MTG Salvation

Quote from Asterisk

What needs to happen is that inflation and minimum wage increase proportionately to each other. This way, Old Money is obsoleted over time, while people have more incentive to work hard for New Money. The lower classes can continue enjoying their relative luxuries in comparison to millions people who live in daily fear and suffering.

edit - better public education is also a must

If the raise in the minimum wage is artificial this just squeezes the middle class by devaluing their labor. The minimum wage gives big corporations who can afford to pay it leverage to edge out mom and pop shops who could thrive on value before. It's just like other regulations. Why do you think the insurance industry is the most regulated industry and yet you still hear people getting ripped off by them all the time? Why do you think big insurance companies wanted Obamacare? Regulation squeezes competition who can't afford lawyers.

The wealthy will always outearn inflation. Inflation increases the wealth disparity. That's what has really happened in the last 100 years. In 1900 over 90% worked for themselves (most in agriculture but still) now more than 90% work for someone else.

It is the arc length. ~160 sounds about right.

The DDM (Domestic Mail Manual) section 200 Regarding Commercial Letters or Cards:

3.12.1 Machinability
To ensure transport through automated mail processing machines, a mailpiece and its contents must bend easily when subjected to a transport belt tension of 40 pounds around an 11-inch-diameter drum.

It specifically identifies credit cards as flexible enough to be machineable. Simply holding a toploader (with a land in it perhaps) and folding it greater than 160% should be enough to convince them that the object will indeed bend around an 11 inch drum.

Personally I try to avoid clerks because I don't want to have this argument. I use the APC or simply buy stamps and then stamp them and dump them in the outgoing.

http://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/201.htm#1042622

I promise you the clerk has never read this.

Quote from rickster_

maybe there's potential, but you won't make insane gains like you would buying fist of suns, through the breach and goryo's vengeance while dzyl won with it on camera

I watched that on the stream this morning at work with no access to MTGO. Let me tell you it hurt, but that kind of stuff happens when you work on the weekends. It's one of the reasons I tend to follow longer trends that don't depend on being online exactly when something breaks.

I too am not a fan of the fact that it's colored. Part of what you're paying for is the color and part is the collectors case et. It's still not $100 worth.

Quote from fnord

Precious metals have no more intrinsic value than scraps of paper. Silver and gold have value because people think they do.

Silver is actually an industrial metal, so it does have a use and people would buy it for that.

Quote from Hobbitg

Why does it feature the queen when it's in dollars?
I would have preferred it if it was in sterling.

Pretty sure they are NZ dollars.

Quote from Praion

I basically don't even know what these Decks are (trying to do). I realise i should look at the Primers here but the forum is kind of supoptimal in that it doesn't have the nice "hover over a cardname and it will show it" that the mtg.com site has which just makes stuff hard to figure out.

Unless you're on a mobile device, is it that much work to click on a card name? I like hover over too, and actually if you use either firefox or chrome someone has developed a plugin to do just that.

Quote from Lorelorn

From M15 forward, Mythics and Rares will be harder to forge.

I'll be honest; I have no idea what the current forgery rate is for standard and modern mythics and rares, but this seems aimed squarely at those areas of concern. The change to a proprietary font is also part of this.

From a market point of view, I think this makes both a Modern Masters 2 and standard reprints of other modern-legal rares and mythics a certainty. Presumably both those formats will be helped when the most expensive cards are also the hardest to copy.

Why would you bother copying a MM2 Goyf when you could copy a MM1 Goyf and still pocket $145 give or take.

My problem with these events is that you have 2000 people coming and the prize is still only $10k and 4 PT slots. (Is it still only 4 w/ an event of that size?) Who collects the rake on a tournament of that size? The TO? Wizards?

I've always wondered how many of those doorbusters end up on ebay. My wife and dad went out 2 years ago and got a couple of the sales. Two weeks later 2 of the 3 things she bought were on sale at a different store for the same price. So you camped out 3 hours on Thanksgiving night for a midnight sale, then 2 hours in the store to get 3 items, two of which you could have bought at your own convienience to save $20 on a $60 bike?

That amounts to $4 an hour on thanksgiving night. NO THANKS!

The big hoopla this year was that more and more stores were just opening up earlier on Thanksgiving day. People were claiming they were boycotting, but my cousin was driving home from dinner and said the line at the Target near his house was out to the dang street, nearly half a mile long.

I HATE the materialism of this season, esp since it's a bunch of religious holidays that have been over-consumerized.

It doesn't work the way you want it to. IE you gain protection from Delaying Shield.

Protection prevents 4 things.
D amage
E quip/enchant
B locking
T argeting

This is life loss and not damage. If Delaying Shield said, for each counter on it, it deals 1 damage to you unless you pay.. then the combo would work.

Also, Moved to Legacy

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Just to make things clear: when people say that packs cost X, they mean when you buy them off the secondary market. You buy tix at the store, but packs from dealer with tix. Tix are the online currency, worth about a dollar each.

usually 10-15 matches, and a solid SB plan for every major meta archetype.

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I just used it for a few auctions, I'll post this here for others in case they need it.

I had three auctions finish with international buyers, two were fine. The third was an unmitigated disaster. My buyer lived in a VATS exempt UK territory.

the Global Shipping Service (GSS), apparently couldn't handle it. The problem was, since his territory was a UK owned territory, GSS thought it could ship there, but in reality it can't.

So what was happening was the buyer would go to do the paypal, and paypal would throw an error "Shipping fees not specified, contact Seller".

When you do GSS, you can't invoice a buyer, so there was *nothing* I could do.

So I called Ebay...5 times...

Call 1 - "It's a GSS problem, you'll have to contact them directly" (GSS: It's an Ebay problem, contact them)

Call 2 - "All you have to do is manually invoice the buyer, message him and ask him for his paypal address, it'll link up to the auction" (Against Ebay ToS to setup the transaction that way, and it will literally block you from asking for the person's paypal address, or giving it to someone else)

Call 3 - "It's a Paypal problem, you have to call them", when I asked "Aren't you Paypal? Ebay owns it", "Oh, um, it's a separate number". When I called into Paypal, the automated voice system routed me right back to Ebay customer service because it was an Ebay problem, never even talked to a Paypal rep.

Call 4 - "All you have to do is invoice the customer", after 5 minutes of explaining that Ebay doesn't allow that, "Ship the package to Kentucky, once it gets there they'll collect the fees and you'll receive your money". When I asked if he was instructing me to ship without getting paid, "Yes, they'll collect the fees". When I told him that Ebay doesn't let you print the shipping invoice without payment "Oh, um...hold on one minute". I asked for a supervisor at this point and was told "I'll connect you with a supervisor after I'm finished helping you" (It was pretty apparent he could not help me)

Call 5 - "It's a GSS problem, let me connect you to an Ebay GSS specialist". 5 minutes later the nice lady confirmed the problem was GSS doesn't service his address, and reset my auction so I could manually invoice. She was knowledgable and efficient.

So if you use GSS, and you run into a problem like mine, ask for the Ebay GSS specialist, the first line of customer service doesn't seem to understand the GSS at all.

You think this place is bad, you should see Smogon.

It's the complete opposite: laissez-faire moderation causing an almost complete lack of discourse. "That idea is bad. You are bad." is considered acceptable. It's a **** hole.

I much prefer it here where, yanno, maturity is stressed.

Menorah of Tawnos.

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