MTG Salvation

Over the weekend, the debut showcase for the upcoming Magic The Gathering: Final Fantasy Universes Beyond set took place at PAX. It was an interesting showcase, complete with several cards that are extremely exciting to me as a huge Final Fantasy nerd. But then the conversation turned to Magic’s premium booster packs, Collector Boosters, and from there the conversation turned to serialized cards - where it was revealed that only one card, Traveling Chocobo will be receiving the serialized treatment. And I don’t know about anybody else, but I got flashbacks to the way The One Ring was handled and started sweating. 

Now, it’s obvious what happened here. The success of The Lord of the Rings combined with the demand from higher-ups forced the hand of the card designers. The One Ring drove up demand for the Collector Boosters of The Lord Of The Rings, which drove up the price of those packs, which led to more money being spent per person. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it does feel rather dirty. 

It is worth noting that it's very clear Wizards of the Coast have learnt a lesson from the fiasco that was the serialized One Ring - despite the fact that the Traveling Chocobo is the only serialized card in the entire set (a decision I applaud, because god knows they could have made Cid a serialized card), there’s still seventy seven of them to find and collect. The treatments are rather beautiful, too, but the fact that there’s no text on the card is a tad annoying, though I imagine Wizards doesn’t think anybody is brave enough to use these serialized cards as actual game pieces. 

My main concern right now is this - if you look at TCGPlayer as of the time of writing, then a single Collector Booster pack for this set is $65.99. This is just not acceptable for packs of cardboard. It’s just not. You can make all the excuses that you want, that there are premium products designed for people with disposable income, but at the end of the day, what is the booster pack game if not gambling? And looking at the Collector Booster Boxes makes it even worse - those are going for $747.99. For some people, that’s the same price as rent.

Now imagine how much these packs are going to increase as more and more cards are revealed, and as more and more people start to pull the Chocobos. We’ve already seen how Wizards of the Coast is willing to slowly jack up prices with the Commander Decks for the set - if we accept that, they think we’ll accept everything, but we can’t do that if we value this game. Who’s buying these and getting a return on their money? Who are these for? Why are these so much more than everything else here?

I suppose we should talk a little about the card itself. After all, there are non-serialized versions of this card (indeed, the Chocobos come in different colors, which, despite all of my misgivings, is very nice flavoring), so is this card worth playing in a deck? Being brutally honest - no. 

It’s a three mana green bird that allows the controller of the card to look at the top card of their library at any time. Cool, so it does something that dozens of cards already do. What’s next? Well, it also allows you to play lands and cast Bird spells from the top of your library. That’s a pretty cool ability - not the land part, which again, we’ve seen before, but the Bird part. Bird tribal is something that recent sets such as Bloomburrow have made possible, and it’s something that Traveling Chocobo encourages with its final ability - if a land or Bird you control entering the battlefield causes a triggered ability of a permanent you control to trigger, it triggers an additional time.

Think of this like a really weird Gandalf The White, but worse because it’s only for birds and it isn’t a legendary creature, so it’s not like this can be a build-around for a Commander deck. And let’s face it, this isn’t seeing play in any other format, is it?

I think part of the problem I have here is that this feels like capitalism for the sake of rapidly advancing capitalism - not a surprise, sure, but a miserable encapsulation of where we’re at with this stuff. It’s cynical, it’s kitsch, and if the idea of artificially boosting prices of this stuff isn’t stomped out before it’s given air, then we run the risk of every single set having this problem in the future.