The Challenger decks for standard are a great way to give players a decent starting point to enter the standard format. Standard rotates constantly though, making these decks have a limited lifetime. In modern, such challenger decks would be a good entry for a much longer period of time. Additionally, modern has a lot more decks that are good and playable, making the decision of what to put in these potential challenger decks a lot more complicated, specifically when keeping in mind how long these are going to be viable.
But ignoring that all that, what would you like to see should Wizards ever decide to create FNM viable prebuilt modern decks?
Personally I would love to see a deck with Snapcaster Mage with the Promo Artwork, 1-2 Vendillion cliques and other good stuff.
Nah I would expect something like the BW Tokens deck. Cards like Shocks, Check Lands, the nuts and bolts of Path and IoK...maybe a Filter Land, a Fetch (single) and stuff like that.
Pre-Con with MULTIPLE $50 dollar cards? That would be them shooting themselves in the foot.
We already had the modern tokens deck with very nice value in there (paths, IoKs, lands). I think were they to make another modern event deck, that's what it would look like.
I think you could do things like Elves, Stompy, Burn, maybe Merfolk and Death and Taxes. Storm might be a good one to do. Maybe a Cheap land destruction or R/G aggro deck could work. Mono-Blue or Eldrazi Tron could work.
Nah I would expect something like the BW Tokens deck. Cards like Shocks, Check Lands, the nuts and bolts of Path and IoK...maybe a Filter Land, a Fetch (single) and stuff like that.
Pre-Con with MULTIPLE $50 dollar cards? That would be them shooting themselves in the foot.
I know it's unrealistic, still fun to think about. Although they wouldn't necessarily shoot themselves in the foot, it's more the secondary market that would be affected.
When they can put Snaps into a Master product as the chase Mythic, yes, throwing the value of that card into the dumpster with multiple in a pre-con, is Wizards shooting themselves in the foot.
Pissing off all the secondary market sellers (that are their partners) by gutting the cost of high priced singles, is Wizards shooting themselves in the foot.
I could see something like a Bant Company pre con, 4 Collected Company, 4 spell quellers, 4 KOTR and then some mix of budget substitutions like avacyn's pilgrim and elvish mystics in the dorks slot, scavenging ooze and maybe strangleroot geists or something in the creature slots. The only real question is whether the manabase is at all workable on a budget and without fetches, which I'm not entirely sure they are.
Elves and Burn would both be super viable budget entries into the format via modern challenger deck. 8 rack wouldn't be too bad either with lots of hand disruption and fatal pushes and it would build towards a variety of black based discard decks like BGx or Mardu Pyromancer or Grixis or Shadow decks.
8 rack wouldn't be too bad either with lots of hand disruption and fatal pushes and it would build towards a variety of black based discard decks like BGx or Mardu Pyromancer or Grixis or Shadow
The best thing an 8 rack would do is introduce balack bordered new art racks. I think that doll is too cute for one of the nastiest deck style there is.
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MtG is where you can hate white players or black players, and still not be racist.
I would expect UG Merfolk without the expensive cards. Lets them put some Standard cards in there and only print inexpensive things (read: no Vial, no Cavern, no duals outside of Botanical Sanctum). You can put in Unclaimed Territory to proxy as Cavern. Put a few cheap lords in there including Mistbinder and call it a day. Seems very doable to me.
I would expect UG Merfolk without the expensive cards. Lets them put some Standard cards in there and only print inexpensive things (read: no Vial, no Cavern, no duals outside of Botanical Sanctum). You can put in Unclaimed Territory to proxy as Cavern. Put a few cheap lords in there including Mistbinder and call it a day. Seems very doable to me.
I would expect UG Merfolk without the expensive cards. Lets them put some Standard cards in there and only print inexpensive things (read: no Vial, no Cavern, no duals outside of Botanical Sanctum). You can put in Unclaimed Territory to proxy as Cavern. Put a few cheap lords in there including Mistbinder and call it a day. Seems very doable to me.
UG fish seems certain doable, but we've just had the merfolk duel deck, cursecatcher in MM25, and silvergill adept in standard. This is a deck they're already trying to get in our hands on the cheap imo.
Tokens was a solid deck choice to begin with, but many of the cards that have it value have drifted down (iok for example).
I could see an 8whack deck easily being an option. I don't think the decks want many 4x of because the idea is for you to have a playable deck, but then trade/but from LGS to complete and optimize. Like have all 8 bushwackers but maybe 1 goblin guide, 2-3 legion loyalist, and 1 goblin chieftain. You could even throw in a goblin rabblemaster or two for good measure.
