That's also why I think MM won't do as much good as WotC might have hoped: they were too conservative (I can understand why) and will adjust it for MM2 (which is inevitable unless Modern just doesn't pick up at all, I don't see that happening)
What will be interesting to see is how fast WotC comes out with an MM2 (if they do): I know that if I was in charge I would have told WotC "you guys better have a second edition not too far behind if we were too conservative with the print run, I don't want to have to wait 2 years for Modern to be as accessible as we want it to be if MM1 doesn't meet our targets"
Yeah, seriously haha. Hopefully they learned their lesson about that from the Commander decks.
Isn't it possible that the increased supply will not be able to keep up with increasing demand from players as Modern picks up steam?
If that happens, then WotC will have failed in their goal of making modern more accessible. In the short term, it would be good that there were more players, but they'd still have the same problem a year from now of not being able to grow the format due to lack of accessibility.
As far as increasing the supply not making accessibility greater, you are incorrect in that now these cards can be picked up through the booster pack lottery, drafting the set or trading for them from people who have them more often than now.
Right, except that they're not significantly adding to the supply because of all the reasons that itachiitachi mentioned, which is the problem. Putting the most expensive cards at mythic, packaging 24 packs in a box, and having a limited print run will not add to the supply enough to make those cards more available.
From previous real world examples. FTV and judge promos increase the supply of cards and never even budge the prices. It is assumed that there are about the same or slightly more of each mythic entering circulation as what you would get from an FTV printing. And it's still useful for the reasons I stated above.
The FTV series and judge promos are great examples of print runs that are too small to affect prices or the availability of cards. The number of copies of the card entering the market has to be large enough to actually affect the price of that card. For the FTV series and judge foils, it isn't, and if the number of mythics in Modern Masters is comparable to a FTV, then Modern Masters won't affect the price of those cards, either. That actually supports my argument perfectly.
From WOTC's viewpoint, it should be quite desirable.
You're missing the point. The intended goal of Modern Masters is to increase the accessibility of modern as a format. The biggest barrier to that is the cost to build a competitive deck. Modern Masters was supposed to help make that barrier smaller. Therefore, if increasing supply doesn't drive down prices, Modern Masters is not achieving its intended goal. So no, increasing supply without decreasing prices is not desirable. As a matter of fact, it is exactly what they do not want to happen.
The top 16 of GP portland had 4 Goyfs and 0 Dark Confidants. [...] Dark Confidant and Goyf are not staples. They are not barriers to entry into the format, because there are plenty of viable decks that run neither of them, and only one deck that runs both. (only sometimes)
First of all, as others have pointed out, bob, thoughtseize, and goyf are not barriers to entry into the format. There are plenty of cheaper ways to get in, and they are about to become a whole lot cheaper when the market becomes saturated with what are currently money uncommons.
Individually, no, those cards are not barriers of entry into the format. Collectively, however, most modern decks take a lot of investment, and cards like that are one of the biggest reasons why. And just because there are a couple of cheap decks doesn't mean that modern is accessible. That's like saying legacy is accessible because you can just build burn. One or two cheap decks does not make an accessible format.
On the other hand, the increased availability really will make itself felt at the local level even if it does nothing for the retail singles side of things.Also, more copies being available helps keep people from raising prices as the cards become more and more scarce.
Only if there is a significant increase in supply. Again, the key word here is "significant." You have to increase the supply enough that it will actually make a difference, and for the big money cards, the supply will not increase enough to make a difference, as you yourself pointed out with your FTV example.
So a lot of people are complaining that Bob and Goyf are being moved to mythic (and presumably so will the other money cards be) so their prices will probably not change much... Did any of you actually read the article announcing Modern Masters? It was pretty explicitly stated that the goal was to increase the availability of modern staples without decreasing their prices... So... Yeah... If you were expecting prices to drop, sorry, but that was never the intent.
This argument again? I don't know where people are getting the notion that increasing the availability of a card will somehow not affect its price. Furthermore, even if it was possible (which it's not), why would that be at all useful to anyone?
