Solution: Every store should allow unsanctioned proxy Legacy/Vintage, and self-report to Wizards. No stores with WPN status = no stores able to host PPTQs = have fun with that, Wizards.
Why would we want to do that? We sell Magic cards. Truth be told, the money in running a game shop isn't in the events. For example, if a shop runs a Modern event for $5.00 a head, and offers two booster packs a head in prize support, or equivalent store credit,the shop's profiting about $.90 a head, roughly, if packs average about $2.05 each. The hope, for most shops, I think, is that players make the shop their own and buy the singles and other product where "real money" can be made. I can't imagine too many shop owners want their place full of people who don't believe they should have to buy product - that once a card becomes valuable, they're entitled to play it for free. Those people aren't customers, any more than walking into a Starbucks with a Starbucks cup filled with your homemade Folgers every day makes you a Starbucks customer. I'm sure Wizards would survive as a business if the only people playing Magic were the fans who actually buy their product. The idea that Magic needs a whole army of freeloaders just to survive is silly.
This is where I'm at with this whole thing. All the cries of "boycott Wizards" and "only jerks would enforce this" are ignoring the fact that the people running stores put up with a lot from players because their business model is allowing people to hang out there all day in hopes that they will buy the things they sell. Taken at its extreme, the attitude of "I shouldn't have to pay for Magic cards" is a red flag to a store owner.
There are basically two types of proxy players at my store -- again, this is in casual pickup games of EDH, so I don't think anyone really cares but for illustrative purposes -- there's Demonic Tutor Guy and there's Sword of Fire and Ice Guy. Demonic Tutor guy has a fully-functioning EDH deck with a couple of cards that have white slips of paper with things written on them. He drops a Demonic Tutor, give a conciliatory shrug and says "yeah, I know, I should buy one, but I'm broke right now." I figure we all know what it does so we just move on. Sword of Fire and Ice guy buys the White Commander precon and proceeds to print off miniature copies of all the swords to stick in it, so it has good artifacts. He drops it on a creature and gives this little smug grin, "I'm attacking you, it's pro-blue so you can't do anything." I squint because it's almost impossible to read and I don't remember all the text.
"What is that?"
"It's a Sword of Fire and Ice."
"It's very difficult to read. Why don't you just buy one?"
scoff "I don't care enough about EDH to spend a lot of money on singles."
"But you care enough to pimp your deck with fake Swords?"
Now imagine you're the store owner. Who would you rather have in your shop? "I'm going buy this soon but bills" guy or "buying cards is beneath me" guy? One's a lot more likely to contribute to your overhead, and thus one's opinions are a lot more valid. If you're hanging out all day and using my bathroom and arguing with my paying customers, it would be nice if you at least asked how much that Sword of Fire and Ice I have sitting in the case cost. I know not everybody participating in a 15-proxy Legacy event has this extreme an attitude, but I can't imagine store owners are afraid of losing the business of people whose philosophy is "cards should be free." Because the lights aren't. A store owner's WPN membership is more valuable that irking some kid who doesn't understand the social contract at work.
Got it. You should have a competitive advantage because you have more disposable income. I'm not saying that you are wrong, but that is the exact attitude that a lot of people take issue with. Honestly, if I go to an event with Death and Taxes, and someone who cant afford duals shows up with shocklands, it feels really bad to just walk all over them. I would much rather my opponent have proxy lands and have a fair game than get a free win.
It's not fair to say you should have an advantage, but that is a sometimes ugly fact of the matter in a collectible card game. That Legacy tournament sounds like an awkward situation, but is it anymore than just an extreme version of a lot of FNMs? I have a fullset of manabases for Standard because I was paying attention when I came back and realized I needed duals, and lots of them, if I were going to play Standard competitively. The 10-year-old sitting across from me with a janky Allies deck full of basics and bulk rares hasn't made that realization, and wouldn't be able to ask mom and dad for the money to fix his manabase even if he had. Does it feel good to crush that kid? Of course not. In all honesty, I'd rather not be paired against that kid because it's an unfair and unfun matchup. But I just shrug it off as part of the game and assume that because he keeps coming his feelings aren't hurt too bad.
Of course there's a huge skill gap there, perhaps unlike your example, but I'm having trouble believing that someone who has put in the time and energy to master a deck and research a meta is somehow completely unable to acquire the cards through buying, bartering, begging or borrowing. The need to build, or otherwise have access to, a rigorous collection, is just part of the game we have to deal with. I don't particularly like it, but I've grown to accept it over the years, and if someone just absolutely can't afford to participate on any timeline, they probably have more serious problems than their Magic deck.
Again, a lot of this is why I prefer Limited to Constructed. It's just a factor you don't have to worry about.
Second, in a casual format, no one likes that guy who outspends everyone. When I first started playing casually back in INN/RTR, there was a dude who brought his Legacy storm deck to our kitchentable games, and refused to let us proxy, and would win on t2 every game. "Oh yeah, just buy force of will". He didn't have a playroup for very long. it doesn't feel good to lose, even in a casual game, when you lose to a person who spend a few hundred dollars more than you for a statistical advantage.
Sure, that's ugly. If this is truly a casual game, then that sounds like a social issue best solved socially. I don't see why that situation requires proxies -- you could ask that person to bring a casual deck to a casual game. Whether or not you own Force of Will should have no bearing on kitchen table games -- Force of Will is expensive specifically because it's necessary to stop degenerate combos in competitive environments.
Unfair advantage is not fun, of course, but if the solution is just to proxy up every card, where does that end? If Bill didn't get the memo that unlimited proxying was just fine, Bill's sitting here with a jank Goblin deck because that's all he can afford, while everyone else walks over him. Now you have the same problem in the opposite direction, except the person contributing to the economy is the one that's suffering. That sounds bonkers to me.
I am reading through as I am bored. I could not find the replay button to reply to #157 by Hipster Mike.
But I do not think it is that hard to release more cards to support Vintage and Legacy. WOTC should just make those cards prizes.
Standard tournaments gets modern prizes, modern gets legacy, legacy gets vintage. Those that do not play a particular format can sell the cards. I personally think legacy should be an "earned" format anyways.
What is your reasoning on Legacy being an "earned" format?
Ultimately WoTC has only a few options. Either get rid of the reserved list and finally get rid of the worst decision they have ever made, ban all the cards on the reserved list for non-Commander constructed formats, or just straight kill Legacy and Vintage by just coming out and saying it finally, like they did Extended, which would still drop the prices of all of those cards because no one wants them for much of anything. No matter what something needs to be done, damn near anything would be better than the current situation at this point.
It is so strange to me that they will let these formats die off and let part of that money that people would pay to get just fly away because of some 20 year old semi-promise for people who didn't want to see their $20 cards lose value back then. They would easily make back any money they would lose from a suit, if they lost, from just selling Alpha duals in anything. They could reprint the entirety of the Homelands set and put them in and they would still make out like bandits.
MY store has run proxy tournaments in the past. The prizes were paid out in packs, which as far as I am aware wizards gets money based on the boxes the store needs to buy to replenish the packs. Proxy events can help the store because the players after playing the events are more likely to buy the singles for the deck in the format that they are working on but can't play in a sanctioned tournament yet and it may be a different deck. I am disappointed as I will be unable to play some vintage once a month.
I will not go out and buy counterfeits though. I do proxy cards in my edh decks (I own them) which will suck swapping the cards between decks between games as any game store profits on having any events, play testing or tournament in the store proxies or not.
See this isn't entirely true. I want to play Legacy so I bought the cards. The only event that I can realistically attend is a proxy legacy night that just got nixed because of this. Now if I want to play, I can show up on Sunday night and hope that 8 people show up to fire the event or I can drive 1+ hour south and play in an event that will end around midnight on a weekday so I can show up to work on 4 hours sleep. It doesn't matter that the two or three of us who do own the cards for several decks bring them to share, because people still wont show. So now I can just playtest with the same 3 people that I already do, or just give up and cash out? Seems perfectly reasonable for someone who bought in.
It seems unreasonable to me. You bought the cards, but you didn't make sure you had a use for them first. Seems like a foolish move.
Seriously, people are so whiny about this. Your budget is not some sort of genetic disorder. You have the ability to earn more. If you really do not, then you have the ability to set realistic expectations of yourself. You shouldn't play cards you cannot afford just because you like them, you shouldn't download illegal music just because you like it, you shouldn't steal my car just because you like it, and you shouldn't sneak into the movies just because you like it. Not being able to afford something does not entitle you to it.
He had the use for the cards he bought up until this change- he could play in proxy tournaments. Was it foolish of him not to anticipate this move that WotC made out of the blue, upending years of precedent?
