You do know that the value on Crucible is going to creep back up, right? If you REALLY want to make money on the card, put twenty of themin a box to sell in five years or so when the price has doubled again. Crucible didn't start out as a $55 card, and M19 won't be new forever.
You can gnash your teeth every time they reprint a valuable card, but do so in recognition that everybody else is celebrating. It sucks that small businesses struggle, and I'm all for helping out the LGS, but the idea that card values should only rise and never come back down to earth is unrealistic, and is anathema to the common player. Prices already run wild.
im not gnash my teeth you can reprint and drop prices while keeping the margins the same, but you have to reprint to demand not past it , if they had printed crucible to demand it would be about 27 dollars but the margins would be the same IE the stores cost and income would be the same or similar . Crucible will never make it past 25 bucks again there are too many copies out in the wild now honestly in 5 years i would be surprised if its at 20 . Look the master set are Responsible reprinting, they aren't over printing, they normally aren't even reaching demand/supply equilibrium but they lower the cost without hitting singles guys and LGS they keep the cards at similar margins, its not just stores either they keep people with decent collections from losing invested capital too .
Look not everyone is celebrating not even close , a good portion of enfranchised players see a core set reprint and start dumping cards left and right , that's not cheering that's trying to save invested capital . in general the only people cheering expensive reprints in standard sets are the people who don't have them or new players. I will be honest the more money you put into a hobby the more likely you will be to stick around in it , also the more value a hobby feels like it provides the longer a person will stick with it .
Look like i said the Best thing wizards could do is go back to the limited time run standard sets like they did before Khans. This helps everyone and will provide reprint equity to wizards and more confidence in cards to the players .
People use this term " the common player" this is a myth the common kitchen table guy is not caring about expensive cards he dosen't know they exist . The people wanting cheap expensive cards are enfranchised players with little to no liquid capital and/or card equity .
If a reprint caused the card price to drop then the previous price was too expensive. Price was only high due to scarcity and not because of play reason.
Simple as that.
no not that simple, scarcity is a valid reason for a high price, people were buying them at 55 so the law of supply and demand says they were not priced too high it says they were perfectly priced actually. what we have now is an over supply of the card lowering the max potential of the cards margin . the demand for the card was 2 a week they printed enough to meet 10 +, this is why they really can't print good reprints in the mass overprinted standard sets because it just destroys any reprint equity the card has, chromatic lantern is a great example of this it was 20 bucks, now 3 bucks so bellow the value of the pack. what your seeing is what happened with Chronicles where they over printed beyond demand on a much smaller scale . Wizards really needs to go back to all sets having a timed print run and a cut off date, this allows for better control of numbers and supply of cards while allowing cards in new sets to acquire reprint equity . the current method of printing allows to many cards into the supply so nothing can gain value .
Except that's not right. People paid that much for perceived rarity. Now that the card isn't perceived to be as rare, price dropped.
Supply and demand. Same thing happens with comics, baseball, cards, beanie babies, etc.
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Except that's not right. People paid that much for perceived rarity. Now that the card isn't perceived to be as rare, price dropped.
Supply and demand. Same thing happens with comics, baseball, cards, beanie babies, etc.
it wasn't perceived rarity it was was actual rarity. the price was correct at the time . Nothing is perceived they are less rare , but they printed beyond demand and dropped the margin on the card , this is bad for sellers, and its bad for wizards cause they just used 90% ish of that cards reprint equity on nothing honestly, m19 would of sold the same with or with out it .
look man no offense but your understanding of supply and demand is some what lacking and rudimentary, In all 3 cases you gave examples of they died and crashed due to over supply , comics printed too much, baseball cards printed too much, and TY made way to many beanies and made multi-able runs of the same stuffy with out letting the consumer know . In all 3 cases too much supply was given ,more supply than could soaked up by even new demand and it brought down the empire . Do you see a pattern, over printing leads to lack of value and kills the market. you don't want this to happen , if this happens magic dies and there is no more magic to play . People, in General , don,t play dead games.
Like I said earlier wizards could of printed the card to demand cut the price in half , and still kept the margins and reprint equity , They need to go back to limited run standard sets with cut off dates , yes occasionally this leads to the worldwake issue but i would rather deal with that then an endless stream of valueless packs at every draft . you have to actually let value grow to keep the game alive .
Most of us here are players, not collectors/investors. I no longer have sympathy for stores who base most of their revenue on singles. That business model is slowly becoming not sustainable. Most of these singles high prices are for non-Standard formats, and that player pool is not going to expand rapidly. MTG singles business is becoming a "low-volume, high profit" which is like a luxury good. Cardboard gaming should not turn into a luxury good.
A card game doesn't need strong secondary market monetary value to stay alive. The game needs to be fun and supported. Pokemon and YuGiOh are still alive after 10+ years, and they have higher reprint frequencies. People are obviously still buying their stuff, because if sales weren't meeting the manufacturer's expectations, neither card game would still be alive.
And you, like way too many posted here and everywhere, just assumes that because someone has a different opinion means they "lack understanding".
Card prices have no universal fundamental price. What constitute an acceptable price for a card, any card, is purely an opinion, often backed by hype, an investor mindset, greed or a perceived entitlement for values. The only real concrete thing that can hold up the value is how much cash you can win in tournaments. Everything else is fairy dust and self-justification. How the game evolves, how many people participate and want to play is in direct relation to card price. Keep them high long enough and the game will die. Simple as that.
There are competing products, games, hobbies. I and many other are not paying the current prices. We just don't put money in Magic because we perceive the prices of some cards to be out of hand and Wizards unwilling to do anything much about it.
Most of us here are players, not collectors/investors. I no longer have sympathy for stores who base most of their revenue on singles. That business model is slowly becoming not sustainable. Most of these singles high prices are for non-Standard formats, and that player pool is not going to expand rapidly. MTG singles business is becoming a "low-volume, high profit" which is like a luxury good. Cardboard gaming should not turn into a luxury good.
A card game doesn't need strong secondary market monetary value to stay alive. The game needs to be fun and supported. Pokemon and YuGiOh are still alive after 10+ years, and they have higher reprint frequencies. People are obviously still buying their stuff, because if sales weren't meeting the manufacturer's expectations, neither card game would still be alive.
pokemon relies almost totally on 6 month in and out kids, from age 8 to 12, they are not really even close to the same thing as magic , the business models are completely different . Yugioh is similar with a target age range of 10 to 16 they are looking to get about 18 months out of each player 1 or 2 seasons of play, once again different business model. Both of those games make much more money off big box store sales and do not really push in person paper competitive play in the same scale or way magic does . But in these two games you don't have near the volume of enfranchised players you do in magic , and a large number of players leave these games and start playing magic because the cards do hold value and the play is better . Also both games mentioned have huge amount of power creep each set. when your player base rotates every 12 months no one realizes the lack of secondary markets. but you also don't establish a large core player base. Now this all applies to the US market i have no idea what they do with these games in Japan, but that's also an issue with both of these games.
single sales are still a large part of most LGS, not a majority of the income but a large minority part. Look i know people hate to hear it but you might not be the target audience for the product , that means it might be priced out of your range or comfort zone. but the company selling and making the product have done research to max out their profit from it . Wizards isn't dropping card prices because its not good for wizards .
Anything that is not food , shelter, basic clothes, or basic health care is a Luxury good, all entertainment is luxury goods, Cardboard gaming by very definition is a luxury good, trying to say other wise is delusional , you don't need Magic or any other costed entertainment to live .