Can you explain to me how significantly increasing availability without decreasing prices is a)possible and b)desirable? Because it seems to me that if you were going to increase availability enough to actually make a difference, then prices would drop. Increasing supply lowers prices. This is like econ 101, so I find it extremely unlikely that WotC didn't take this into account when they stated their desire to make cards more available. And they said they didn't want to crash prices, they didn't say they didn't want to affect them at all.
As for b), if cards were more available but the same price, how would that be useful to anyone? If there were 20 playsets of Tarmogoyf on Channel Fireball instead of 5 (or however many there are now), but they're still $120, how does that help a player trying to get into the game? It's still just as expensive to buy them as it was before, and thus just as much of a barrier of entry to the format. In other words, if the prices don't change, "increased availability" doesn't mean jack.
Someone tried to make the argument earlier that increased availability without a price change was possible because people would be drafting the cards and acquiring their copies that way. First of all, if people were actually able to acquire playsets of Goyfs via draft, the price would definitely go down to reflect that. If people were able to get, say, two copies of it, but then had to buy the other two copies, that would mean that they didn't have to buy the full four copies, and prices would go down (though not as much) to reflect that, too. In other words, any significant increase in availability via limited would cause a price drop, and any increase in availability that didn't cause a price drop would not actually be a significant increase in availability. Availability and price are closely related, and if one is affected, the other will be, too.
1 in 8 packs have a mythic.
3 mythics (on average) per box of MM
15 mythics in the set.
1 in 5 boxs will have any given mythic.
Now i've heard numbers range from 9 to 32 boxs per store, lets find a happy median, assume 18 boxs per store.
thats 3.25? Of any given mythic per store.
How many stores will carry this product? Y?
3.25 x Y = how many of the card is printed and will be on the market.
Thats alot guys.
Not really. You have to consider that most stores get multiple playsets of each mythic for normal sets just to sell as singles. This doesn't count copies of the card opened from people who buy sealed product from the store or from people who draft the card and keep it. For this set, assuming your math is right, just over 3 of each mythic will be opened at the store total. That is a tiny amount when you consider that the demand for these cards is extremely high.
Modern is expensive all around, when some of the rares and uncommons fall in price then you'll see more people with expendable cash to grab their goyfs, bobs, etc... This set regardless of Goyfs price will help more people get into modern... Which is a good thing, I don't think they ever intended to bring the prices down of the money cards... I think they wanted to bring down the prices of all the others so you can have a little more cash to spend on them...
Fair point. I really hope you're right that making the commons/uncommons more affordable will have a significant impact on the price of decks. I'm worried, though, that the commons/uncommons aren't expensive enough, and won't go down enough, to make that much of a difference. In Jund, for example, you still need 4 Bobs, 4 Goyfs, 4 Lilianas, and 3 Thoughtseizes. That's easily $1000 right there, not even counting the rest of the deck. Is it really going to matter at that point if you save $20 on your playset of Kitchen Finks?
3 Card spoiled, set not due to be released for a month and your conclusion is:
THEY HAVE COMPLETELY FAILED THEIR PURPOSE.
It doesn't matter how many cards have been spoiled. Even if they reprinted literally all of the expensive cards in the set, we already know the size of the booster boxes and print run. It doesn't take a huge leap of logic to come to the conclusion that I did. And the set's being released in two weeks, not a month.
I see the connection just fine, but people are not understanding that what Wizards is really trying to do here is stop rising prices by giving players the opportunity to open them in packs.
Ah, I think I see what you're saying now. So you're saying that, rather than increase the supply to lower the prices on the secondary market, WotC is trying to make the cards available via limited so that people don't have to buy the cards on the secondary market? Or don't have to buy as many cards on the secondary market?
Well, even if that was the case, which it's not, the same rules of scarcity apply. The fact that Dark Confidant is a mythic rare in a limited print run set means they aren't increasing the supply enough to have any tangible effect on the availability of the card, which means that they're failing in their stated goal of making modern more accessible. Either way you look at it, printing modern staples at mythic rare in this limited print run set achieves nothing for the format, and, as people have said, is simply a cash grab.
