card for a set price, it will still be listed at that price, but its not "worth" that price.
The current markets are setup that they will force the price that people want , as the only way to go down is when people list the cards for less and most wont bother doing that to fit the current price of a card (at least not regularly, maybe once in a moon).
----
So if a card tanks value, it will keep that value for a long time, as long as theres at least a bunch of people (not even a lot) that will sometimes buy the card.
An option to reduce the price would be a market that will periodicly reduce the price of all cards in the market if they are not sold in a set time frame.
Say after 1 month the price is reduced to the lowest bidder that also didnt sell for 1 month (and if all are the same, it goes down by like ~10%, a number that would need balancing ofcourse) , till to a set minimum price (which the seller might set beforehand).
That way, people wouldnt need to update the prices of their cards and cards would get cheaper with time, if no demand exists for the "too expensive" cards, till to a point they will be cheap enough (and if nobody wants the card, nobody wants the card, even cheap).
This would create a market that drives the price down overall, but it also means that people will wait longer to buy cards if they "know" the cards will reduce in value naturally (but thats overall the case anyway, especially if cards rotate out of a format).
Everything boils down to supply and demand. To decrease prices, the supply must increase and/or demand must decrease, but your biggest obstacle is the sheer size of Magic's secondary market and the player base it services.
Influencing supply from the consumer side (without committing fraud, mind you) would require a massive selloff, which would require lots of players to get rid of large quantities of high-value cards. Getting players to agree that the game has a price problem is one thing, but good luck trying to get enough people to actually go to the extent of liquidating their collections just to suppress prices. Wizards' reprint policy also falls under the supply side, but only so much can be done to convince the company to reprint more.
The other half of this would be to influence demand, namely with a boycott. Proxies fall under the category of how players would obtain cards while boycotting the company and secondary market, so those suggestions can be rolled up into this tactic. Historically, demand is far easier to affect than supply, and it's much easier to convince players to stop doing something than to take radical action. Of course, organizing a boycott large enough to leave a dent in a market of this size would be no mean feat, especially considering that a handful of people who already don't spend have so little effect. Still, large-scale organization would probably be the best shot to influence the market without relying on the company.
More homebrewing. If more people experiment with their own decks insted of netdecking you will reduce the demand on cards of tier 1 decks that are really expensive. The problem with this is that even for homebrewing you will want to play the best cards, e.g. you will want to play Gideon even if you are not playing madru because the card is too good, so gideon would be very expensive even in a diverse meta but it's something.
Personally I think they should modify "reserved list" policy same way only with reprinting Legacy only and "reserved" cards when they breach $80-$150+ ranges in cheapest version, but its discussion for elsewhere (and I plan put this to official reserved list thread too)
That would not work as expected. I point to Shivan Dragon which sits somewhere North of $300 for the Beta edition (Alpha is over $1000) on TCGPlayer and has been reprinted at least 14 times since. The cheapest edition is less than 25 cents.
You have the right idea though. Shivan is indicative of a healthy card price structure driven almost entirely by collectors and players.
Black Lotus is an unhealthy price driven almost entirely by investors and speculators. I just recently read an investment article recommending that investors improve their investment portfolio by buying RL cards as a stable means of parking money with high returns.
More homebrewing. If more people experiment with their own decks insted of netdecking you will reduce the demand on cards of tier 1 decks that are really expensive. The problem with this is that even for homebrewing you will want to play the best cards, e.g. you will want to play Gideon even if you are not playing madru because the card is too good, so gideon would be very expensive even in a diverse meta but it's something.
Massive disagreement here.
There's a reason tiers form in any constructed format. With everyone knowing the card pool, decks get tested and retested to a tremendous extent. Using a homebrew is fine if you're just playing for fun, but in a competitive setting some cards are simply better than others. Your point essentially means "prices will drop if people stop playing competitively."
More homebrewing. If more people experiment with their own decks insted of netdecking you will reduce the demand on cards of tier 1 decks that are really expensive. The problem with this is that even for homebrewing you will want to play the best cards, e.g. you will want to play Gideon even if you are not playing madru because the card is too good, so gideon would be very expensive even in a diverse meta but it's something.
Massive disagreement here.
There's a reason tiers form in any constructed format. With everyone knowing the card pool, decks get tested and retested to a tremendous extent. Using a homebrew is fine if you're just playing for fun, but in a competitive setting some cards are simply better than others. Your point essentially means "prices will drop if people stop playing competitively."
Agreed. Might as well say that prices will drop if people stop playing altogether lol. Still can't wrap my head around why some people still think doing research when building a deck is something unnatural.