Not only that, but he bought the product and this decision rendered him unable to use it. If he bought music legally and wasn't able to listen to it, or bought a car legally with his hard earned cash and couldn't drive it, or bought a movie ticket and couldn't watch it, he'd have a very legitimate complaint indeed.
Oh believe me, I bought my cards with a use. I retired for a while and never cashed out so I had a good stock of $10 duals from 99-01. When I came back (08) I quickly realized that Legacy was the only format that I enjoyed and bought in further. At the time, I lived 30 min further south so I could get to events that would fire with reasonable quantities of people and not be home by 1-2am during the week. Hell the events I used to go to in that time were 4-5 rounds. Once moving up here, one of my friends opened a shop and started running events out here too (Northeast Cleveland area). There's good turnout but it's slowly started to dwindle as singles are harder to come by. The proxy legacy night was starting to revitalize the legacy scene here. We went from not being able to fire to having 12-16 people show up. So now the option that I guess we have is the three or four of us who have multiple decks can start renting/loaning them out and advertising this on facebook or something?
I understand that the Legacy scene is slowly dying because of supply and demand, but there is no reason to murder it in lesser populated areas like this. I could only imagine how awful it is for some of the people who live in more rural areas as this is a problem in my neighborhood and there are at least 10 shops that I can think of in an hour's drive of me. Now I can think of one that would reliably hold a legacy event and it's an hour drive (on a good day) away.
In the end, all this does for me is makes it much easier to quit again. Standard and Modern are both horrible, Limited is fun. Now all I see is a bunch of expensive cardboard that I may get to dust off once a month and no inspiration to continue purchasing.
I am reading through as I am bored. I could not find the replay button to reply to #157 by Hipster Mike.
But I do not think it is that hard to release more cards to support Vintage and Legacy. WOTC should just make those cards prizes.
Standard tournaments gets modern prizes, modern gets legacy, legacy gets vintage. Those that do not play a particular format can sell the cards. I personally think legacy should be an "earned" format anyways.
What is your reasoning on Legacy being an "earned" format?
Ultimately WoTC has only a few options. Either get rid of the reserved list and finally get rid of the worst decision they have ever made, ban all the cards on the reserved list for non-Commander constructed formats, or just straight kill Legacy and Vintage by just coming out and saying it finally, like they did Extended, which would still drop the prices of all of those cards because no one wants them for much of anything. No matter what something needs to be done, damn near anything would be better than the current situation at this point.
What if they just view the existence of Legacy as a concession to those who already own the cards?
I saw a bunch of people get out of Magic in the 90s because they didn't like the fact that a lot of events were Type II only. The attitude was, "that's dumb, I bought these cards, I should be able to play with them." The response is, "okay, cool. I get that. We'll keep supporting Type I." They were loyal customers for five years or so, they should be respected. New players and/or players who like a rotation system can play with the new stuff, old players can continue playing the (let's be honest) degenerate games they love, and everyone's happy. Legacy/Vintage (Type I then) at its inception was, by definition, targeted towards players who already had the cards. At one level it's just an answer to "I have the cards and I want to play with them."
Flashforward a generation and now there's a complaint of "I don't have the cards and I want to play with them." Um... what? I can see this at a philosophical level, but on a practical level, it might be incumbent on the new player to understand that the format is not for them. Now, you can play it if you want to -- I could go climb Mt. Everest if I wanted to -- but it's going to be a uphill struggle if your box of powerful cards from the 90s has been sold/lost or never existed. Just like if I wanted to climb Mt. Everest I'd have to save a lot of money for travel expenses and equipment as well as begin a vigorous exercise routine, like, yesterday.
So while I can understand the frustration of Legacy players who see attendance dropping, and would-be Legacy players who see the price tag as too big a barrier, I don't know that it's glaringly obvious that the status quo is wretched for that shrinking group of players the format was originally intended for.
You say something needs to be done and I respect that perspective, but to my mind two things have been done -- the establishment of Modern and the support of Legacy Online. Modern is a non-rotating format that sidesteps both the Reserved List and the truly degenerate decks that came up from the fast-and-loose game design that defined the game in the early years, and while I haven't tried it myself, I'm led to understand that playing Legacy Online is a heck of a lot cheaper due to card availability. Maybe paper Legacy as-is is dead as a doornail, but that doesn't mean its ghost won't be walking around for years to come.
It is so strange to me that they will let these formats die off and let part of that money that people would pay to get just fly away because of some 20 year old semi-promise for people who didn't want to see their $20 cards lose value back then. They would easily make back any money they would lose from a suit, if they lost, from just selling Alpha duals in anything. They could reprint the entirety of the Homelands set and put them in and they would still make out like bandits.
Why does it have to involve a lawsuit to be a bad business decision? I don't have a lot of hard data as to how much money is sitting around invested in Reserved List cards across the world, but here's a minor data point: Star City Games has over $30,000 worth of Tundras for sale on their site. Many, many people buy and sell these cards because (a) they are collector's items (b) they are very useful in certain formats and (c) they are 99% positive they are trading in one of a limited number of copies. If they announced they were getting rid of the Reserved List today, Star City Games would need to immediately begin restructuring their business, which would probably involve firing people are purchasing less sealed product as well as liquidating their stock of our-of-print Legacy/Vintage staples. How many frenzied individuals snapping up new printings does it take to make up for all the stores that would be getting out of the singles game? You and I (I assume) don't have the buying power of Star City Games, so we could not hope to make up the loss of business on that scale even if we wanted to.
So if you think they could just drop a Tundra Expedition into Oath of the Gatewatch packs and call it good, I think you're greatly underestimating the disruption this would cause. Sure, they could do whatever they want, but I don't see how they have much incentive to shout "fire" in a crowded theater like this.
The amount of hate people give to others this thread is disgusting.
My shop runs full proxy Modern tournaments (already unsanctioned, mind you). They're there so people without enough money to buy a modern deck and attend the modern FNMs, but still want to play a different kind/flavor of Magic than draft or Pauper.
Yes, we could spend a ****ton of money onto Modern. But guess what, we don't want to because we got other hobbies too. So someone telling us we don't deserve to play modern in this case is just disgusting.
They don't deserve to play any more than I deserve to play Warhammer - another potential hobby that looks cool, but, because I already have a hobby in Magic, I can't afford. They don't deserve anything. Magic is a hobby, a luxury, and not an entitlement. It's a shame they're interested in something they can't afford. That's just life. If they can find a way to play high stakes poker without paying for it, they might be able to leverage this cheapskate spirit to fund their collecting.
This probably doesn't belong here but reading this thread is what made me realize it, those people who complain about not being able to play legacy with others and then go on to say they have 3-6 decks so they could loan them out and such. Do you realize that you are in fact a part of the problem? People can't buy into the format because so many people are like you and don't stop at the bare minimum but have lost of legacy staples and yes you are taking them out of circulation, you say your playing with them but you can only play with so many cards. This is in no way the sole problem or even the biggest problem but it seems hilarious that so many people who are upset don't seem to realize they are part of the problem.
The amount of hate people give to others this thread is disgusting.
My shop runs full proxy Modern tournaments (already unsanctioned, mind you). They're there so people without enough money to buy a modern deck and attend the modern FNMs, but still want to play a different kind/flavor of Magic than draft or Pauper.
Yes, we could spend a ****ton of money onto Modern. But guess what, we don't want to because we got other hobbies too. So someone telling us we don't deserve to play modern in this case is just disgusting.
They don't deserve to play any more than I deserve to play Warhammer - another potential hobby that looks cool, but, because I already have a hobby in Magic, I can't afford. They don't deserve anything. Magic is a hobby, a luxury, and not an entitlement. It's a shame they're interested in something they can't afford. That's just life. If they can find a way to play high stakes poker without paying for it, they might be able to leverage this cheapskate spirit to fund their collecting.
This is the level of elitism I'm talking about.
I buy a lot of singles for my EDH at my LGS, I buy sealed products like Duel Decks to play with friends from them, occasional fat packs, I attend a prerelease for every single set that comes out, encourage people to come there.
And yet I shouldn't play proxy Modern. Because apparently I'm not already spending enough money on Magic and I'n a cheapskate.
I spend hundreds of dollars, probably thousands over time, on gas for my truck. I get oil changes. I take it to the dealership for maintenance whenever the check engine light comes on. Apparently I'm not spending enough for them to give me a sports car.
I spend hundreds of dollars on my cable bill, and yet I apparently don't deserve free HBO.
This argument is ludicrous if you swap out Magic terminology for any other. It's ludicrous here, too.
They don't deserve to play any more than I deserve to play Warhammer - another potential hobby that looks cool, but, because I already have a hobby in Magic, I can't afford. They don't deserve anything. Magic is a hobby, a luxury, and not an entitlement. It's a shame they're interested in something they can't afford. That's just life. If they can find a way to play high stakes poker without paying for it, they might be able to leverage this cheapskate spirit to fund their collecting.