Elves can easily be done on a budget, but again we've seen a metric ton of reprints not just for modern, but also legacy recently. Eternal masters had heritage Druid, green sun zennith, and natural order. Mm25 has nettle sentinel. Dwynens elite and shaman of the pack are recent printings. Mm17 had cavern. There is an elf dual deck with ezuri coming out soon. There was an elf themed commander deck, etc. really everything for legacy is easy to get except the cradles at this point, and growing rites of itlamoc is them playing in good space imho.
You can easily do a variant of tron or eldrazi that's a weird mash up of the two, but all your chase cards are 1-2 copies at most. If you go full tron then you run the risk of speculators snatching it up, even printing it into the dirt may not stop some degree of price memory and hoarding.
There is a control shell that you can do without tanking the market, like UW or jeskai flash with spell quellers, resto angel, etc. maybe have snap as your 1 of mythic, but not more than a 1 of.
Even the new red deck has just 1 hazoret and 1 Chandra. You have to have a structure that entices people to finish up the deck.
UG fish seems certain doable, but we've just had the merfolk duel deck, cursecatcher in MM25, and silvergill adept in standard. This is a deck they're already trying to get in our hands on the cheap imo.
...
Even the new red deck has just 1 hazoret and 1 Chandra. You have to have a structure that entices people to finish up the deck.
If you put rares in it you can only put so many copies. This is especially true for legendary creatures or Planeswalkers. Part of what makes Merfolk attractive is you can put singular Merfolk lords at rare since there's a few, and there aren't $30 cards.
If we cut the Vials, all the lands, and the SB Relics, the deck price is actually around the amount that we could print. They've got a lot they can do with it. I think the fact that we have Merfolk in Standard makes it a really attractive option. You can leverage Standard players into Modern like that by giving them a nice way to transition. "Hey you know that Standard Merfolk deck? Well you can upgrade it with some other powerful Merfolk from Magic's past and then play it in Modern". That's definitely going to turn some heads.
As a reminder, if $75 is about where they want the deck to be MSRP valued. I'm guessing the whole deck has to be under $200 market value at the time of making it. They're at 3x on the challenger decks upper end, so about $200 max seems about right. I also think with Modern, they're more willing to skirt the idea of 1-ofs and print a more playable product, since the cost is higher and is more likely to attract competitive/semi-competitive rather than casual players.
Nah I would expect something like the BW Tokens deck. Cards like Shocks, Check Lands, the nuts and bolts of Path and IoK...maybe a Filter Land, a Fetch (single) and stuff like that.
Pre-Con with MULTIPLE $50 dollar cards? That would be them shooting themselves in the foot.
WotC doesn't care about the secondary market value of cards, though, because they don't benefit from it. A good $40, 75-card precon would make them a ton of money.
Nah I would expect something like the BW Tokens deck. Cards like Shocks, Check Lands, the nuts and bolts of Path and IoK...maybe a Filter Land, a Fetch (single) and stuff like that.
Pre-Con with MULTIPLE $50 dollar cards? That would be them shooting themselves in the foot.
WotC doesn't care about the secondary market value of cards, though, because they don't benefit from it. A good $40, 75-card precon would make them a ton of money.
Not true. WotC can’t officially acknowledge the secondary market, since they could enter that grey area of gambling. They DO, however, actively benefit by having cards that are worth money. It might not be on actual secondary market card sales, but it comes in the form of reprint equity.
They could drop Liliana of the Veil in every new Masters set. Each Masters set would sell and Liliana’s price would steadily decline with each reprint. Then, the market is flooded with Liliana, so placing her in a masters set no longer “sells” packs because they’ve crushed her value. Instead, if they stagger printings and control the supply, they can squeeze out more money over time. It’s a smart long game to not overprint valuable cards.
The trick for them is to print cards just enough where supply is satisfied, but not so much that it completely destroys the value of their high dollar cards. It's a tough balance.
When card values are high, they are basically printing money by adding cards like Liliana, or Chalice into a set. So yes, they DO benefit by allowing the prices to creep higher before a reprint.
Nah I would expect something like the BW Tokens deck. Cards like Shocks, Check Lands, the nuts and bolts of Path and IoK...maybe a Filter Land, a Fetch (single) and stuff like that.
Pre-Con with MULTIPLE $50 dollar cards? That would be them shooting themselves in the foot.
WotC doesn't care about the secondary market value of cards, though, because they don't benefit from it. A good $40, 75-card precon would make them a ton of money.