More homebrewing. If more people experiment with their own decks insted of netdecking you will reduce the demand on cards of tier 1 decks that are really expensive. The problem with this is that even for homebrewing you will want to play the best cards, e.g. you will want to play Gideon even if you are not playing madru because the card is too good, so gideon would be very expensive even in a diverse meta but it's something.
Problem is that these days, many net deck as it's like they think it's a shortcut to fame and fortune. To elaborate, it's the whole "If this makes them rich and famous, it'll make me rich and famous too".
More homebrewing. If more people experiment with their own decks insted of netdecking you will reduce the demand on cards of tier 1 decks that are really expensive. The problem with this is that even for homebrewing you will want to play the best cards, e.g. you will want to play Gideon even if you are not playing madru because the card is too good, so gideon would be very expensive even in a diverse meta but it's something.
Problem is that these days, many net deck as it's like they think it's a shortcut to fame and fortune. To elaborate, it's the whole "If this makes them rich and famous, it'll make me rich and famous too".
"Many" seems too broad of a scope. I would be interested in statistics on people who netdeck.
There was a really good article (that I can't find right now) that describes the thought process. More importantly, it describes why people should netdeck before home brewing completely new decks.
The card pool is so massive that net decking offers a shortcut to learning many of the more common interactions between cards. In my case, I have no problem admitting I netdeck because I have a huge gap in my knowledge of the card pool between Mirage block and SOI block. I really don't have the time, or desire, to analyze thousands of cards that appeared between this blocks and figure out all of the interactions. All I need to do is study existing decks and learn the interactions that way.
All but one of my decks are nerds led or variants of a netdeck and ALL of them take advantage of cards within my gap of pool knowledge. To home brew these same decks and come up with these interactions on my own would have taken months or even years of constant play testing. Something that is virtually impossible nowadays simply because there are whole teams working together to accelerate the process.
I'm not blindly netdecking and playing, that is a different problem. I'm examining my deck lists and analyzing them. Much in the same way I take source code (or taking it a step further, reverse engineering finished programs) and analyzing them to understand how to apply what I discover. Quite often, the resulting deck looks very similar to the netdeck by sheer virtue of the particular meta involved.
Those who usually just copy and play blindly really aren't lending anything more than warm bodies and inflated prices to the game. A sort of "Weekend Planeswalker" sort of thing I guess. Those who copy, play and evolve their decks are just taking the shortcut.
I'm more referring to the ones who think "get net deck, go to a tourney, become rich and famous", their delusions not letting them see the fact that it's not instant get rich quick.
I'm more referring to the ones who think "get net deck, go to a tourney, become rich and famous", their delusions not letting them see the fact that it's not instant get rich quick.
OIC. I think that's why I want see statistics.
How many people sit in both camps. Of the four in my playgroup, 3 do some form of netdecking in varying degrees. I do the most tinkering (not that that's a good thing, I do it because I have the largest collection of Legacy and smallest collection of Modern cards).
But one dude strictly netdecks. He'll find card lists, load'em up in TCGPlayer, then buy them en masse.
But I digress. It would be interesting to see how any type of netdecking as opposed to speculators drive prices on key cards.
I'm more referring to the ones who think "get net deck, go to a tourney, become rich and famous", their delusions not letting them see the fact that it's not instant get rich quick.
OIC. I think that's why I want see statistics.
How many people sit in both camps. Of the four in my playgroup, 3 do some form of netdecking in varying degrees. I do the most tinkering (not that that's a good thing, I do it because I have the largest collection of Legacy and smallest collection of Modern cards).
But one dude strictly netdecks. He'll find card lists, load'em up in TCGPlayer, then buy them en masse.
But I digress. It would be interesting to see how any type of netdecking as opposed to speculators drive prices on key cards.
Let's see if I can describe this correctly. Sure the spec'ers can drive prices, but remember that when a card performs well, it often gets inflated. This leads to the two groups of netdeckers, the ones who want to use it to play better, and the ones who do it to win tournaments for money and more cards. The latter group often gives cards even more publicity. This can drive demand even higher, which then the speculators/scalpers use to inflate even further for more profit.
It's the saying of "A vicious cycle". When netdeckers inflate demand, it tends to inflate prices. This is just from my point of view anyway, I'm sure there's a lot of underlying things I don't know of.
I feel like there's some missing context in this entire discussion. What cards does the OP feel need to come down in price and which ones are priced properly? Also, what format of Magic? I'm pretty sure wizards is basically "We LOVE standard! Do you love standard? No? That's fine we will just make you like standard by publishing and supporting events so that you literally can't escape it!"
