A sizable portion of players seem to be especially disappointed when rares are bad. Why is this? Only a certain percentage of cards are ever going to be constructed-playable; the more those are concentrated in higher rarities, the more expensive the game is. Shouldn't, when (say) a bad rare is spoiled, people be more inclined to say "well, at least it's a rare" than "on a rare, no less!"
(I can of course see why Johnny junk rares don't appeal to everyone, even if I adore them; but that's a separate question.)
Well, people actually spend money to bust boosters, so finding a rare that's just not worth it will disappoint people. I personally prefer booster-busting than singles hunting...
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You answered your own question. They are crap, and they are the majority of the worth of a booster pack. I want my boosters to have a trade value of at least what I payed for it.
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While only a small percentage of cards will be constructed playable (exactly which cards are playable depends on the format). I don't think that there is an excuse for "junk" rares that are completely unplayable in all formats (Xenograft) or ones that could have been printed at a lower rarity (Fervor could have been an uncommon.)
That's why you shouldn't crack many boosters, unless it's limited or a good price or you just feel like gambling. It's impossible for every rare to be good and I think the majority of people understand why there have to be bad rares.
You answered your own question. They are crap, and they are the majority of the worth of a booster pack. I want my boosters to have a trade value of at least what I payed for it.
But an unopened booster pack is always (taking into account transaction costs on the singles market) going to cost the expected value of its contents, and the number of packs you'd have to buy to get the Constructed cards you want (if making the incredibly inefficient choice to crack packs for that purpose) goes down as the number of bad rares rises. (I trust that if you buy singles the financial advantage of good cards being at lower rarities is already obvious.)
Once you open enough cube booster packs of all good cards , the allure of opening WOTC product kind of loses its luster. Why not just save money in the long run, spending money on drafts for the fun of it, and then ordering singles you want? If you're good at draft/sealed, you can even break even or make a profit sometimes.
Tons of corner case, "crap rares", that are fun for casual/edh/etc. are cheap as hell when you get them in bulk from a vendor like CFG / SCG.
As far as I'm concerned it's good to have somewhat of a balance in the rare slot between constructed playable cards (for different formats: standard, modern, legacy, vintage, edh, etc.), limited playable cards, and casual "fun" cards (yes, even Xenograft fits this category). There are cards I would consider to be purely "crap" at rare. Ie. Fervor had no place in a rare slot, but generally there aren't too many of those printed each set.
Really, though, the place where cool/valuable cards should fall is at uncommon. Yeah, having some splashy rares/mythics drives sales, but satisfying booster cracking (at least in my experience) comes from opening solid uncommons. The cards that you will inevitably need for decks, that will show up in multiples, and are true staples.
Johnnies. (And: Rare is obviously the place to put things that are unplayable in Limited.)
I think the extent to which "Junk" Rares can be written off as "Johnny-fodder" has been very overstated. To me as a Johnny (Johnny/Spike for limited), cards like these seem like they're being pulled in two directions. On one side R&D says here Johnny have this cool new toy to play with and on the other side, they nerf the ever living crap of out it to keep it out of the hands of spikes and therefore make it unplayable, even by Johnny standards. That seems like a disconnect, doesn't it?
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Lately, yes. They have been trying very hard to keep combos down. But keep in mind that historically, viable combos (fast, consistent enough) are often discovered "by accident" and often combine two cards you wouldn't necessarily think of. Donate and Show and Tell being very silly, flavorful, probably multiplayer oriented/casual cards. And look what happened to them
Look at Village Bell-ringer, just a pretty good Innistrad limited wall / combat trick. I was saying for the longest time, "all you need is a critical mass of Elf-wave pieces for this to be playable in a standard elfball deck." Just one little missing piece, Arbor Elf, and for a time now you sometimes seen in it a functional elf wave deck (that will see a lot of pieces rotate pretty soon unfortunately )
All you need is some aura like Presence of Gond in standard, and you will have an infinite token combo like Squirrel Nest / Earthcraft.
Wasn't Seismic Swans another one that just kind of popped up unintentionally out of nowhere. Combo is like that, it's sort of like a fever that takes hold once someone puts the mysterious pieces together.
You said it yourself. They're "crap rares"; why would anyone like them instead of disliking them?
That being said, I'm a huge fan of constructed and a lot of the Johnny rares are very playable / slammable in limited. The only times that I will get riled up over a "crap rare" is when people try to tell others that one or more of these "crap rares" will be playable in constructed formats (ESPECIALLY eternal formats).