And you, like way too many posted here and everywhere, just assumes that because someone has a different opinion means they "lack understanding".
Card prices have no universal fundamental price. What constitute an acceptable price for a card, any card, is purely an opinion, often backed by hype, an investor mindset, greed or a perceived entitlement for values. The only real concrete thing that can hold up the value is how much cash you can win in tournaments. Everything else is fairy dust and self-justification. How the game evolves, how many people participate and want to play is in direct relation to card price. Keep them high long enough and the game will die. Simple as that.
There are competing products, games, hobbies. I and many other are not paying the current prices. We just don't put money in Magic because we perceive the prices of some cards to be out of hand and Wizards unwilling to do anything much about it.
If you are not playing Magic why do you care about prices?
He does lack understanding of supply and demand, there is no alternative facts to it, he was expelling middle school level stuff. I didn't insult him , but he really didn't understand what he was talking about .
Card prices are opinion in a similar way the value of a dollar is an opinion. neither really have any "true" value beyond the material they are made of , but in both cases Millions of people have decided this is worth that . I suspect you think a dollar is worth a dollar and a twenty is worth a twenty its fiat, IE only backed by the good word of the creator . you don't agree with card pricing , however there is enough belief in the price of cards to make it so . its not fairy dust and magic its free market values at work. This is how it works, thinking other wise dose not change it . Look i even understand not everyone believes in capitalism , but you have to accept the reality of the society you live in and play by the rules of it or your going to have a lot of hard feelings headed your way in life. If you want to get technical most prices of cards just keep up with 3% inflation as far as the increase in price goes. RL stuff is a different story
you are correct if less people play the prices will come down ,No one is arguing about that , but People are still paying the current prices, and demand is higher than supply for most cards of value , ( i cant keep blood crypts or wooded foothills in stock to save my life i sell them before they even make the POS). The people Wizards are losing are the 6 months and drop guys not the enfranchised guys , the guys buying singles are the enfranchised guys. Wizards had such a huge growth with and since RTR that the peeling off that is happening now isn't surprising or unexpected, remember wizards is still growing ( more players playing more product sold ) its just not at the RTR level . This lack of large growth is actually one of the reason hasbro is erked with wizards right now , not lack of growth and profit, lack of RTR level growth and profit .
I just want to say that I dont know anything about much of anything, but this narlix guy seems to know whats up. It could all be bull poop, but he typed it in way that makes sense.
Having played for 23 years, and only having an edh set of reserved list staples, I would like to see some changes to the way reprints happen, and abolish the reserved list, but thats another story.
In my ideal world they would print less of each standard set, so that when I booster draft for 15 bucks each week I end up with more then $2.35 of secondary market value. Masters sets would be all hits as well. I would look at what 15 mythics and 53 rares need reprints to try to meet demand and print that. I wouldnt care if they were $20 packs, as long as I couldnt open a 10 cent rare in an extra expensive sealed pack.
Except that's not right. People paid that much for perceived rarity. Now that the card isn't perceived to be as rare, price dropped.
Supply and demand. Same thing happens with comics, baseball, cards, beanie babies, etc.
it wasn't perceived rarity it was was actual rarity. the price was correct at the time . Nothing is perceived they are less rare , but they printed beyond demand and dropped the margin on the card , this is bad for sellers, and its bad for wizards cause they just used 90% ish of that cards reprint equity on nothing honestly, m19 would of sold the same with or with out it .
look man no offense but your understanding of supply and demand is some what lacking and rudimentary, In all 3 cases you gave examples of they died and crashed due to over supply , comics printed too much, baseball cards printed too much, and TY made way to many beanies and made multi-able runs of the same stuffy with out letting the consumer know . In all 3 cases too much supply was given ,more supply than could soaked up by even new demand and it brought down the empire . Do you see a pattern, over printing leads to lack of value and kills the market. you don't want this to happen , if this happens magic dies and there is no more magic to play . People, in General , don,t play dead games.
Like I said earlier wizards could of printed the card to demand cut the price in half , and still kept the margins and reprint equity , They need to go back to limited run standard sets with cut off dates , yes occasionally this leads to the worldwake issue but i would rather deal with that then an endless stream of valueless packs at every draft . you have to actually let value grow to keep the game alive .
Only one version of Crucible is super low. And you know what? It's not even that low. It's a piece of cardboard that costs $13.
Consumers want things cheaper, printing cards makes things cheaper. Other games continue to thrive. Magic can too.
They still make baseball cards and comics and thank goodness the rampant get rich quick speculation is much lower than it used to be. I sure hope Magic gets more reasonable like this.
And don't insult me... you act like some professor because you sell singles.
You know it all and all these people are as dumb as me. Got it.
Currently Playing: Standard:
Nothing, the format Bores me! Legacy: RBurn (Made on the Cheap!)R RGBelcherRG WSoldier StompyW BReanimatorB EDH: BUGRWSliver OverlordWRGUB BGeth, Lord of the VaultB
Except that's not right. People paid that much for perceived rarity. Now that the card isn't perceived to be as rare, price dropped.
Supply and demand. Same thing happens with comics, baseball, cards, beanie babies, etc.
it wasn't perceived rarity it was was actual rarity. the price was correct at the time . Nothing is perceived they are less rare , but they printed beyond demand and dropped the margin on the card , this is bad for sellers, and its bad for wizards cause they just used 90% ish of that cards reprint equity on nothing honestly, m19 would of sold the same with or with out it .
look man no offense but your understanding of supply and demand is some what lacking and rudimentary, In all 3 cases you gave examples of they died and crashed due to over supply , comics printed too much, baseball cards printed too much, and TY made way to many beanies and made multi-able runs of the same stuffy with out letting the consumer know . In all 3 cases too much supply was given ,more supply than could soaked up by even new demand and it brought down the empire . Do you see a pattern, over printing leads to lack of value and kills the market. you don't want this to happen , if this happens magic dies and there is no more magic to play . People, in General , don,t play dead games.
Like I said earlier wizards could of printed the card to demand cut the price in half , and still kept the margins and reprint equity , They need to go back to limited run standard sets with cut off dates , yes occasionally this leads to the worldwake issue but i would rather deal with that then an endless stream of valueless packs at every draft . you have to actually let value grow to keep the game alive .
Only one version of Crucible is super low. And you know what? It's not even that low. It's a piece of cardboard that costs $13.
Consumers want things cheaper, printing cards makes things cheaper. Other games continue to thrive. Magic can too.
They still make baseball cards and comics and thank goodness the rampant get rich quick speculation is much lower than it used to be. I sure hope Magic gets more reasonable like this.
And don't insult me... you act like some professor because you sell singles.
You know it all and all these people are as dumb as me. Got it.
Actually I probably know more about the supply/demand stuff due to my degree in Econ/business not because I sell singles , wasn’t insulting you, I am trying to educate you though.
While the other printing of COW are higher , only collectors want them . Everyone else wants the cheap one . Actually it’s even a bigger issue with COW because all the printings have the same art . This has actually been a issue since iconic masters. Another big offender on this front is rishadan port.
You do realize that the only thing that kept comics as an actually medium was movies right ? Marvel bout went bankrupt , there is no money in paper comics . And baseball cards are much the same , they have gone the super premium , We literally only printed 3 of this card route . So hundreds of boxes of worthless cards are open digging for literally 1 of 50 foils or one set had a 1 of 1 . It’s like masterpieces on crack .