I know, right? I'm trying to imagine other hobbies people have and how they would proxy them and it's absurd and enjoyably funny. But I really am having a hard time getting my head around why a person would feel entitled to play magic if they aren't willing to pay for it. This isn't an in-game purchase kind of deal where you only pay to play if you want to unlock things.
Never heard of Xmage, and I don't use Cockatrice. I'm only interested in paper. But, if I ever get into digital Magic, it should be the official version.
Never heard of Xmage, and I don't use Cockatrice. I'm only interested in paper. But, if I ever get into digital Magic, it should be the official version.
Oh, I'm not talking about you playing it, just other people playing on it. Does it rub you in the wrong way as IRL proxying?
I'm certainly no activist - even this discussion is one of opportunity and convenience, and not a mission. That said, if WotC brought the hammer down on unofficial digital Magic, and there was a thread here about it, I'd take the same basic position.
Never heard of Xmage, and I don't use Cockatrice. I'm only interested in paper. But, if I ever get into digital Magic, it should be the official version.
Ultimately you are entitled to enjoy the hobby how you want to enjoy it, but because you like the hobby your way does it mean others can't enjoy it their way?
I get the argument for intellectual property and copyright protection, but ultimately WOTC leveraging WPN status to shops has caused an onslaught of infighting for local groups - mine is already torn to the point where we almost have 2 opposing factions - and that I believe has been more harmful to the community than the existence of proxies.
Collectors and hoarders ruin the secondary market. What's new?
That's not fair at all. I don't consider myself a collector or a hoarder but I have (basically) enough cards to play Standard competitively and can at least dip my toe in the Modern waters. I, like anyone with the little bit of recreation money required to show up at FNM regularly, can do things like open a prize pack on a whim and end up with a Tarmagoyf or a Jace, Vryn's Prodigy that I can trade for those staples that I need for the decks I want to build. If I'm drafting and I open a Gideon, Ally of Zendikar (about a month ago before the price dropped), that's a couple free drafts for me. I don't own a shop and I don't certainly don't consider myself a rich person, yet I benefit from the system, and so does that kid who's spending his $5 allowance money and opens an Expedition Blood Crypt. The fact that some cards has value allows people a chance to bootstrap themselves into the collection they want -- over time, and with careful attention to card value.
We could just play the "us vs. them" game and assume all people with expensive cards want them to stay expensive because they're creepy misers, but what about the high school kid who's been saving his/her paychecks to build the Legacy deck s/he dreamed of playing for months? I'd feel pretty bad for that person if s/he were staring at a deck of rapidly sinking value when Wizards "finally" decided to stick it to those dirty hoarders.
Again, it's not that simple. We're talking about an internal economy that has a lot of players with a lot of motivations.
The only argument I've read so far that I can partially support is from store owners who claim that they sell fewer expensive cards due to proxies. I don't personally believe it's a reasonable concern, I doubt people playing proxies would be buying expensive cards. Actually, I believe it could bite them the other way: by not participating in these event for lacks of cards, it would reduce their presence and patronizing of the store. I, for example, don't ever play in standard events because there are too many prerequisite cards for standard deck that are ridiculously expensive. I don't buy 4 Jace, so I *also* don't buy the other cards with reasonable prices that would be required for the deck.
Still, even if I disagree, I can understand one could hold that view and it's a valid argument.
The other arguments? Hoghwash to me. I fail to see how can one can be against proxies when people constantly use borrowed cards. Even from pros, I frequently read that they borrowed this decks or that deck, or these cards. How is borrowing cards different from proxies, except for the amount of cash lining Wizards coffers? In the case of legacy and vintage events, they don't even affect Wizards monetarily.
Edit: wow, another hateful post a few posts back. People seem to think that: a lot of people don't buy expensive cards because they can play with proxies. That is incorrect. The actual behaviour is: a lot of people don't want to buy expensive cards. But given the possibility of playing in event that allow proxy, they will participate. Banning proxies won't increase sale in any significant way, it will only decrease participation. A lot of people have the causality wrong.
I'm just going to choose to ignore this. How will WOTC even know if people used proxies? In unsanctioned tournaments we will play with as many proxies as we like.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Standard
none
Modern UBG B/U/G control BBB MBC WUR Control WWW Prison RRR Goblins
Legacy BBB Pox UBG B/U/G Control UWU StoneBlade UW Miracle Control
Magic has always had three spheres of challenge, for lack of a better way to phrase it. You've got to, first off, come up with a good deck. Then you've got to acquire the cards for it. Finally, you've got to get good at playing it. The internet certainly helps speed up step one. Acquiring the cards is supposed to be no small feat. You needn't necessarily spend money on cards outright - it is a collectible card game after all, and the intent was that folks would trade from their collections. Like most video games these days, you can progress by grinding your time away, or you can pay cash for a shortcut. Acquiring the best cards for one's deck, particularly, I imagine, if it's one you concocted yourself, is a good feeling. Once you've done that, you're finally ready to see how good you are at Magic. That's Magic, the Gathering, a game you play from cards you've gathered.
This thread in general gave me severe brain rot, but this post in particular was special.
So you go on and grind, and grind, and grind, because you're not a customer or a person, you're ******* farming equipment. Pretty 1984, not an evil or dystopic disposition to have for your consumer base at all, and of course it has to be excruciating or you don't "desserve" your cards according to some people in this thread. Anyway, you grind for years and then you have finally "earned" your vintage deck. Now you can play.
NO, YOU CAN'T! Because you're the only imbecile who wasted so much time doing something so stupid for so long and now all the people you could play with are banned from playing because they needed proxies to compete.
Most of you who play the dance and song of "entitled this entitled that" are speaking from a double dose of ignorance and egotism. Fist, you don't play the ******* format or are even trying to get into it, some of you actively want it dead because you're too petty and self-centered to believe someone else desserves to get any fun out of being a long-time player, because they're not doing things exactly how you do or how you like it so they must be right and stopped immediately. Pretty ****ed up in the head there.
Secondly, you keep opening your mouths and letting utter bull ***** fall of claiming that vintage players don't spend money on the game. Do you have any ******* idea how many boxes of Conspiracy had to be opened for just 10 vintage players to have their foil Dack Fayden? Oh but that can't be, your little microcosmovision cannot fathom that vintage players have spend a dime on magic since '94, you havent taken a ******* second to look at any decklist database and realize at least a third of every competitive vintage deck is composed of cards that saw their first printing in the modern border, or that at least half of the rest have more accessible or more desirable newer versions such as fist-time foils, no, that cannot be true because "vintage players don't buy cards :V"
Most proxi tournaments are 10 proxi, specifically so they can account for the power 9 and one other ridiculously hard to get piece like Imperial Seal, no one was coming for your *****ty Gideons and flip Jaces that cost you so much to get and have you so proud of your "economic standing" and how you desserve to win more than filthy poor people.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if getting a playset of foil Young Pyromancer or Gitaxian Probe for two vintage players sold more boosters than outfitting a whole T2 PTQ's worth of tier 1 decks. But sure, eternal players don't make WotC any money.
This is getting increasingly ridiculous, the company seems to be now run by mental bureaucrats who erred their way to Marvel where the IPs and character are actual cultural icons and not just ***** meant to dress up A TOY, and I'm starting to wonder if there is any legal recouse against WotC for making it increasingly difficult to play their stupid game after promoting an "investment" that rivals real estate. Specially having in mind that effective Dec 2015 their last word about proxi vintage was PROMOTING it and telling you to ask your LGS or TO about it. In the meanwhile: I support players or a company unrelated to WotC creating an alternative competitive ranking system and tournament scene. There cannot be any semblance of seriousness so long as we depend on a company that bans you for ***** you did 10 years ago or for belonging to a facebook group wether you participate or not. I support the death of the Resserved List and the mass printing of paper Vintage Masters. I own moxen, I don't care. White bordered power stands to lose more value if vintage stops being a sanctioned format than by being reprinted by the millions. AB power won't lose at all either way. I support the banning of all Resserved List cards in Legacy and Commander. If they don't have half the ball to ask the most litigious toy company to pull them off from a non-binding promise they made to idiotic manchildren 18 years ago, WotC shoud at least bite the ******* bullet and cut the dead weight from these formats. Only 28 cards in the RL are played in Legacy, 10 are the Dual Lands, 12 are sideboard tech or only seen in rogue decks. Storm and Lands can survive without LED and Tabernacle.
If neither of these were to happen, I support chinese counterfeits. WotC doesn't give a ***** if I get to play the stupidly expensive cards I bought for them? I don't give a ***** if their precious secondary market business partners and collectors get ****ed out of selling their hoarded power nine.