And while they are doing that, they are sort of going "oh hey, I heard you played Commander so have a commander product. Oh and I guess we have you disenfranchised people over there that need something so we got some masters sets for you. It's related to that modern thing we started? Ugh, okay so we will support it at the pro-tour. Wait... no never mind we'll keep doing it. Yes I know we banned that one card over there but we DID make this new one that does roughly the same thing and is balanced for standard! It's not good enough? Uh, okay we'll think about unbanning that older card if we can think of a way to make things not get bad for the other people playing..."
With all of that craziness going on I'm not really sure people can drop the price of the problem cards unless we're talking about a lot of people just exiting the game.
Edit: And before anyone comments the odd bit of how I omitted conspiracy 2, planechase anthology, and various duel deck / secondary products from the parody above, it's because I have no idea where those would fit in. It's like that message in Silent Hill 4: There was a hole here... it's gone now...
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!
If your name is Kim Jong-un, then yes. You can counterfeit Magic cards to to the point where counterfeits are essentially the same as the real deal. If your name is not Kim Jong-un, then no.
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Modern: URW Madcap Experiment
Pauper: MonoU Tempo Delver
My EDH Commanders:
Aminatou, The Fateshifter UBW
Azami, Lady of Scrolls U
Mikaeus, the Unhallowed B
Edric, Spymaster of Trest UG
Glissa, the Traitor BG
Arcum Dagsson U
The only way to bring pricing down is to not buy cards that you think are too expensive. As mASTERsELF said, allowing proxies is one way to make that easier.
Also, there is no sign that Magic is dying out - it in fact has been rapidly growing for years.
I see a lot of this from a card getting picked up in a modern deck as a 2 of in most cases and it skyrockets for my commander community. I'm sure that happens across all formats though.
(W/U)(B/R)GForm of Progenitus, Shape of a Scrubland
BRGJund Tokens with Prossh, the Magic Dragon Foil
URGAnimar, the RUG CleanerFoil
RRRFeldon of the Third Path 2.0 Foil
BG(B/G)Not Another Meren DeckFoil
UR(U/R)Mizzix, Y Control and X Burn Spells
(W/U)(B/R)GHarold Ramos - The 35 Foot Long Twinkie (In +1/+1 counters)
UB(U/B)Dragonlord Silumgar
Which is not an option, as WotC simply does not allow it and stores that arent sanctioned pretty much dont matter.
Kitchen table proxies exist since the beginning of time, and that doesnt really help the prices at all.
----
That said, prices are what people are willing to pay.
If nobody buys a card for a set price, it will still be listed at that price, but its not "worth" that price.
The current markets are setup that they will force the price that people want , as the only way to go down is when people list the cards for less and most wont bother doing that to fit the current price of a card (at least not regularly, maybe once in a moon).
----
So if a card tanks value, it will keep that value for a long time, as long as theres at least a bunch of people (not even a lot) that will sometimes buy the card.
An option to reduce the price would be a market that will periodicly reduce the price of all cards in the market if they are not sold in a set time frame.
Say after 1 month the price is reduced to the lowest bidder that also didnt sell for 1 month (and if all are the same, it goes down by like ~10%, a number that would need balancing ofcourse) , till to a set minimum price (which the seller might set beforehand).
That way, people wouldnt need to update the prices of their cards and cards would get cheaper with time, if no demand exists for the "too expensive" cards, till to a point they will be cheap enough (and if nobody wants the card, nobody wants the card, even cheap).
This would create a market that drives the price down overall, but it also means that people will wait longer to buy cards if they "know" the cards will reduce in value naturally (but thats overall the case anyway, especially if cards rotate out of a format).
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
Influencing supply from the consumer side (without committing fraud, mind you) would require a massive selloff, which would require lots of players to get rid of large quantities of high-value cards. Getting players to agree that the game has a price problem is one thing, but good luck trying to get enough people to actually go to the extent of liquidating their collections just to suppress prices. Wizards' reprint policy also falls under the supply side, but only so much can be done to convince the company to reprint more.
The other half of this would be to influence demand, namely with a boycott. Proxies fall under the category of how players would obtain cards while boycotting the company and secondary market, so those suggestions can be rolled up into this tactic. Historically, demand is far easier to affect than supply, and it's much easier to convince players to stop doing something than to take radical action. Of course, organizing a boycott large enough to leave a dent in a market of this size would be no mean feat, especially considering that a handful of people who already don't spend have so little effect. Still, large-scale organization would probably be the best shot to influence the market without relying on the company.