I will say this as far as wizards is concerned the players are not the customer distributors/amazon / single sellers / and LGS are .
by Crashing the value of cards you disenfranchise current players , you remove value they have invested in
I'm going to put this as plainly as I can. If you are buying cards not on the Reserved List then at any point you should expect a reprint to happen. Hell, even if you do have cards on the Reserved List they can still be reprinted, nothing is no law stopping them from doing so. It is no one's fault but your own if you are "investing" into a card game. There are far smarter investments out there.
If someone feels disenfranchised by their Lightning Bolt being cheaper after it's printed then there's nothing anyone can do for them outside of pointing them to a therapist.
and can no longer recover to buy other magic product, cause lets be honest thats what happens with most card value it gets re invested in other magic product normally . so while "timmy stay six months" can now afford a crucible of worlds, " stan 10 years" just lost 50 bucks .
Oh....no? I had multiple Onslaught fetchlands that went from $50-$100 and shot down to $8-$15. Did I complain? **** no! I was ecstatic because it's far better for the game for people to be able to afford playing than for "Stan 10 years" to make sure he doesn't lose money on cardboard.
if you get "timmy 6 months" to invest 50 to 60 in a crucible he is much more likely to hang around longer than 6 months and become an enfranchised player.
Oh do share your sources for this little gem. The fact you said if someone spends more money they are likely to stay longer sounds like whole heap of nonsense. People stay because they like the game, not because they spent too much money.
but its not for poor people,
Funny, I just had a "conversation" with someone that said something similar, that anyone poor doesn't get to have a hobby. It was just as much bull then as it is here.
they honestly can not afford to play this game in any way , they are not the target audience , wizards wants middle class parents moneys and gen X'ers with real jobs money , and the best way to do that is push limited, and keep the secondary market high and flushed with value .
Pokemon literally just reprinted a $50 card in a $50 product, with about $100 worth of total product in it, and no one complained. So if people can't enjoy Magic because the cards aren't expensive enough then I don't know what to do for those people, but let them waste their money investing on cardboard.
The investment Mentality is what wizards wants , thats the part that keeps people buying. Look the collectible is crucial in the life of this game , if you kill that you kill the game , stores wont carry it and run tournaments if they cant make money off it ,
Yeah, you're right, the game couldn't run without that. From the start it was all about the investments, that's why Black Lotus was $1000 in the very first year of the game, because without it being that price there would be no way the game could last 25 years. Just imagine entire years of cards not above $100. Could you imagine the outrage from the player...I mean hoarders....I mean investors....I mean player base?
do you say the same about TV's of different quality , or Cars, US currency ( all printed on the same linen with the same inks). Things made in similar ways with similar materials can and do have vastly different values .
Yeah, I kinda do. I car that sells for $200,000 does nothing different a car for $20,000 does. TVs mostly don't do anything different from any other versions.
fwiw: anyone saying that keeping volume low and value high is the way to do business (in singles/sealed/whatever) doesn't understand economics at. all.
The most successful retail companies in the world do insane volume at razor-thin margins. This is a verifiable fact. Printing sets as long as people are buying is the correct business move for WotC. Yes, sure, you don't want to overprint (and thus sit on piles of product) but underprinting is leaving money on the table, and at the margins they're making selling to distributors they'd rather overprint a -tiny- bit than underprint at all. The fact that they ever do limited print runs of insanely popular products (Battlebond for one recent example, and likely UMA given the preorder data) baffles me. Their business analysts are clearly hacks.
Distributors operate on similar principle: move as much as you can as fast as you can.
Singles retailers operate on exactly the same principle. Moving a thousand .10 cards is the same as moving one 100.00 card, and it is -way- easier to sell a thousand units of chaff than it is to sell one heavy hitter. Trust me, I sell gigantic piles of nigh-worthless EDH cards at an exponentially faster clip than I sell legacy staples. Sitting on expensive pieces of cardboard is an extremely slow, relatively safe way to make money way down the road, but moving them from one person's hands to another's and skimming a little profit in the transaction is -way- more profitable. Then you can use that money to do it again. And again.
Opportunity cost is real.
Investing is a coward's game.
People buying to play > people buying for value, as far as sheer volume of sales.
Oversaturation isn't great. Sure. But you want to get as close as you can to that line.
I hate that WotC has the gall to charge what they're charging for this set, but the early numbers are making it look like the demand for UMA is going to easily outstrip the supply. As such ordering as much as you possibly can is looking like a winning bet. I'd prefer to move it all immediately and not be stuck with any overstock, but even then you can just raise the price a little when supply inevitably dries up and recoup the lost opportunity cost.
Oh do share your sources for this little gem. The fact you said if someone spends more money they are likely to stay longer sounds like whole heap of nonsense. People stay because they like the game, not because they spent too much money.
this section i will answer, its a combination of objection to sunk cost fallacy and escalation of commitment , along with a few other things i can't remember off the top of my head, but the general theory is once people have money put into something they will commit to it even if its not in there best interest, and will feel guilty over lost money if they do stop . This is also why people care about value and being able to pull cash back out of cards , if you can pull the cash back out its not a true sunk cost. Most People reject and hate sunk cost even if we all live with it ( cars). I will also mention that while black lotus wasnt a 1000 bucks from the out set , the collectible card secondary market was well established at the time thanks to baseball cards and the Magic secondary market had firmly set in by the time legends rolled around. This was expected and wanted . Remember at this time WIZARDS was publishing its own price guide for its cards.
Look I'm giving the rest of this post a pass as your anger and frustration at the reality of the situation. There isn't much i can say that would change your mind so I'm not going to try . But i will say this if you let stuff like this worry and bother you , you will give yourself and ulcer, I have, they suck ,I almost died from blood loss. Once you accept the reality things get easier and life gets a lot less stressful.
fwiw: anyone saying that keeping volume low and value high is the way to do business (in singles/sealed/whatever) doesn't understand economics at. all.
The most successful retail companies in the world do insane volume at razor-thin margins. This is a verifiable fact. Printing sets as long as people are buying is the correct business move for WotC. Yes, sure, you don't want to overprint (and thus sit on piles of product) but underprinting is leaving money on the table, and at the margins they're making selling to distributors they'd rather overprint a -tiny- bit than underprint at all. The fact that they ever do limited print runs of insanely popular products (Battlebond for one recent example, and likely UMA given the preorder data) baffles me. Their business analysts are clearly hacks.
Distributors operate on similar principle: move as much as you can as fast as you can.
Singles retailers operate on exactly the same principle. Moving a thousand .10 cards is the same as moving one 100.00 card, and it is -way- easier to sell a thousand units of chaff than it is to sell one heavy hitter. Trust me, I sell gigantic piles of nigh-worthless EDH cards at an exponentially faster clip than I sell legacy staples. Sitting on expensive pieces of cardboard is an extremely slow, relatively safe way to make money way down the road, but moving them from one person's hands to another's and skimming a little profit in the transaction is -way- more profitable. Then you can use that money to do it again. And again.
I hate that WotC has the gall to charge what they're charging for this set, but the early numbers are making it look like the demand for UMA is going to easily outstrip the supply. As such ordering as much as you possibly can is looking like a winning bet. I'd prefer to move it all immediately and not be stuck with any overstock, but even then you can just raise the price a little when supply inevitably dries up and recoup the lost opportunity cost.
