If you are worried about fakes buy from SCG or Cardkingdom.
I would advise against ordering from Card Kingdom if you live on the East Coast. I have ordered from them on a Sunday night and the cards still did not arrive in time for the next FNM.
ICE Imports has fair prices and is much better on the east coast IMO
The cost is prohibitive enough with minimum order size that it's not worth it for you to try and get some made for your pet legacy deck. I know, I went and found out from the printer for funsies.
Are you sure about that? By my calculations, you end up with 50x of 56 different expensive cards for somewhere in the $600 range. Considering just the fact that 50x Wastelands are worth about $3,750 at the moment, just that single card leaves enough value to make any deck in Legacy and have leftovers, and then the rest is flat out gravy.
Dragon's Maze should be considered a spat in the face of M:tG players world-wide.
Seriously, Dragon's Maze and M14 are a gigantic raised middle finger to MTG players.
Both sets were only drafted/given as prizes/door packs for like two months, and contain nothing but garbage, worthless, unplayed cards except for 1-2 per set.
Seriously, DGM is Voice, Blood Baron or nothing. M14 is slightly better with Mutavault and a few planeswalkers but is otherwise also garbage. You can open an entire box of these sets and come away with $20 or less in value. I'm not one of those people that thinks a box should net you $200 in cards but you should get at least half or 3/4 of your money in value. Not with these sets. Flat out insulting.
They care soley about overall profit, so what is the point of paying their design crew more money to make new, fixed card images while they have already sold out their stock (according to other forums)? If what they have is selling, why change it?
Don't let the picture of Chairman Mao fool you, China is no less Capitalist than the USA. Other companies will compete with them, or they will make improvement to the product to increase sales. It's how business works - part of running a business is growth and every business is always trying to grow.
Some people over in Reddit started to get email responses back from a couple of these sellers. One said that they wouldn't sell MTG cards anymore because it was "too risky." The other was more than happy to offer details. 55 cards in a sealed box for $6.50 USD, a case is 100 of these boxes. Can't rightly tell for sure, but it may be that you can only buy them by the case.
That means the only people buying these are people looking to scam, NOT kitchen table friends who want to pull together a cheap cube. We have every right to be nervous, unless what I saw in that thread is clarified to mean something different.
No, it does not. $650 is really not much money, a lot of Standard decks cost about half of that at the moment. A playset of FoW and Wasteland total up to $460 together going by TCG mid. So $650 for 100 Force of Wills and Tarmogoyfs plus 100 each of 53 other valuable cards? Split the cost 50/50 with a friend and for $325 someone now has Legacy staples enough to trade away for thousands of dollars in real card value. The investment gives someone the option to play several decks, enough cards to trade away for a lifetime, and then some. $650 is a lot more accessible than the price barrier WOTC has allowed to block the entrance into Legacy/Modern. That is what should give pause to everyone.
This is what happens when an entire format relies on $80 uncommons and $100+ lands that can't be reprinted because 18 years ago WOTC made a promise to a bunch of people who have no idea how investing actually works in the real world.
Pretty much every avenue you can imagine - crackdown on players, shut down the company, etc. is either unrealistic, unwieldy, or ineffective. They have a choice now, to abolish the reserve list and lower the massive barrier of entry to Legacy and even Modern that has given these counterfeiters a market in the first place.
We can sit here and talk of the "consequences" of this but I must ask, did the RIAA shutting down Napster end music downloading forever? And as for the "risks" of ordering these online, I also point out that there are many illicit products which I will not name, that can be delivered to you from places which I also will not name, of which the best efforts of Federal law enforcement has not been able to stop either, which makes fake magic cards look like quite a trivial manner.
There are many ways for WOTC to react to this, and I hope they choose the right way as I have enjoyed this game for a long time and would hate to see its events turned into witch hunts and its market ruined.
I had a similar problem at a shop around here. After a couple weeks of crushing small children's "big green creatures with no sleeves" decks with an Affinity deck in Modern. Winning on turn 3-4, having spent those turns explaining every single card interaction with nothing but 2-3 Forests on the other side of the table felt more like Solitaire than Magic. There was just no fun in beating 2-3 complete garbage decks and maybe facing 1 real opponent all night. I decided to stop playing there.
Put it this way. It's slightly less harmful than just sitting around smoking pot 24/7, or being an alcoholic. And it's definitely better than real drugs.
So knowing all of that, it's pretty obvious deck choice, and therefore the metagame isn't being driven by price of cards. Perhaps this is true at the FNM level. At my FNM no one plays Voice of Resurgence. But that's not going to be true at a PTQ. The people that consistently end up in the top half of those events are the ones that shell out the money, test a lot and have playgroups.