I think your going to have a hard time convincing me of that. The secondary market impacting reprint value has a huge relevancy to Wizards prolonged health.
Mono green elves with like 2 CoCo, 1-2 Ezuri and maybe a nykthos shrine.
Mono red goblins with like 1-2 each legion loyalist and goblin guide.
Mono blue tron without snapcaster or chalice of the void. Academy Ruins is expensive, maybe 1 copy of wurmcoil engine the rest is pretty cheap.
Mono white soul sisters.
Mono black 8 rack with no LOTV, maybe 1-2 thoughtseize, 2-3 inquisition and 2 fatal push.
Mono color decks are the easiest to work with. If we are just theorymongering here, depending on the price point you could include a fetchland in each one too just to say you have it. You can have EV around $80-100 on each of these, expecting they will go down due to increased supply.
Budget Tron. 12 lands, the search stuff, Chromatics, maybe 2 Wurmcoil and one Karn. The deck is expensive, but they could put a surprising amount of it in there for under $200 TCG as suggested. With the price fall a reprint would do to Chromatics and the lands, most of the value left is just in the premium wincons. One of each good one, a couple Ballista, throw in Steel Hell kite and call it actually really good.
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Project Booster Fun makes it less fun to open a booster.
I think your going to have a hard time convincing me of that. The secondary market impacting reprint value has a huge relevancy to Wizards prolonged health.
It's pretty basic economics. The lower the cost of a product, the bigger your potential overall profit is. Walmart makes billions an an extreme version of that model.
Think about how many people are priced out of Modern, even with a relatively inexpensive deck like Burn. Not only that, but Wizards sees zero profit from a constructed Modern deck. I can give you a real world example of such an effect; try and find a Commander 2017 precon anywhere. Wizards has made a ton of money from supporting that format and selling decks for $40, even though a DIY copy of, for example, the Ur-Dragon deck will set you back more than $100.
I think your going to have a hard time convincing me of that. The secondary market impacting reprint value has a huge relevancy to Wizards prolonged health.
It's pretty basic economics. The lower the cost of a product, the bigger your potential overall profit is. Walmart makes billions an an extreme version of that model.
Think about how many people are priced out of Modern, even with a relatively inexpensive deck like Burn. Not only that, but Wizards sees zero profit from a constructed Modern deck. I can give you a real world example of such an effect; try and find a Commander 2017 precon anywhere. Wizards has made a ton of money from supporting that format and selling decks for $40, even though a DIY copy of, for example, the Ur-Dragon deck will set you back more than $100.
Simple economics, huh? Did you know that the Adidas Yeezy shoe costs about $75 to manufacture, but retails near $350? So, why don’t they just lower the price to like, $150? They’d sell SO many more shoes!
Well, the consumer base who wants that shoe will eventually dry up and it may be smarter to keep, say 25% of their consumers priced out of the shoe, but charge double the money. As long as their intended consumer still buys the shoe at this inflated price, this nets them more money, helps keep the products image of exclusivity, even if they sold fewer shoes in the end.
Wal-Mart is an entirely different beast. Their entire strategy is to cast a wide net, by carrying everything under the sun. Their consumer base is anyone who needs to eat food, or whoever needs a TV, or a shirt, or a futon, or a… well, you get the idea. Wal-Mart has a WIDE consumer base, filled with people who need a wide variety of things. They can afford to charge super low prices because they can scrape small margins on everything because of the sheer volume of product they go through.
Magic is different. It’s a card game. It appeals to a very specific consumer base and Modern players (or potential Modern players) are a much smaller portion of that consumer base. Until people stop buying Masters sets, there’s really no reason for them to blow up their consistent inflow of sales by crashing their perceived card values in a single attempt to make Modern more affordable.
You could easily make Modern Challenge deck of the following
Storm
Boggles
Dredge
Burn
Just remove the expensive manabase, replace $$$ non core expensive cards with cheaper options, add only 1x of some key $ cards (gifts ungiven/kor spiritdancer/bloodghast/goblin guide) and add tutors/worst substitutes for this cards.
You could easily make Modern Challenge deck of the following
Storm
Boggles
Dredge
Burn
Just remove the expensive manabase, replace $$$ non core expensive cards with cheaper options, add only 1x of some key $ cards (gifts ungiven/kor spiritdancer/bloodghast/goblin guide) and add tutors/worst substitutes for this cards.
gifts has not been a money card for about two years, but I hear ya.