OK you have brought up something important to note, ECONOMY OF SCALE to do what walmart , target , and other big box stores do at super cheap with razor margins you need a literal ARMYof employees and man power. No single seller or LGS or hell even the distributors have that economy of scale, ( please note toy r us failed to keep up with economy of scale and crashed, economy of scale like wal marts is bad honestly for every one but the owners of wal mart. walmart is to the point now that they can force people to sell goods to them at a loss. ( see the 10 gallon pickle example)). Amazon does but that's why its selling boxes for almost the same price ACD and Alliance are selling boxes to the LGS for. Wizards is making about 35 buck on a box of standard, the drstributors are making about 25 and the LGS is making about 10 because they have to try and price match the ebay and guys and amazon , no one is actually selling boxes at MSRP . Even the Largest singles guy Star city only has one warehouse with about 100 employees, that is not even one local walmart worth of scale .
This is why all single sellers use the Luxury good model . there is another point on the supply demand model where I can make less items ( lower supply) reduce my materials used and sell at a higher price and make the same or more money than if I had printed to true demand. Jeweler stores, luxury cars ( BMW, , Aston, Ferrari) High end bicycles, Harley davidson all use this model . It also means you don't need an army of man power to move a mountain of goods. wizards can also do this by expending non liquid reprint equity to force up the price ( see master sets and mythic boxes). Actually another great example of this is Games Workshop, they realized long ago that making less selling higher netted more cash and promoted a luxury image.
look on paper your right 1000 .10 cent cards and 1 100 dollar cards will bring in the same income but there is a huge amount of time spent pulling 1000 cards out of boxes verse the literal less than a minute it takes to pull the 100 buck card that 4 or 5 hours you have the card kobold pulling 1000's of commons is a huge cost figure 50 bucks in pay. That eats into the income and profit . Look i agree about cards sitting around being inventory and not profit, its why i normally don't buy foils and masterpieces unless im getting them in the 40 to 50% store credit range they don't move and i end up taking them to opens and GP's and trading them to other vendors for stuff i know i will move like fetches and shocks. Look here is the deal most of the Cards we both mostly deal with are in the 5 to 40 range , all of them move quickly and at a steady pace, I also sell bulk boxes on line but thats more to get the commons out of my store since they take up a huge amount of room ( i am the premier limited store in my area so tons of draft chaft ) Its pretty few card that actually get over 50 bucks the players actually care about ( tarn, snappy, lilli , goyf , ).
this section i will answer, its a combination of objection to sunk cost fallacy and escalation of commitment , along with a few other things i can't remember off the top of my head, but the general theory
So you don't have sources to your claim that this will happen and only have a theory? Why am I not surprised?
I will also mention that while black lotus wasnt a 1000 bucks from the out set
That's the point. You said the game couldn't thrive without expensive cards and yet way back in the beginning the game was fairly cheap and yet here we are, the game hasn't died and yet for some reason people think we need $100 Goyfs and other cards else people won't like the game.
The only people that don't want their cards being reduced in price are hoarders and investors, not actual players. Any normal player will love that cards are cheaper, so they can get more and make more decks, not to stash away like a nest egg so they can retire.
Once you accept the reality things get easier and life gets a lot less stressful.
Oh please, do tell me the reality. Without your wisdom how can I get through this thing called life?
Also, nice little "you can't disagree with me, you'll get an ulcer" is garbage.
this section i will answer, its a combination of objection to sunk cost fallacy and escalation of commitment , along with a few other things i can't remember off the top of my head, but the general theory
So you don't have sources to your claim that this will happen and only have a theory? Why am I not surprised?
I will also mention that while black lotus wasnt a 1000 bucks from the out set
That's the point. You said the game couldn't thrive without expensive cards and yet way back in the beginning the game was fairly cheap and yet here we are, the game hasn't died and yet for some reason people think we need $100 Goyfs and other cards else people won't like the game.
The only people that don't want their cards being reduced in price are hoarders and investors, not actual players. Any normal player will love that cards are cheaper, so they can get more and make more decks, not to stash away like a nest egg so they can retire.
OK sunk cost fallacy and escalation of commitment are both established economic and human behavior principals , this isn't my "theory" these have been around a loooooong time in the business and science world , the sheer fact you didn't realize my explanation was a dumbed down version of it tells me, you didn't look it up, and two you might not know what your talking about here . Its ok not to know or understand something and admitting you don't is the first step to learning. look Like i said escalation of commitment basically states once you invest in something you will keep doing it , even if its not making the results you want , or is even detrimental to you, you do this because of the fear of loss of the sunk cost . this is human nature . the Theory was first put to paper in 1976 by barry m straw. it has been expanded on widely since then . There is more too it than just these two but your talking 300 level college course stuff i would have to look up myself since i don't recall it off the top of my head . Look the best way to think about business is its the applied practice of statistics and normal human psychology. if you have a good understanding of how humans act with money ( and we do) you can make them do what you want with that money almost every time .
you know what happened the last time wizards tried to drop prices across the board , they bout sank the ship and we got the RL list . look this is LITERALLY the same argument , people wanted cheaper cards, legends stuff was expensive , remember this was the MID 90's, elder dragons were 50 bucks each ( almost 100 in today's money ) . They printed them into the dirt and people left in droves , card value keeps consumer confidence high in the product , they tried to leave the collectible market model cause they though its just a game . they were wrong . Look there is no such thing as a player or collector/investor/hoarder( as you put it) everyone in this game is BOTH with very few exception( you can collect without playing you can't play with out collecting ) . you also just ignored the fact the game was created with the secondary market in mind based on the baseball card example and the company was even providing price lists for its own cards for a long time they escalated and enforced the secondary market . People are strongly adverse to sunk cost, stuff having value that can be recouped eases sunk cost fears. Look dont give me the whole its not the mid 90's it could be different this time, people wont run , learn from history , doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is the definition of insanity
I don't understand why you are so angry about this, its based in sound economic models, economic theory, and human behavior theory, and evidence from previous actions of the parent company of the game . I haven't said anything insulting , or anything not fact and evidence based . but you read very angry . And before you go there saying poor people are not the target audience is not insulting , its the truth. Look if you want to flop cardboard and not worry about the secondary market Fantasy Flight Games makes a great line of LCG ( living card games) they have L5R right now and just finished there run of netrunner They even have game of thrones if that is your thing .
They printed them into the dirt and people left in droves
The card pool at the time was a tiny fraction of what it is now. Tourney playable staples numbers were far lower at that time. And yes I remember buying Chronicles. It was cool for a while until I figured out those cards still sucked in competitive play and I'd get my butt handed to me by those that had a hold of the power 9 and other competitive 93/94 cards that never saw a reprint in Chronicles. Wizards would have to print a set with several thousand cards in numbers unheard of to do anything close to what Chronicles may or may not have done.
This game needs to be cheaper, not more expensive. PERIOD.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
They printed them into the dirt and people left in droves
The card pool at the time was a tiny fraction of what it is now. Tourney playable staples numbers were far lower at that time. And yes I remember buying Chronicles. It was cool for a while until I figured out those cards still sucked in competitive play and I'd get my butt handed to me by those that had a hold of the power 9 and other competitive 93/94 cards that never saw a reprint in Chronicles. Wizards would have to print a set with several thousand cards in numbers unheard of to do anything close to what Chronicles may or may not have done.
This game needs to be cheaper, not more expensive. PERIOD.
Wizards numbers are good right now and have been over the previous year dropping prices by a large margin is bad for wizards . And prices on almost all cards are down and have been for almost two months lilis are down almost 25 buck from her high of 110 . This is in line with the natural economic flow though. The Game is cheaper . Maybe just draft it’s honestly the cheapest way to play and really one of the most skill intensive .
