Why I'm playing Affinity in Legacy or this updated reprint policy is dumb.
I've thought alot about WoTC's decision to not only keep the Reserved List but also to update it and I can't help but feel its a shot in the foot to competitive Legacy. I started playing Magic just after Darksteel was released and so I was never really exposed to what Magic was before the 6th Edition changes and the new card frames. My teachers taught me about Standard and Extended and sort of glossed over Vintage and Legacy. Recently some friends have started making Legacy deck so they can compete in SCG's Legacy Opens and that got me interested in the format.
The second thing I noticed about Legacy was the enormous price difference between it and Standard. $12 for a Dragonskull Summit? Thats fine(I need them btw so PM if you have any for sale!). $90 for an Underground Sea? Wait what?!?! I know I don't need duals or other expensive cards to play Legacy but I'd like to do well in a tournament and the format sort of requires that you play the best cards available. I simply can't afford to play any good decks so I'm porting my Extended deck over to Legacy. I'm replacing Soul's Fire with Fling and tossing in some Disciple of the Vault and hoping for the best.
I've been thinking about what I'd say to WoTC if I could call them up. All I came up with is this: You're not insurance salesmen. Not one Magic: the Gathering product has a guarantee that its value will be retained. If you don't guarantee rare ratios why guarantee card scarcity? No investment is without risk and so giving collectors a security blanket from WoTC itself does more harm than good. The fact is that the secondary market can crash regardless of what WoTC says or does. Value through scarcity in a trading card game is ok in the short term but bad for the long term health of the game. The oldest reserved card will be 17 years old this year and I may be in the minority but I don't want to buy cardboard that old. Most Alpha cards are likely smelly, germy, and badly faded and thats the "mint" cards. I just want to play with the cards, not put them on my shelf and think about how uberleet I am because I have a Beta Gauntlet of Might.
I understand why WoTC has treaded carefully on this issue. Many players are also collectors and perhaps they feel they'll lose players by abolishing the Reserved List. I honestly think WoTC is simply afraid of alienating players, not collectors, who've invested alot of money into the game. If you've spent hundreds of dollar getting Legacy staples over the year and suddenly the value of the cards you spent years getting plummeted you'd be understandably upset. But you'd still have the cards, eventually the secondary market would stablize, and the cards value would probably rise. If WoTC reprinted the original duals in a Masters Edition-esqe set(please can haz?) the value of the older cards might go down at first but then they'd go back up. Reprints spark interest in the originals and people like to show off older editions of cards.
If WoTC is really behind this new policy then I guess their aquisition drive is over because it seems to go against it.
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