As a last word. Having such an emotional investment in your adquisitive power that you wish harm on other people for asking to be able to play a game (in a non-sanctioned competitive setting, while supporting their LGS) can't not be a mental illness, and a bunch of people in this thread really need to get checked.
The only argument I've read so far that I can partially support is from store owners who claim that they sell fewer expensive cards due to proxies. I don't personally believe it's a reasonable concern, I doubt people playing proxies would be buying expensive cards. Actually, I believe it could bite them the other way: by not participating in these event for lacks of cards, it would reduce their presence and patronizing of the store. I, for example, don't ever play in standard events because there are too many prerequisite cards for standard deck that are ridiculously expensive. I don't buy 4 Jace, so I *also* don't buy the other cards with reasonable prices that would be required for the deck.
Still, even if I disagree, I can understand one could hold that view and it's a valid argument.
The other arguments? Hoghwash to me. I fail to see how can one can be against proxies when people constantly use borrowed cards. Even from pros, I frequently read that they borrowed this decks or that deck, or these cards. How is borrowing cards different from proxies, except for the amount of cash lining Wizards coffers? In the case of legacy and vintage events, they don't even affect Wizards monetarily.
Edit: wow, another hateful post a few posts back. People seem to think that: a lot of people don't buy expensive cards because they can play with proxies. That is incorrect. The actual behaviour is: a lot of people don't want to buy expensive cards. But given the possibility of playing in event that allow proxy, they will participate. Banning proxies won't increase sale in any significant way, it will only decrease participation. A lot of people have the causality wrong.
For the most part I agree with you, other than the bit about lining Wizards coffers. The cards being proxied are almost always things that are long since out of print, and therefor things you'd have to buy from an LGS or an online retailer. It's hurting their wallets when people don't buy them, not Wizards. Wizards isn't just protecting themselves with this move, they're protecting their partners who have these cards and feel like proxies hurt their sales. It may be a misguided effort, but it's still intended to be more for the benefit of their partner businesses and collectors than Wizards itself.
The only argument I've read so far that I can partially support is from store owners who claim that they sell fewer expensive cards due to proxies. I don't personally believe it's a reasonable concern, I doubt people playing proxies would be buying expensive cards. Actually, I believe it could bite them the other way: by not participating in these event for lacks of cards, it would reduce their presence and patronizing of the store.
Exactly.
By the banning of proxies it actually kills potential business and becomes a turn off to customers. As customers of an LGS have less of an excuse to actually go to a store if their favorite thing at the store is no longer a legal thing. Which is honestly facepalm worthy as B&M stores need all the good PR they can get to maintain customers. Even if they aren't buying cards while at a LGS, they might just be buying snacks or sleeves or an entirely unrelated product like a board game or comic book they might have there. They are in fact still supporting the store by even just buying a soda or a single pack of cards.
For a person to be actively against proxies and to celebrate its banning, in my opinion, is like spitting at your LGS and sneering at the other customers as you relish in their despair as their beloved formats crumble away. It sounds harsh but its frankly the truth. To be against a method that allowed people to play the game and have fun AND THEN celebrate or be in favor of older formats dying or being removed... it seems fairly heartless to me.
So you're saying that because cards are expensive, we shouldn't make cards less expensive because they will lose value for people who already bought them? Goods of all kinds drop in price along time. And most cards have been steadily rising for past years. I bought X360 like day 3 it came out, but I'm not holding it against people who now bought it for 20% of that price, even though I technically "overpaid". I'm not gonna be upset at Microsoft releasing more and more X360s to the shops, or releasing a new console, all of which ends up with X360 being way cheaper than before. Imagine thousands of whiners writing to Microsoft, being mad they're sending another wave of 360s to the shops because "their consoles will now lose in value and they technically lost money". Yeah, no way.
There's a huge difference between planned obsolescence and disrupting a large and relatively stable market by reversing the policy that has (one could argue) kept it stable for two decades. My example was not about someone being jealous of someone who got something for cheaper, it was about someone who just spent a lot of money to buy into a thing taking a huge hit in one of their liquid assets. I feel sorry for that hypothetical person, and if there's at least one of those people (I believe there is), it gives the lie to the idea that the only people who would be harmed by a reversal of policy deserve to be harmed. There are people who would be harmed just by following the rules. So it suggests a lot of questions -- when do they do this? How far ahead of time do they announce it? How much do they print, and on what sort of a schedule? These may be questions that Wizards is already asking behind the scenes, but I don't see that they have a lot of incentive to do so.
Do you dispute the notion that newer/less wealthy players benefit from the ability to trade and sell singles? You say you play Modern and buy sealed product, but yet you feel the need to play proxies in Modern. Why? Do you not have enough to trade for the staples you need? Are there budget choices you can make? The difference between Grove of the Burnwillows and Karplusan Forest is a small but noticable disadvantage in an already bad matchup, so I wouldn't say I'm unable to play because I don't use proxies in my Tron deck. In addition, a lot of my cards -- Spellskite, Karn Liberated, All Is Dust, came from the recent MM2 printing and I was able to open them/trade for them relatively easily. Heck, one of the most important cards in Burn, Monastery Swiftspear, is an uncommon from about 15 months ago. So how expensive is your meta that you don't feel you can play if you don't proxy? I mean, you don't really need a Blood Moon if you're not on the Pro Tour.
To put it another way, how cheap would the cards have to get before you'd consider buying them? I get that MM2 was a low print run and didn't effect the prices as much as one would hope. What would be your threshold for "this is worth buying?"
For the record, I wish they hadn't created Reserve List in the first place, forcing them to deal with the problem of secondary markets & barrier to entry right then and there. Obviously they had different priorities. Now the problems are entrenched. They can't be done away with via a press release. The metagame that would exist in a post-reserve-list world would be unrecognizable.
The other arguments? Hoghwash to me. I fail to see how can one can be against proxies when people constantly use borrowed cards. Even from pros, I frequently read that they borrowed this decks or that deck, or these cards. How is borrowing cards different from proxies...
The simple and easy to enforce rule that if you are currently in possession of an official copy of a card, you may play it in your tournament deck. It would be a mess to try to enforce a policy against borrowing, whereas the policy on proxies/counterfeits is crystal clear.
The amount of hate people give to others this thread is disgusting.
My shop runs full proxy Modern tournaments (already unsanctioned, mind you). They're there so people without enough money to buy a modern deck and attend the modern FNMs, but still want to play a different kind/flavor of Magic than draft or Pauper.
Yes, we could spend a ****ton of money onto Modern. But guess what, we don't want to because we got other hobbies too. So someone telling us we don't deserve to play modern in this case is just disgusting.
They don't deserve to play any more than I deserve to play Warhammer - another potential hobby that looks cool, but, because I already have a hobby in Magic, I can't afford. They don't deserve anything. Magic is a hobby, a luxury, and not an entitlement. It's a shame they're interested in something they can't afford. That's just life. If they can find a way to play high stakes poker without paying for it, they might be able to leverage this cheapskate spirit to fund their collecting.
This is the level of elitism I'm talking about.
I buy a lot of singles for my EDH at my LGS, I buy sealed products like Duel Decks to play with friends from them, occasional fat packs, I attend a prerelease for every single set that comes out, encourage people to come there.
And yet I shouldn't play proxy Modern. Because apparently I'm not already spending enough money on Magic and I'n a cheapskate.
I spend hundreds of dollars, probably thousands over time, on gas for my truck. I get oil changes. I take it to the dealership for maintenance whenever the check engine light comes on. Apparently I'm not spending enough for them to give me a sports car.
I spend hundreds of dollars on my cable bill, and yet I apparently don't deserve free HBO.
This argument is ludicrous if you swap out Magic terminology for any other. It's ludicrous here, too.
I OWN A ******* VINTAGE DECK.
Now the piss poor pieces of ***** running WotC have made sure that instead of playing once a month, I only get to play once a year at BOM.
They reduced my pool of possible opponents at a competitive level by the thousands after spending $20k on their ******* game, because they made a stupid promise to the kind of people who incentivized the creation of a certain mardu-colored political party a hundred years ago, but we are the ones who are being ludicrous?
You really need to shut the **** up because you don't know what they **** it is like to exist within the vintage community and how much WotC keeps ******* us over. Your stupid analogies don't mean *****. This isn't standard, nobody wants to proxi your stupid rhinos, but if tournaments are to ever fire, people NEED to proxi te power 9 because those cards literally do not exist in the quantities necessary for a healthy community to prosper.
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But even if Wizards abolishes the Reserved List, what then?
Is it ever possible they get to print a Legacy or Vintage Masters on paper? The product will probably cost an arm or leg, and I don't even wanna talk about foils.