Thus, Wizards wants to fix Modern and line their pockets at the same time.
Except they're not fixing modern. They're only lining their pockets, because the price of the staples was what needed to be fixed, and this set will have very little effect on the price of those staples. That's why people are complaining: WotC is still going to make a lot of money from Modern Masters even though the set is going to fail at its intended purpose of making modern more accessible, which is frustrating.
The thing is, Mythic Rares are not a special rarity. They're just rares, that tend to be on the "better" side. Like, say before you'd have 15 good rares on the sheet. These days, 6 of those would be mythic, the other 9 remain at rare.
The entire point of Mythic is to have a higher percentage of them being "good", so players don't have to play Where's Waldo as much to find The Good Cards.
I'm not sure if you're just trolling, but this is completely wrong. Wizards has stated on numerous occasions that mythics are not meant to be "better" than rares, and, furthermore, that they aim to make powerful cards at all rarities. Mythics are cards with big, splashy, unusual effects, but that doesn't make the effects "better," necessarily. Goblin Guide, for example, is arguably the most powerful aggressive creature ever printed, but that doesn't mean it should be mythic. It's definitely better as a rare. Likewise, Worldspine Wurm is big and splashy and very "mythic," but that doesn't make it good, and it is certainly a lot worse than a lot of the rares in Return to Ravnica.
For Modern Masters, though, they did things a bit differently. It appears that the cards with the highest secondary market price are the mythics, hence why Dark Confidant is being printed at mythic.
Yes, obviously making cards more available means more people can play the format. And the reason that making cards more available allows more people to play the format is because those cards become cheaper to buy.
I don't understand how you don't see the connection here. Wizards has stated that card availability is a barrier to entry for modern. Yet, if I wanted to and had the money, I could buy all the cards for, say, a modern Jund deck from Internet retailers right now. The cards are all "available" in the sense that you can buy them. The issue is that they are so expensive that people can't afford to buy them. That is what a "card availability issue" is. Making cards more available means that people can buy them more cheaply. It's simple supply and demand: you increase the supply, the price drops. That's the whole point of Modern Masters. It's also extremely basic economics, and should not be a controversial claim in the slightest.
Please show me where they said they were printing cards to tackle prices, and not quote they said they wanted to tackle card availability.
But, again, tackling card availability is tackling the price problem. If they say "We want cards to be more readily available to players, so we're printing more of them," what they're essentially saying is "We want the cards to be cheaper, so people can more easily afford them."
All cards are "available" if you're willing to pay the price. Making a card more available means printing more of it, which makes it less scarce, which lowers the price.
In a nutshell, making a card more available means making it cheaper by printing more copies of it.
Why are you people angry at Wizards for making sure your prices don't crash when there's a reprint? They explicitly stated that secondary market value was a problem that wasn't going to be addressed in a way to bring it down. It was being addressed in a way for people to have access to these cards, meaning entering draft and buying boxes. At least you know that when you bite the bullet for buying them, you don't lose.
You pay to play, same as anything.
Right, except that secondary market value and card access are closely tied. If there is limited access to a card, it will have a higher secondary market value due to scarcity. Conversely, a card will have a lower secondary market value if more people have access to it.
Modern Masters was supposed to be a way for people to get access to cards that were creating a significant barrier to entry on the format. But by printing those cards at mythic, making the set have a limited print run, and only providing 24 packs in a box, they're not really lowering the barrier to entry at all. Some of the expensive commons and uncommons will probably come down in price a little, but those weren't causing the barrier to entry in the first place.
Yeah, I'm not really sure why they feel the need to keep replacing the art on the invitational cards when they reprint them. It's annoying, and it's pretty disrespectful to the invitational winners. It's like they're saying "This isn't your card anymore." At least this artwork isn't as crappy as the new Meddling Mage or Solemn Simulacrum artworks, though. Those were just bad.
I talked with some RM mods (and other staffers? I don't remember) about it, and I would not agree with going away from the Rumor Mill name, as it is basically an established brand of MTGS that people recognize and come here for. My suggestion was that if a new name is desired, we rename it "Rumor Mill & Magic News" or some such.
