I have my playset, bought a box and traded for the 3 others because I intended to play the card in my deck.....people who are complaining only does so because they either missed the boat or lost money tradewise for waiting.
I hope the BAB promo stays that way.
If the card stays below $40 long term, I think that Wizards will continue the same practice going forward. $40 and lower is reasonable enough for a high-demand mythic in Standard as long as they don't make future BaB promos staples by any measure. If anything, Wizards' experience with Nexus of Fate only proves that such a practice makes the promo highly desirable and will serve to move boxes even more in the future.
As far as the people complaining about it, I highly doubt that the vast majority of those individuals actually want to purchase a playset of the card to be able to put it into a deck. Those of us who wanted to play the card knew it immediately after the card was spoiled (I know I did), and did everything they could to acquire the necessary copies of the card as soon as they could. Instead, the majority of the outcry on the issue comes from the perception that players may find it more difficult to play a certain deck in Standard if they so desired. No one likes being told they can't have something, even if they don't necessarily want it, especially when it comes to MTG.
I have my playset, bought a box and traded for the 3 others because I intended to play the card in my deck.....people who are complaining only does so because they either missed the boat or lost money tradewise for waiting.
I hope the BAB promo stays that way.
If the card stays below $40 long term, I think that Wizards will continue the same practice going forward. $40 and lower is reasonable enough for a high-demand mythic in Standard as long as they don't make future BaB promos staples by any measure. If anything, Wizards' experience with Nexus of Fate only proves that such a practice makes the promo highly desirable and will serve to move boxes even more in the future.
As far as the people complaining about it, I highly doubt that the vast majority of those individuals actually want to purchase a playset of the card to be able to put it into a deck. Those of us who wanted to play the card knew it immediately after the card was spoiled (I know I did), and did everything they could to acquire the necessary copies of the card as soon as they could. Instead, the majority of the outcry on the issue comes from the perception that players may find it more difficult to play a certain deck in Standard if they so desired. No one likes being told they can't have something, even if they don't necessarily want it, especially when it comes to MTG.
So it's ok to make a card that is one shot and legal in multi-formats? So know immediately that you want this card and pay to grab them up and forget everyone else. New players who never had a shot at getting one. Changing what standard deck you want to play? Too late, $80 bucks a copy... and don't say 'it's only 40' because if they continue the practice and a card is more widely desired and the same deal you bet the price will get there. The price is a result of supply being pathetically low and no more 'openings' along the way.
Crap idea, poor implementation, and not right. The price of standard is already a problem and this only has the potential to make it worse. They can't even spit out sets that work right why is this a priority other than box sales.
I say don't let them think they're smart. Don't buy boxes.
So, no one has a reasonable compromise? I doubt feedback era is about just constantly shooting everything wizards does down and claiming they're evil or incompetent. What you should reasonably do is find something sensible to ask Santa wizards for that they can do that will be popular and not just piss most people off. I've mostly seen *****ing and unreasonable stuff like bear tribal commander. Sure that could be cool but it's not going to be popular unless we get a bear tribal theme because there aren't enough good ones to scrape a halfway decent deck to go head to head with a precon. There might be a great time for them to do it, but if you want something like that, you'll probably be waiting quite a while. They're probably not going to do serra either until they have her or urza perfect because otherwise they'll get shouted down worse than ludevic. Now, if anyone thinks they have a good thing to replace the current buy a box promo with that will, you know, get people to buy boxes, and won't cause a bunch of drama, I'm sure they'd consider it but just shooting down from the vault, buy a box, and everything they try isn't helping. Of course, it might be a good idea to think about masters as well. The community asked for it but there's only so much they can reasonably do. Sure they could drop the msrp some or add a couple more $5 rares, but they certainly couldn't shove all the modern staples in, drop msrp to $4 and print to demand. That would make the have nots happy for a little bit but the haves would riot over their losses. Everyone would also take all their prizes in #masters broken cards exclusively until the set was so worthless you could wipe your ass with mindsculptors and then ***** because standard rare X is $40+ because no ones opening any standard packs and modern gets boring because they can't affect it that easily without breaking something. We already know it would happen just looking at zendkiar, return to ravnica, and khans of tarkir. They even reprinted goblin guide multiple times until people said they shouldn't anymore. Then, they didn't reprint it until people went off about how stupid wizards was for not reprinting it and letting it explode in price. There's only so many cards that can be good, though. Way back in the day, juzam djinn was a mega staple and so was savannah lions. Now, we regularly get far stronger and they go into the jank bin. Even if you power creep every card, there will still only be 2-3 top decks which means a maximum of 27 nonland cards will be top tier standard and realistically less than that.
Only if you ignore the compromises already suggested.
The default stance is "Standard legal cards should be available through boosters". The first compromise is to add "or preconstructed decks if they are on an unlimited print run". I'll call this first compromise the "line in the sand", because crossing that line was the actual starting point of this discussion.
A suggestion would be to put the BAB promo also into the set proper at mythic rare. There, problem solved! But you'll notice suggestions that are definite compromises from there like "At least stop forcing foil-only prints on tournament players who want to use a card that you - despite affirmations otherwise - pushed to the level of being Standard-playable". That's not a compromise? Or is ist an unreasonable compromise?
I think a lot of people would be happy if there was something like "BAB promo is always foil and maybe gets a little stamp of distinction for collectability, card in booster is non-foil by default", but that's actually the default stance anyway.
One could argue that "please stop this practice in the future even if you don't address the current issue" (compare the linked article regarding the ways the current issue could be handled - hinting at some "uncompromising" positions IMO) is a compromise and if "at least give us nonfoil BAB promos" is not a reasonabe compromise, then I argue the threshold for "reasonable compromise" is set to high, because that level has to feel like a "please don't put anything disgusting into our botttled drinking water after you outlawed getting our own water from the well" compromise.
Also paragraphs, I have no idea what your train of thought is.
Private Mod Note
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Planar Chaos was not a mistake neither was it random. You might want to look at it again.
[thread=239793][Game] Level Up - Creature[/thread]
So, no one has a reasonable compromise? I doubt feedback era is about just constantly shooting everything wizards does down and claiming they're evil or incompetent. What you should reasonably do is find something sensible to ask Santa wizards for that they can do that will be popular and not just piss most people off. I've mostly seen *****ing and unreasonable stuff like bear tribal commander. Sure that could be cool but it's not going to be popular unless we get a bear tribal theme because there aren't enough good ones to scrape a halfway decent deck to go head to head with a precon. There might be a great time for them to do it, but if you want something like that, you'll probably be waiting quite a while. They're probably not going to do serra either until they have her or urza perfect because otherwise they'll get shouted down worse than ludevic. Now, if anyone thinks they have a good thing to replace the current buy a box promo with that will, you know, get people to buy boxes, and won't cause a bunch of drama, I'm sure they'd consider it but just shooting down from the vault, buy a box, and everything they try isn't helping. Of course, it might be a good idea to think about masters as well. The community asked for it but there's only so much they can reasonably do. Sure they could drop the msrp some or add a couple more $5 rares, but they certainly couldn't shove all the modern staples in, drop msrp to $4 and print to demand. That would make the have nots happy for a little bit but the haves would riot over their losses. Everyone would also take all their prizes in #masters broken cards exclusively until the set was so worthless you could wipe your ass with mindsculptors and then ***** because standard rare X is $40+ because no ones opening any standard packs and modern gets boring because they can't affect it that easily without breaking something. We already know it would happen just looking at zendkiar, return to ravnica, and khans of tarkir. They even reprinted goblin guide multiple times until people said they shouldn't anymore. Then, they didn't reprint it until people went off about how stupid wizards was for not reprinting it and letting it explode in price. There's only so many cards that can be good, though. Way back in the day, juzam djinn was a mega staple and so was savannah lions. Now, we regularly get far stronger and they go into the jank bin. Even if you power creep every card, there will still only be 2-3 top decks which means a maximum of 27 nonland cards will be top tier standard and realistically less than that.
First, paragraphs are your friend. They help break up long posts and make them easier to read, as well as indicating to the reader when you're done with a current thought and moving on to another. Without paragraphs your post just looks like a long, rambling mess of non-sequiturs.
Second, I don't even really know where to begin because you just sort of move from point to point without much explanation. Yes, people have been critical of WotC recently, perhaps more so than usual. That might have something to do with people no longer being happy with the quality of the product WotC is producing. If all of your ideas are bad, it will in fact look like people are shooting down all of your ideas. Because the ideas are bad. Not because they just like shooting your ideas down.
Third, WotC had a good idea to get people to buy boxes. It was called the Masterpiece series. They killed it because they mismanaged the ***** out of it. Battle for Zendikar is an objectively terrible set. MaRo has admitted as much. That didn't stop it from being one of the best selling sets ever. And as far as I'm aware, the vast majority of people were open to the idea of Masterpieces and most of the negativity around them was entirely due to the execution of that idea. Too many terrible Masterpieces (hello, Divert), too many Masterpieces per set, the strict adherence to a broad "theme" and the insistence of making more and more distracting and ugly card frames eventually led to WotC just giving up instead of trying to fix a good idea with bad execution.
Fourth, the Masters sets. Ugh... the Masters sets are legitimately frustrating to talk about. The Masters sets are again (noticing a trend yet?) a good idea marred by WotC's inability to execute properly. The fundamental problem with Masters sets is the fact that they are trying to serve two entirely separate goals at the same time and as a result they ended up achieving neither. If WotC wanted to make a sweet, non-Standard draft environment created by mashing together old sets then by all means, I'll be first in line. I love drafting. But if you want people to enjoy your draft format, make sure they can actually afford to draft your format. Over $30 a draft is unreasonable, even for people without tight budgets.
Instead, if WotC wanted to make a set as a way to get needed Modern/Legacy reprints out into the wild, that is also fine. And at $10 a pack, it's a bit pricey but not egregiously so. But in that case, WotC cannot possibly justify the amount of draft chaff cards they printed in every Masters set. WotC tried to have their cake and eat it too by charging customers an absurd premium on a product that costs them the exact same amount of money to produce as a Standard-legal set, while simultaneously filling that overpriced product with bulk rares. And then jamming 3 Masters sets down our throats in less than 12 months. Honestly it's a miracle to me that customers haven't demanded WotC apologize for such a shamefully blatant cash grab, but I guess that's the gullibility of the masses for you.
Fifth, we didn't even mention WotC's other glaring recent failures like the card stock quality or their inability to create a healthy Standard environment. It's no wonder people are upset. I'm generally supportive of Magic, but something is clearly very wrong at WotC because they continue to make poor decisions in the face of all logic and reason. If I had a financial stake in WotC, I'd be hitting the panic button right about now.