It will be so expensive that people might start thinking of a Magic heist.
Just a small comment on proxies and the market. At least where I was playing legacy, some people had partially proxied decks. This allowed to the pool of people available for games to increase. Also, the people using proxies were purchasing cards for those decks piece by piece. Without being able to proxy, they couldn't participate and events wouldn't fire. I'm one of the lucky few to have a complete deck, but since I was close to having all the cards necessary for a 2nd deck, I proxied 7 cards for another deck I am actively building. In fact, since I started building it, I've spent a few hundred on the deck between TCG, local stores and local players. So allowing proxies has been beneficial to stores because people end up finding a deck they like and then buying the actual cards they want for that deck. In the process, everybody has fun and everybody benefits. Even people with 100% real decks like myself benefit because we get a greater variety of decks to play against. With the current environment, I am going to do everything I can to keep people building decks while playing with proxies. It isn't like the important thing was actually winning an event anyway. We just all love legacy and have fun playing it. The only real loser now is the stores. Time for people to just toss 5 bucks in a pot and divide it up after playing several games. If the LGS won't allow it, we will just have to find a new location if we wanna have prizes.
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All your base are belong to us!
RIP Batman guy. I hope somebody picks up the slack now that you are gone. Sick children need their Batman.
They don't deserve to play any more than I deserve to play Warhammer - another potential hobby that looks cool, but, because I already have a hobby in Magic, I can't afford. They don't deserve anything. Magic is a hobby, a luxury, and not an entitlement. It's a shame they're interested in something they can't afford. That's just life. If they can find a way to play high stakes poker without paying for it, they might be able to leverage this cheapskate spirit to fund their collecting.
Wow. That is the most succinct "kiss off" post I've ever read.
Magic is a social game. You need people to play againt. Like most games, it helps to have multiple people with a variety of decks so that you aren't playing the same matchups game after game. If I go to FNM and there is nobody (or only one guy with his uber deck) to play against in my chosen format, what is the point?
I'm not rich. I can only afford a few cards per paycheck. A $700 deck is an entire month of work for me. By your standards, I shouldn't even be playing. A modern deck is a year or more of investment. A legacy deck is longer still. None of my standard cards already owned further either goal. Guess I won't get to play Magic until 2018.
Magic is choking its lifeblood out on two fronts; expensive standard with a quickening expiration date, and slow decay of eternal via difficult or expensive to get cards. The attitude of "pay to win or don't bother" is accelerating the process.
So if you think they could just drop a Tundra Expedition into Oath of the Gatewatch packs and call it good, I think you're greatly underestimating the disruption this would cause. Sure, they could do whatever they want, but I don't see how they have much incentive to shout "fire" in a crowded theater like this.
Retail has a profit margin of about 30%, and 0% if the item does not move. Retailers are not curators who sell attendance to look at items.
Even then, you're trying to mark to market based on their price or the going median price according to several places. If we presume massive liquidation the price of those Tundas will go down. I have talked with other collectors, and the consensus has been and even gestures made by SGC itself has been that Legacy as a format is moving into the Vintage bin. That a small, selective community will control the assets and slowly define the game play over time. Then other people who have cash or the will to play the format will enter the format.
However, SGC has recently this season determined to decrease their support for Legacy while increasing their support for Modern.
There is a single subset of players that wants the reserve list to stay, and those are the people who have several collections worth of Alpha.
If the Reserved List were to go off board with the original arts being "retired" and the old borders to never be used again effectively making those original prints a whatever off of will maintain their collectors value. The value of a Magic card is this:
1. Aesthetics (especially in the case of collector cards like Guru Lands or misprints or ect.)
2. Rarity
3. Playability
In order to have the highest ROI, we must presume that something must be:
1. Be pretty and/or iconic
2. Have a very high rarity
3. Be playable in as many decks as possible in as many formats as possible
Those are the three reasons why Guru lands are so great. The art is awesome and everyone can play one of the five basic lands in ANY format.
What would happen in the reserved list fell:
1. Prices would decrease, then increase
2. There would be a stratification on the different available versions of the card (just as it is now)
3. There would be accumulated interest in the older formats and therefore other cards would rise in price (portfolio theory and associated commodities)
Overall, prices would be distributed across and most would increase presuming mint over time as right now appreciation has slowed as diminished interest in those formats has lowered. Continued interest in a format is necessary to maintain interest. If it wasn't for Commander, the prices would have stalled sooner for the RL. Most of the appreciation in the market has come from:
1. Magic gaining popularity
2. SCG tournament support and marketing push for competitive play
And I feel that the appreciation will continue to slow, while the gains in appreciation for Modern cards is more defined, sharp and boom bust as the nature of the format.
Magic is choking its lifeblood out on two fronts; expensive standard with a quickening expiration date, and slow decay of eternal via difficult or expensive to get cards. The attitude of "pay to win or don't bother" is accelerating the process.
They're turning to do two things with Standard:
1. Turn it into Portal
2. Entry level format
3. Decrease the power level through conservative effort with some other areas rising in power level. So overall the power level remains "balanced" the Escher Staircase
4. Limited Support
Limited support is choking off good constructed cards, the biggest fatality of this was savage nerfs to removal cards and moving removal from common to uncommon and therefore driving up the price. "Back in my day" you could buy a Terminate for 10 cents right now some of the best uncommon removal for competitive standard is $2.
We're living in the reversal vision from Time Spiral, and we're seeing the tipping point of that move to support casual and limited more than constructed and the eternals. Time Spiral was THE eternal set, Khans is a Modern set, while this block is "What?" set.
The amount of hate people give to others this thread is disgusting.
My shop runs full proxy Modern tournaments (already unsanctioned, mind you). They're there so people without enough money to buy a modern deck and attend the modern FNMs, but still want to play a different kind/flavor of Magic than draft or Pauper.
Yes, we could spend a ****ton of money onto Modern. But guess what, we don't want to because we got other hobbies too. So someone telling us we don't deserve to play modern in this case is just disgusting.
They don't deserve to play any more than I deserve to play Warhammer - another potential hobby that looks cool, but, because I already have a hobby in Magic, I can't afford. They don't deserve anything. Magic is a hobby, a luxury, and not an entitlement. It's a shame they're interested in something they can't afford. That's just life. If they can find a way to play high stakes poker without paying for it, they might be able to leverage this cheapskate spirit to fund their collecting.
This is the level of elitism I'm talking about.
I buy a lot of singles for my EDH at my LGS, I buy sealed products like Duel Decks to play with friends from them, occasional fat packs, I attend a prerelease for every single set that comes out, encourage people to come there.
And yet I shouldn't play proxy Modern. Because apparently I'm not already spending enough money on Magic and I'n a cheapskate.
I spend hundreds of dollars, probably thousands over time, on gas for my truck. I get oil changes. I take it to the dealership for maintenance whenever the check engine light comes on. Apparently I'm not spending enough for them to give me a sports car.
I spend hundreds of dollars on my cable bill, and yet I apparently don't deserve free HBO.
This argument is ludicrous if you swap out Magic terminology for any other. It's ludicrous here, too.
Not having a sports car doesn't prevent you from driving on the road.
Not having race car will prevent you from driving in a race track though.
The race track in my analogy would be top tier tournaments not smaller ones.
If WOTC really gave damn they would get rid of the reserved list. It's gotten to the point where this game isn't what it was then. The cards that are useful cannot be printed anymore and the remaining cards are just slowly dwindling over time. By making a print run of these cards, the originals would be lightly affected by the value as usually first prints retain value. It's just not worth spending that much money on cards that can be destroyed if something were to happen to them. It would grow the audience since playing with 2000+ decks wouldn't be an issue.
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It hurts...NESS...
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This is where I'm at with this whole thing. All the cries of "boycott Wizards" and "only jerks would enforce this" are ignoring the fact that the people running stores put up with a lot from players because their business model is allowing people to hang out there all day in hopes that they will buy the things they sell. Taken at its extreme, the attitude of "I shouldn't have to pay for Magic cards" is a red flag to a store owner.
There are basically two types of proxy players at my store -- again, this is in casual pickup games of EDH, so I don't think anyone really cares but for illustrative purposes -- there's Demonic Tutor Guy and there's Sword of Fire and Ice Guy. Demonic Tutor guy has a fully-functioning EDH deck with a couple of cards that have white slips of paper with things written on them. He drops a Demonic Tutor, give a conciliatory shrug and says "yeah, I know, I should buy one, but I'm broke right now." I figure we all know what it does so we just move on. Sword of Fire and Ice guy buys the White Commander precon and proceeds to print off miniature copies of all the swords to stick in it, so it has good artifacts. He drops it on a creature and gives this little smug grin, "I'm attacking you, it's pro-blue so you can't do anything." I squint because it's almost impossible to read and I don't remember all the text.