I have heard vague rumors of a moustache-dispensing vending machine in a distant laundromat, across the street from a tattoo parlor. However, this information is shaky, and time is of the essence.
Well, I guess whenever I open a pack, I always have high hopes.
Don't get me wrong though. Something like Sphinx of Uthuun still provides CA and couldn't exist at a lower rarity, but it's still something I don't think I'll ever have much use for.
Crap rares can be fun, and thanks to EDH, they can actually be pretty playable. A few years back we were playing with a massive stack of crap rares (a singular library), and it turns out Call of the Wild is amazing in this set-up.
Some, however, are just awful (like the Purelace cycle, or Pale Moon).
I'm going on record right now and stating that before the end of 2012 we will see foil dual lands in booster packs (The real, Alpha dual lands). You can quote me on that.
I'm fine with crap rares. They make opening boosters less profitable definitely, but if every rare is good (or every good card is rare) then the singles market becomes a whole lot more expensive. Imagine if Delver of Secrets were rare. It'd be nicer to open but it'd make building a Delver deck expensive.
Ignoring limited for a second, are we happy that Bonfire of the Damned is a Mythic? Sure it's a chase card and is more exciting to open because of its price but if it were an uncommon its availability would skyrocket and it would be affordable enough for the average player to use.
There can only be a certain percentage of constructed playable cards at a given time, some cards will just end up better than others. I'd rather have a few junk rares and some solid commons/uncommons than have all the playable cards be rares just to increase my pack's trade value.
EDIT: Also, as a Johnny I love crap rares even without taking into account their being good for the health of the game.
Because the economy sucks and money is tight. So when you buy a pack of cards for $4 and get a $1 rare, you haven't even gotten your money's worth for the pack. It's $4 thrown away.
Buying Magic packs is like playing the lottery and it shouldn't be. You should get at least $4 of value in every pack. But you don't.
I'm fine with crap rares. They make opening boosters less profitable definitely, but if every rare is good (or every good card is rare) then the singles market becomes a whole lot more expensive. Imagine if Delver of Secrets were rare. It'd be nicer to open but it'd make building a Delver deck expensive.
Ignoring limited for a second, are we happy that Bonfire of the Damned is a Mythic? Sure it's a chase card and is more exciting to open because of its price but if it were an uncommon its availability would skyrocket and it would be affordable enough for the average player to use.
There can only be a certain percentage of constructed playable cards at a given time, some cards will just end up better than others. I'd rather have a few junk rares and some solid commons/uncommons than have all the playable cards be rares just to increase my pack's trade value.
EDIT: Also, as a Johnny I love crap rares even without taking into account their being good for the health of the game.
You have it completely backwards, actually. The more "chase" cards at rare or mythic in any given set, the lower the average price for each of those chase cards. Return to Ravnica is an excellent example - we have a cycle of shocklands with guaranteed value and playability, abrupt decay, dreadbore, Vraska, New Jace, Angel of Serenity, playable rares like Pack Rat and Lotleth Troll, very solid uncommons like the Dryad Militant, Grisly Salvage, and the Charms, etc. Each successively playable card eats a chunk out of the total demand for the set. Granted, the demand of the set is not a finite thing- if the set is chock full of cards that are going to warp formats outside of standard, then you are increasing total demand for the product. However, the principle still stands when players are given MANY options for constructed-playable archetypes in addition to MANY card choices within those archetypes. The result is that players prioritize their singles purchases, which allows retailers to lower prices while still making a profit margin on their box/case purchases.
In the end, it boils down to this - Retailers have to make sure that buying singles is ALWAYS a more cost-efficient choice than buying boxes for the consumer, otherwise singles demand will drop until buying singles becomes the safer choice to cracking packs and trading rares for rares. This is why Bonfire is a bajillion dollars; the AVR set's value is focused on very few chase cards (essentially the mythic miracles, griselbrand, and resto angel), and the unfortunate fact that it's also a mythic and a 3 or 4-of in a few archetypes means it sits rather high on the value chain. Hopefully, the huge demand for RTR product will force bonfire's price down a bit.
With all of that said, I'm perfectly OK with rares that don't have a lot of constructed value, but contribute towards some other legitimate purpose, i.e. the limited bomb. It's cards like Cast Through Time that really irk me, as they are essentially a waste of cardboard when a card literally won't see play outside of the kitchen table. Casual players should never be the sole demographic in regards to a card design.
Buying Magic packs is like playing the lottery and it shouldn't be. You should get at least $4 of value in every pack. But you don't.
