What cards that are NECESSARY to play to play in modern are PROHIBITEVLY expensive? Name 6 please.
The Top 8 at the Grand Prix on 3/9/14 ran a collective 23 Misty Rainforest, 16 Verdant Catacombs, 13 Voice of Resurgence, 15 Chord of Calling, 15 Noble Hierarch, 8 Mox Opal, and 5 Linvala, Keeper of Silence. Special note on that last one: although the overall count is low, 5 of the top 8 decks ran exactly one copy.
So, in answer to your question:
Misty Rainforest
Verdant Catacombs
Chord of Calling
Noble Hierarch
Mox Opal
Linvala, Keeper of Silence
Of these, Voice of Resurgence is far and away the most affordable, checking in at a mere $25 a pop. I'd also like to note that there were 22 copies of Thoughtseize in the Top 8 as well, which is only not prohibitively expensive because, surprise! It was just reprinted!!
A "reprint" can and has destroyed the value of many cards in players' collections. Why do you get to decide every card should be reprinted in a normal price booster from time to time so all players can access them for pennies on the dollar? See what I did there?
No offense, but every discussion these days leads to the same point. Magic is getting too damn expensive. I feel every (Modern) card should be available as a single for $5-10. It would be better for the game. And the players. Not for the collectors. Who gives a flying F about collectors? Everyone who loves playing this game, whether it's casual, competitive or otherwise, is hurt by overpriced cards. The only ones laughing here are the "speculators" and "dealers", the scum who buy out cards just to get rich over some poor kid's back. Well F that. Give me a $75 event deck for every damn archetype out there. Make it $100. I'd LOVE it. And so would 99% of the PLAYERS of this game. The only benefit of high prices is if you plan on selling the cards you have. Ergo, not a player. A shark.
This logic seems to ignore the simple fact that numerous collectors are players. Who gives a flying F about collectors? I'm sure the collectors do and unless you sell off your cards every time you buy new cards, then you have a collection and are therefore a collector by definition. What you are arguing for, is that people with better collections than yourself, have their collections devalued so you can more easily acquire a playable collection similar to theirs. That is really what it comes down to and I along with most people who love to both play the game and collect the cards in the game reject such a self-serving argument.
No, what he's arguing for is removing the barrier to entry that currently exists within the Modern environment. You can spin it all you want, but there's an objective fact at play here: cards that are necessary to be competitive within the format are prohibitively expensive, more now than ever. How is that healthy?
Personally, I find that riffling over and over tends to bend cards in one direction, so when I do riffle, I periodically bridge shuffle to offset that. I don't have any scientific basis for this, but I know that cards that are consistently riffled "curve" over time. Bending them in the other direction occasionally seems to help prevent that.
I've noticed that Star City Games has made a couple of changes to their UI when searching for cards. First, they removed the "search by price" option from the Advanced Search page. Second, they seem to be using a form of code for displaying card prices that makes it difficult (if not impossible) to copy/paste price data from search results.
To put this in context, I occasionally used their price search to look for overvalued cards that I might be able to find on the cheap from a local not-so-savvy hobby shop (like looking for uncommons valued higher than $5). I also sometimes dumped their price data for an entire set (say, Commander 2013) into an Excel sheet, so that I could determine the dollar value of precons, which would assist how I determined purchase priority. I recognize that this is not what the pricing data is intended for, but I don't exactly think I'm using it for nefarious purposes.
I also understand that SCG's prices are skewed, but the way they formatted their search results meant that I could aggregate their prices into a spreadsheet relatively easily, and with minimal effort. Now it seems that that resource is gone, because I can't search by price and can't copy/paste price info.
Has anyone else used this information as a resource? Does anyone have a means to circumvent the way they display price data? Alternatively, what's the best source of bulk price data available?
My official response for where to display your collection is this: somewhere away from light, heat and moisture. Magic cards don't like any of those things.
Binders will work as long as they're stored somewhere that's not going to get hot or humid. If you're concerned about sets being too large for binders, fear not: modern "large" sets tend to have ~250 cards, and "small" sets have ~150.
And if that becomes an issue anyway, get a few large (2"-3") three-ring binders and a boatload of 9-pocket 3-hole pages. Problem solved.
If you keep doing this, though, your collection will probably hit a critical mass at some point where switching to 5,000-count boxes just makes sense.
How many people are really going to quit Magic because Wizard reprinted Reserved cards? Collectors and hoarders dont play the game so they cant quit it.
It's not about that, I honestly think it's more about the perception of the company going back on its word.
Calling the people who push WOTC to maintain the reserved list "steadfast supporters" of WOTC is akin to calling a Wallstreet day trader making money on oil futures a "steadfast supporter" of the energy industry.
They arent collectors. Collectors dont care about reprints because they can continue to collect the originals. They are investors manipulating a system to cash in on the insane and arbitrary limitation that WOTC has placed on themselves.
While I don't completely disagree with your position, I do think you're pigeonholing early adopters as being strictly investors. These are the people who bought into the game in its infancy, who supported it when it wasn't popular. They maintain collections (as you would call them, "investments") to this day and have probably done a lot over the past 20 years to help popularize the game. I'd hazard a guess that many of them remain active in the MTG community, and some may still play in sanctioned tournaments. I think it's unfair to paint them all with the same brush as investors who manipulate the game's economy for their own benefit.
Nevertheless, I'm sure there are a few folks out there who want the RL to persist, and if you were to look just at the number of people who want to maintain it vs. the number of people who want to eliminate it, the answer would be obvious. But there's more to it than that, namely the fact that Wizards promised not to eliminate the RL.
If they did renege on that promise and abolish the List, don't you suppose there would be a general loss of confidence in Wizards as a company for going back on its word?
This is a complex, highly nuanced situation involving public relations and emotional responses. It's not as easy as just deciding whether they want to piss off Group A vs. Group B.
Instead they alienate a large portion of the community that have supported them from the begining and collectively say screw you to the players, hoarders and collectors mean more to us.
~shrug~ It's a PR thing. They lose more ground by breaking their promise than they gain by pandering to the current player base. How many people are *really* going to quit Magic because Wizards won't reprint Reserved cards? The game is still playable without them; hell, it's still tremendously enjoyable and is more popular now than it ever has been.
Honestly, they have little to gain by abolishing the Reserved List, and a lot more to lose.
What I dont get is why Wizards wont grab their balls back from this miniscule group of people.
Wizards, and Hasbro by extension, would never be able to shake the perception that they sold out their longest-running, most steadfast supporters ostensibly to make a quick buck by reprinting high-demand cards. It would be a crushing blow to the company's public persona.
Decks would effectively be able to play up to 8 of the same original dual if they wanted though, which would change the format a lot unless you banned the old ones which would cause more rage than it would erase.
And there's always this to consider, which adds another dimension of unwinnability to an already unwinnable scenario.
The Reserved List is a holdover from a time in the game when having it made sense. It has become increasingly irrelevant over the years, and its existence now borders on damaging. Obviously there is pressure from the community to abolish the RL and freely reprint the cards on it, as appropriate, but Wizards needs to balance that against the possibility of offending a portion of their player base and losing face as a company by going back on their word. They have painted themselves into a corner, and there's no right way to resolve the situation.
But I don't think workarounds are in the cards here (no pun intended). If Wizards were interested in getting RL cards into print, they'd find a way. They could be printing cards like:
Soda Springs
Land - Island Mountain
When Soda Springs enters the battlefield, you may look at the bottom card of your library.
No one could possibly argue that it's a functional reprint of Volcanic Island, because it has different abilities. Yet it serves the same purpose and it's new ability has negligible impact on the game state.
Like I said, if Wizards really wanted to work around the RL, they could. But their integrity as a corporation seems more important to them, and I can't really blame them for that.
I can handle that.
The Top 8 at the Grand Prix on 3/9/14 ran a collective 23 Misty Rainforest, 16 Verdant Catacombs, 13 Voice of Resurgence, 15 Chord of Calling, 15 Noble Hierarch, 8 Mox Opal, and 5 Linvala, Keeper of Silence. Special note on that last one: although the overall count is low, 5 of the top 8 decks ran exactly one copy.
So, in answer to your question:
Misty Rainforest
Verdant Catacombs
Chord of Calling
Noble Hierarch
Mox Opal
Linvala, Keeper of Silence
Of these, Voice of Resurgence is far and away the most affordable, checking in at a mere $25 a pop. I'd also like to note that there were 22 copies of Thoughtseize in the Top 8 as well, which is only not prohibitively expensive because, surprise! It was just reprinted!!
No, what he's arguing for is removing the barrier to entry that currently exists within the Modern environment. You can spin it all you want, but there's an objective fact at play here: cards that are necessary to be competitive within the format are prohibitively expensive, more now than ever. How is that healthy?
I've noticed that Star City Games has made a couple of changes to their UI when searching for cards. First, they removed the "search by price" option from the Advanced Search page. Second, they seem to be using a form of code for displaying card prices that makes it difficult (if not impossible) to copy/paste price data from search results.
To put this in context, I occasionally used their price search to look for overvalued cards that I might be able to find on the cheap from a local not-so-savvy hobby shop (like looking for uncommons valued higher than $5). I also sometimes dumped their price data for an entire set (say, Commander 2013) into an Excel sheet, so that I could determine the dollar value of precons, which would assist how I determined purchase priority. I recognize that this is not what the pricing data is intended for, but I don't exactly think I'm using it for nefarious purposes.
I also understand that SCG's prices are skewed, but the way they formatted their search results meant that I could aggregate their prices into a spreadsheet relatively easily, and with minimal effort. Now it seems that that resource is gone, because I can't search by price and can't copy/paste price info.
Has anyone else used this information as a resource? Does anyone have a means to circumvent the way they display price data? Alternatively, what's the best source of bulk price data available?
Thanks!
Would you please set my custom to: Here against my better judgment
Thank you!!!
Binders will work as long as they're stored somewhere that's not going to get hot or humid. If you're concerned about sets being too large for binders, fear not: modern "large" sets tend to have ~250 cards, and "small" sets have ~150.
And if that becomes an issue anyway, get a few large (2"-3") three-ring binders and a boatload of 9-pocket 3-hole pages. Problem solved.
If you keep doing this, though, your collection will probably hit a critical mass at some point where switching to 5,000-count boxes just makes sense.
It's not about that, I honestly think it's more about the perception of the company going back on its word.
While I don't completely disagree with your position, I do think you're pigeonholing early adopters as being strictly investors. These are the people who bought into the game in its infancy, who supported it when it wasn't popular. They maintain collections (as you would call them, "investments") to this day and have probably done a lot over the past 20 years to help popularize the game. I'd hazard a guess that many of them remain active in the MTG community, and some may still play in sanctioned tournaments. I think it's unfair to paint them all with the same brush as investors who manipulate the game's economy for their own benefit.
Nevertheless, I'm sure there are a few folks out there who want the RL to persist, and if you were to look just at the number of people who want to maintain it vs. the number of people who want to eliminate it, the answer would be obvious. But there's more to it than that, namely the fact that Wizards promised not to eliminate the RL.
If they did renege on that promise and abolish the List, don't you suppose there would be a general loss of confidence in Wizards as a company for going back on its word?
This is a complex, highly nuanced situation involving public relations and emotional responses. It's not as easy as just deciding whether they want to piss off Group A vs. Group B.
~shrug~ It's a PR thing. They lose more ground by breaking their promise than they gain by pandering to the current player base. How many people are *really* going to quit Magic because Wizards won't reprint Reserved cards? The game is still playable without them; hell, it's still tremendously enjoyable and is more popular now than it ever has been.
Honestly, they have little to gain by abolishing the Reserved List, and a lot more to lose.
Wizards, and Hasbro by extension, would never be able to shake the perception that they sold out their longest-running, most steadfast supporters ostensibly to make a quick buck by reprinting high-demand cards. It would be a crushing blow to the company's public persona.
That's why.
And there's always this to consider, which adds another dimension of unwinnability to an already unwinnable scenario.
But I don't think workarounds are in the cards here (no pun intended). If Wizards were interested in getting RL cards into print, they'd find a way. They could be printing cards like:
Soda Springs
Land - Island Mountain
When Soda Springs enters the battlefield, you may look at the bottom card of your library.
No one could possibly argue that it's a functional reprint of Volcanic Island, because it has different abilities. Yet it serves the same purpose and it's new ability has negligible impact on the game state.
Like I said, if Wizards really wanted to work around the RL, they could. But their integrity as a corporation seems more important to them, and I can't really blame them for that.