I just wish Asceticism had been one of the Green Rares, and we got Leyline of Anticipation instead of Dig Through Time, and High Tide over Magus. Scroll Rack in the Artifacts section would have been amazing too. That said, other than the MSRP hike, this set has been great for my decks.
I'm not saying you're wrong, Mr. Narlix. I'm no economist, nor a businessperson. I can say beyond a doubt that Wizards has very highly paid minds on their payroll who are making exactly the arguments that you are making, and making them at a very high level. However, that is only one perspective, and Wizards knows this. That is the big-picture business perspective (which is very important to their continued existence). However, that perspective looks at the forest, and ignores the trees.
Wizards has a LOT of considerations to make, and one of the most important ones is the appeasement of public outcry. Public outcry is almost unilateral in saying that card prices are too high on basically every older staple. This outcry has been loudly sung for years, and it does Wizards no good to ignore it. That puts Wizards at cross purposes with itself in some ways.
For my part, I'd want to see card value max out around $50. I'd still be priced out of a lot of stuff, but middle-class people would be able to play any format from standard to vintage with a reasonable amount of effort. This is obviously an implausible dream, but the dream would be that you could order a fifty-dollar copy of literally any card from Wizards. They would be tournament legal, but marked in such a way as to be less appealing to collectors. There could be a seller discount so stores could get in on it too. But as great as that would be for some of us, they're thinking about a lot more than that.
In the end, Wizards has to try to appease everybody. That means that some of the things they do (like reprinting crucible) will be very good for some, and bad for others. A lot of things they do are going to keep cards out of the hands of poor folks. Its a very big, very mixed bag.
I'm not saying you're wrong, Mr. Narlix. I'm no economist, nor a businessperson. I can say beyond a doubt that Wizards has very highly paid minds on their payroll who are making exactly the arguments that you are making, and making them at a very high level. However, that is only one perspective, and Wizards knows this. That is the big-picture business perspective (which is very important to their continued existence). However, that perspective looks at the forest, and ignores the trees.
Wizards has a LOT of considerations to make, and one of the most important ones is the appeasement of public outcry. Public outcry is almost unilateral in saying that card prices are too high on basically every older staple. This outcry has been loudly sung for years, and it does Wizards no good to ignore it. That puts Wizards at cross purposes with itself in some ways.
For my part, I'd want to see card value max out around $50. I'd still be priced out of a lot of stuff, but middle-class people would be able to play any format from standard to vintage with a reasonable amount of effort. This is obviously an implausible dream, but the dream would be that you could order a fifty-dollar copy of literally any card from Wizards. They would be tournament legal, but marked in such a way as to be less appealing to collectors. There could be a seller discount so stores could get in on it too. But as great as that would be for some of us, they're thinking about a lot more than that.
In the end, Wizards has to try to appease everybody. That means that some of the things they do (like reprinting crucible) will be very good for some, and bad for others. A lot of things they do are going to keep cards out of the hands of poor folks. Its a very big, very mixed bag.
what your suggesting is it be more like a LCG ( living card game) and if they had started say with even as late as legends this could of happened, and like i said earlier Fantasy flight makes some good ones, I do disagree with some of you statement, and I will admit fully i normally look at econ stuff in a larger format . Wizards can ignore it because they can't actually acknowledge the secondary market openly due to legal reasons ( its also partially why they stopped putting out their own price guides) . I get that legacy pricing is super high right now , and its most likely going to eventually pay the price for the sins of Chronicles, and they were sins . But everything in modern can be reprinted and basically has been at least once , modern staples are almost 100% demand driven and most modern staples are 50 bucks or less ( snappy, tarns, lilli being the big exceptions)
I really do appreciate you being so rational and thought out in your post
[quote from="Dontrike »" url="/forums/magic-fundamentals/the-rumor-mill/800876-ultimate-masters-box-topper-promos-psa-regarding?comment=673"][quote from="Narlix the Blue »" url="/forums/magic-fundamentals/the-rumor-mill/800876-ultimate-masters-box-topper-promos-psa-regarding?comment=672"]
Look there is no such thing as a player or collector/investor/hoarder( as you put it) everyone in this game is BOTH with very few exception( you can collect without playing you can't play with out collecting ) .
I disagree with most of this. You can collect without playing, and you can't play without collecting. But. And it's a big one. There is a massive line between investors and players. One one hand, you have people who buy what they need to play (like myself), and have very little consideration for trying to make money from cards, and on the other, you have the likes of Rudy who buy up as many RL cards just to make money. That is a very, VERY, big divide. One helps the game, one actively harms it.
Where, Mr. the Blue, in your models, do people who want to play the game fit?
All but the richest of players (or those lucky enough to have bought in when prices were low) have been priced out of Legacy and Vintage. Modern deck prices are climbing higher and higher.
What happens to the player who gets into the game, and wants to play an older format. One that doesn't rotate, or one similar to what they tried when they were younger? What happens when they look into card prices and sees they can't afford a deck to play at their LGS? What happens when that player walks away because of high card prices? What happens when more players are pushed away because they can't play what they want?
This game needs to be cheaper, not more expensive. PERIOD.
It's a shame this set is making things... more expensive?
TEMPORARY!!!
12 to 18 months out prices will be right up to what they were before, if not higher. Hoarders and investors will sit on product until they can extract higher prices. Happens all the time, will happen again.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
They printed them into the dirt and people left in droves
The card pool at the time was a tiny fraction of what it is now. Tourney playable staples numbers were far lower at that time. And yes I remember buying Chronicles. It was cool for a while until I figured out those cards still sucked in competitive play and I'd get my butt handed to me by those that had a hold of the power 9 and other competitive 93/94 cards that never saw a reprint in Chronicles. Wizards would have to print a set with several thousand cards in numbers unheard of to do anything close to what Chronicles may or may not have done.
This game needs to be cheaper, not more expensive. PERIOD.
Wizards numbers are good right now and have been over the previous year dropping prices by a large margin is bad for wizards . And prices on almost all cards are down and have been for almost two months lilis are down almost 25 buck from her high of 110 . This is in line with the natural economic flow though. The Game is cheaper . Maybe just draft it’s honestly the cheapest way to play and really one of the most skill intensive .
So what Jund in Modern costs 1900 bucks instead of 2000. Whew what a bargain!!! Selling cards to distributors makes Wizards money. They don't see a penny of the secondary market (legally).
This Elitism seems to be pervasive right now. It will kill the game, mark my words.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
This game needs to be cheaper, not more expensive. PERIOD.
It's a shame this set is making things... more expensive?
TEMPORARY!!!
12 to 18 months out prices will be right up to what they were before, if not higher. Hoarders and investors will sit on product until they can extract higher prices. Happens all the time, will happen again.
Which means buy them if you need them. This price dip will be an excellent time to pick up many much needed staples at heavily discounted prices.
This set is dropping prices across the board for literally everything included, and yet people are still complaining. "Magic fans" are impossible to please.
im not gnash my teeth you can reprint and drop prices while keeping the margins the same, but you have to reprint to demand not past it , if they had printed crucible to demand it would be about 27 dollars but the margins would be the same IE the stores cost and income would be the same or similar . Crucible will never make it past 25 bucks again there are too many copies out in the wild now honestly in 5 years i would be surprised if its at 20 . Look the master set are Responsible reprinting, they aren't over printing, they normally aren't even reaching demand/supply equilibrium but they lower the cost without hitting singles guys and LGS they keep the cards at similar margins, its not just stores either they keep people with decent collections from losing invested capital too .
