Speculators and their influence will exist as long as individual Magic cards have differing monetary values. I think it's pretty obvious that universal cost-lowering has never been Wizards' primary goal with any of their products. Their primary concern has never been making things universally affordable, but to keep some amount of interest alive in the various formats. I actually think that universal affordability would have a seriously negative effect on the sustainability of the game and its continued development.
Periodic reprints to shift market prices around as well as maintain/increase interest in these formats. It's a much better and sustainable business strategy than universal affordability.
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- Sillia
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Jun 25, 2015
Sillia posted a message on The Running Tally of Current Sets for June 22, 2015Posted in: Articles -
Jun 25, 2015
Sillia posted a message on The Running Tally of Current Sets for June 22, 2015I think the mistake comes from misunderstanding the economics at work here. In general, people don't adjust their budget to the price, they just buy what the budget allows. What you've got is your average player looking to spend at most some amount X on a Modern (or Legacy or whatever) deck, and they always look to get the most that they can for their money.Posted in: Articles
When reprints happen, the price on those reprinted cards falls. However, this doesn't mean that the player will spend less than X, it just means that the player will happily buy at the new lower prices on the reprints and spend the "leftover" money on other items - non-reprinted staple cards. Combine this with the fact the quantity of the format staples that weren't reprinted hasn't changed, and you've got a price-rising stew going.
Basically, the total amount of money being spent on cards doesn't decrease with reprints, even if the reprints drive individual prices down. The reprints cause the stuff that wasn't reprinted to rise in price to compensate for the vacuum left by the reprints.
The only way for Wizards to actually lower the overall buy-in price for Modern is to literally reprint all of the things to increase the supply in tandem with the size of the player base to maintain some sort of equilibrium. Otherwise, the demand-driven prices will always rise in whatever wasn't reprinted to compensate for the prices lowering on the reprinted cards. - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
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His modern play is as 3.6-of in grixis control/twin decks that make up around 5% of the meta combined. A 50+% drop (to $35 or less) is damn near inevitable. There is practically zero chance that he will maintain a price higher than Dark Confidant or Vendilion Clique post rotation when he sees less play than either of them.
Unless something changes, I don't think that OriJace will do anything to unseat his main competition in the two-drop category, which would be Tarmogoyf (24%, 4-of), Dark Confidant (10.29%, 4-of), Spellskite (44.57%, 2-of), and Snapcaster Mage (19.43%, 3-of). Comparatively speaking, new cards like Atarka's Command and Monastery Swiftspear show up twice as often in modern as OriJace does. The numbers we're seeing suggest that he's a big deal in one deck, but that deck doesn't make up a particularly large part of the meta, and that suggests that he's due for a huge crash upon rotation.
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Every box of BFZ has a baseline value, and that's determined by how much it costs to obtain from distributors. They sell to stores, who turn around and sell them to you, the player. As time passes, there is (effectively) no limit to the number of boxes players can buy because Wizards will just keep printing more.
We can mathematically calculate how many of each card you can expect to get if you open a large number of boxes.
So, because there's a baseline price for a box, and we can expect a probabilistic number of each card (even including the expeditions) after opening enough boxes, the base price of the box sets the price of the individual cards of the set. If a card like Drana, Liberator of Malakir jumps in value, she doesn't just gain it out of nowhere. That card will siphon off a little bit of value from every other card in the set in order to rise.
The expeditions do this too. Because we can calculate how many expeditions you can expect to get per box (it's something like... 1 expedition shows up per case or so. Possibly more.), if somebody is willing to pay $300 for one, that means some card store out there is going to open boxes until they find that expedition to sell. But after opening all those boxes, they have a ton of singles that aren't worth as much, and they have to get rid of them or they'll end up eating a loss on paying for all the packs they opened to find the expedition. Those expeditions are sucking the value out of the other cards in the set.
So yeah, there's going to be a price drop. People will want certain cards, so they'll open packs. People will look to sell off their less-desired cards just to help recoup the cost of buying those packs. You can expect that most of the lesser cards in this set to be worthless, and even the better ones not to be particularly valuable because of the siphoning effect of the expedition cards. Even the basic lands are more valuable than normal ones, which will also siphon off value from the regular cards in the set.
Combine this with an set that's generally lower in power level than the previous few blocks and you're looking at a recipe for a handful of very expensive cards and a whole lot of bulk.
According to the wiki here, Wizards distributes 7 foil card per box. If we go with the equivalent rarity distribution (10 commons, 3 uncommons, 7/8 rare, 1/8 mythic), that would mean that you would get 1 mythic, 7 rares, 24 uncommons, and 80 commons out of every 112 foil-bearing packs. Even if you cut out any foil basic lands (which would dilute this even further), at 7 foils per box, you're looking at 16 boxes per foil mythic - not 6 boxes. 16 boxes per foil mythic actually puts it in the ballpark of the original "priceless treasures" Zendikar print run (1 per 18-19 boxes).
That said, I'm not entirely sure about that foil distribution. Does anyone actually know? If the chances are lower to obtain an expedition, it would drive their individual prices up, but likely not have much effect on each box any more than the priceless treasure inserts did.
They're hoping to combo it with tokens and Battlefield Thaumaturge.
Is Jeskai Ascendancy really a thing in modern? I usually look to mtggoldfish for a meta breakdown and Jeskai Ascendancy only showed up once after going 3-1 in a single modern daily. Even so.. I don't really think that a spot in a tier 2 deck is going to maintain its value. My verdict for Caryatid is still to dump it.
I'm skeptical. Just comparing it to the other CMC 4 cards in modern right now, most of them have a much higher impact on the board. Cards like Splinter Twin, Past in Flames, and Scapeshift will outright win you the game if they resolve. The others, like Cryptic Command, Siege Rhino, Supreme Verdict, have a huge board impact. Collected Company has to compete with those cards in the four-drop slot, and I'm trying to think of what sort of consistent result from resolving one could have as much impact as one of the other cards I just listed. Double Goyf?
Dump them both. Caryatid sees no play in any format but standard. Birds, Hierarch, and Deathrite tend to edge out the Caryatid in all of the formats they are legal in, and it has to compete with two-drops like Tarmogoyf and Scavenging Ooze for a slot. No chance. Rabblemaster is too slow for burn and doesn't push modern or legacy goblins any further - you always want Goblin Chieftain as your three drop in a goblin deck, so you're looking to fill the 3-drop slot #5+, and you've got to compete with Goblin Matron (tutor) or Goblin King (evasion) for that.