That is a perfect example. For many months now, I have noticed the FNM metagame is very different than the pro-level metagame, and the main reason simply has been price. It is definitely hard to justify paying $200 for a set of VoR's just to go to FNM and win like 6 packs once in a while.
So M14's out and the new decklists from this weekend's SCG events are out.
It seems like Jund is a very, very large portion of the metagame at those events, more than ever. Except, there isn't really too much from the new sets in it save for Scavenging Ooze. Now don't get me wrong, the Ooze is awesome and nukes the Rites decks, but otherwise, the deck already had Thrag and Huntmaster to stabilize and gain life.
So I was talking to some people at the LGS and I pointed a few things out - a few months ago, the metagame there was over 2/3 R/x aggro decks, and these days it is much more varied. Talking to some with those decks, the main reason many were playing it was not necessarily because of metagame choices or them liking the deck itself or those particular colors, but simply because it was the cheapest deck to build, by far.
So I'm wondering if this new resurgence of Jund is not really a metagame factor, but simply a price factor. I wanted to build Jund back in January but decided not to, after all, 20+ nonbasic lands, playsets of $20 Thrags and $25 Bonfires and $27 Huntmasters gets really pricey, really fast. MTG is a fun game, but when a Standard deck costs nearly six hundred bucks, many people wonder, for good reason, if it's really worth spending that much to play FNM.
But now that most of these cards are down as low as $6,7,8 a piece Jund is a lot more realistic to build. So, I'd like some input from the community:
What is your local metagame like? How much of a determining factor is price to people at your shop and the decks they build?
I wouldn't describe it as freaking out, more like, just giving up.
I think the issue is that WOTC knows that Legacy & even Modern having a finite supply of extremely expensive and ever-increasing cards is simply not a good idea.
I just wish they would grow a pair and tackle the reserve list issues and other reprint traditions head on, rather than try and sneak tournament staples into the collector's sets and special products.
Modern Masters was failure, once again because they are too chicken to actually just print the cards that people need to play. So Kitchen Finks dropped two bucks in price and Goyf/Bob are still $150 and $80 each. Wow Wizards, great job at making a format easier to get into.
The mainstream TV/print news is a failure and does not adequately inform the public of current events. It would be nice to see publicly funded, publicly owned news that is more fact based than talking head opinion shows.
Piers Morgan interviewing Rachael Jeantel (Trayvon Martin's "friend") - quite possibly the lowest "journalism" has ever gone.
The issue is that the 24/7 Cable News networks, in their efforts to compete with second-by-second social media, have resorted to this level of utter garbage "reporting" and complete lack of fact checking or editing.
I mean, what was the story here? Okay, so let's say we DID know the names of the pilots. Did they have any information about why their names were even relevant? Were these pilots previously involved in errors or dangerous behaviors? Did the news have any reason why the names of the pilots matter?
No.
They just reported the names for the sake of reporting something. Junk Food TV that serves no news purpose. And this is what they get. Pranked by an intern by one of the oldest jokes in the book. Several people at the TV station actually read that **** with a straight face and believed it was real.
Morons. That's what they get. How about reporting some real news?
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I would advise against ordering from Card Kingdom if you live on the East Coast. I have ordered from them on a Sunday night and the cards still did not arrive in time for the next FNM.
ICE Imports has fair prices and is much better on the east coast IMO
Are you sure about that? By my calculations, you end up with 50x of 56 different expensive cards for somewhere in the $600 range. Considering just the fact that 50x Wastelands are worth about $3,750 at the moment, just that single card leaves enough value to make any deck in Legacy and have leftovers, and then the rest is flat out gravy.
Seriously, Dragon's Maze and M14 are a gigantic raised middle finger to MTG players.
Both sets were only drafted/given as prizes/door packs for like two months, and contain nothing but garbage, worthless, unplayed cards except for 1-2 per set.
Seriously, DGM is Voice, Blood Baron or nothing. M14 is slightly better with Mutavault and a few planeswalkers but is otherwise also garbage. You can open an entire box of these sets and come away with $20 or less in value. I'm not one of those people that thinks a box should net you $200 in cards but you should get at least half or 3/4 of your money in value. Not with these sets. Flat out insulting.
Don't let the picture of Chairman Mao fool you, China is no less Capitalist than the USA. Other companies will compete with them, or they will make improvement to the product to increase sales. It's how business works - part of running a business is growth and every business is always trying to grow.