Look not everyone is celebrating not even close , a good portion of enfranchised players see a core set reprint and start dumping cards left and right , that's not cheering that's trying to save invested capital . in general the only people cheering expensive reprints in standard sets are the people who don't have them or new players. I will be honest the more money you put into a hobby the more likely you will be to stick around in it , also the more value a hobby feels like it provides the longer a person will stick with it .
Look like i said the Best thing wizards could do is go back to the limited time run standard sets like they did before Khans. This helps everyone and will provide reprint equity to wizards and more confidence in cards to the players .
People use this term " the common player" this is a myth the common kitchen table guy is not caring about expensive cards he dosen't know they exist . The people wanting cheap expensive cards are enfranchised players with little to no liquid capital and/or card equity .
Except that's not right. People paid that much for perceived rarity. Now that the card isn't perceived to be as rare, price dropped.
Supply and demand. Same thing happens with comics, baseball, cards, beanie babies, etc.
Currently Playing:
Standard:
Nothing, the format Bores me!
Legacy:
RBurn (Made on the Cheap!)R
RGBelcherRG
WSoldier StompyW
BReanimatorB
EDH:
BUGRWSliver OverlordWRGUB
BGeth, Lord of the VaultB
it wasn't perceived rarity it was was actual rarity. the price was correct at the time . Nothing is perceived they are less rare , but they printed beyond demand and dropped the margin on the card , this is bad for sellers, and its bad for wizards cause they just used 90% ish of that cards reprint equity on nothing honestly, m19 would of sold the same with or with out it .
look man no offense but your understanding of supply and demand is some what lacking and rudimentary, In all 3 cases you gave examples of they died and crashed due to over supply , comics printed too much, baseball cards printed too much, and TY made way to many beanies and made multi-able runs of the same stuffy with out letting the consumer know . In all 3 cases too much supply was given ,more supply than could soaked up by even new demand and it brought down the empire . Do you see a pattern, over printing leads to lack of value and kills the market. you don't want this to happen , if this happens magic dies and there is no more magic to play . People, in General , don,t play dead games.
Like I said earlier wizards could of printed the card to demand cut the price in half , and still kept the margins and reprint equity , They need to go back to limited run standard sets with cut off dates , yes occasionally this leads to the worldwake issue but i would rather deal with that then an endless stream of valueless packs at every draft . you have to actually let value grow to keep the game alive .
A card game doesn't need strong secondary market monetary value to stay alive. The game needs to be fun and supported. Pokemon and YuGiOh are still alive after 10+ years, and they have higher reprint frequencies. People are obviously still buying their stuff, because if sales weren't meeting the manufacturer's expectations, neither card game would still be alive.
Card prices have no universal fundamental price. What constitute an acceptable price for a card, any card, is purely an opinion, often backed by hype, an investor mindset, greed or a perceived entitlement for values. The only real concrete thing that can hold up the value is how much cash you can win in tournaments. Everything else is fairy dust and self-justification. How the game evolves, how many people participate and want to play is in direct relation to card price. Keep them high long enough and the game will die. Simple as that.
There are competing products, games, hobbies. I and many other are not paying the current prices. We just don't put money in Magic because we perceive the prices of some cards to be out of hand and Wizards unwilling to do anything much about it.
pokemon relies almost totally on 6 month in and out kids, from age 8 to 12, they are not really even close to the same thing as magic , the business models are completely different . Yugioh is similar with a target age range of 10 to 16 they are looking to get about 18 months out of each player 1 or 2 seasons of play, once again different business model. Both of those games make much more money off big box store sales and do not really push in person paper competitive play in the same scale or way magic does . But in these two games you don't have near the volume of enfranchised players you do in magic , and a large number of players leave these games and start playing magic because the cards do hold value and the play is better . Also both games mentioned have huge amount of power creep each set. when your player base rotates every 12 months no one realizes the lack of secondary markets. but you also don't establish a large core player base. Now this all applies to the US market i have no idea what they do with these games in Japan, but that's also an issue with both of these games.
single sales are still a large part of most LGS, not a majority of the income but a large minority part. Look i know people hate to hear it but you might not be the target audience for the product , that means it might be priced out of your range or comfort zone. but the company selling and making the product have done research to max out their profit from it . Wizards isn't dropping card prices because its not good for wizards .
Anything that is not food , shelter, basic clothes, or basic health care is a Luxury good, all entertainment is luxury goods, Cardboard gaming by very definition is a luxury good, trying to say other wise is delusional , you don't need Magic or any other costed entertainment to live .
If you are not playing Magic why do you care about prices?
He does lack understanding of supply and demand, there is no alternative facts to it, he was expelling middle school level stuff. I didn't insult him , but he really didn't understand what he was talking about .
Card prices are opinion in a similar way the value of a dollar is an opinion. neither really have any "true" value beyond the material they are made of , but in both cases Millions of people have decided this is worth that . I suspect you think a dollar is worth a dollar and a twenty is worth a twenty its fiat, IE only backed by the good word of the creator . you don't agree with card pricing , however there is enough belief in the price of cards to make it so . its not fairy dust and magic its free market values at work. This is how it works, thinking other wise dose not change it . Look i even understand not everyone believes in capitalism , but you have to accept the reality of the society you live in and play by the rules of it or your going to have a lot of hard feelings headed your way in life. If you want to get technical most prices of cards just keep up with 3% inflation as far as the increase in price goes. RL stuff is a different story
you are correct if less people play the prices will come down ,No one is arguing about that , but People are still paying the current prices, and demand is higher than supply for most cards of value , ( i cant keep blood crypts or wooded foothills in stock to save my life i sell them before they even make the POS). The people Wizards are losing are the 6 months and drop guys not the enfranchised guys , the guys buying singles are the enfranchised guys. Wizards had such a huge growth with and since RTR that the peeling off that is happening now isn't surprising or unexpected, remember wizards is still growing ( more players playing more product sold ) its just not at the RTR level . This lack of large growth is actually one of the reason hasbro is erked with wizards right now , not lack of growth and profit, lack of RTR level growth and profit .
Having played for 23 years, and only having an edh set of reserved list staples, I would like to see some changes to the way reprints happen, and abolish the reserved list, but thats another story.
In my ideal world they would print less of each standard set, so that when I booster draft for 15 bucks each week I end up with more then $2.35 of secondary market value. Masters sets would be all hits as well. I would look at what 15 mythics and 53 rares need reprints to try to meet demand and print that. I wouldnt care if they were $20 packs, as long as I couldnt open a 10 cent rare in an extra expensive sealed pack.
fwiw anyways
Only one version of Crucible is super low. And you know what? It's not even that low. It's a piece of cardboard that costs $13.
Consumers want things cheaper, printing cards makes things cheaper. Other games continue to thrive. Magic can too.
They still make baseball cards and comics and thank goodness the rampant get rich quick speculation is much lower than it used to be. I sure hope Magic gets more reasonable like this.
And don't insult me... you act like some professor because you sell singles.
You know it all and all these people are as dumb as me. Got it.
Currently Playing:
Standard:
Nothing, the format Bores me!
Legacy:
RBurn (Made on the Cheap!)R
RGBelcherRG
WSoldier StompyW
BReanimatorB
EDH:
BUGRWSliver OverlordWRGUB
BGeth, Lord of the VaultB
Actually I probably know more about the supply/demand stuff due to my degree in Econ/business not because I sell singles , wasn’t insulting you, I am trying to educate you though.