There were around 20/75 cards in the Modern Event deck at rare or higher. for some god-only-knows reason, they want to make rarity levels matter in precons. So what decks can you build around that rare & mythic: common and uncommon ratio? 8 Rack or Pox seems like a good fit. Throw 2 Liliana of the Veil in there and it would sell itself. Any Tron deck could be the same if you include 2 Karn.
But ignoring that all that, what would you like to see should Wizards ever decide to create FNM viable prebuilt modern decks?
Personally I would love to see a deck with Snapcaster Mage with the Promo Artwork, 1-2 Vendillion cliques and other good stuff.
That alone is what $300?
Nah I would expect something like the BW Tokens deck. Cards like Shocks, Check Lands, the nuts and bolts of Path and IoK...maybe a Filter Land, a Fetch (single) and stuff like that.
Pre-Con with MULTIPLE $50 dollar cards? That would be them shooting themselves in the foot.
Spirits
UB Faeries (15-6-0)
UWR Control (10-5-1)/Kiki Control/Midrange/Harbinger
UBR Cruel Control (6-4-0)/Grixis Control/Delver/Blue Jund
UWB Control/Mentor
UW Miracles/Control (currently active, 14-2-0)
BW Eldrazi & Taxes
RW Burn (9-1-0)
I do (academic) research on video games and archaeology! You can check out my open access book here: https://www.sidestone.com/books/the-interactive-past
I know it's unrealistic, still fun to think about. Although they wouldn't necessarily shoot themselves in the foot, it's more the secondary market that would be affected.
Pissing off all the secondary market sellers (that are their partners) by gutting the cost of high priced singles, is Wizards shooting themselves in the foot.
Spirits
Elves and Burn would both be super viable budget entries into the format via modern challenger deck. 8 rack wouldn't be too bad either with lots of hand disruption and fatal pushes and it would build towards a variety of black based discard decks like BGx or Mardu Pyromancer or Grixis or Shadow decks.
I could also see budget Tron
The best thing an 8 rack would do is introduce balack bordered new art racks. I think that doll is too cute for one of the nastiest deck style there is.
Grixis Death's Shadow, Jund, UW Tron, Jeskai Control, Storm, Counters Company, Eldrazi Tron, Affinity, Living End, Infect, Merfolk, Dredge, Ad Nauseam, Amulet, Bogles, Eldrazi Tron, Mono U Tron, Lantern, Mardu Pyromancer
UG fish seems certain doable, but we've just had the merfolk duel deck, cursecatcher in MM25, and silvergill adept in standard. This is a deck they're already trying to get in our hands on the cheap imo.
Tokens was a solid deck choice to begin with, but many of the cards that have it value have drifted down (iok for example).
I could see an 8whack deck easily being an option. I don't think the decks want many 4x of because the idea is for you to have a playable deck, but then trade/but from LGS to complete and optimize. Like have all 8 bushwackers but maybe 1 goblin guide, 2-3 legion loyalist, and 1 goblin chieftain. You could even throw in a goblin rabblemaster or two for good measure.
Elves can easily be done on a budget, but again we've seen a metric ton of reprints not just for modern, but also legacy recently. Eternal masters had heritage Druid, green sun zennith, and natural order. Mm25 has nettle sentinel. Dwynens elite and shaman of the pack are recent printings. Mm17 had cavern. There is an elf dual deck with ezuri coming out soon. There was an elf themed commander deck, etc. really everything for legacy is easy to get except the cradles at this point, and growing rites of itlamoc is them playing in good space imho.
You can easily do a variant of tron or eldrazi that's a weird mash up of the two, but all your chase cards are 1-2 copies at most. If you go full tron then you run the risk of speculators snatching it up, even printing it into the dirt may not stop some degree of price memory and hoarding.
There is a control shell that you can do without tanking the market, like UW or jeskai flash with spell quellers, resto angel, etc. maybe have snap as your 1 of mythic, but not more than a 1 of.
Even the new red deck has just 1 hazoret and 1 Chandra. You have to have a structure that entices people to finish up the deck.
If you put rares in it you can only put so many copies. This is especially true for legendary creatures or Planeswalkers. Part of what makes Merfolk attractive is you can put singular Merfolk lords at rare since there's a few, and there aren't $30 cards.
If we cut the Vials, all the lands, and the SB Relics, the deck price is actually around the amount that we could print. They've got a lot they can do with it. I think the fact that we have Merfolk in Standard makes it a really attractive option. You can leverage Standard players into Modern like that by giving them a nice way to transition. "Hey you know that Standard Merfolk deck? Well you can upgrade it with some other powerful Merfolk from Magic's past and then play it in Modern". That's definitely going to turn some heads.