Yeah, I was worried there would be a branding issue with renaming it. What if, instead of calling it "Rumor Mill & Magic News," it was given "Magic News" as a subtitle or parenthetical. For example:
The Rumor Mill: Magic News
or
The Rumor Mill (Magic News)
I really like the idea of having a subtitle (the first example, using the colon), as that maintains the brand identity while making it clear what the subforum is used for.
I also just realized that you could change the description of the subforum without changing the name itself. Right now, the description reads "Everybody loves Magic rumors! Share yours with others here. Please read the Rumor Mill Guidelines." That could easily be changed to more accurately describe what the subforum is used for, and that would help a lot. That would get around the branding issue, as I can't imagine that the description is part of the brand identity.
Even if you do change the description, though (and I really think you should), it still makes sense to add the subtitle of "Magic News" to make sure things are as clear as possible.
The Rumor Mill is an oddly named subforum. While all of the other subforums are named for their function, the Rumor Mill is not. In fact, the name has nothing to do with the forum, as actual "rumors" are relegated to Speculation and specifically forbidden in the Rumor Mill proper. This makes it more difficult to direct people to Magic-related news threads (which is what the Rumor Mill is actually for), as there is no logical connection between "news" and a "rumor mill."
I realize that the name "News" is already used for a subforum concerning news about MTGSalvation itself, but there are plenty of alternative names that would more clearly indicate the Rumor Mill's function. "The News Desk" is the one that immediately jumped to mind, but if that's too close to "News," you could get more creative. "The Future Future League" might work, as nearly all the news in the Rumor Mill currently is concerning future releases or changes. Alternatively, you could rename the News subforum to something else, like "MTGS News," and change the Rumor Mill to "News."
There are lots of naming possibilities, but I don't really care too much about that, too be honest. All I know is that the Rumor Mill is not a rumor mill and calling it such obfuscates its true function.
Right, except that they're not significantly adding to the supply because of all the reasons that itachiitachi mentioned, which is the problem. Putting the most expensive cards at mythic, packaging 24 packs in a box, and having a limited print run will not add to the supply enough to make those cards more available.
The FTV series and judge promos are great examples of print runs that are too small to affect prices or the availability of cards. The number of copies of the card entering the market has to be large enough to actually affect the price of that card. For the FTV series and judge foils, it isn't, and if the number of mythics in Modern Masters is comparable to a FTV, then Modern Masters won't affect the price of those cards, either. That actually supports my argument perfectly.
You're missing the point. The intended goal of Modern Masters is to increase the accessibility of modern as a format. The biggest barrier to that is the cost to build a competitive deck. Modern Masters was supposed to help make that barrier smaller. Therefore, if increasing supply doesn't drive down prices, Modern Masters is not achieving its intended goal. So no, increasing supply without decreasing prices is not desirable. As a matter of fact, it is exactly what they do not want to happen.
Individually, no, those cards are not barriers of entry into the format. Collectively, however, most modern decks take a lot of investment, and cards like that are one of the biggest reasons why. And just because there are a couple of cheap decks doesn't mean that modern is accessible. That's like saying legacy is accessible because you can just build burn. One or two cheap decks does not make an accessible format.
Only if there is a significant increase in supply. Again, the key word here is "significant." You have to increase the supply enough that it will actually make a difference, and for the big money cards, the supply will not increase enough to make a difference, as you yourself pointed out with your FTV example.
Can you explain to me how significantly increasing availability without decreasing prices is a)possible and b)desirable? Because it seems to me that if you were going to increase availability enough to actually make a difference, then prices would drop. Increasing supply lowers prices. This is like econ 101, so I find it extremely unlikely that WotC didn't take this into account when they stated their desire to make cards more available. And they said they didn't want to crash prices, they didn't say they didn't want to affect them at all.