While the other printing of COW are higher , only collectors want them . Everyone else wants the cheap one . Actually it’s even a bigger issue with COW because all the printings have the same art . This has actually been a issue since iconic masters. Another big offender on this front is rishadan port.
You do realize that the only thing that kept comics as an actually medium was movies right ? Marvel bout went bankrupt , there is no money in paper comics . And baseball cards are much the same , they have gone the super premium , We literally only printed 3 of this card route . So hundreds of boxes of worthless cards are open digging for literally 1 of 50 foils or one set had a 1 of 1 . It’s like masterpieces on crack .
I will say this as far as wizards is concerned the players are not the customer distributors/amazon / single sellers / and LGS are .
I'm going to put this as plainly as I can. If you are buying cards not on the Reserved List then at any point you should expect a reprint to happen. Hell, even if you do have cards on the Reserved List they can still be reprinted, nothing is no law stopping them from doing so. It is no one's fault but your own if you are "investing" into a card game. There are far smarter investments out there.
If someone feels disenfranchised by their Lightning Bolt being cheaper after it's printed then there's nothing anyone can do for them outside of pointing them to a therapist.
Oh....no? I had multiple Onslaught fetchlands that went from $50-$100 and shot down to $8-$15. Did I complain? **** no! I was ecstatic because it's far better for the game for people to be able to afford playing than for "Stan 10 years" to make sure he doesn't lose money on cardboard.
Oh do share your sources for this little gem. The fact you said if someone spends more money they are likely to stay longer sounds like whole heap of nonsense. People stay because they like the game, not because they spent too much money.
Funny, I just had a "conversation" with someone that said something similar, that anyone poor doesn't get to have a hobby. It was just as much bull then as it is here.
Pokemon literally just reprinted a $50 card in a $50 product, with about $100 worth of total product in it, and no one complained. So if people can't enjoy Magic because the cards aren't expensive enough then I don't know what to do for those people, but let them waste their money investing on cardboard.
Yeah, you're right, the game couldn't run without that. From the start it was all about the investments, that's why Black Lotus was $1000 in the very first year of the game, because without it being that price there would be no way the game could last 25 years. Just imagine entire years of cards not above $100. Could you imagine the outrage from the player...I mean hoarders....I mean investors....I mean player base?
Yeah, I kinda do. I car that sells for $200,000 does nothing different a car for $20,000 does. TVs mostly don't do anything different from any other versions.
The most successful retail companies in the world do insane volume at razor-thin margins. This is a verifiable fact. Printing sets as long as people are buying is the correct business move for WotC. Yes, sure, you don't want to overprint (and thus sit on piles of product) but underprinting is leaving money on the table, and at the margins they're making selling to distributors they'd rather overprint a -tiny- bit than underprint at all. The fact that they ever do limited print runs of insanely popular products (Battlebond for one recent example, and likely UMA given the preorder data) baffles me. Their business analysts are clearly hacks.
Distributors operate on similar principle: move as much as you can as fast as you can.
Singles retailers operate on exactly the same principle. Moving a thousand .10 cards is the same as moving one 100.00 card, and it is -way- easier to sell a thousand units of chaff than it is to sell one heavy hitter. Trust me, I sell gigantic piles of nigh-worthless EDH cards at an exponentially faster clip than I sell legacy staples. Sitting on expensive pieces of cardboard is an extremely slow, relatively safe way to make money way down the road, but moving them from one person's hands to another's and skimming a little profit in the transaction is -way- more profitable. Then you can use that money to do it again. And again.
Opportunity cost is real.
Investing is a coward's game.
People buying to play > people buying for value, as far as sheer volume of sales.
Oversaturation isn't great. Sure. But you want to get as close as you can to that line.
I hate that WotC has the gall to charge what they're charging for this set, but the early numbers are making it look like the demand for UMA is going to easily outstrip the supply. As such ordering as much as you possibly can is looking like a winning bet. I'd prefer to move it all immediately and not be stuck with any overstock, but even then you can just raise the price a little when supply inevitably dries up and recoup the lost opportunity cost.
this section i will answer, its a combination of objection to sunk cost fallacy and escalation of commitment , along with a few other things i can't remember off the top of my head, but the general theory is once people have money put into something they will commit to it even if its not in there best interest, and will feel guilty over lost money if they do stop . This is also why people care about value and being able to pull cash back out of cards , if you can pull the cash back out its not a true sunk cost. Most People reject and hate sunk cost even if we all live with it ( cars). I will also mention that while black lotus wasnt a 1000 bucks from the out set , the collectible card secondary market was well established at the time thanks to baseball cards and the Magic secondary market had firmly set in by the time legends rolled around. This was expected and wanted . Remember at this time WIZARDS was publishing its own price guide for its cards.
Look I'm giving the rest of this post a pass as your anger and frustration at the reality of the situation. There isn't much i can say that would change your mind so I'm not going to try . But i will say this if you let stuff like this worry and bother you , you will give yourself and ulcer, I have, they suck ,I almost died from blood loss. Once you accept the reality things get easier and life gets a lot less stressful.
OK you have brought up something important to note, ECONOMY OF SCALE to do what walmart , target , and other big box stores do at super cheap with razor margins you need a literal ARMYof employees and man power. No single seller or LGS or hell even the distributors have that economy of scale, ( please note toy r us failed to keep up with economy of scale and crashed, economy of scale like wal marts is bad honestly for every one but the owners of wal mart. walmart is to the point now that they can force people to sell goods to them at a loss. ( see the 10 gallon pickle example)). Amazon does but that's why its selling boxes for almost the same price ACD and Alliance are selling boxes to the LGS for. Wizards is making about 35 buck on a box of standard, the drstributors are making about 25 and the LGS is making about 10 because they have to try and price match the ebay and guys and amazon , no one is actually selling boxes at MSRP . Even the Largest singles guy Star city only has one warehouse with about 100 employees, that is not even one local walmart worth of scale .
This is why all single sellers use the Luxury good model . there is another point on the supply demand model where I can make less items ( lower supply) reduce my materials used and sell at a higher price and make the same or more money than if I had printed to true demand. Jeweler stores, luxury cars ( BMW, , Aston, Ferrari) High end bicycles, Harley davidson all use this model . It also means you don't need an army of man power to move a mountain of goods. wizards can also do this by expending non liquid reprint equity to force up the price ( see master sets and mythic boxes). Actually another great example of this is Games Workshop, they realized long ago that making less selling higher netted more cash and promoted a luxury image.
look on paper your right 1000 .10 cent cards and 1 100 dollar cards will bring in the same income but there is a huge amount of time spent pulling 1000 cards out of boxes verse the literal less than a minute it takes to pull the 100 buck card that 4 or 5 hours you have the card kobold pulling 1000's of commons is a huge cost figure 50 bucks in pay. That eats into the income and profit . Look i agree about cards sitting around being inventory and not profit, its why i normally don't buy foils and masterpieces unless im getting them in the 40 to 50% store credit range they don't move and i end up taking them to opens and GP's and trading them to other vendors for stuff i know i will move like fetches and shocks. Look here is the deal most of the Cards we both mostly deal with are in the 5 to 40 range , all of them move quickly and at a steady pace, I also sell bulk boxes on line but thats more to get the commons out of my store since they take up a huge amount of room ( i am the premier limited store in my area so tons of draft chaft ) Its pretty few card that actually get over 50 bucks the players actually care about ( tarn, snappy, lilli , goyf , ).