Standard legal cards should always be in standard boosters isn't going to move anything because even at mythic, nexus nexus of fate is a $2 jank mythic if its in the set. It had a decent performance one day of one tournament where no one was ready for it. In order to make a card worthy of selling a box, you'd have to have a format defining mythic or a multi format all-star like an eldrazi titan or snapcaster mage. Now, they could make the card non foil, but that would piss off the people that want it in foil, the default standard for promos. A reasonable compromise would be abolishing the buy a box promo in favor of something else that will sell a box because we already know staple rare from the set didn't move the needle on box sales, even one designed to be the new permanent wrath of god. The whole point of having the promo or from the vault was to put cash in local game store's pockets because they can't possibly compete with online sellers who often sell cards out of their house and, therefore, have zero overhead. That's why a box buying boycott is completely stupid. It won't hurt wizards at all. They still sell product whether you buy singles or boxes. You just stick it to the stores that host your local tournaments.
The complaints about the masters sets are also unreasonable. Even if you up the value of the packs a little or drop the msrp, it HAS TO be a set of mostly modern irrelevant cards. There aren't even enough modern viable cards to even fill a set and if you cram them all in at once, and print to demand, you would destroy the price of every modern staple with the exception of possibly a couple of the most valuable cards. That's what happened with the sets like return to ravnica or khans of tarkir. It made everything besides the lands worth slightly more than toilet paper for years after people got done opening so much product. Unlike the regular standard sets, though, you're talking every modern staple you're doing it to. That's millions of dollars worth of cards people already own going from $20+ down to practically nothing for years. That's basically what happened with chronicles that led to the reserved list being implemented and it would also be a one and done sales spike because you've now destroyed the price of said cards. What do you do the next year when the parent company is expecting you to produce sales figures like that again? That's why the complaints are completely unrealistic.
Now, as for masterpieces, the idea was stupid and unsustainable just like making a masters set exclusively about modern staples. There simply aren't that many high dollar magic cards that exist unless you count cards that are only valuable because of scarcity but not play value. They used up most of them in zendikar and kaladesh. There really isn't anything you can possibly pick that can rival the lands theme from zendkiar and if you only do a few masterpieces per set, you're giving away all your masters pack sales for free as bonuses in standard boosters. You'll also have to repeat the same cards a lot because, like I said, there aren't a ton of them.
There are things they can do like the exclusive buy a box promo but pretty much everything people want to come up with is completely unrealistic because we're talking about busineses that must make money to pay their employees, benefits, the outside contractors, and everything else that goes into running a business. That's just the reality of how jobs work and a lot of people either don't understand that or are just being deliberately unreasonable. That doesn't mean game stores, wizards, online sellers, etc. Are mean or don't enjoy magic and hope it does well. They just have to be realistic about the reality of running a profitable business since all the stuff that goes into it can't realistically be done for free because too much and too many people have to go into its creation. I don't personally and have never made any money off of magic but other people make their living off of it. The game is how they make a lot or even all of their money to live on.
Standard legal cards should always be in standard boosters isn't going to move anything because even at mythic, nexus nexus of fate is a $2 jank mythic if its in the set. It had a decent performance one day of one tournament where no one was ready for it. In order to make a card worthy of selling a box, you'd have to have a format defining mythic or a multi format all-star like an eldrazi titan or snapcaster mage. Now, they could make the card non foil, but that would piss off the people that want it in foil, the default standard for promos. A reasonable compromise would be abolishing the buy a box promo in favor of something else that will sell a box because we already know staple rare from the set didn't move the needle on box sales, even one designed to be the new permanent wrath of god. The whole point of having the promo or from the vault was to put cash in local game store's pockets because they can't possibly compete with online sellers who often sell cards out of their house and, therefore, have zero overhead. That's why a box buying boycott is completely stupid. It won't hurt wizards at all. They still sell product whether you buy singles or boxes. You just stick it to the stores that host your local tournaments.
That's ridiculous. Of course WotC cares if we don't buy product. Sure, distributors can help conceal the fact that a set isn't selling well, but what do you think will happen when the next set releases? All those middlemen that got left holding the bag last time are going to avoid it like the plague. For example, ChannelFireball isn't going to order huge quantities of a new set if the last one sold extremely poorly. WotC might not notice immediately, but they most certainly care if players stop buying.
As to the second point, I agree that it is unfortunate that LGSs can end up caught in the crossfire when they personally didn't do anything wrong, but that is simply an unfortunate fact of business. I appreciate the intention behind the BaB promos (to help support LGSs) but the implementation is atrocious and cannot be allowed to continue. Magic is first and foremost a game, and compromising the integrity of the game (say, by printing powerful cards that can only be obtained through special means) is unacceptable, even if it wasn't done with malicious intent.
The complaints about the masters sets are also unreasonable. Even if you up the value of the packs a little or drop the msrp, it HAS TO be a set of mostly modern irrelevant cards. There aren't even enough modern viable cards to even fill a set and if you cram them all in at once, and print to demand, you would destroy the price of every modern staple with the exception of possibly a couple of the most valuable cards. That's what happened with the sets like return to ravnica or khans of tarkir. It made everything besides the lands worth slightly more than toilet paper for years after people got done opening so much product. Unlike the regular standard sets, though, you're talking every modern staple you're doing it to. That's millions of dollars worth of cards people already own going from $20+ down to practically nothing for years. That's basically what happened with chronicles that led to the reserved list being implemented and it would also be a one and done sales spike because you've now destroyed the price of said cards. What do you do the next year when the parent company is expecting you to produce sales figures like that again? That's why the complaints are completely unrealistic.
You seemed to have missed the point. You cannot claim that neither path I laid out for Masters sets would work, then only address one of those paths. If WotC doesn't want to (or can't, as you seem to claim but I find it highly dubious) fill a set with nothing but staples, they could have easily made Masters sets $4/pack like every other supplemental set they've made (Conspiracy, Conspiracy 2, Battlebond, etc) and nobody would have complained. As I said, I'd be more than happy with WotC taking this route to provide unique drafting experiences. That doesn't mean every card has to be jank, but people are certainly more forgiving about opening a $1 bulk rare when they only paid $4 for the pack, instead of $10. This is a completely legitimate route to salvaging the Masters sets, but WotC obviously doesn't want to take it because until recently, Masters sets were literally just printed money as WotC knew people would snap them up regardless of their actual quality.
As for your other argument, it is simply not true that a Masters set "HAS TO be a set of mostly Modern irrelevant cards". I cannot fathom why you think that. You talk about Modern staples costing less like that's somehow a bad thing. Oh no, people might actually be able to afford to play! The horror!
Now, as for masterpieces, the idea was stupid and unsustainable just like making a masters set exclusively about modern staples. There simply aren't that many high dollar magic cards that exist unless you count cards that are only valuable because of scarcity but not play value. They used up most of them in zendikar and kaladesh. There really isn't anything you can possibly pick that can rival the lands theme from zendkiar and if you only do a few masterpieces per set, you're giving away all your masters pack sales for free as bonuses in standard boosters. You'll also have to repeat the same cards a lot because, like I said, there aren't a ton of them.
First, you seem to be under the assumption that only "high dollar magic cards" are allowed to be Masterpieces. That's not true. Sol Ring is less than $5 for the majority of it's printings. That hasn't stopped it from being a highly sought after Masterpiece (currently around $400). The only requirement to being a good Masterpiece is being a card people want, either for pimp value or simply to play with. Hopefully both, obviously.
As for the unsustainable bit, that was entirely due to WotC's handling of them. The original Expeditions could have been the 10 fetches as the only possible ones, 5 in BFZ and the other 5 in Oath. Boom. Done. Instead WotC had the bright idea of putting something like 50 in the entire block, and then restricted themselves even further by rigidly adhering to the Land theme. Of course that's unsustainable. But it didn't have to be. Which was kind of my point to begin with. The idea was sound, but WotC again botched the execution. If they had limited themselves to 5-10 per set, and got rid of the silly theme requirements, Masterpieces could have easily lasted for years and years. Going back to Ravnica? Bam, Shockland Masterpeices. Kaladesh? Bam, the 10 best mana rocks you feel like printing. Dominaria? Bam, 10 iconic legends from the past like Captain Sisay. Return to Innistrad? Bam, Lili, Snapcaster, and the Powerpuff Girls including Avacyn. Khans of Tarkir? Bam, the original Elder Dragons. I feel like I've made my point by now. There are tons of cards people would love to see with fancy new artwork and borders (assuming the borders aren't terrible like Amonkhet). Instead WotC tried twice after BFZ then gave up.
There are things they can do like the exclusive buy a box promo but pretty much everything people want to come up with is completely unrealistic because we're talking about busineses that must make money to pay their employees, benefits, the outside contractors, and everything else that goes into running a business. That's just the reality of how jobs work and a lot of people either don't understand that or are just being deliberately unreasonable. That doesn't mean game stores, wizards, online sellers, etc. Are mean or don't enjoy magic and hope it does well. They just have to be realistic about the reality of running a profitable business since all the stuff that goes into it can't realistically be done for free because too much and too many people have to go into its creation. I don't personally and have never made any money off of magic but other people make their living off of it. The game is how they make a lot or even all of their money to live on.
I don't really get your point here. Are you suggesting that WotC was forced to print lets just say Tree of Redemption for the sake of argument in Masters 25 because printing an actual good card would somehow cost them more or cause them to lose money? That doesn't sound right. Can you please explain what you mean here?
The concept is called Reprint Equity. It wouldn’t cost them any more money in the immediate to print valuable chards rather than chaff, no. But if they reprint all valuable cards and the set sells boffo units and the prices of all big modern staples fall - then when happens next time they want to print a masters set? Demand is lower because all the major cards everyone wanted they recently got in the prior set. They won’t be able to drive demand and sustain their price point as well when there are no more big dollar heavy demand items to push after the last round brought everything major down to lower price.
The concept is called Reprint Equity. It wouldn’t cost them any more money in the immediate to print valuable chards rather than chaff, no. But if they reprint all valuable cards and the set sells boffo units and the prices of all big modern staples fall - then when happens next time they want to print a masters set? Demand is lower because all the major cards everyone wanted they recently got in the prior set. They won’t be able to drive demand and sustain their price point as well when there are no more big dollar heavy demand items to push after the last round brought everything major down to lower price.
Well to start with, Masters sets are already artificially scarce because WotC throttles supply. They aren't printed to demand, so unless WotC grossly misjudges the demand, there will be an absolute cap on how many reprints are entering the market. So even if every card in a Masters set was a desired Modern playable card, the supply should never outpace the demand.