As a reminder, if $75 is about where they want the deck to be MSRP valued. I'm guessing the whole deck has to be under $200 market value at the time of making it. They're at 3x on the challenger decks upper end, so about $200 max seems about right. I also think with Modern, they're more willing to skirt the idea of 1-ofs and print a more playable product, since the cost is higher and is more likely to attract competitive/semi-competitive rather than casual players.
Grixis Death's Shadow, Jund, UW Tron, Jeskai Control, Storm, Counters Company, Eldrazi Tron, Affinity, Living End, Infect, Merfolk, Dredge, Ad Nauseam, Amulet, Bogles, Eldrazi Tron, Mono U Tron, Lantern, Mardu Pyromancer
WotC doesn't care about the secondary market value of cards, though, because they don't benefit from it. A good $40, 75-card precon would make them a ton of money.
Not true. WotC can’t officially acknowledge the secondary market, since they could enter that grey area of gambling. They DO, however, actively benefit by having cards that are worth money. It might not be on actual secondary market card sales, but it comes in the form of reprint equity.
They could drop Liliana of the Veil in every new Masters set. Each Masters set would sell and Liliana’s price would steadily decline with each reprint. Then, the market is flooded with Liliana, so placing her in a masters set no longer “sells” packs because they’ve crushed her value. Instead, if they stagger printings and control the supply, they can squeeze out more money over time. It’s a smart long game to not overprint valuable cards.
The trick for them is to print cards just enough where supply is satisfied, but not so much that it completely destroys the value of their high dollar cards. It's a tough balance.
When card values are high, they are basically printing money by adding cards like Liliana, or Chalice into a set. So yes, they DO benefit by allowing the prices to creep higher before a reprint.
I think your going to have a hard time convincing me of that. The secondary market impacting reprint value has a huge relevancy to Wizards prolonged health.
Spirits
Mono red goblins with like 1-2 each legion loyalist and goblin guide.
Mono blue tron without snapcaster or chalice of the void. Academy Ruins is expensive, maybe 1 copy of wurmcoil engine the rest is pretty cheap.
Mono white soul sisters.
Mono black 8 rack with no LOTV, maybe 1-2 thoughtseize, 2-3 inquisition and 2 fatal push.
Mono color decks are the easiest to work with. If we are just theorymongering here, depending on the price point you could include a fetchland in each one too just to say you have it. You can have EV around $80-100 on each of these, expecting they will go down due to increased supply.
It's pretty basic economics. The lower the cost of a product, the bigger your potential overall profit is. Walmart makes billions an an extreme version of that model.
Think about how many people are priced out of Modern, even with a relatively inexpensive deck like Burn. Not only that, but Wizards sees zero profit from a constructed Modern deck. I can give you a real world example of such an effect; try and find a Commander 2017 precon anywhere. Wizards has made a ton of money from supporting that format and selling decks for $40, even though a DIY copy of, for example, the Ur-Dragon deck will set you back more than $100.
Simple economics, huh? Did you know that the Adidas Yeezy shoe costs about $75 to manufacture, but retails near $350? So, why don’t they just lower the price to like, $150? They’d sell SO many more shoes!
Well, the consumer base who wants that shoe will eventually dry up and it may be smarter to keep, say 25% of their consumers priced out of the shoe, but charge double the money. As long as their intended consumer still buys the shoe at this inflated price, this nets them more money, helps keep the products image of exclusivity, even if they sold fewer shoes in the end.
Wal-Mart is an entirely different beast. Their entire strategy is to cast a wide net, by carrying everything under the sun. Their consumer base is anyone who needs to eat food, or whoever needs a TV, or a shirt, or a futon, or a… well, you get the idea. Wal-Mart has a WIDE consumer base, filled with people who need a wide variety of things. They can afford to charge super low prices because they can scrape small margins on everything because of the sheer volume of product they go through.
Magic is different. It’s a card game. It appeals to a very specific consumer base and Modern players (or potential Modern players) are a much smaller portion of that consumer base. Until people stop buying Masters sets, there’s really no reason for them to blow up their consistent inflow of sales by crashing their perceived card values in a single attempt to make Modern more affordable.
Storm
Boggles
Dredge
Burn
Just remove the expensive manabase, replace $$$ non core expensive cards with cheaper options, add only 1x of some key $ cards (gifts ungiven/kor spiritdancer/bloodghast/goblin guide) and add tutors/worst substitutes for this cards.
gifts has not been a money card for about two years, but I hear ya.
http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/13649 - My all foil cube.