"What is that?"
"It's a Sword of Fire and Ice."
"It's very difficult to read. Why don't you just buy one?"
scoff "I don't care enough about EDH to spend a lot of money on singles."
"But you care enough to pimp your deck with fake Swords?"
Now imagine you're the store owner. Who would you rather have in your shop? "I'm going buy this soon but bills" guy or "buying cards is beneath me" guy? One's a lot more likely to contribute to your overhead, and thus one's opinions are a lot more valid. If you're hanging out all day and using my bathroom and arguing with my paying customers, it would be nice if you at least asked how much that Sword of Fire and Ice I have sitting in the case cost. I know not everybody participating in a 15-proxy Legacy event has this extreme an attitude, but I can't imagine store owners are afraid of losing the business of people whose philosophy is "cards should be free." Because the lights aren't. A store owner's WPN membership is more valuable that irking some kid who doesn't understand the social contract at work.
It's not fair to say you should have an advantage, but that is a sometimes ugly fact of the matter in a collectible card game. That Legacy tournament sounds like an awkward situation, but is it anymore than just an extreme version of a lot of FNMs? I have a fullset of manabases for Standard because I was paying attention when I came back and realized I needed duals, and lots of them, if I were going to play Standard competitively. The 10-year-old sitting across from me with a janky Allies deck full of basics and bulk rares hasn't made that realization, and wouldn't be able to ask mom and dad for the money to fix his manabase even if he had. Does it feel good to crush that kid? Of course not. In all honesty, I'd rather not be paired against that kid because it's an unfair and unfun matchup. But I just shrug it off as part of the game and assume that because he keeps coming his feelings aren't hurt too bad.
Of course there's a huge skill gap there, perhaps unlike your example, but I'm having trouble believing that someone who has put in the time and energy to master a deck and research a meta is somehow completely unable to acquire the cards through buying, bartering, begging or borrowing. The need to build, or otherwise have access to, a rigorous collection, is just part of the game we have to deal with. I don't particularly like it, but I've grown to accept it over the years, and if someone just absolutely can't afford to participate on any timeline, they probably have more serious problems than their Magic deck.
Again, a lot of this is why I prefer Limited to Constructed. It's just a factor you don't have to worry about.
Sure, that's ugly. If this is truly a casual game, then that sounds like a social issue best solved socially. I don't see why that situation requires proxies -- you could ask that person to bring a casual deck to a casual game. Whether or not you own Force of Will should have no bearing on kitchen table games -- Force of Will is expensive specifically because it's necessary to stop degenerate combos in competitive environments.
Unfair advantage is not fun, of course, but if the solution is just to proxy up every card, where does that end? If Bill didn't get the memo that unlimited proxying was just fine, Bill's sitting here with a jank Goblin deck because that's all he can afford, while everyone else walks over him. Now you have the same problem in the opposite direction, except the person contributing to the economy is the one that's suffering. That sounds bonkers to me.
What is your reasoning on Legacy being an "earned" format?
Ultimately WoTC has only a few options. Either get rid of the reserved list and finally get rid of the worst decision they have ever made, ban all the cards on the reserved list for non-Commander constructed formats, or just straight kill Legacy and Vintage by just coming out and saying it finally, like they did Extended, which would still drop the prices of all of those cards because no one wants them for much of anything. No matter what something needs to be done, damn near anything would be better than the current situation at this point.
It is so strange to me that they will let these formats die off and let part of that money that people would pay to get just fly away because of some 20 year old semi-promise for people who didn't want to see their $20 cards lose value back then. They would easily make back any money they would lose from a suit, if they lost, from just selling Alpha duals in anything. They could reprint the entirety of the Homelands set and put them in and they would still make out like bandits.
MY store has run proxy tournaments in the past. The prizes were paid out in packs, which as far as I am aware wizards gets money based on the boxes the store needs to buy to replenish the packs. Proxy events can help the store because the players after playing the events are more likely to buy the singles for the deck in the format that they are working on but can't play in a sanctioned tournament yet and it may be a different deck. I am disappointed as I will be unable to play some vintage once a month.
I will not go out and buy counterfeits though. I do proxy cards in my edh decks (I own them) which will suck swapping the cards between decks between games as any game store profits on having any events, play testing or tournament in the store proxies or not.
Oh believe me, I bought my cards with a use. I retired for a while and never cashed out so I had a good stock of $10 duals from 99-01. When I came back (08) I quickly realized that Legacy was the only format that I enjoyed and bought in further. At the time, I lived 30 min further south so I could get to events that would fire with reasonable quantities of people and not be home by 1-2am during the week. Hell the events I used to go to in that time were 4-5 rounds. Once moving up here, one of my friends opened a shop and started running events out here too (Northeast Cleveland area). There's good turnout but it's slowly started to dwindle as singles are harder to come by. The proxy legacy night was starting to revitalize the legacy scene here. We went from not being able to fire to having 12-16 people show up. So now the option that I guess we have is the three or four of us who have multiple decks can start renting/loaning them out and advertising this on facebook or something?
I understand that the Legacy scene is slowly dying because of supply and demand, but there is no reason to murder it in lesser populated areas like this. I could only imagine how awful it is for some of the people who live in more rural areas as this is a problem in my neighborhood and there are at least 10 shops that I can think of in an hour's drive of me. Now I can think of one that would reliably hold a legacy event and it's an hour drive (on a good day) away.
In the end, all this does for me is makes it much easier to quit again. Standard and Modern are both horrible, Limited is fun. Now all I see is a bunch of expensive cardboard that I may get to dust off once a month and no inspiration to continue purchasing.
What if they just view the existence of Legacy as a concession to those who already own the cards?
I saw a bunch of people get out of Magic in the 90s because they didn't like the fact that a lot of events were Type II only. The attitude was, "that's dumb, I bought these cards, I should be able to play with them." The response is, "okay, cool. I get that. We'll keep supporting Type I." They were loyal customers for five years or so, they should be respected. New players and/or players who like a rotation system can play with the new stuff, old players can continue playing the (let's be honest) degenerate games they love, and everyone's happy. Legacy/Vintage (Type I then) at its inception was, by definition, targeted towards players who already had the cards. At one level it's just an answer to "I have the cards and I want to play with them."
Flashforward a generation and now there's a complaint of "I don't have the cards and I want to play with them." Um... what? I can see this at a philosophical level, but on a practical level, it might be incumbent on the new player to understand that the format is not for them. Now, you can play it if you want to -- I could go climb Mt. Everest if I wanted to -- but it's going to be a uphill struggle if your box of powerful cards from the 90s has been sold/lost or never existed. Just like if I wanted to climb Mt. Everest I'd have to save a lot of money for travel expenses and equipment as well as begin a vigorous exercise routine, like, yesterday.
So while I can understand the frustration of Legacy players who see attendance dropping, and would-be Legacy players who see the price tag as too big a barrier, I don't know that it's glaringly obvious that the status quo is wretched for that shrinking group of players the format was originally intended for.
You say something needs to be done and I respect that perspective, but to my mind two things have been done -- the establishment of Modern and the support of Legacy Online. Modern is a non-rotating format that sidesteps both the Reserved List and the truly degenerate decks that came up from the fast-and-loose game design that defined the game in the early years, and while I haven't tried it myself, I'm led to understand that playing Legacy Online is a heck of a lot cheaper due to card availability. Maybe paper Legacy as-is is dead as a doornail, but that doesn't mean its ghost won't be walking around for years to come.
Why does it have to involve a lawsuit to be a bad business decision? I don't have a lot of hard data as to how much money is sitting around invested in Reserved List cards across the world, but here's a minor data point: Star City Games has over $30,000 worth of Tundras for sale on their site. Many, many people buy and sell these cards because (a) they are collector's items (b) they are very useful in certain formats and (c) they are 99% positive they are trading in one of a limited number of copies. If they announced they were getting rid of the Reserved List today, Star City Games would need to immediately begin restructuring their business, which would probably involve firing people are purchasing less sealed product as well as liquidating their stock of our-of-print Legacy/Vintage staples. How many frenzied individuals snapping up new printings does it take to make up for all the stores that would be getting out of the singles game? You and I (I assume) don't have the buying power of Star City Games, so we could not hope to make up the loss of business on that scale even if we wanted to.
So if you think they could just drop a Tundra Expedition into Oath of the Gatewatch packs and call it good, I think you're greatly underestimating the disruption this would cause. Sure, they could do whatever they want, but I don't see how they have much incentive to shout "fire" in a crowded theater like this.