But that's beside the point. You're looking at Masters sets as a yearly release. They shouldn't be. There's no reason for them to be. Except because WotC wants to milk them for as much value as humanly possible, even if it means actively sabotaging the product's stated goal and upsetting customers in the process.
No, they didn't have to charge $10 a pack for masters sets. They could totally charge $4 and scale the reprints down accordingly.The reason they made them annual, though, is because when they were once every 2 years, speculators, staged buyouts on whatever wasn't in the set and was played heavily in modern. Assuming you go down to $4, they have to chop the chase cards down so speculators will probably stage more buyouts. If you go down to semi annual or more, were back to the same complaint as the first masters. Lets say, though, we do the $4 a pack. We want tarmogoyf, so if we add confidant or snapcaster, we've probably reached our reasonable limit for the set. We could instead add a few more cheaper cards, but the total expected value of a pack must be less than the price of a pack or people will open packs until that isn't the case. That means everything but the most valuable and desired cards will become bulk if it goes on too long. Assuming it happens, everything that became bulk is no longer longer able to sell a set for years. There are tweaks you can make to adjust a set, but probably not any that will make people happy long term. The$4 a pack probably also won't make as many people happy since, without new cards, the set is now worthless to you unless you want tarmogoyf or the handful of other cards they added for value.
Now, they could add new cards, but if you make them modern legal, they now have to test them, put them in a set called modern but ban them or put them on some kind of illegal list, make them weak,or inject untested cards into the format. Being its called modern, people are going to want new modern staples. In order to do that, you either have to hire more testers to test a niche product for a less played format, and commission new art for them on top or pull people away from standard testing.
As for masterpieces being highly desirable foils that aren't expensive, that really only applies to a handful of cards that aren't in foil/new border and that's also dipping into your judge foil pool.
As any reasonable person can see, all those solutions are going to cost money or make someone mad. That's just the reality of business.
Now, as for Mark rosewater, the face of all fallout, no one can possibly make a case he doesn't care about the game. He donates thousands of hours of his own time, uncompensated by the company he works for, communicating with the community and taking ***** over every perceived mistake his company makes. Sure he makes mistakes, but if he wasn't doing all his CHARITY work outside his job, wed probably have never had stuff like red "draw," popular cards like arixmethes, the possibility of taking kamigawa off the not a chance in hell list, wizard tribal in dorminaria, or anything else came out of his blogging, tweeting, podcasting, email reading, consistent article writing, or signing of items. Everyone that's benefited from his absurdly energetic enthusiasm for the game should really thank him instead of treating him like garbage.
Now, as for Mark rosewater, the face of all fallout, no one can possibly make a case he doesn't care about the game. He donates thousands of hours of his own time, uncompensated by the company he works for, communicating with the community and taking ***** over every perceived mistake his company makes. Sure he makes mistakes, but if he wasn't doing all his CHARITY work outside his job, wed probably have never had stuff like red "draw," popular cards like arixmethes, the possibility of taking kamigawa off the not a chance in hell list, wizard tribal in dorminaria, or anything else came out of his blogging, tweeting, podcasting, email reading, consistent article writing, or signing of items. Everyone that's benefited from his absurdly energetic enthusiasm for the game should really thank him instead of treating him like garbage.
Its not "charity" its his job.
He has to stay in contact with at least some people from the outside and you expect anybody to do their job, no praises for doing your job.
Anyway, he doesnt do a particularly "good" job with all the mistakes made and his community work is abysmal, simply said, he locks into a very one-sided part of the "community" and and just hand picks critic he likes to address, while all the other stuff is blatantly ignored or even covered up (which again, they make a terrible job at).
Fixing problems will always cost money, thats why you try your hardest to avoid doing mistakes in the first place, or try stuff out in a small testing group, which again, they do a terrible job at, as they do have a testing group, but they just blatantly fail to see the obvious, and thats just crazy.
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Easiest solution, remove the promo, give players 3 Showdown booster packs instead, you produce them anyway, make some more.
WotC operates on a mechanism that is "Oh i have an idea, lets try it out in production and see if it deals any damage!".
Any software developer would be lynched for such bogus idiocy.
They clearly have too many people with supposedly "Good ideas" and way too less people that want to ensure the product is good or gets better as it is.
Changing stuff, just to change stuff is a terrible approach and doomed for failure.
WotC operates on a mechanism that is "Oh i have an idea, lets try it out in production and see if it deals any damage!".
Any software developer would be lynched for such bogus idiocy.
You are absolutely right that in a development environment, making changes in Production is an absolute no-no. That is why we have Test and, in some cases, a "Development" environment where I work so anything I do can be fully tested before ever getting to the point of touching a production environment and to ensure that, once there, there is no adverse impact.
So, in your hypothetical world where Wizards takes the same approach and tests things out in a Test Environment, what would that look like? What do you expect them to do to test changes they want to make? Surely Market Research is not enough of a test as that doesn't give the whole picture of how something will work in "Production". Do they then use China or Germany or Canada or some other country that is not the US to test out their changes? How do they reconcile these test cases with still allowing everything to function as it has been?
The answer is that they can't. And to suggest that this is any way like a software development situation is, frankly, a bit inane. They have made mistakes in the past and they have attempted to mitigate these mistakes with their Play Design team (who was involved in a fair bit of Dominaria and fully involved in GoR). They are using this as their "test" for card design and development. This still doesn't tell them anything about Buy-a-Box promos or other promotions. They still need actual, real-world data and only "making these changes in Prod" will they get that data.
As to MaRo's "Charity", the charity is spending time on Blogatog listening to us and engaging with us. This is not even close to being his "job". It is something he does because he enjoys it and uses these interactions to make for a better game. Just look at his Twitter Poll on Head to Head planes. Lorwyn was the winner which went against a lot of what he has said in the past about Lorwyn being difficult to return to. They could have continued looking at their data and saying it wasn't worth it but now they have new data because Mark decided to create a poll.
To suggest he is infallible is obviously ludicrous, but to suggest he is any way bad completely inept (didn't mean to say everything he does is good) is the other end of the extreme.
People really should read the thread on Twitter Kelly Digges (?) wrote a few days ago. WotC may not be the biggest company there is, but it's nevertheless a chimera of many different people working together, often with different goals. Trashing a single person like MaRo for not answering to the enfranchised community's each and every demand and labeling his approach to everything you don't like as "cherrypicking" is pretty shortsighted. If the outcry and damage to the game was really as big as people make it out to be, there would be no reason for them to continue. You can only test so much - in many cases you just have to try if something works. Movies flop all the time, but that can rarely be attributed to specific people simply being "terrible at their job", "not knowing what's good" and "changing things just for the sake of change".
It is pretty stupid to target one person to blame for everything. So lets target blame where it belongs.
MaRo came up with the 'make more money and give people what they want' strategy which was nerf removal and counters and create midrange slam fest mtg. Look how that went. Even if he wasn't the originator of the idea he is the LEAD designer and that buck stops with him.
Kaladesh. Sure fine limited set... constructed? Dumpster fire.
Forsythe is supposed to force balance onto sets that are being produced. Look at the last 3 years of standard plus the bans. Nuff said.
Marketing might be responsible for trying to force players to change the days and times when they play, for changing the rotation cycle, for getting rid of FNM promos, and for lots of other smaller insults that were very poorly timed. I'm unconvinced that there isn't a more 'group effort' going on at WotC's MTG team where many of these things came as team decisions or dictated decisions from design. Ultimately though, marketing should push back against stupid ideas. How many of the above have been walked back or are still screwing things up?
FNMs are no longer well attended by Standard players (what few there are left).
Promos gone then back again.
Rotation changed, changed back sort of.
Hasbro - obviously they've said 'make more money' and some of the changes are forced by this. Doesn't excuse all the other departments for trying to do it in the worst possible ways or torpedoing standard for almost 4 years now.
BaB exclusivity and the outcry after was a warning. They did not listen and are doing it again with a better card than last time. To continue to have a legal card that is not in print and cannot be acquired in boosters is not ok nor should it be with any player. "I got mine, suck it" is the most damaging and toxic kind of response from those who do not care about the community or longevity of mtg at all.
So, in your hypothetical world where Wizards takes the same approach and tests things out in a Test Environment, what would that look like? What do you expect them to do to test changes they want to make? Surely Market Research is not enough of a test as that doesn't give the whole picture of how something will work in "Production".
Their internal "test environment" is flawed as its small and people that work for WotC are already a tiny corner of the people that play the game, you will get more and more opinions that are kinda the same, as WotC operates in a way that they ensure the people follow the companies idea of what defines fun, especially Maro establishes these "rules" after which they design cards and make desicions, its perfectly observable in their "Search a Designer" Test questions, as they dont search "new blood" or someone with actual new ideas, they just search more of the same, people that have the same opinion as they have, simply put they want more "Yes-Sir"-People.
That is very damaging for design and produces incredible poor results, as ideas are not questioned enough and you will way too easily be fooled that the idea is just 100% perfectly great, as all the people that dislike it, are not in your testing group.
The fact, every time they bring in Richard Garfield, as an EXTERIOR designer in a set makes it pretty great is a very real sign that they badly need fresh opinions and they greatly BENEFIT from having critical questions and ideas questioned ; only ideas that stand the test of critic can be polished to be great, what we get is just shiny coal, but we could get polished diamonds.
The same is true for software developers. You need critical people that think different to question your logic. A team of "Yes"-Sayers will run into their doom as their ideas do not stand the test of the real world.
The current testing team they have produces at least cards that work better within the rules, somewhat obvious mistakes of infinite combos are easier to detect if a bunch of "experienced" players (and especially deck brewers, the Johnny, Combo Player kind of player) just looks over a file of "spoiler" cards for a set.
Changes like "Set Rotation" produce drastic issues and mess up all planning. Its like hotfixing some code right before you merge into production, while all your tests worked out, that change wont be accounted for and it will mess up everything ; a mistake like that should NEVER be possible, if at least some experienced people question these motivations ; you absolutely cannot do that stuff if its not tested, and someone has to have the balls to stand up and defend these principles (even against a manager that might threaten to speak up against you).
The answer is that they can't.
But the way they currently organize themselves, they produced a working environment that benefits the "Yes-Sayer" and lets terrible ideas into production.
The results will always be terrible, as the fountain of all the work is already poisoned and dirty.
They have made mistakes in the past and they have attempted to mitigate these mistakes with their Play Design team (who was involved in a fair bit of Dominaria and fully involved in GoR). They are using this as their "test" for card design and development. This still doesn't tell them anything about Buy-a-Box promos or other promotions. They still need actual, real-world data and only "making these changes in Prod" will they get that data.