No, it does not. $650 is really not much money, a lot of Standard decks cost about half of that at the moment. A playset of FoW and Wasteland total up to $460 together going by TCG mid. So $650 for 100 Force of Wills and Tarmogoyfs plus 100 each of 53 other valuable cards? Split the cost 50/50 with a friend and for $325 someone now has Legacy staples enough to trade away for thousands of dollars in real card value. The investment gives someone the option to play several decks, enough cards to trade away for a lifetime, and then some. $650 is a lot more accessible than the price barrier WOTC has allowed to block the entrance into Legacy/Modern. That is what should give pause to everyone.
This is what happens when an entire format relies on $80 uncommons and $100+ lands that can't be reprinted because 18 years ago WOTC made a promise to a bunch of people who have no idea how investing actually works in the real world.
Pretty much every avenue you can imagine - crackdown on players, shut down the company, etc. is either unrealistic, unwieldy, or ineffective. They have a choice now, to abolish the reserve list and lower the massive barrier of entry to Legacy and even Modern that has given these counterfeiters a market in the first place.
We can sit here and talk of the "consequences" of this but I must ask, did the RIAA shutting down Napster end music downloading forever? And as for the "risks" of ordering these online, I also point out that there are many illicit products which I will not name, that can be delivered to you from places which I also will not name, of which the best efforts of Federal law enforcement has not been able to stop either, which makes fake magic cards look like quite a trivial manner.
There are many ways for WOTC to react to this, and I hope they choose the right way as I have enjoyed this game for a long time and would hate to see its events turned into witch hunts and its market ruined.
One could say that comic book characters, medieval stories, even ancient carvings, all depict the same things...
That is a perfect example. For many months now, I have noticed the FNM metagame is very different than the pro-level metagame, and the main reason simply has been price. It is definitely hard to justify paying $200 for a set of VoR's just to go to FNM and win like 6 packs once in a while.
It seems like Jund is a very, very large portion of the metagame at those events, more than ever. Except, there isn't really too much from the new sets in it save for Scavenging Ooze. Now don't get me wrong, the Ooze is awesome and nukes the Rites decks, but otherwise, the deck already had Thrag and Huntmaster to stabilize and gain life.
So I was talking to some people at the LGS and I pointed a few things out - a few months ago, the metagame there was over 2/3 R/x aggro decks, and these days it is much more varied. Talking to some with those decks, the main reason many were playing it was not necessarily because of metagame choices or them liking the deck itself or those particular colors, but simply because it was the cheapest deck to build, by far.
So I'm wondering if this new resurgence of Jund is not really a metagame factor, but simply a price factor. I wanted to build Jund back in January but decided not to, after all, 20+ nonbasic lands, playsets of $20 Thrags and $25 Bonfires and $27 Huntmasters gets really pricey, really fast. MTG is a fun game, but when a Standard deck costs nearly six hundred bucks, many people wonder, for good reason, if it's really worth spending that much to play FNM.
But now that most of these cards are down as low as $6,7,8 a piece Jund is a lot more realistic to build. So, I'd like some input from the community:
What is your local metagame like? How much of a determining factor is price to people at your shop and the decks they build?
I think the issue is that WOTC knows that Legacy & even Modern having a finite supply of extremely expensive and ever-increasing cards is simply not a good idea.
I just wish they would grow a pair and tackle the reserve list issues and other reprint traditions head on, rather than try and sneak tournament staples into the collector's sets and special products.
Modern Masters was failure, once again because they are too chicken to actually just print the cards that people need to play. So Kitchen Finks dropped two bucks in price and Goyf/Bob are still $150 and $80 each. Wow Wizards, great job at making a format easier to get into.
Piers Morgan interviewing Rachael Jeantel (Trayvon Martin's "friend") - quite possibly the lowest "journalism" has ever gone.
Then I saw they stuck a foil Jace in there and turned it from a collector's set to a crazy chase product. What a slap in the face to fans.
The issue is that the 24/7 Cable News networks, in their efforts to compete with second-by-second social media, have resorted to this level of utter garbage "reporting" and complete lack of fact checking or editing.
I mean, what was the story here? Okay, so let's say we DID know the names of the pilots. Did they have any information about why their names were even relevant? Were these pilots previously involved in errors or dangerous behaviors? Did the news have any reason why the names of the pilots matter?
No.
They just reported the names for the sake of reporting something. Junk Food TV that serves no news purpose. And this is what they get. Pranked by an intern by one of the oldest jokes in the book. Several people at the TV station actually read that **** with a straight face and believed it was real.
Morons. That's what they get. How about reporting some real news?