They don't deserve to play any more than I deserve to play Warhammer - another potential hobby that looks cool, but, because I already have a hobby in Magic, I can't afford. They don't deserve anything. Magic is a hobby, a luxury, and not an entitlement. It's a shame they're interested in something they can't afford. That's just life. If they can find a way to play high stakes poker without paying for it, they might be able to leverage this cheapskate spirit to fund their collecting.
I spend hundreds of dollars, probably thousands over time, on gas for my truck. I get oil changes. I take it to the dealership for maintenance whenever the check engine light comes on. Apparently I'm not spending enough for them to give me a sports car.
I spend hundreds of dollars on my cable bill, and yet I apparently don't deserve free HBO.
This argument is ludicrous if you swap out Magic terminology for any other. It's ludicrous here, too.
I know, right? I'm trying to imagine other hobbies people have and how they would proxy them and it's absurd and enjoyably funny. But I really am having a hard time getting my head around why a person would feel entitled to play magic if they aren't willing to pay for it. This isn't an in-game purchase kind of deal where you only pay to play if you want to unlock things.
WUBRGPauper Battle BoxWUBRG ... and why I am not a fan of Wayne Reynolds' Illustrations.
I'm certainly no activist - even this discussion is one of opportunity and convenience, and not a mission. That said, if WotC brought the hammer down on unofficial digital Magic, and there was a thread here about it, I'd take the same basic position.
I get the argument for intellectual property and copyright protection, but ultimately WOTC leveraging WPN status to shops has caused an onslaught of infighting for local groups - mine is already torn to the point where we almost have 2 opposing factions - and that I believe has been more harmful to the community than the existence of proxies.
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RW Aurelia, The Warleader --- R Daretti, Scrap Savant --- RUB Thraximundar
That's not fair at all. I don't consider myself a collector or a hoarder but I have (basically) enough cards to play Standard competitively and can at least dip my toe in the Modern waters. I, like anyone with the little bit of recreation money required to show up at FNM regularly, can do things like open a prize pack on a whim and end up with a Tarmagoyf or a Jace, Vryn's Prodigy that I can trade for those staples that I need for the decks I want to build. If I'm drafting and I open a Gideon, Ally of Zendikar (about a month ago before the price dropped), that's a couple free drafts for me. I don't own a shop and I don't certainly don't consider myself a rich person, yet I benefit from the system, and so does that kid who's spending his $5 allowance money and opens an Expedition Blood Crypt. The fact that some cards has value allows people a chance to bootstrap themselves into the collection they want -- over time, and with careful attention to card value.
We could just play the "us vs. them" game and assume all people with expensive cards want them to stay expensive because they're creepy misers, but what about the high school kid who's been saving his/her paychecks to build the Legacy deck s/he dreamed of playing for months? I'd feel pretty bad for that person if s/he were staring at a deck of rapidly sinking value when Wizards "finally" decided to stick it to those dirty hoarders.
Again, it's not that simple. We're talking about an internal economy that has a lot of players with a lot of motivations.
Still, even if I disagree, I can understand one could hold that view and it's a valid argument.
The other arguments? Hoghwash to me. I fail to see how can one can be against proxies when people constantly use borrowed cards. Even from pros, I frequently read that they borrowed this decks or that deck, or these cards. How is borrowing cards different from proxies, except for the amount of cash lining Wizards coffers? In the case of legacy and vintage events, they don't even affect Wizards monetarily.
Edit: wow, another hateful post a few posts back. People seem to think that: a lot of people don't buy expensive cards because they can play with proxies. That is incorrect. The actual behaviour is: a lot of people don't want to buy expensive cards. But given the possibility of playing in event that allow proxy, they will participate. Banning proxies won't increase sale in any significant way, it will only decrease participation. A lot of people have the causality wrong.
none
Modern
UBG B/U/G control
BBB MBC
WUR Control
WWW Prison
RRR Goblins
Legacy
BBB Pox
UBG B/U/G Control
UWU StoneBlade
UW Miracle Control
This thread in general gave me severe brain rot, but this post in particular was special.
So you go on and grind, and grind, and grind, because you're not a customer or a person, you're ******* farming equipment. Pretty 1984, not an evil or dystopic disposition to have for your consumer base at all, and of course it has to be excruciating or you don't "desserve" your cards according to some people in this thread. Anyway, you grind for years and then you have finally "earned" your vintage deck. Now you can play.
NO, YOU CAN'T! Because you're the only imbecile who wasted so much time doing something so stupid for so long and now all the people you could play with are banned from playing because they needed proxies to compete.
Most of you who play the dance and song of "entitled this entitled that" are speaking from a double dose of ignorance and egotism. Fist, you don't play the ******* format or are even trying to get into it, some of you actively want it dead because you're too petty and self-centered to believe someone else desserves to get any fun out of being a long-time player, because they're not doing things exactly how you do or how you like it so they must be right and stopped immediately. Pretty ****ed up in the head there.
Secondly, you keep opening your mouths and letting utter bull ***** fall of claiming that vintage players don't spend money on the game. Do you have any ******* idea how many boxes of Conspiracy had to be opened for just 10 vintage players to have their foil Dack Fayden? Oh but that can't be, your little microcosmovision cannot fathom that vintage players have spend a dime on magic since '94, you havent taken a ******* second to look at any decklist database and realize at least a third of every competitive vintage deck is composed of cards that saw their first printing in the modern border, or that at least half of the rest have more accessible or more desirable newer versions such as fist-time foils, no, that cannot be true because "vintage players don't buy cards :V"
Most proxi tournaments are 10 proxi, specifically so they can account for the power 9 and one other ridiculously hard to get piece like Imperial Seal, no one was coming for your *****ty Gideons and flip Jaces that cost you so much to get and have you so proud of your "economic standing" and how you desserve to win more than filthy poor people.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if getting a playset of foil Young Pyromancer or Gitaxian Probe for two vintage players sold more boosters than outfitting a whole T2 PTQ's worth of tier 1 decks. But sure, eternal players don't make WotC any money.
This is getting increasingly ridiculous, the company seems to be now run by mental bureaucrats who erred their way to Marvel where the IPs and character are actual cultural icons and not just ***** meant to dress up A TOY, and I'm starting to wonder if there is any legal recouse against WotC for making it increasingly difficult to play their stupid game after promoting an "investment" that rivals real estate. Specially having in mind that effective Dec 2015 their last word about proxi vintage was PROMOTING it and telling you to ask your LGS or TO about it. In the meanwhile:
I support players or a company unrelated to WotC creating an alternative competitive ranking system and tournament scene. There cannot be any semblance of seriousness so long as we depend on a company that bans you for ***** you did 10 years ago or for belonging to a facebook group wether you participate or not.
I support the death of the Resserved List and the mass printing of paper Vintage Masters. I own moxen, I don't care. White bordered power stands to lose more value if vintage stops being a sanctioned format than by being reprinted by the millions. AB power won't lose at all either way.
I support the banning of all Resserved List cards in Legacy and Commander. If they don't have half the ball to ask the most litigious toy company to pull them off from a non-binding promise they made to idiotic manchildren 18 years ago, WotC shoud at least bite the ******* bullet and cut the dead weight from these formats. Only 28 cards in the RL are played in Legacy, 10 are the Dual Lands, 12 are sideboard tech or only seen in rogue decks. Storm and Lands can survive without LED and Tabernacle.
If neither of these were to happen, I support chinese counterfeits. WotC doesn't give a ***** if I get to play the stupidly expensive cards I bought for them? I don't give a ***** if their precious secondary market business partners and collectors get ****ed out of selling their hoarded power nine.
As a last word. Having such an emotional investment in your adquisitive power that you wish harm on other people for asking to be able to play a game (in a non-sanctioned competitive setting, while supporting their LGS) can't not be a mental illness, and a bunch of people in this thread really need to get checked.
For the most part I agree with you, other than the bit about lining Wizards coffers. The cards being proxied are almost always things that are long since out of print, and therefor things you'd have to buy from an LGS or an online retailer. It's hurting their wallets when people don't buy them, not Wizards. Wizards isn't just protecting themselves with this move, they're protecting their partners who have these cards and feel like proxies hurt their sales. It may be a misguided effort, but it's still intended to be more for the benefit of their partner businesses and collectors than Wizards itself.
Exactly.
By the banning of proxies it actually kills potential business and becomes a turn off to customers. As customers of an LGS have less of an excuse to actually go to a store if their favorite thing at the store is no longer a legal thing. Which is honestly facepalm worthy as B&M stores need all the good PR they can get to maintain customers. Even if they aren't buying cards while at a LGS, they might just be buying snacks or sleeves or an entirely unrelated product like a board game or comic book they might have there. They are in fact still supporting the store by even just buying a soda or a single pack of cards.