Mistakes are good, but you have to learn from them, and remove the "source" of the problem, not just write the mistake off and do another very similar mistake, just to write that off again. If the source of the problem still exists, you havent fixed it.
As we can read from their little "chat-history" of design team members, they make a lot of small changes on cards, play with them and test with them, and then randomly change it more, without testing again ; its a classic issue of last second changes and the root of evil is to never ever put anything into production or print you havent fully tested. Its a no-go and they just keep doing it over and over and over again, they didnt learn anything from it.
As to MaRo's "Charity", the charity is spending time on Blogatog listening to us and engaging with us. This is not even close to being his "job". It is something he does because he enjoys it and uses these interactions to make for a better game.
I absolutely EXPECT a head of development to engage with the community.
Still, he build himself a echo chamber of specific parts of a much broader community and the bad thing is it influences him into making even worse decisions, as it might please his echo chamber of people, but others just hate him for it.
So the "charity" is a two-sided edge, it might be great for some people, but its also a very problematic approach, as it gives the head of design a blurred vision of what the players enjoy or want, which i might say is quite the root issue.
Having a guy with that echo chamber view is not a problem in itself, its a good thing to have as many DIFFERENT views as possible. WotC is really really bad at this, as they very actively pick the voices they want to listen to, and they just blatantly ignore the rest, till it bites them in the back.
Its all avoidable problems, the information exists, they just dont use it and worse even, actively ignore it.
Just look at his Twitter Poll on Head to Head planes. Lorwyn was the winner which went against a lot of what he has said in the past about Lorwyn being difficult to return to. They could have continued looking at their data and saying it wasn't worth it but now they have new data because Mark decided to create a poll.
The basic idea of what Maro does is good, but the way he does it is a problem.
Imagine a CEO of a company would play at 1 Local Game Store, and based on that feedback alone would make all decisions.
That CANNOT work, its doomed to fail (and yes this is a argument to the extreme, just to make the idea as clear as possible).
To suggest he is infallible is obviously ludicrous, but to suggest he is any way bad completely inept (didn't mean to say everything he does is good) is the other end of the extreme.
At the end its a bonus to do something "extra" , but you absolutely have to ensure you avoid blatant mistakes.
If a factory worker is always early to work and nice to all the people but damages the product during work time, its no good, its not giving you any bonus points, you either do your job 100%, and then put in the bonus, or you stop doing all the bonus stuff to ensure you actually do your job better.
(that said, Maro especially should spend less time on twitter and all that social stuff, and put much more effort into quality control for all topics related to his actual job , his articles are nice, but they are ultimately just bonus, and the blatant mistakes weight much heavier and cut much deeper wounds into the fanbase than the bonus is doing good)
And dont get me wrong, i would love all the stuff and praise it, when they could avoid these visible pitfalls and stopped actively stabbing little knives into the fanbase.
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Some ideas to work on could be to make an ENTIRE set of "you make the card", not just 1 card. And entire freaking set that is made by peoples choices of design.
They could flood social media channels with these "You make the card" , different cards all over the world.
It connects the people much better with the product and you have much more eyes to watch it.
This is a special thing, clearly you cannot do that all the time.
For master sets, it would work really well if they actively put out a Top 10 list of cards people WANT to have reprinted. And then actually reprint the cards, but let all the people know way ahead of time which cards are on the list of possible choices.
Its easy to do for great effect, and it involves lots and lots of people all over the world into the process of making a set.
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Thats just rough ideas, but in the end, what they BADLY need is to get more people working for them that do not share the same background and not cherry pick what people they want to support, go broad, as broad as possible, get as many views as possible from as many people as possible and kick out all the "Yes-Sayers" , thats exactly the kind of people you do NOT want in any creative environment.
You know, the poll to pick cards for masters rares is actually a good idea that could work.That's certainly on the vein of reasonable feedback. Of course, ill tell you how feedback era works now and has basically always worked. They have to craft things on their own for legal reasons and also because people on the outside both know nothing about what's coming and are generally terrible about designing fun and balanced cards at an appropriate power level on their own. Way back around lorwyn block, the head developer talked about how they didn't really do fatties with shroud because they might be too uninteractive. I pitched the question of what if scaled wurm had shroud? We would get kalonian behemoth, progenitus, inkwell leviathan, sphinx of jwarr isle,sigarda, host of herons, geist of st traft, and thrunn the last troll. I pitched an idea pointing toward how most legacy/vintage. combo decks have to target a player to do their thing. We got a counterspell that counters spells that target a player in avacyn restored. I pitched that we needed instant wraths and cards that could deal with a horde of 50/50 trampling indestructible tokens. We got an instant wrath in the theros block and rakdos charm has a mode that stops the tokens. I pitched that they could probably make a real 20/20 creature after seeing desolation twin. I also theorized we could actually have a constructed playable one outside of combo. We got infinity elemental, animate library, grunn the lonely king, josu vess lich lord, and evra halcyon witness, a sort of callback to my baby, serra avatar that Mario knows I love.I told a story about how at a zendikar tournament, I killed my brother's stone idol trap with a massively pumped terra stomper. We got aggressive mammoth and ancient stone idol. The idol is also a callback to worldspine wurm and the wurm is the same size pumped as crash of rhino beetles. The beetles even have a reward for tons of lands possibility reflecting my girlfriend's obsessive love for for playing lands.We also got the double mechanic on nyleas colossus as well as the. cyclops in battlebond and grunn. That may have been inspired by my and several other's love of triple strike.After all, spoiler:they could do triple or quadruple that way without changing any rules. I also pitched triple and double strike for green since it has a very green feel with stupidly big damage.I and another person also pitched a green fight creature. I suggested making it huge like kaijudos almighty colossus to not stomp on the color pie. We got viviens invocation.I brought up what ken nagle said about fusion elemental originally being a 9/9 after seeing ghalta. Of course, I argued 10/10 because it's likely to be the only 5 color vanilla ever and should be super special. We got grothama all devouring and gigantosaurus.I actually asked for a regular animate library that was probably in serra avatar's spot in commander. I think maro was hinting at its death with the talk of a game vs activity though. Despite the statement on counting, you never really need to count with it because its effectively always infinity/infinity. Its so big it is probably always right to attack with it unless the defender has deathtouch because you can't gang block it down and if you don't block at all, it's lethal. That basically means it obsoleted every big vanilla or */* virtual vanilla in the color forever while offering no actual. choices in gameplay. Its like damage on the stack where there is technically a third choice, but its never wrong to make it. I also pitched the idea of a minimum floor on rares/mythics that led to the web comic rule as Aaron forsythe called it where a card should never be unusable to the point the most fun anyone will ever have with it is reading it during spoiler season. I even pitched something to do with their market research surveys. I really shouldn't elaborate on what exactly I said but I bet some nerds out there have a pretty good idea. If you have something you like or there's a mechanic they've done that you think would be fun to see again, drop a little hint to Santa maro. If there's something he can reasonably do to make you happy, he'll try. Of course, when you get your prize, try and act grateful. That doesn't mean you can't be critical, but explain what could be better without being a jackass. You also have to be realistic in your desires as well. I like in sets a ton and crash of rhino beetles even ended up being kind of silly. We even got a bear commander even though several people acted silly because they couldn't reasonably have bear tribal right this minute.
We could instead add a few more cheaper cards, but the total expected value of a pack must be less than the price of a pack or people will open packs until that isn't the case. That means everything but the most valuable and desired cards will become bulk if it goes on too long. Assuming it happens, everything that became bulk is no longer longer able to sell a set for years. There are tweaks you can make to adjust a set, but probably not any that will make people happy long term. The$4 a pack probably also won't make as many people happy since, without new cards, the set is now worthless to you unless you want tarmogoyf or the handful of other cards they added for value.
Again, you're making it sound like this is a bad thing. Oh no, reasonably priced cards! Whatever shall we do? Not to mention that what you're suggesting simply isn't possible with a Masters set because WotC intentionally limits supply. So what exactly is your point?
As for masterpieces being highly desirable foils that aren't expensive, that really only applies to a handful of cards that aren't in foil/new border and that's also dipping into your judge foil pool.
It really doesn't. There are a ton of moderate value cards that players would love to have pimp versions of. And that's not even counting obvious chase Masterpieces. I literally suggested over 50 cards as potential Masterpieces in a previous post, and that was the result of about 10 seconds of brainstorming. It is not hard to come up with good cards people obviously want, and if WotC uses actual reasonable numbers per set they would last basically forever. As for cutting into the judge foil pool... honestly so what? Judge promos stand apart already because of their unique art and rarity. For example, the Judge Promo Force of Will is still by far the most expensive version, despite also being printed as a Masterpiece. This isn't a real concern.
Now, as for Mark rosewater, the face of all fallout, no one can possibly make a case he doesn't care about the game. He donates thousands of hours of his own time, uncompensated by the company he works for, communicating with the community and taking ***** over every perceived mistake his company makes. Sure he makes mistakes, but if he wasn't doing all his CHARITY work outside his job, wed probably have never had stuff like red "draw," popular cards like arixmethes, the possibility of taking kamigawa off the not a chance in hell list, wizard tribal in dorminaria, or anything else came out of his blogging, tweeting, podcasting, email reading, consistent article writing, or signing of items. Everyone that's benefited from his absurdly energetic enthusiasm for the game should really thank him instead of treating him like garbage.
I... I don't know where this came from. Was this in response to something I said?
Another thing that produces poor results is bad data. Maro's questionnaires are freaking horrible. They skew data towards what he wants and don't ask enough hard questions about what they've been doing wrong. Giving people what you THINK they want based on totally random people choosing to do a flawed bank of questions has ended badly for everyone.
Another thing that bodes ill for the future is one person with too much influence who keeps making catastrophic mistakes.
The word catastrophic is totally appropriate if you consider how many people play standard right now as compared to 3 years ago... think just before Rally and CoCo days. "Should have banned it" and 'learned from mistakes' aren't cutting it anymore.
The long and short of it is he believes that "the powers that be" don't believe that this is a problem currently. He states that it's easy to get caught up in what others believe. However, I don't think that's the case in this situation. As part of his "charity", he takes it upon himself as a spokesperson for WotC and tries to put a spin on it to calm the masses using these quotes:
"There are many players who like the promotion..."
"So why are we continuing the promotion? Because it was very successful at doing what it was created to do and was well liked by enough of our audience to justify it..."
"...we have to weigh all the feedback from all the interested parties as well as look at what it’s doing overall for the business and we came to the conclusion that it was worth continuing."