The thing is: they can make print runs very long to flood the market with cards, but that makes the game less profitable.
The only real idea that I have is this: make a format where expensive cards are all banned or restricted to few copies.
That would not work as expected. I point to Shivan Dragon which sits somewhere North of $300 for the Beta edition (Alpha is over $1000) on TCGPlayer and has been reprinted at least 14 times since. The cheapest edition is less than 25 cents.
You have the right idea though. Shivan is indicative of a healthy card price structure driven almost entirely by collectors and players.
Black Lotus is an unhealthy price driven almost entirely by investors and speculators. I just recently read an investment article recommending that investors improve their investment portfolio by buying RL cards as a stable means of parking money with high returns.
Massive disagreement here.
There's a reason tiers form in any constructed format. With everyone knowing the card pool, decks get tested and retested to a tremendous extent. Using a homebrew is fine if you're just playing for fun, but in a competitive setting some cards are simply better than others. Your point essentially means "prices will drop if people stop playing competitively."
Agreed. Might as well say that prices will drop if people stop playing altogether lol. Still can't wrap my head around why some people still think doing research when building a deck is something unnatural.
Problem is that these days, many net deck as it's like they think it's a shortcut to fame and fortune. To elaborate, it's the whole "If this makes them rich and famous, it'll make me rich and famous too".
"Many" seems too broad of a scope. I would be interested in statistics on people who netdeck.
There was a really good article (that I can't find right now) that describes the thought process. More importantly, it describes why people should netdeck before home brewing completely new decks.
The card pool is so massive that net decking offers a shortcut to learning many of the more common interactions between cards. In my case, I have no problem admitting I netdeck because I have a huge gap in my knowledge of the card pool between Mirage block and SOI block. I really don't have the time, or desire, to analyze thousands of cards that appeared between this blocks and figure out all of the interactions. All I need to do is study existing decks and learn the interactions that way.
All but one of my decks are nerds led or variants of a netdeck and ALL of them take advantage of cards within my gap of pool knowledge. To home brew these same decks and come up with these interactions on my own would have taken months or even years of constant play testing. Something that is virtually impossible nowadays simply because there are whole teams working together to accelerate the process.
I'm not blindly netdecking and playing, that is a different problem. I'm examining my deck lists and analyzing them. Much in the same way I take source code (or taking it a step further, reverse engineering finished programs) and analyzing them to understand how to apply what I discover. Quite often, the resulting deck looks very similar to the netdeck by sheer virtue of the particular meta involved.
Those who usually just copy and play blindly really aren't lending anything more than warm bodies and inflated prices to the game. A sort of "Weekend Planeswalker" sort of thing I guess. Those who copy, play and evolve their decks are just taking the shortcut.
OIC. I think that's why I want see statistics.
How many people sit in both camps. Of the four in my playgroup, 3 do some form of netdecking in varying degrees. I do the most tinkering (not that that's a good thing, I do it because I have the largest collection of Legacy and smallest collection of Modern cards).
But one dude strictly netdecks. He'll find card lists, load'em up in TCGPlayer, then buy them en masse.
But I digress. It would be interesting to see how any type of netdecking as opposed to speculators drive prices on key cards.
Let's see if I can describe this correctly. Sure the spec'ers can drive prices, but remember that when a card performs well, it often gets inflated. This leads to the two groups of netdeckers, the ones who want to use it to play better, and the ones who do it to win tournaments for money and more cards. The latter group often gives cards even more publicity. This can drive demand even higher, which then the speculators/scalpers use to inflate even further for more profit.
It's the saying of "A vicious cycle". When netdeckers inflate demand, it tends to inflate prices. This is just from my point of view anyway, I'm sure there's a lot of underlying things I don't know of.
And while they are doing that, they are sort of going "oh hey, I heard you played Commander so have a commander product. Oh and I guess we have you disenfranchised people over there that need something so we got some masters sets for you. It's related to that modern thing we started? Ugh, okay so we will support it at the pro-tour. Wait... no never mind we'll keep doing it. Yes I know we banned that one card over there but we DID make this new one that does roughly the same thing and is balanced for standard! It's not good enough? Uh, okay we'll think about unbanning that older card if we can think of a way to make things not get bad for the other people playing..."
With all of that craziness going on I'm not really sure people can drop the price of the problem cards unless we're talking about a lot of people just exiting the game.
Edit: And before anyone comments the odd bit of how I omitted conspiracy 2, planechase anthology, and various duel deck / secondary products from the parody above, it's because I have no idea where those would fit in. It's like that message in Silent Hill 4: There was a hole here... it's gone now...
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!