So you don't have sources to your claim that this will happen and only have a theory? Why am I not surprised?
That's the point. You said the game couldn't thrive without expensive cards and yet way back in the beginning the game was fairly cheap and yet here we are, the game hasn't died and yet for some reason people think we need $100 Goyfs and other cards else people won't like the game.
The only people that don't want their cards being reduced in price are hoarders and investors, not actual players. Any normal player will love that cards are cheaper, so they can get more and make more decks, not to stash away like a nest egg so they can retire.
Oh please, do tell me the reality. Without your wisdom how can I get through this thing called life?
Also, nice little "you can't disagree with me, you'll get an ulcer" is garbage.
OK sunk cost fallacy and escalation of commitment are both established economic and human behavior principals , this isn't my "theory" these have been around a loooooong time in the business and science world , the sheer fact you didn't realize my explanation was a dumbed down version of it tells me, you didn't look it up, and two you might not know what your talking about here . Its ok not to know or understand something and admitting you don't is the first step to learning. look Like i said escalation of commitment basically states once you invest in something you will keep doing it , even if its not making the results you want , or is even detrimental to you, you do this because of the fear of loss of the sunk cost . this is human nature . the Theory was first put to paper in 1976 by barry m straw. it has been expanded on widely since then . There is more too it than just these two but your talking 300 level college course stuff i would have to look up myself since i don't recall it off the top of my head . Look the best way to think about business is its the applied practice of statistics and normal human psychology. if you have a good understanding of how humans act with money ( and we do) you can make them do what you want with that money almost every time .
you know what happened the last time wizards tried to drop prices across the board , they bout sank the ship and we got the RL list . look this is LITERALLY the same argument , people wanted cheaper cards, legends stuff was expensive , remember this was the MID 90's, elder dragons were 50 bucks each ( almost 100 in today's money ) . They printed them into the dirt and people left in droves , card value keeps consumer confidence high in the product , they tried to leave the collectible market model cause they though its just a game . they were wrong . Look there is no such thing as a player or collector/investor/hoarder( as you put it) everyone in this game is BOTH with very few exception( you can collect without playing you can't play with out collecting ) . you also just ignored the fact the game was created with the secondary market in mind based on the baseball card example and the company was even providing price lists for its own cards for a long time they escalated and enforced the secondary market . People are strongly adverse to sunk cost, stuff having value that can be recouped eases sunk cost fears. Look dont give me the whole its not the mid 90's it could be different this time, people wont run , learn from history , doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is the definition of insanity
I don't understand why you are so angry about this, its based in sound economic models, economic theory, and human behavior theory, and evidence from previous actions of the parent company of the game . I haven't said anything insulting , or anything not fact and evidence based . but you read very angry . And before you go there saying poor people are not the target audience is not insulting , its the truth. Look if you want to flop cardboard and not worry about the secondary market Fantasy Flight Games makes a great line of LCG ( living card games) they have L5R right now and just finished there run of netrunner They even have game of thrones if that is your thing .
The card pool at the time was a tiny fraction of what it is now. Tourney playable staples numbers were far lower at that time. And yes I remember buying Chronicles. It was cool for a while until I figured out those cards still sucked in competitive play and I'd get my butt handed to me by those that had a hold of the power 9 and other competitive 93/94 cards that never saw a reprint in Chronicles. Wizards would have to print a set with several thousand cards in numbers unheard of to do anything close to what Chronicles may or may not have done.
This game needs to be cheaper, not more expensive. PERIOD.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Wizards numbers are good right now and have been over the previous year dropping prices by a large margin is bad for wizards . And prices on almost all cards are down and have been for almost two months lilis are down almost 25 buck from her high of 110 . This is in line with the natural economic flow though. The Game is cheaper . Maybe just draft it’s honestly the cheapest way to play and really one of the most skill intensive .
|| UW Jace, Vyn's Prodigy UW || UG Kenessos, Priest of Thassa (feat. Arixmethes) UG ||
Cards I still want to see created:
|| Olantin, Lost City || Pavios and Thanasis || Choryu ||
Wizards has a LOT of considerations to make, and one of the most important ones is the appeasement of public outcry. Public outcry is almost unilateral in saying that card prices are too high on basically every older staple. This outcry has been loudly sung for years, and it does Wizards no good to ignore it. That puts Wizards at cross purposes with itself in some ways.
For my part, I'd want to see card value max out around $50. I'd still be priced out of a lot of stuff, but middle-class people would be able to play any format from standard to vintage with a reasonable amount of effort. This is obviously an implausible dream, but the dream would be that you could order a fifty-dollar copy of literally any card from Wizards. They would be tournament legal, but marked in such a way as to be less appealing to collectors. There could be a seller discount so stores could get in on it too. But as great as that would be for some of us, they're thinking about a lot more than that.
In the end, Wizards has to try to appease everybody. That means that some of the things they do (like reprinting crucible) will be very good for some, and bad for others. A lot of things they do are going to keep cards out of the hands of poor folks. Its a very big, very mixed bag.
Low-power cube enthusiast!
My 1570 card cube (no longer updated)
My 415 Peasant+ Artifact and Enchantment Cube
Ever-Expanding "Just throw it in" cube.
It's a shame this set is making things... more expensive?
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
what your suggesting is it be more like a LCG ( living card game) and if they had started say with even as late as legends this could of happened, and like i said earlier Fantasy flight makes some good ones, I do disagree with some of you statement, and I will admit fully i normally look at econ stuff in a larger format . Wizards can ignore it because they can't actually acknowledge the secondary market openly due to legal reasons ( its also partially why they stopped putting out their own price guides) . I get that legacy pricing is super high right now , and its most likely going to eventually pay the price for the sins of Chronicles, and they were sins . But everything in modern can be reprinted and basically has been at least once , modern staples are almost 100% demand driven and most modern staples are 50 bucks or less ( snappy, tarns, lilli being the big exceptions)
I really do appreciate you being so rational and thought out in your post
I disagree with most of this. You can collect without playing, and you can't play without collecting. But. And it's a big one. There is a massive line between investors and players. One one hand, you have people who buy what they need to play (like myself), and have very little consideration for trying to make money from cards, and on the other, you have the likes of Rudy who buy up as many RL cards just to make money. That is a very, VERY, big divide. One helps the game, one actively harms it.
Where, Mr. the Blue, in your models, do people who want to play the game fit?
All but the richest of players (or those lucky enough to have bought in when prices were low) have been priced out of Legacy and Vintage. Modern deck prices are climbing higher and higher.
What happens to the player who gets into the game, and wants to play an older format. One that doesn't rotate, or one similar to what they tried when they were younger? What happens when they look into card prices and sees they can't afford a deck to play at their LGS? What happens when that player walks away because of high card prices? What happens when more players are pushed away because they can't play what they want?
TEMPORARY!!!
12 to 18 months out prices will be right up to what they were before, if not higher. Hoarders and investors will sit on product until they can extract higher prices. Happens all the time, will happen again.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
So what Jund in Modern costs 1900 bucks instead of 2000. Whew what a bargain!!! Selling cards to distributors makes Wizards money. They don't see a penny of the secondary market (legally).
This Elitism seems to be pervasive right now. It will kill the game, mark my words.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Which means buy them if you need them. This price dip will be an excellent time to pick up many much needed staples at heavily discounted prices.
This set is dropping prices across the board for literally everything included, and yet people are still complaining. "Magic fans" are impossible to please.
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate