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- Teia Rabishu
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Member for 13 years, 6 months, and 23 days
Last active Tue, Oct, 4 2022 13:53:22
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Oct 9, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Magic Street Journal: Wizards Always Hurts The Ones They LoveI don't really have a lot of social media presence, though with the Magic Street Journal becoming a featured column on MTGS, updates will go through the MTGS twitter account.Posted in: Articles
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Oct 6, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Magic Street Journal: Wizards Always Hurts The Ones They LoveDon't peruse sites that pretend to be objective but actually aren't. Buy cards from your local game store or other smaller organizations rather than the largest online retailers. Rebuke blatant profiteering when you see it and make it clear that behaviour isn't tolerated in our community. Express to Wizards that you dislike where they're going with their reprint policies and demand they change things to be more player-friendly.Posted in: Articles
If the Magic community can get enough voices to do those things, you'd see some change happening. -
Oct 4, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Magic Street Journal: Wizards Always Hurts The Ones They LovePromissory estoppel can essentially "replace" consideration when it comes to contracts if it can be shown that the promisee relied upon the promissor's statements in order to make decisions (invest in Magic cards, in this case) that, should the promissor break their word, would result in economic harm. To take a simple example, let's say there are a thousand Tarmogoyfs out there being held as investments, and Wizards' direct actions cause them to lose $100 of value each. Wizards could conceivably be liable for $100,000 in damages for that alone due to the implied contract, despite there being no direct consideration from Wizards. Promissory estoppel would, in that case, serve as consideration. In other words, despite that traditional consideration isn't involved, contracts can be upheld due to the presence of promissory estoppel. There are a number of cases that show this in action, such as Feinberg v. Pheiffer Co. (employee retires on promise of a certain pension, takes legal action when the company attempts to lower the amount) or Hoffman v. Red Owl Stores Inc (person sells business on promise of obtaining a franchise, takes action when he doesn't get it).Posted in: Articles
Plus, consumer confidence isn't the only kind of confidence they'd stand to lose. Entities such as suppliers, creditors, and investors generally wouldn't be as keen to do business with a business that gets sued for breach of contract and goes back on their word. This could well lead to things like more costly credit, less favourable repayment periods for their debts, loss of investment into the company, and other similar financial repercussions. -
Oct 4, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Magic Street Journal: Wizards Always Hurts The Ones They LoveYeah, that's why I'm pretty sore that they didn't do more before closing the door forever in 2002. It must have seemed like such a big deal at the time, but it really hindered things in the long run. I realize they needed to make some form of concession to the collectors of the day, and that removing non-rare cards was a huge thing to do, but in the end it's unfortunately a case of not conservative enough to please the collectors, not radical enough to please the players. The worst kind of compromise.Posted in: Articles
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Oct 3, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Magic Street Journal: Wizards Always Hurts The Ones They LoveMost LGSes make their revenue from high-volume sales in Standard and to an extent Modern cards, along with running Limited events. They don't necessarily want to have $200+ duals and other overpriced cards sitting in their display cases gathering dust until someone comes in and buys them. That ruins their inventory turnover (essentially, the rate at which a store cycles through selling its inventory) and hogs valuable display space that could've gone to more highly salable product. If I buy a dual land for $100 and sit around for a week or three before it sells at $200, I just made the same profit I could've made buying twenty tangolands for $5 and selling for $10 each in much less time (yes, diversification comes into play to an extent, but it matters less for merchandise inventory meant to be sold ASAP than investments held onto in the long term).Posted in: Articles
This isn't an "all singles should be like a dollar" article, but an "all cards should be reasonably priced" article. $20 for a Modern staple on the level of Tiago or Liliana is fine, but $50+ is absurd (and remember, Wizards explicitly stated at the format's inception that they wanted to avoid card availability problems, implicitly including price as a factor, but such problems are only proliferating due to their reprint policies). -
Oct 2, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Magic Street Journal: Wizards Always Hurts The Ones They LoveZendikar Expeditions is technically a standalone set. It's just distributed in BFZ packs. Conceptually it's little different from FTV or other limited releases when you get right down with it. It's a silly cash grab, but it's not really a new rarity since Zendikar Expedition isn't Standard-legal in and of itself.Posted in: Articles
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Oct 2, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Magic Street Journal: Wizards Always Hurts The Ones They LoveMTGO is kind of an odd duck. I didn't mention it in the article because it doesn't influence paper Magic very much—it's a very one-way relationship there. They very clearly intend for it to be an official Magic-playing space that actually doesn't have to worry about the reserve list, since they can print Vintage Masters and the like. But for whatever reason, their management just isn't willing to give it the budget and talent it really needs to succeed. The infamous stories of bad management (nepotism, office politics, etc) combined with paying below industry average for programmers on the grounds that they should be working for the love of the game mean its direction and progress are inherently stifled. I suspect this is due to someone in Wizards' management structure not wanting MTGO to detract too heavily from the physical game. In other words, surging popularity for MTGO would be a success, unless it makes players play the physical game less. Compare this to the Duels franchise, which grabs new players who don't otherwise play Magic and tries to be a springboard into the physical game, and you can see why Wizards would overall prefer Duels to MTGO.Posted in: Articles
I really want to like MTGO, but I just can't, for a number of reasons not worth getting into here. But the gist of it is that it does solve a number of real-world Maginomics problems (while introducing a few others, such as bottleneck pricing for certain random unpopular foils to complete set redemption) and doesn't have the reserve list to worry about. It could be great if Wizards wanted it to be, but it's a long way to go. -
Sep 2, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Magic Street Journal: Glitter, Gimmicks, and Glamours - Wizards' Reprint ShenanigansPosted in: ArticlesQuote from halahel »Wizards displayed a clear respect for the importance of finance and the collectibility of the cards very early in the game's history with the creation of the Reserved List and Type 1. People like to forget that Chronicles nearly sank Magic for good.
Just because something is good once doesn't mean it will always be good (there's a reason Maro and others have openly stated how much they dislike still being bound by the reserve list), nor does it mean that different measures nowadays to target that same market segment are necessarily good. If you disagree with the psychology behind equity theory, then that's your prerogative, but you do have to wonder how many people wind up quitting after a Standard season or two because they realize how expensive this game is because so many decisions are geared more towards collectors and investors than players. Even Modern is getting to be as expensive as Legacy was only a few years ago, with Standard being tremendously expensive to play for more than a season, and the prospect of dropping another $300-500 (or more if they want to play anything with Tarmogoyf) just to have one non-rotating deck that might wane out of the meta and become non-competitive or get banned at a moment's notice (on top of the Standard expenses they've incurred) turns a lot of people off the game. -
Sep 2, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Magic Street Journal: Glitter, Gimmicks, and Glamours - Wizards' Reprint ShenanigansPosted in: ArticlesQuote from jnewhouse »Sales increase by continuing to grow the player base.
Each growth effort has diminishing returns, so they need to resort to greater measures to get an equivalent growth as time goes on.
Let's say you start with 1000 players for the sake of easy math. If you attract 100 new players, you're now at 1100, or 10% growth. Another 100 new players from there would be 9.1% growth. You can substitute any metric (packs sold, number of WPN locations, etc) and this holds true because it's simple math. You're got the same amount of new players, but your growth rate has slowed. So you'd have to find ways to get a greater number of players to join each time just to maintain the same level of growth. At some point, it just becomes unfeasible to keep growing rapidly as the market becomes saturated.
Bear also in mind that most of the highly valuable Standard cards lately have been reprints and planeswalkers. Not many recently-printed cards would have that much gravitas being reprinted as a sales booster in about five years the way shocks, fetches, and Modern staples like Thoughtseize are. In order to keep their desired growth, to have each fall set outsell the last, they're resorting to increasingly drastic measures, and they're draining the well faster than it can refill (the BFZ slowlands are really the only recent new cards I can think of that would have any significant set-selling oomph to them). If they don't change their approach to the game, that well's gotta dry out eventually, and you have to wonder what other measures they'll resort to if that happens. -
Jun 27, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Running Tally of Current Sets for June 26, 2015But it's usually such colourless commentary.Posted in: Articles
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Jun 25, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Running Tally of Current Sets for June 22, 2015To be fair, a lot of this comes from speculators. Some upticks in price, like Snapcaster, come from bottlenecks to creating decks and their price increased is matched by a format-wide increase in demand due to the income effect you described. Other upticks in price (often the unsustainable ones that settle back down, albeit at a higher price than before) are due to market manipulation from speculators either wanting to get in on the next big thing, or who simply want to pump-and-dump an easy target. Overall format price can be lowered, but not with Wizards' current strategy, especially given the exploitative state of the market.Posted in: Articles
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Jun 25, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Running Tally of Current Sets for June 22, 2015Posted in: ArticlesQuote from Rai Kerensky »Edit: I am aware of the Bitterblossom / Cryptic Command line. I thought I deleted those, but that is my fault. It is Cryptic Command then Bitterblossom.
To be fair, as editor, I should've caught that too, and in my negligence, I didn't. This error has been corrected, and I apologize for the original oversight. -
Jun 25, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Running Tally of Current Sets for June 22, 2015Prices are down for the cards in MM2, but there are a great many cards not in the set that spiked alongside those falling, so the cost of entry into the format itself isn't really any lower. You have cheaper Splinter Twins, but much more expensive Blood Moons. You have cheaper Cryptics, but much more expensive Snapcasters. At the end of the day, a few staples went down, but the format as a whole isn't a much more affordable proposition to play at a competitive level.Posted in: Articles
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Jun 5, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Running Tally of Current Sets for June 5, 2015I've fixed it in this instance, however unfortunately it's not feasible to check every single entry in every table, so if Rai's not careful, sometimes these things slip through. I try to see whether the most notable movers are correct and adjust accordingly, but sometimes these things slip through. My apologies for any confusion this may have caused.Posted in: Articles
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May 22, 2015Teia Rabishu posted a message on The Running Tally of Current Sets for May 22, 2015As the editor behind this project, I can definitely say that the formatting and other details aren't necessarily set in stone. We simply feel that we reached a point where it was time to go live and see what kind of feedback we'll get and adjust accordingly. Colour-coding the changes is definitely something we can look into, and of course as we go on, we can look at refining how we report price trends. The unfortunate reality, though, is that technical limitations of our article system prevent us from implementing things like plugins for live price charts, so everything will have to be text- and image-based (i.e. history graphs would have to be non-interactive static images). Nevertheless, we do appreciate your feedback and will be looking into improving the tally over the next few weeks.Posted in: Articles
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If they put Force of Will or Wasteland into Modern, I'd play that format more.
"It's respectful not to respect another's wishes"?
So if I were to ask you which pronoun you wanted, have you tell me, then reply "sorry I think I'd be being disrespectful to call you that so I'm going to call you something else instead," would you agree or disagree that this would be respectful?
"It" is considered insulting and dehumanizing. That's also not the pronoun people ask for.
The respectful thing to do is to use the pronoun people ask for. So when they ask for "they" that means you use "they," not "it." Equivocating between something people don't ask for and something people ask for is like saying "I don't see why this deck's land base can't just be 20 Wastes" when they're trying to get the right balance of certain colour sources.
I expect it's only a matter of time before "supplementary product" is the new "mythic rare" in terms of dumping grounds for cards that don't really deserve to be there other than not breaking Limited or stuffing the intended chase cards.
I'll give points for creativity but take away double the amount for the level of jank involved. It didn't even occur to me because just... why would you ever set out to do that?
There'd have to be a way to make the Steed not an artifact first.
You are literally being the opposite of respectful. All you're really saying here is that since you personally don't like things such as the singular "they" (which, to be fair, has only been used by complete nobodies like Chaucer and Shakespeare) so you'll insist on what you think someone else's pronouns should be even when they specifically ask otherwise.
Blame the University of Chicago Press if you want to make an issue out of this. Wizards adheres to the Chicago Manual of Style and the reason they switched to "they" instead of "he or she" is because the style guide changed.
Your feelings don't trump how language works. "They" is reentering the common vernacular and complaining about it just makes you look like those 19th century prescriptivists who said, "I don't care how people actually talk. My feelings about how people should talk are more important."
Sure they do. You can't just play Gideon Jura, animate him, and take a swing with him.
Let's not muddy the waters with flavour discussion when doing so can easily lead to someone making gameplay errors.
It's worth pointing out that the singular "they" has been in use for centuries and has been used by such writers as Chaucer and Shakespeare. Opposition to it largely dates back to the 19th century with linguistic prescriptivists that wanted to impose arbitrary, Latin-like rules on the English language (such as by saying you shouldn't split infinitives in English solely because you can't split them in Latin—it was a very elitist approach to things). So when it comes to non-binary people or just people where gender isn't known or assumed, English has had the tools to handle those cases longer than Modern English has been a language.
It's so messed up that, unlike how MTGS switched to the singular "they" instead of using "he or she" simply because I decided inclusivity was more important than linguistic prescriptivism back when I was Content Manager, Wizards only switched because the Chicago Manual of Style finally did. Make of this what you will.
But between cards like Bitterblossom and All is Dust you'll still see it pop up a fair bit here and there.
The only really significant thing Tribal does from a player standpoint (since the average player doesn't care about needing Tribal to exist so Sorcery and Enchantment can have creature types) is pump Tarmogoyf though, which is largely outclassed by Gurmag Angler so it doesn't see nearly the play it used to.
Hot take: Magic cards shouldn't be excluded from gambling legislation. Drop some money, get a pack whose contents can have wildly varying values with some extremely expensive "jackpot" cards. Sounds like gambling to me, especially because unlike pure collectibles such as trading cards, Magic cards' monetary value tends to correlate strongly with in-game advantage.
The MSRP on those kinds of products isn't really meant to be followed, though. Both Wizards and LGSes know that specialty releases like FTV are just meant as giveaways to stores, barring some of the really godawful FTV releases they've had.
It'd be funny if this was a result of Amazon's 2016 acquisition of Curse, LLC (the company that owns this site, among others) by way of its Twitch ownership. The fact that Curse was unceremoniously dumped on Wikia, Inc should tell you how that one wound up going, but the corporate process is always slow and that'd make for a hilarious delayed effect.
Or it could just be Amazon being the Walmart of the digital world (abuse the supply chain to keep costs low while pretending that you're doing good for consumers) and trying to set things up in a marketplace they probably don't understand very well. Either or.
Ultimately it's just capitalistic market forces at work. Stores know that signed cards are harder to move normally than non-signed cards, so they'll slip in something like "non-NM/M cards include signed cards if we feel like it unless you specifically request otherwise" into their terms of service. It's a bad-faith move that gets the store a little bit of profit but I've seen enough desperate moves from stores to move stock (Tiny Leaders and Frontier weren't real formats, for example, just ways for stores to move old stock, which is why they died horribly after the stores got their sales in, on top of being *****ty formats) to know what's going on there.