I see that he's putting a positive spin on it, but at what cost does this road take us? Does temporary gains from some people outweigh the longevity of the player base? There are plenty of people having problems firing off FNM events as of late. Does this exclusive problem help? Nope, not in the slightest. If they wanted to improve FNM and general MTG attendance, then why did they cut money for FNM and special event promos, while simultaneously increase prices on booster boxes? Why did they cut the Wizard's Direct service for purchasing booster boxes and instead make it "distributor only"? Why are we having issues with poor card quality and curling? It all comes down to the bottom line of profits. There are plenty of videos on youtube discussing these changes and how they are counter intuitive to quotes of "helping the local gaming stores with these exclusive promos".
To argue that these BAB promos are for support of the stores is ridiculous. It's merely a cheap, temporary piece of tape trying to cover up cost saving methods of increasing profits in their pockets. WotC wants attendance numbers to be up, but aren't willing to spend money to upkeep this. I think they are banking on MTG Arena to usher in a large group of players to boost numbers of "active" players.
As for the real solution to fix this problem, I know of one that would work. It would reward players who attend FNMs, Standard Showdowns, PPTQs, RPTQs, etc. It would support local game stores, as long as they were willing to follow the guidelines given. Provide more support to the local games store. More promos. More showdown packs. More tangible rewards, such as lapel pins or patches, deck boxes, unique sleeves, whatever. Create an ongoing league to accrue planeswalker points and make planeswalker points matter by instating a reward system where you would trade in your points for certain promos at your LGS that you play at. Invest in your player base. Invest in your stores that promote your game. Show them you care by showering them and us in unique gifts. The logistic are there and it wouldn't be terribly hard to create. However I know that WotC won't do it because it would require them to spend more money than they are wanting to.
I know that I'm rambling and it's a bit off topic, but the BAB promos are but one symptom of many something much bigger than we should all see: Corporate Greed.
I snipped all but the punchline... however I agree fully with the whole post.
Paper players should be incensed that they made more copies of Nexus available in MTGO but paper gets the shaft. I think they forget that a great many of the digital come from the paper. You're completely right though they're totally banking on Arena and I have to tell you right now that's not going to pan out for them like they hope as it's currently going. Same poor decision making different medium.
I find the total lack of interest in the community and making a great game of Arena somehow classic WotC right now.
Arena devs have their idea of what it's going to be and seems to be a waste of time to try to explain to them how they're wrong. Oh and predatory gems system... so awesome. I can think about the waste of money while my opponent's animations are bogged down and my timer is ticking away removing MY timeouts.
People got pissed off about the last BaB (Buy a Box) promo and Maro gave us a 'heard you loud and clear'. So then they release a BETTER promo the next set. Whuuuuut?
It's like oops we made a 2 card infinite combo in standard... lets not ban that before release or anything sensical...
When you serve spaghetti, it should have protection, even though we removed that from the game, and dammit you should be able to cheat it in.
We SHOULD have banned CoCo...
Sorry we'll give you back the promos for FNM but we won't like it...
Goblin feceswhirler will be fine... later... we think...
We're going to make you buy cards more often by rotating faster! Holy crap everyone moved to Modern...
Spikes should play on weekends! FNM is for newbies! Because... uh... we say so!
We don't like fixing bugs for Arena so let's make people play only decks that we think rate against theirs and not tell them what the details of that system is. Random matching based on rank? That's just stupid. It's soooooo much fun to play against the same decks again and again and especially mirror matches!! Everyone will love it!
No koreandog, I think your post was way more on-topic than people making wild assumptions for why the designers are terrible at their jobs. Like you said, Maro mentiones the echo chamber problem all the time. Why would he not be aware that he's in one himself (if he was at all - I think people are exaggerating big time when it comes to this)? This specific problem doesn't have its roots in game design, it has its root in the business side of things. Like Kelly Digges said, "making great stuff that you will love is not the actual function of media corporations, even when they're made up mostly of amazing people who want to do exactly that". In the end a company like WotC will make decisions that may or may not be bad for the game they're producing as long as it means positive business for them. Obviously there might be long-term implications, but that's not what this is about and it's not like anyone can really tell what's going to happen. Is it a piece of tape-type solution going against the interests of a certain group of players? Probably. It might still be worth doing for them. Just think of Mythic rarity. That worked out for them too. Now everyone is used to it and while people might complain about upshifts to mythic, they rarely complain about mythic rarity itself anymore.
The bottom line is, if you don't like what they're doing, in addition to voicing your complaints to them (directly, not just in some internet community), sinply don't buy their product. It's not that hard. For the most part, I've been watching Magic from the sidelines for the last 6 years or so.
People got pissed off about the last BaB (Buy a Box) promo and Maro gave us a 'heard you loud and clear'. So then they release a BETTER promo the next set. Whuuuuut?
Is it really so hard to understand that there might be other people the're also listening to?
Is it really so hard to understand that there might be other people the're also listening to?
Maro was replying to all the angry and wary people and oh look... we were right. It's getting worse.
This is not 'just a group of players' that are disenfranchised by BaB exclusivity combined with being legal for play. It hurts everyone and it hurts the game.
How many times can they shoot themselves in the foot and still survive is what they need to start asking themselves.
Standard is not enjoying a heyday of populated LGS events. This BaB thing is bad for the game because how many people will show up, get eaten by Nexus decks, try to make their own, and find they either can't get the card or smartly will refuse to pay for it?
How many players do they lose (which really they can't afford to keep bleeding) because now you have to hunt down cards that you can't find in packs?
You can take Maro's side but things like Kaladesh are his responsibility. Set design and constructed play are HIS to create and nurture. Not much nurture for 3 years but plenty of bans and stagnant metas.
You bet I don't give them my money anymore. I don't buy boxes. Hell the only reason I play is because I have a large credit built up from FNMs and card trades to the store so I don't spend cash. If that runs out and we're still in the Standard nuclear winter I'll just quit too, like so many others have already.
Positive spin is not positive environment or the result of good decisions. It's damage control.
When the game is good sales happen and market share increases. You don't make money for very long tricking people and handing out feel bad all the time.
When the game is good sales happen and market share increases. You don't make money for very long tricking people and handing out feel bad all the time.
I quoted the last post and cut most things out, but I'm actually just responding to your general response over this thread:
Let nature take its course. If MTG is indeed doomed to fall in this era, then this is its fate.
No point talking about "How many times can they shoot themselves in the foot and still survive is what they need to start asking themselves" - when they shoot themselves hard enough that Hasbro's investors feel the pain, then that's when the real action will start. Note that I didn't say salvation - the game (and WotC) is just another property to them and we can be liquidated to another more profitable asset in their eyes.
No point pining "responsibility", it's pretty darn clear that these people with "responsibility" don't quite have the "authority" to fix what they're responsible for, be it because the entire thing is more of a group decision or someone from the absolute higher-ups put a command down. Even if you take the person "responsible" to task, the authority that generates the end results will continue clockwork.
It's been pointed out from the R&D process that things have changed and yes, they have - MTG is no longer designed as a game, it's designed as a corporate machine. or to be more exact, it has always been designed as both (remember MTG was initially created by Richard Garfield as a mechanical means to get RoboRally published and not completely for its own sake, so strictly speaking it was always for business from the beginning, even if due to its simpler origins then it certainly had more heart of game-design then), but over the years, the "corporate machine" part has been taking more and more priority and precedence than the "game" part.
But such is the nature and eventual fate of games, especially long-running ones. Just look at most other games out there, even from other mediums... in fact, especially MMOs from the other medium. Even the outstanding ones designed from a passion of game-design have to succumb to corporate fate eventually. They excel in their first few years against the outright-soulless replicas in competition, but over the years novelty can never keep up with cost and they succumb to their fate. It just happens their "flow of time" is much faster than TCGs (or tabletop in general), which is why we get to see the entire process despite MTG being the pioneer of "modern TCGs" and older than MMOs by default.
In fact, they're so fast and we're so slow that the "third" later market - mobile games, that spews out even more soulless games at a faster rate because of its even simpler nature caught up and it created a greater problem - the F2P issue - nobody wants to create a quality game because having a front-price-tag is considered negative marketing in that market itself. Hence it becomes easier to just make money from "very long tricking people and handing out feel bad all the time."
"But MTG isn't F2P, it's expensive as all oblivion"... true, but also remember we are all enfranchised players. Note those "terrible" new player introduction decks? Not intro packs, the really bad ones meant to be given out for free and made that bad enough that they are indeed used for that intention? That's enough to make MTG "F2P". The first taste of addictive mechanics is what both TCGs and mobile games use to lure you into the snare. We are just too enfranchised to recognize that since it is irrelevant to us at this point. Intro Packs are then the second step, the one that brings the nature of Booster Packs / Gacha-microtransactions into the game.
Then comes to real deal - awarding the whales - giving them the power to punish the ones trying to play for free or for as low a cost as possible. B-A-B cards being good are a facet of that aspect, something MTG has been more or less successfully avoiding on the primary front, until perhaps the Secondary Market showed how much profits there is to be made just from the sheer price-hiking the game has gone through... and that was naturally from the Secondary Market. Not that they have to even look there, since the mirror example of the sheer number of Gacha-Mobile Games also provide similar testimony.
And hence the conversion from "game" to "corporate machine" is complete. Well, some were just machines from the very start, but they all require the "flavoring" of a "game" to snare their wallets.
I think that now Nexus of Fate has established the precedent of being a $40 card, it is very possible that BaB cards in the future across the board will have inflated prices, because card carriers see how much people are willing to pay.
Or maybe Nexus hits hard because it's not only a half decent card, but its printed in an underwhelming set. I don't imagine M2019 moving like Dominaria.
But once these sets rotate you can bet your buns there will be buyouts of the BaBs, since magic has become an easily target for buyers to arbitrarily influence the market.
Coming from this prospective as a Commander player mainly -- (I sympathize with all the Standard Folks who wanted to run this as a 4 of in some combo deck)
Then comes to real deal - awarding the whales - giving them the power to punish the ones trying to play for free or for as low a cost as possible. B-A-B cards being good are a facet of that aspect, something MTG has been more or less successfully avoiding on the primary front, until perhaps the Secondary Market showed how much profits there is to be made just from the sheer price-hiking the game has gone through...
This is what the result right now is whether that's what they intended or not. Thus the 'I got mine, suck it'.
Yatsufusa has it right, the corporate is really what has screwed us, I suppose I had been hoping these last few years that WotC might see the error of their ways and convince HASBRO that the right way to cash is the way it's always been. But corporate greed only leads to downgrades in product and increase in profit or death. Toys R Us and KayBee were the victims of wall street buy and burn. WotC is the victim of share holder pressure but they're on the road to join TRU from their own failed efforts to please the masters and 'innovate'.