As for b), if cards were more available but the same price, how would that be useful to anyone? If there were 20 playsets of Tarmogoyf on Channel Fireball instead of 5 (or however many there are now), but they're still $120, how does that help a player trying to get into the game? It's still just as expensive to buy them as it was before, and thus just as much of a barrier of entry to the format. In other words, if the prices don't change, "increased availability" doesn't mean jack.
Someone tried to make the argument earlier that increased availability without a price change was possible because people would be drafting the cards and acquiring their copies that way. First of all, if people were actually able to acquire playsets of Goyfs via draft, the price would definitely go down to reflect that. If people were able to get, say, two copies of it, but then had to buy the other two copies, that would mean that they didn't have to buy the full four copies, and prices would go down (though not as much) to reflect that, too. In other words, any significant increase in availability via limited would cause a price drop, and any increase in availability that didn't cause a price drop would not actually be a significant increase in availability. Availability and price are closely related, and if one is affected, the other will be, too.
Well, even if that was the case, which it's not, the same rules of scarcity apply. The fact that Dark Confidant is a mythic rare in a limited print run set means they aren't increasing the supply enough to have any tangible effect on the availability of the card, which means that they're failing in their stated goal of making modern more accessible. Either way you look at it, printing modern staples at mythic rare in this limited print run set achieves nothing for the format, and, as people have said, is simply a cash grab.
Except they're not fixing modern. They're only lining their pockets, because the price of the staples was what needed to be fixed, and this set will have very little effect on the price of those staples. That's why people are complaining: WotC is still going to make a lot of money from Modern Masters even though the set is going to fail at its intended purpose of making modern more accessible, which is frustrating.
For Modern Masters, though, they did things a bit differently. It appears that the cards with the highest secondary market price are the mythics, hence why Dark Confidant is being printed at mythic.
I don't understand how you don't see the connection here. Wizards has stated that card availability is a barrier to entry for modern. Yet, if I wanted to and had the money, I could buy all the cards for, say, a modern Jund deck from Internet retailers right now. The cards are all "available" in the sense that you can buy them. The issue is that they are so expensive that people can't afford to buy them. That is what a "card availability issue" is. Making cards more available means that people can buy them more cheaply. It's simple supply and demand: you increase the supply, the price drops. That's the whole point of Modern Masters. It's also extremely basic economics, and should not be a controversial claim in the slightest.
All cards are "available" if you're willing to pay the price. Making a card more available means printing more of it, which makes it less scarce, which lowers the price.
In a nutshell, making a card more available means making it cheaper by printing more copies of it.
Modern Masters was supposed to be a way for people to get access to cards that were creating a significant barrier to entry on the format. But by printing those cards at mythic, making the set have a limited print run, and only providing 24 packs in a box, they're not really lowering the barrier to entry at all. Some of the expensive commons and uncommons will probably come down in price a little, but those weren't causing the barrier to entry in the first place.
Too perfect.
The Rumor Mill: Magic News
or
The Rumor Mill (Magic News)
I really like the idea of having a subtitle (the first example, using the colon), as that maintains the brand identity while making it clear what the subforum is used for.
I also just realized that you could change the description of the subforum without changing the name itself. Right now, the description reads "Everybody loves Magic rumors! Share yours with others here. Please read the Rumor Mill Guidelines." That could easily be changed to more accurately describe what the subforum is used for, and that would help a lot. That would get around the branding issue, as I can't imagine that the description is part of the brand identity.
Even if you do change the description, though (and I really think you should), it still makes sense to add the subtitle of "Magic News" to make sure things are as clear as possible.
I realize that the name "News" is already used for a subforum concerning news about MTGSalvation itself, but there are plenty of alternative names that would more clearly indicate the Rumor Mill's function. "The News Desk" is the one that immediately jumped to mind, but if that's too close to "News," you could get more creative. "The Future Future League" might work, as nearly all the news in the Rumor Mill currently is concerning future releases or changes. Alternatively, you could rename the News subforum to something else, like "MTGS News," and change the Rumor Mill to "News."
There are lots of naming possibilities, but I don't really care too much about that, too be honest. All I know is that the Rumor Mill is not a rumor mill and calling it such obfuscates its true function.