For a person to be actively against proxies and to celebrate its banning, in my opinion, is like spitting at your LGS and sneering at the other customers as you relish in their despair as their beloved formats crumble away. It sounds harsh but its frankly the truth. To be against a method that allowed people to play the game and have fun AND THEN celebrate or be in favor of older formats dying or being removed... it seems fairly heartless to me.
There's a huge difference between planned obsolescence and disrupting a large and relatively stable market by reversing the policy that has (one could argue) kept it stable for two decades. My example was not about someone being jealous of someone who got something for cheaper, it was about someone who just spent a lot of money to buy into a thing taking a huge hit in one of their liquid assets. I feel sorry for that hypothetical person, and if there's at least one of those people (I believe there is), it gives the lie to the idea that the only people who would be harmed by a reversal of policy deserve to be harmed. There are people who would be harmed just by following the rules. So it suggests a lot of questions -- when do they do this? How far ahead of time do they announce it? How much do they print, and on what sort of a schedule? These may be questions that Wizards is already asking behind the scenes, but I don't see that they have a lot of incentive to do so.
Do you dispute the notion that newer/less wealthy players benefit from the ability to trade and sell singles? You say you play Modern and buy sealed product, but yet you feel the need to play proxies in Modern. Why? Do you not have enough to trade for the staples you need? Are there budget choices you can make? The difference between Grove of the Burnwillows and Karplusan Forest is a small but noticable disadvantage in an already bad matchup, so I wouldn't say I'm unable to play because I don't use proxies in my Tron deck. In addition, a lot of my cards -- Spellskite, Karn Liberated, All Is Dust, came from the recent MM2 printing and I was able to open them/trade for them relatively easily. Heck, one of the most important cards in Burn, Monastery Swiftspear, is an uncommon from about 15 months ago. So how expensive is your meta that you don't feel you can play if you don't proxy? I mean, you don't really need a Blood Moon if you're not on the Pro Tour.
To put it another way, how cheap would the cards have to get before you'd consider buying them? I get that MM2 was a low print run and didn't effect the prices as much as one would hope. What would be your threshold for "this is worth buying?"
For the record, I wish they hadn't created Reserve List in the first place, forcing them to deal with the problem of secondary markets & barrier to entry right then and there. Obviously they had different priorities. Now the problems are entrenched. They can't be done away with via a press release. The metagame that would exist in a post-reserve-list world would be unrecognizable.
The simple and easy to enforce rule that if you are currently in possession of an official copy of a card, you may play it in your tournament deck. It would be a mess to try to enforce a policy against borrowing, whereas the policy on proxies/counterfeits is crystal clear.
I OWN A ******* VINTAGE DECK.
Now the piss poor pieces of ***** running WotC have made sure that instead of playing once a month, I only get to play once a year at BOM.
They reduced my pool of possible opponents at a competitive level by the thousands after spending $20k on their ******* game, because they made a stupid promise to the kind of people who incentivized the creation of a certain mardu-colored political party a hundred years ago, but we are the ones who are being ludicrous?
You really need to shut the **** up because you don't know what they **** it is like to exist within the vintage community and how much WotC keeps ******* us over. Your stupid analogies don't mean *****. This isn't standard, nobody wants to proxi your stupid rhinos, but if tournaments are to ever fire, people NEED to proxi te power 9 because those cards literally do not exist in the quantities necessary for a healthy community to prosper.
Is it ever possible they get to print a Legacy or Vintage Masters on paper? The product will probably cost an arm or leg, and I don't even wanna talk about foils.
It will be so expensive that people might start thinking of a Magic heist.
A foil lotus... I can't even imagine the price...
UR Melek, Izzet ParagonUR, B Shirei, Shizo's CaretakerB, R Jaya Ballard, Task MageR,RW Tajic, Blade of the LegionRW, UB Lazav, Dimir MastermindUB, UB Circu, Dimir LobotomistUB, RWU Zedruu the GreatheartedRWU, GUBThe MimeoplasmGUB, UGExperiment Kraj UG, WDarien, King of KjeldorW, BMarrow-GnawerB, WBGKarador, Ghost ChieftainWBG, UTeferi, Temporal ArchmageU, GWUDerevi, Empyrial TacticianGWU, RDaretti, Scrap SavantR, UTalrand, Sky SummonerU, GEzuri, Renegade LeaderG, WUBRGReaper KingWUBRG, RGXenagos, God of RevelsRG, CKozilek, Butcher of TruthC, WUBRGGeneral TazriWUBRG, GTitania, Protector of ArgothG
RIP Batman guy. I hope somebody picks up the slack now that you are gone. Sick children need their Batman.
Wow. That is the most succinct "kiss off" post I've ever read.
Magic is a social game. You need people to play againt. Like most games, it helps to have multiple people with a variety of decks so that you aren't playing the same matchups game after game. If I go to FNM and there is nobody (or only one guy with his uber deck) to play against in my chosen format, what is the point?
I'm not rich. I can only afford a few cards per paycheck. A $700 deck is an entire month of work for me. By your standards, I shouldn't even be playing. A modern deck is a year or more of investment. A legacy deck is longer still. None of my standard cards already owned further either goal. Guess I won't get to play Magic until 2018.
Magic is choking its lifeblood out on two fronts; expensive standard with a quickening expiration date, and slow decay of eternal via difficult or expensive to get cards. The attitude of "pay to win or don't bother" is accelerating the process.
Retail has a profit margin of about 30%, and 0% if the item does not move. Retailers are not curators who sell attendance to look at items.
Even then, you're trying to mark to market based on their price or the going median price according to several places. If we presume massive liquidation the price of those Tundas will go down. I have talked with other collectors, and the consensus has been and even gestures made by SGC itself has been that Legacy as a format is moving into the Vintage bin. That a small, selective community will control the assets and slowly define the game play over time. Then other people who have cash or the will to play the format will enter the format.
However, SGC has recently this season determined to decrease their support for Legacy while increasing their support for Modern.
There is a single subset of players that wants the reserve list to stay, and those are the people who have several collections worth of Alpha.
If the Reserved List were to go off board with the original arts being "retired" and the old borders to never be used again effectively making those original prints a whatever off of will maintain their collectors value. The value of a Magic card is this:
1. Aesthetics (especially in the case of collector cards like Guru Lands or misprints or ect.)
2. Rarity
3. Playability
In order to have the highest ROI, we must presume that something must be:
1. Be pretty and/or iconic
2. Have a very high rarity
3. Be playable in as many decks as possible in as many formats as possible
Those are the three reasons why Guru lands are so great. The art is awesome and everyone can play one of the five basic lands in ANY format.
What would happen in the reserved list fell:
1. Prices would decrease, then increase
2. There would be a stratification on the different available versions of the card (just as it is now)
3. There would be accumulated interest in the older formats and therefore other cards would rise in price (portfolio theory and associated commodities)
Overall, prices would be distributed across and most would increase presuming mint over time as right now appreciation has slowed as diminished interest in those formats has lowered. Continued interest in a format is necessary to maintain interest. If it wasn't for Commander, the prices would have stalled sooner for the RL. Most of the appreciation in the market has come from:
1. Magic gaining popularity
2. SCG tournament support and marketing push for competitive play
And I feel that the appreciation will continue to slow, while the gains in appreciation for Modern cards is more defined, sharp and boom bust as the nature of the format.
They're turning to do two things with Standard:
1. Turn it into Portal
2. Entry level format
3. Decrease the power level through conservative effort with some other areas rising in power level. So overall the power level remains "balanced" the Escher Staircase
4. Limited Support
Limited support is choking off good constructed cards, the biggest fatality of this was savage nerfs to removal cards and moving removal from common to uncommon and therefore driving up the price. "Back in my day" you could buy a Terminate for 10 cents right now some of the best uncommon removal for competitive standard is $2.
We're living in the reversal vision from Time Spiral, and we're seeing the tipping point of that move to support casual and limited more than constructed and the eternals. Time Spiral was THE eternal set, Khans is a Modern set, while this block is "What?" set.
Modern
Commander
Cube
<a href="http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/the-cube-forum/cube-lists/588020-unpowered-themed-enchantment-an-enchanted-evening">An Enchanted Evening Cube </a>
Not having a sports car doesn't prevent you from driving on the road.
Not having race car will prevent you from driving in a race track though.
The race track in my analogy would be top tier tournaments not smaller ones.
If WOTC really gave damn they would get rid of the reserved list. It's gotten to the point where this game isn't what it was then. The cards that are useful cannot be printed anymore and the remaining cards are just slowly dwindling over time. By making a print run of these cards, the originals would be lightly affected by the value as usually first prints retain value. It's just not worth spending that much money on cards that can be destroyed if something were to happen to them. It would grow the audience since playing with 2000+ decks wouldn't be an issue.