Arena could have been SO much more than skinnerware.
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If the card stays below $40 long term, I think that Wizards will continue the same practice going forward. $40 and lower is reasonable enough for a high-demand mythic in Standard as long as they don't make future BaB promos staples by any measure. If anything, Wizards' experience with Nexus of Fate only proves that such a practice makes the promo highly desirable and will serve to move boxes even more in the future.
As far as the people complaining about it, I highly doubt that the vast majority of those individuals actually want to purchase a playset of the card to be able to put it into a deck. Those of us who wanted to play the card knew it immediately after the card was spoiled (I know I did), and did everything they could to acquire the necessary copies of the card as soon as they could. Instead, the majority of the outcry on the issue comes from the perception that players may find it more difficult to play a certain deck in Standard if they so desired. No one likes being told they can't have something, even if they don't necessarily want it, especially when it comes to MTG.
So it's ok to make a card that is one shot and legal in multi-formats? So know immediately that you want this card and pay to grab them up and forget everyone else. New players who never had a shot at getting one. Changing what standard deck you want to play? Too late, $80 bucks a copy... and don't say 'it's only 40' because if they continue the practice and a card is more widely desired and the same deal you bet the price will get there. The price is a result of supply being pathetically low and no more 'openings' along the way.
Crap idea, poor implementation, and not right. The price of standard is already a problem and this only has the potential to make it worse. They can't even spit out sets that work right why is this a priority other than box sales.
I say don't let them think they're smart. Don't buy boxes.
Only if you ignore the compromises already suggested.
The default stance is "Standard legal cards should be available through boosters". The first compromise is to add "or preconstructed decks if they are on an unlimited print run". I'll call this first compromise the "line in the sand", because crossing that line was the actual starting point of this discussion.
A suggestion would be to put the BAB promo also into the set proper at mythic rare. There, problem solved! But you'll notice suggestions that are definite compromises from there like "At least stop forcing foil-only prints on tournament players who want to use a card that you - despite affirmations otherwise - pushed to the level of being Standard-playable". That's not a compromise? Or is ist an unreasonable compromise?
I think a lot of people would be happy if there was something like "BAB promo is always foil and maybe gets a little stamp of distinction for collectability, card in booster is non-foil by default", but that's actually the default stance anyway.
One could argue that "please stop this practice in the future even if you don't address the current issue" (compare the linked article regarding the ways the current issue could be handled - hinting at some "uncompromising" positions IMO) is a compromise and if "at least give us nonfoil BAB promos" is not a reasonabe compromise, then I argue the threshold for "reasonable compromise" is set to high, because that level has to feel like a "please don't put anything disgusting into our botttled drinking water after you outlawed getting our own water from the well" compromise.
Also paragraphs, I have no idea what your train of thought is.
Finally a good white villain quote: "So, do I ever re-evaluate my life choices? Never, because I know what I'm doing is a righteous cause."
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Second, I don't even really know where to begin because you just sort of move from point to point without much explanation. Yes, people have been critical of WotC recently, perhaps more so than usual. That might have something to do with people no longer being happy with the quality of the product WotC is producing. If all of your ideas are bad, it will in fact look like people are shooting down all of your ideas. Because the ideas are bad. Not because they just like shooting your ideas down.
Third, WotC had a good idea to get people to buy boxes. It was called the Masterpiece series. They killed it because they mismanaged the ***** out of it. Battle for Zendikar is an objectively terrible set. MaRo has admitted as much. That didn't stop it from being one of the best selling sets ever. And as far as I'm aware, the vast majority of people were open to the idea of Masterpieces and most of the negativity around them was entirely due to the execution of that idea. Too many terrible Masterpieces (hello, Divert), too many Masterpieces per set, the strict adherence to a broad "theme" and the insistence of making more and more distracting and ugly card frames eventually led to WotC just giving up instead of trying to fix a good idea with bad execution.
Fourth, the Masters sets. Ugh... the Masters sets are legitimately frustrating to talk about. The Masters sets are again (noticing a trend yet?) a good idea marred by WotC's inability to execute properly. The fundamental problem with Masters sets is the fact that they are trying to serve two entirely separate goals at the same time and as a result they ended up achieving neither. If WotC wanted to make a sweet, non-Standard draft environment created by mashing together old sets then by all means, I'll be first in line. I love drafting. But if you want people to enjoy your draft format, make sure they can actually afford to draft your format. Over $30 a draft is unreasonable, even for people without tight budgets.
Instead, if WotC wanted to make a set as a way to get needed Modern/Legacy reprints out into the wild, that is also fine. And at $10 a pack, it's a bit pricey but not egregiously so. But in that case, WotC cannot possibly justify the amount of draft chaff cards they printed in every Masters set. WotC tried to have their cake and eat it too by charging customers an absurd premium on a product that costs them the exact same amount of money to produce as a Standard-legal set, while simultaneously filling that overpriced product with bulk rares. And then jamming 3 Masters sets down our throats in less than 12 months. Honestly it's a miracle to me that customers haven't demanded WotC apologize for such a shamefully blatant cash grab, but I guess that's the gullibility of the masses for you.
Fifth, we didn't even mention WotC's other glaring recent failures like the card stock quality or their inability to create a healthy Standard environment. It's no wonder people are upset. I'm generally supportive of Magic, but something is clearly very wrong at WotC because they continue to make poor decisions in the face of all logic and reason. If I had a financial stake in WotC, I'd be hitting the panic button right about now.
The complaints about the masters sets are also unreasonable. Even if you up the value of the packs a little or drop the msrp, it HAS TO be a set of mostly modern irrelevant cards. There aren't even enough modern viable cards to even fill a set and if you cram them all in at once, and print to demand, you would destroy the price of every modern staple with the exception of possibly a couple of the most valuable cards. That's what happened with the sets like return to ravnica or khans of tarkir. It made everything besides the lands worth slightly more than toilet paper for years after people got done opening so much product. Unlike the regular standard sets, though, you're talking every modern staple you're doing it to. That's millions of dollars worth of cards people already own going from $20+ down to practically nothing for years. That's basically what happened with chronicles that led to the reserved list being implemented and it would also be a one and done sales spike because you've now destroyed the price of said cards. What do you do the next year when the parent company is expecting you to produce sales figures like that again? That's why the complaints are completely unrealistic.
Now, as for masterpieces, the idea was stupid and unsustainable just like making a masters set exclusively about modern staples. There simply aren't that many high dollar magic cards that exist unless you count cards that are only valuable because of scarcity but not play value. They used up most of them in zendikar and kaladesh. There really isn't anything you can possibly pick that can rival the lands theme from zendkiar and if you only do a few masterpieces per set, you're giving away all your masters pack sales for free as bonuses in standard boosters. You'll also have to repeat the same cards a lot because, like I said, there aren't a ton of them.
There are things they can do like the exclusive buy a box promo but pretty much everything people want to come up with is completely unrealistic because we're talking about busineses that must make money to pay their employees, benefits, the outside contractors, and everything else that goes into running a business. That's just the reality of how jobs work and a lot of people either don't understand that or are just being deliberately unreasonable. That doesn't mean game stores, wizards, online sellers, etc. Are mean or don't enjoy magic and hope it does well. They just have to be realistic about the reality of running a profitable business since all the stuff that goes into it can't realistically be done for free because too much and too many people have to go into its creation. I don't personally and have never made any money off of magic but other people make their living off of it. The game is how they make a lot or even all of their money to live on.
As to the second point, I agree that it is unfortunate that LGSs can end up caught in the crossfire when they personally didn't do anything wrong, but that is simply an unfortunate fact of business. I appreciate the intention behind the BaB promos (to help support LGSs) but the implementation is atrocious and cannot be allowed to continue. Magic is first and foremost a game, and compromising the integrity of the game (say, by printing powerful cards that can only be obtained through special means) is unacceptable, even if it wasn't done with malicious intent.
You seemed to have missed the point. You cannot claim that neither path I laid out for Masters sets would work, then only address one of those paths. If WotC doesn't want to (or can't, as you seem to claim but I find it highly dubious) fill a set with nothing but staples, they could have easily made Masters sets $4/pack like every other supplemental set they've made (Conspiracy, Conspiracy 2, Battlebond, etc) and nobody would have complained. As I said, I'd be more than happy with WotC taking this route to provide unique drafting experiences. That doesn't mean every card has to be jank, but people are certainly more forgiving about opening a $1 bulk rare when they only paid $4 for the pack, instead of $10. This is a completely legitimate route to salvaging the Masters sets, but WotC obviously doesn't want to take it because until recently, Masters sets were literally just printed money as WotC knew people would snap them up regardless of their actual quality.
As for your other argument, it is simply not true that a Masters set "HAS TO be a set of mostly Modern irrelevant cards". I cannot fathom why you think that. You talk about Modern staples costing less like that's somehow a bad thing. Oh no, people might actually be able to afford to play! The horror!
First, you seem to be under the assumption that only "high dollar magic cards" are allowed to be Masterpieces. That's not true. Sol Ring is less than $5 for the majority of it's printings. That hasn't stopped it from being a highly sought after Masterpiece (currently around $400). The only requirement to being a good Masterpiece is being a card people want, either for pimp value or simply to play with. Hopefully both, obviously.
As for the unsustainable bit, that was entirely due to WotC's handling of them. The original Expeditions could have been the 10 fetches as the only possible ones, 5 in BFZ and the other 5 in Oath. Boom. Done. Instead WotC had the bright idea of putting something like 50 in the entire block, and then restricted themselves even further by rigidly adhering to the Land theme. Of course that's unsustainable. But it didn't have to be. Which was kind of my point to begin with. The idea was sound, but WotC again botched the execution. If they had limited themselves to 5-10 per set, and got rid of the silly theme requirements, Masterpieces could have easily lasted for years and years. Going back to Ravnica? Bam, Shockland Masterpeices. Kaladesh? Bam, the 10 best mana rocks you feel like printing. Dominaria? Bam, 10 iconic legends from the past like Captain Sisay. Return to Innistrad? Bam, Lili, Snapcaster, and the Powerpuff Girls including Avacyn. Khans of Tarkir? Bam, the original Elder Dragons. I feel like I've made my point by now. There are tons of cards people would love to see with fancy new artwork and borders (assuming the borders aren't terrible like Amonkhet). Instead WotC tried twice after BFZ then gave up.
I don't really get your point here. Are you suggesting that WotC was forced to print lets just say Tree of Redemption for the sake of argument in Masters 25 because printing an actual good card would somehow cost them more or cause them to lose money? That doesn't sound right. Can you please explain what you mean here?
But that's beside the point. You're looking at Masters sets as a yearly release. They shouldn't be. There's no reason for them to be. Except because WotC wants to milk them for as much value as humanly possible, even if it means actively sabotaging the product's stated goal and upsetting customers in the process.
Now, they could add new cards, but if you make them modern legal, they now have to test them, put them in a set called modern but ban them or put them on some kind of illegal list, make them weak,or inject untested cards into the format. Being its called modern, people are going to want new modern staples. In order to do that, you either have to hire more testers to test a niche product for a less played format, and commission new art for them on top or pull people away from standard testing.
As for masterpieces being highly desirable foils that aren't expensive, that really only applies to a handful of cards that aren't in foil/new border and that's also dipping into your judge foil pool.
As any reasonable person can see, all those solutions are going to cost money or make someone mad. That's just the reality of business.
Now, as for Mark rosewater, the face of all fallout, no one can possibly make a case he doesn't care about the game. He donates thousands of hours of his own time, uncompensated by the company he works for, communicating with the community and taking ***** over every perceived mistake his company makes. Sure he makes mistakes, but if he wasn't doing all his CHARITY work outside his job, wed probably have never had stuff like red "draw," popular cards like arixmethes, the possibility of taking kamigawa off the not a chance in hell list, wizard tribal in dorminaria, or anything else came out of his blogging, tweeting, podcasting, email reading, consistent article writing, or signing of items. Everyone that's benefited from his absurdly energetic enthusiasm for the game should really thank him instead of treating him like garbage.
Its not "charity" its his job.
He has to stay in contact with at least some people from the outside and you expect anybody to do their job, no praises for doing your job.
Anyway, he doesnt do a particularly "good" job with all the mistakes made and his community work is abysmal, simply said, he locks into a very one-sided part of the "community" and and just hand picks critic he likes to address, while all the other stuff is blatantly ignored or even covered up (which again, they make a terrible job at).
Fixing problems will always cost money, thats why you try your hardest to avoid doing mistakes in the first place, or try stuff out in a small testing group, which again, they do a terrible job at, as they do have a testing group, but they just blatantly fail to see the obvious, and thats just crazy.
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Easiest solution, remove the promo, give players 3 Showdown booster packs instead, you produce them anyway, make some more.
WotC operates on a mechanism that is "Oh i have an idea, lets try it out in production and see if it deals any damage!".
Any software developer would be lynched for such bogus idiocy.
They clearly have too many people with supposedly "Good ideas" and way too less people that want to ensure the product is good or gets better as it is.
Changing stuff, just to change stuff is a terrible approach and doomed for failure.
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So, in your hypothetical world where Wizards takes the same approach and tests things out in a Test Environment, what would that look like? What do you expect them to do to test changes they want to make? Surely Market Research is not enough of a test as that doesn't give the whole picture of how something will work in "Production". Do they then use China or Germany or Canada or some other country that is not the US to test out their changes? How do they reconcile these test cases with still allowing everything to function as it has been?
The answer is that they can't. And to suggest that this is any way like a software development situation is, frankly, a bit inane. They have made mistakes in the past and they have attempted to mitigate these mistakes with their Play Design team (who was involved in a fair bit of Dominaria and fully involved in GoR). They are using this as their "test" for card design and development. This still doesn't tell them anything about Buy-a-Box promos or other promotions. They still need actual, real-world data and only "making these changes in Prod" will they get that data.
As to MaRo's "Charity", the charity is spending time on Blogatog listening to us and engaging with us. This is not even close to being his "job". It is something he does because he enjoys it and uses these interactions to make for a better game. Just look at his Twitter Poll on Head to Head planes. Lorwyn was the winner which went against a lot of what he has said in the past about Lorwyn being difficult to return to. They could have continued looking at their data and saying it wasn't worth it but now they have new data because Mark decided to create a poll.
To suggest he is infallible is obviously ludicrous, but to suggest he is
any way badcompletely inept (didn't mean to say everything he does is good) is the other end of the extreme.Edit: Here's the thread https://twitter.com/kellydigges/status/1025138232051154944?s=09
MaRo came up with the 'make more money and give people what they want' strategy which was nerf removal and counters and create midrange slam fest mtg. Look how that went. Even if he wasn't the originator of the idea he is the LEAD designer and that buck stops with him.
Kaladesh. Sure fine limited set... constructed? Dumpster fire.
Forsythe is supposed to force balance onto sets that are being produced. Look at the last 3 years of standard plus the bans. Nuff said.
Marketing might be responsible for trying to force players to change the days and times when they play, for changing the rotation cycle, for getting rid of FNM promos, and for lots of other smaller insults that were very poorly timed. I'm unconvinced that there isn't a more 'group effort' going on at WotC's MTG team where many of these things came as team decisions or dictated decisions from design. Ultimately though, marketing should push back against stupid ideas. How many of the above have been walked back or are still screwing things up?
FNMs are no longer well attended by Standard players (what few there are left).
Promos gone then back again.
Rotation changed, changed back sort of.
Hasbro - obviously they've said 'make more money' and some of the changes are forced by this. Doesn't excuse all the other departments for trying to do it in the worst possible ways or torpedoing standard for almost 4 years now.
BaB exclusivity and the outcry after was a warning. They did not listen and are doing it again with a better card than last time. To continue to have a legal card that is not in print and cannot be acquired in boosters is not ok nor should it be with any player. "I got mine, suck it" is the most damaging and toxic kind of response from those who do not care about the community or longevity of mtg at all.
Their internal "test environment" is flawed as its small and people that work for WotC are already a tiny corner of the people that play the game, you will get more and more opinions that are kinda the same, as WotC operates in a way that they ensure the people follow the companies idea of what defines fun, especially Maro establishes these "rules" after which they design cards and make desicions, its perfectly observable in their "Search a Designer" Test questions, as they dont search "new blood" or someone with actual new ideas, they just search more of the same, people that have the same opinion as they have, simply put they want more "Yes-Sir"-People.
That is very damaging for design and produces incredible poor results, as ideas are not questioned enough and you will way too easily be fooled that the idea is just 100% perfectly great, as all the people that dislike it, are not in your testing group.
The fact, every time they bring in Richard Garfield, as an EXTERIOR designer in a set makes it pretty great is a very real sign that they badly need fresh opinions and they greatly BENEFIT from having critical questions and ideas questioned ; only ideas that stand the test of critic can be polished to be great, what we get is just shiny coal, but we could get polished diamonds.
The same is true for software developers. You need critical people that think different to question your logic. A team of "Yes"-Sayers will run into their doom as their ideas do not stand the test of the real world.
The current testing team they have produces at least cards that work better within the rules, somewhat obvious mistakes of infinite combos are easier to detect if a bunch of "experienced" players (and especially deck brewers, the Johnny, Combo Player kind of player) just looks over a file of "spoiler" cards for a set.
Changes like "Set Rotation" produce drastic issues and mess up all planning. Its like hotfixing some code right before you merge into production, while all your tests worked out, that change wont be accounted for and it will mess up everything ; a mistake like that should NEVER be possible, if at least some experienced people question these motivations ; you absolutely cannot do that stuff if its not tested, and someone has to have the balls to stand up and defend these principles (even against a manager that might threaten to speak up against you).
But the way they currently organize themselves, they produced a working environment that benefits the "Yes-Sayer" and lets terrible ideas into production.
The results will always be terrible, as the fountain of all the work is already poisoned and dirty.
Mistakes are good, but you have to learn from them, and remove the "source" of the problem, not just write the mistake off and do another very similar mistake, just to write that off again. If the source of the problem still exists, you havent fixed it.
As we can read from their little "chat-history" of design team members, they make a lot of small changes on cards, play with them and test with them, and then randomly change it more, without testing again ; its a classic issue of last second changes and the root of evil is to never ever put anything into production or print you havent fully tested. Its a no-go and they just keep doing it over and over and over again, they didnt learn anything from it.
I absolutely EXPECT a head of development to engage with the community.
Still, he build himself a echo chamber of specific parts of a much broader community and the bad thing is it influences him into making even worse decisions, as it might please his echo chamber of people, but others just hate him for it.
So the "charity" is a two-sided edge, it might be great for some people, but its also a very problematic approach, as it gives the head of design a blurred vision of what the players enjoy or want, which i might say is quite the root issue.
Having a guy with that echo chamber view is not a problem in itself, its a good thing to have as many DIFFERENT views as possible. WotC is really really bad at this, as they very actively pick the voices they want to listen to, and they just blatantly ignore the rest, till it bites them in the back.
Its all avoidable problems, the information exists, they just dont use it and worse even, actively ignore it.
The basic idea of what Maro does is good, but the way he does it is a problem.
Imagine a CEO of a company would play at 1 Local Game Store, and based on that feedback alone would make all decisions.
That CANNOT work, its doomed to fail (and yes this is a argument to the extreme, just to make the idea as clear as possible).
At the end its a bonus to do something "extra" , but you absolutely have to ensure you avoid blatant mistakes.
If a factory worker is always early to work and nice to all the people but damages the product during work time, its no good, its not giving you any bonus points, you either do your job 100%, and then put in the bonus, or you stop doing all the bonus stuff to ensure you actually do your job better.
(that said, Maro especially should spend less time on twitter and all that social stuff, and put much more effort into quality control for all topics related to his actual job , his articles are nice, but they are ultimately just bonus, and the blatant mistakes weight much heavier and cut much deeper wounds into the fanbase than the bonus is doing good)
And dont get me wrong, i would love all the stuff and praise it, when they could avoid these visible pitfalls and stopped actively stabbing little knives into the fanbase.
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Some ideas to work on could be to make an ENTIRE set of "you make the card", not just 1 card. And entire freaking set that is made by peoples choices of design.
They could flood social media channels with these "You make the card" , different cards all over the world.
It connects the people much better with the product and you have much more eyes to watch it.
This is a special thing, clearly you cannot do that all the time.
For master sets, it would work really well if they actively put out a Top 10 list of cards people WANT to have reprinted. And then actually reprint the cards, but let all the people know way ahead of time which cards are on the list of possible choices.
Its easy to do for great effect, and it involves lots and lots of people all over the world into the process of making a set.
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Thats just rough ideas, but in the end, what they BADLY need is to get more people working for them that do not share the same background and not cherry pick what people they want to support, go broad, as broad as possible, get as many views as possible from as many people as possible and kick out all the "Yes-Sayers" , thats exactly the kind of people you do NOT want in any creative environment.
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It really doesn't. There are a ton of moderate value cards that players would love to have pimp versions of. And that's not even counting obvious chase Masterpieces. I literally suggested over 50 cards as potential Masterpieces in a previous post, and that was the result of about 10 seconds of brainstorming. It is not hard to come up with good cards people obviously want, and if WotC uses actual reasonable numbers per set they would last basically forever. As for cutting into the judge foil pool... honestly so what? Judge promos stand apart already because of their unique art and rarity. For example, the Judge Promo Force of Will is still by far the most expensive version, despite also being printed as a Masterpiece. This isn't a real concern.
I... I don't know where this came from. Was this in response to something I said?
Another thing that bodes ill for the future is one person with too much influence who keeps making catastrophic mistakes.
The word catastrophic is totally appropriate if you consider how many people play standard right now as compared to 3 years ago... think just before Rally and CoCo days. "Should have banned it" and 'learned from mistakes' aren't cutting it anymore.
http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/174024638688/going-forward-well-be-continuing-this
The long and short of it is he believes that "the powers that be" don't believe that this is a problem currently. He states that it's easy to get caught up in what others believe. However, I don't think that's the case in this situation. As part of his "charity", he takes it upon himself as a spokesperson for WotC and tries to put a spin on it to calm the masses using these quotes:
"There are many players who like the promotion..."
"So why are we continuing the promotion? Because it was very successful at doing what it was created to do and was well liked by enough of our audience to justify it..."
"...we have to weigh all the feedback from all the interested parties as well as look at what it’s doing overall for the business and we came to the conclusion that it was worth continuing."
I see that he's putting a positive spin on it, but at what cost does this road take us? Does temporary gains from some people outweigh the longevity of the player base? There are plenty of people having problems firing off FNM events as of late. Does this exclusive problem help? Nope, not in the slightest. If they wanted to improve FNM and general MTG attendance, then why did they cut money for FNM and special event promos, while simultaneously increase prices on booster boxes? Why did they cut the Wizard's Direct service for purchasing booster boxes and instead make it "distributor only"? Why are we having issues with poor card quality and curling? It all comes down to the bottom line of profits. There are plenty of videos on youtube discussing these changes and how they are counter intuitive to quotes of "helping the local gaming stores with these exclusive promos".
To argue that these BAB promos are for support of the stores is ridiculous. It's merely a cheap, temporary piece of tape trying to cover up cost saving methods of increasing profits in their pockets. WotC wants attendance numbers to be up, but aren't willing to spend money to upkeep this. I think they are banking on MTG Arena to usher in a large group of players to boost numbers of "active" players.
As for the real solution to fix this problem, I know of one that would work. It would reward players who attend FNMs, Standard Showdowns, PPTQs, RPTQs, etc. It would support local game stores, as long as they were willing to follow the guidelines given. Provide more support to the local games store. More promos. More showdown packs. More tangible rewards, such as lapel pins or patches, deck boxes, unique sleeves, whatever. Create an ongoing league to accrue planeswalker points and make planeswalker points matter by instating a reward system where you would trade in your points for certain promos at your LGS that you play at. Invest in your player base. Invest in your stores that promote your game. Show them you care by showering them and us in unique gifts. The logistic are there and it wouldn't be terribly hard to create. However I know that WotC won't do it because it would require them to spend more money than they are wanting to.
I know that I'm rambling and it's a bit off topic, but the BAB promos are but one symptom of many something much bigger than we should all see: Corporate Greed.
Standard: Risky Burn, Aggro/Burn, Tempo
Modern: Goblins, Budget 8 Rack, Soul Sisters, 42 Land Swan Hunt, Stompy, Burn
Pauper: Miracles, Madness
I snipped all but the punchline... however I agree fully with the whole post.
Paper players should be incensed that they made more copies of Nexus available in MTGO but paper gets the shaft. I think they forget that a great many of the digital come from the paper. You're completely right though they're totally banking on Arena and I have to tell you right now that's not going to pan out for them like they hope as it's currently going. Same poor decision making different medium.
I find the total lack of interest in the community and making a great game of Arena somehow classic WotC right now.
Arena devs have their idea of what it's going to be and seems to be a waste of time to try to explain to them how they're wrong. Oh and predatory gems system... so awesome. I can think about the waste of money while my opponent's animations are bogged down and my timer is ticking away removing MY timeouts.
People got pissed off about the last BaB (Buy a Box) promo and Maro gave us a 'heard you loud and clear'. So then they release a BETTER promo the next set. Whuuuuut?
It's like oops we made a 2 card infinite combo in standard... lets not ban that before release or anything sensical...
When you serve spaghetti, it should have protection, even though we removed that from the game, and dammit you should be able to cheat it in.
We SHOULD have banned CoCo...
Sorry we'll give you back the promos for FNM but we won't like it...
Goblin feceswhirler will be fine... later... we think...
We're going to make you buy cards more often by rotating faster! Holy crap everyone moved to Modern...
Spikes should play on weekends! FNM is for newbies! Because... uh... we say so!
We don't like fixing bugs for Arena so let's make people play only decks that we think rate against theirs and not tell them what the details of that system is. Random matching based on rank? That's just stupid. It's soooooo much fun to play against the same decks again and again and especially mirror matches!! Everyone will love it!
Systemic failures throughout management.
The bottom line is, if you don't like what they're doing, in addition to voicing your complaints to them (directly, not just in some internet community), sinply don't buy their product. It's not that hard. For the most part, I've been watching Magic from the sidelines for the last 6 years or so.
Is it really so hard to understand that there might be other people the're also listening to?
Maro was replying to all the angry and wary people and oh look... we were right. It's getting worse.
This is not 'just a group of players' that are disenfranchised by BaB exclusivity combined with being legal for play. It hurts everyone and it hurts the game.
How many times can they shoot themselves in the foot and still survive is what they need to start asking themselves.
Standard is not enjoying a heyday of populated LGS events. This BaB thing is bad for the game because how many people will show up, get eaten by Nexus decks, try to make their own, and find they either can't get the card or smartly will refuse to pay for it?
How many players do they lose (which really they can't afford to keep bleeding) because now you have to hunt down cards that you can't find in packs?
You can take Maro's side but things like Kaladesh are his responsibility. Set design and constructed play are HIS to create and nurture. Not much nurture for 3 years but plenty of bans and stagnant metas.
You bet I don't give them my money anymore. I don't buy boxes. Hell the only reason I play is because I have a large credit built up from FNMs and card trades to the store so I don't spend cash. If that runs out and we're still in the Standard nuclear winter I'll just quit too, like so many others have already.
Positive spin is not positive environment or the result of good decisions. It's damage control.
When the game is good sales happen and market share increases. You don't make money for very long tricking people and handing out feel bad all the time.
I quoted the last post and cut most things out, but I'm actually just responding to your general response over this thread:
Let nature take its course. If MTG is indeed doomed to fall in this era, then this is its fate.
No point talking about "How many times can they shoot themselves in the foot and still survive is what they need to start asking themselves" - when they shoot themselves hard enough that Hasbro's investors feel the pain, then that's when the real action will start. Note that I didn't say salvation - the game (and WotC) is just another property to them and we can be liquidated to another more profitable asset in their eyes.
No point pining "responsibility", it's pretty darn clear that these people with "responsibility" don't quite have the "authority" to fix what they're responsible for, be it because the entire thing is more of a group decision or someone from the absolute higher-ups put a command down. Even if you take the person "responsible" to task, the authority that generates the end results will continue clockwork.
It's been pointed out from the R&D process that things have changed and yes, they have - MTG is no longer designed as a game, it's designed as a corporate machine. or to be more exact, it has always been designed as both (remember MTG was initially created by Richard Garfield as a mechanical means to get RoboRally published and not completely for its own sake, so strictly speaking it was always for business from the beginning, even if due to its simpler origins then it certainly had more heart of game-design then), but over the years, the "corporate machine" part has been taking more and more priority and precedence than the "game" part.
But such is the nature and eventual fate of games, especially long-running ones. Just look at most other games out there, even from other mediums... in fact, especially MMOs from the other medium. Even the outstanding ones designed from a passion of game-design have to succumb to corporate fate eventually. They excel in their first few years against the outright-soulless replicas in competition, but over the years novelty can never keep up with cost and they succumb to their fate. It just happens their "flow of time" is much faster than TCGs (or tabletop in general), which is why we get to see the entire process despite MTG being the pioneer of "modern TCGs" and older than MMOs by default.
In fact, they're so fast and we're so slow that the "third" later market - mobile games, that spews out even more soulless games at a faster rate because of its even simpler nature caught up and it created a greater problem - the F2P issue - nobody wants to create a quality game because having a front-price-tag is considered negative marketing in that market itself. Hence it becomes easier to just make money from "very long tricking people and handing out feel bad all the time."
"But MTG isn't F2P, it's expensive as all oblivion"... true, but also remember we are all enfranchised players. Note those "terrible" new player introduction decks? Not intro packs, the really bad ones meant to be given out for free and made that bad enough that they are indeed used for that intention? That's enough to make MTG "F2P". The first taste of addictive mechanics is what both TCGs and mobile games use to lure you into the snare. We are just too enfranchised to recognize that since it is irrelevant to us at this point. Intro Packs are then the second step, the one that brings the nature of Booster Packs / Gacha-microtransactions into the game.
Then comes to real deal - awarding the whales - giving them the power to punish the ones trying to play for free or for as low a cost as possible. B-A-B cards being good are a facet of that aspect, something MTG has been more or less successfully avoiding on the primary front, until perhaps the Secondary Market showed how much profits there is to be made just from the sheer price-hiking the game has gone through... and that was naturally from the Secondary Market. Not that they have to even look there, since the mirror example of the sheer number of Gacha-Mobile Games also provide similar testimony.
And hence the conversion from "game" to "corporate machine" is complete. Well, some were just machines from the very start, but they all require the "flavoring" of a "game" to snare their wallets.
Or maybe Nexus hits hard because it's not only a half decent card, but its printed in an underwhelming set. I don't imagine M2019 moving like Dominaria.
But once these sets rotate you can bet your buns there will be buyouts of the BaBs, since magic has become an easily target for buyers to arbitrarily influence the market.
Coming from this prospective as a Commander player mainly -- (I sympathize with all the Standard Folks who wanted to run this as a 4 of in some combo deck)
This is what the result right now is whether that's what they intended or not. Thus the 'I got mine, suck it'.
Yatsufusa has it right, the corporate is really what has screwed us, I suppose I had been hoping these last few years that WotC might see the error of their ways and convince HASBRO that the right way to cash is the way it's always been. But corporate greed only leads to downgrades in product and increase in profit or death. Toys R Us and KayBee were the victims of wall street buy and burn. WotC is the victim of share holder pressure but they're on the road to join TRU from their own failed efforts to please the masters and 'innovate'.
Arena could have been SO much more than skinnerware.