That's why we hate bad rares.
Is this such a difficult concept to understand?
It's not hard to understand the concept; it's just a terribly flawed concept.
If the value of a pack somehow rises above $4 street value (not retailer's sell prices), then retailers will start opening packs (since they can sell the contents of a pack for more than you can, ripping packs is even more profitable for them) until either the value of the cards in the set drops below $4/pack (if there are enough packs in the supply channel to do so) or the price of a pack will go up if there isn't enough supply.
In general, the market will always self-correct to make sure you never get $4 average value from a pack, let alone $4 minimum value.
You have it completely backwards, actually. The more "chase" cards at rare or mythic in any given set, the lower the average price for each of those chase cards. Return to Ravnica is an excellent example - we have a cycle of shocklands with guaranteed value and playability, abrupt decay, dreadbore, Vraska, New Jace, Angel of Serenity, playable rares like Pack Rat and Lotleth Troll, very solid uncommons like the Dryad Militant, Grisly Salvage, and the Charms, etc. Each successively playable card eats a chunk out of the total demand for the set. Granted, the demand of the set is not a finite thing- if the set is chock full of cards that are going to warp formats outside of standard, then you are increasing total demand for the product. However, the principle still stands when players are given MANY options for constructed-playable archetypes in addition to MANY card choices within those archetypes. The result is that players prioritize their singles purchases, which allows retailers to lower prices while still making a profit margin on their box/case purchases.
In the end, it boils down to this - Retailers have to make sure that buying singles is ALWAYS a more cost-efficient choice than buying boxes for the consumer, otherwise singles demand will drop until buying singles becomes the safer choice to cracking packs and trading rares for rares. This is why Bonfire is a bajillion dollars; the AVR set's value is focused on very few chase cards (essentially the mythic miracles, griselbrand, and resto angel), and the unfortunate fact that it's also a mythic and a 3 or 4-of in a few archetypes means it sits rather high on the value chain. Hopefully, the huge demand for RTR product will force bonfire's price down a bit.
Important points. Thinking further, I think the math here is a bit more complex than it initially appears and depends on what's crowding out what.
Let's simplify a bit and assume that Wizards has a totally flat supply curve, selling boosters for $4 and printing as many as will sell at that rate. (So obviously this doesn't apply to limited-run products.) Let's also assume transaction costs on the singles market are zero. Then the expected value of the singles in an unopened pack is always $4.
Let's also simplify by assuming that players either quit the game or keep playing, and that better Limited environments or (the appeal of) cheaper Standards only affect the number of players brought in or dropping out, not the amount of product bought per player, and that all players magically know in advance what those environments will look like. Then, even though there's a bunch of interesting math that Hasbro has to consider weighing game health against chasing after chase rares, we only have to look at a simplified player side.
Consider a representative group of 100 players who choose to participate in the singles market to get the cards they want. What's the expected number of packs that will need to be opened to provide them with this? If only Block Constructed exists in our world, how many boosters on average does it take to construct a representative sample of 100 decks?
The worst case scenario (for players) is that every deck in the metagame employs 4 of a certain Mythic. Then players sure do buy (directly or not) a lot of product. They'll buy half as much if there are two decks in the metagame, each of which employs 4 of a certain Mythic. On the opposite theoretical end, if the metagame consists of 100 wildly different Pauper-legal decks, then you don't even need as many as two packs per player to satisfy them. (If you add in transaction costs, then the effects of turning these dials becomes smoother and more intuitive: a metagame where every deck requires 4 of two certain Mythics will be more expensive than one where they all "merely" run 4 of one, &c. But let's continue to abstract from this.)
So I think your analysis is right on two levels:
Given that the expected value of the cards in a pack will always be ~$4, and that most of that expected value is going to be in the rare slot, the price of the most expensive rares is going to be a direct function of the number of crap rares: more crap rares, more expensive good rares.
As the number of Constructed-playable cards in a set rises, participation in Constructed becomes cheaper. (This might be the same level, depending on how you look at it.)
Whether a player should be disappointed, moneywise, to learn that a spoiled rare is crap, then, depends on what she expects to be more variant: the percentage of cards in the typical Constructed deck that are of higher rarities, or the percentage of cards in the set that are Constructed-playable. If the first is relatively more fixed, she should be disappointed, because each additional crap rare means that the metagame is less diverse and more expensive. If the second is relatively more fixed, she should be happy, because this implies a greater proportion of Constructed-playables are in lower rarities.
Um, well. You can't play with them, you can't sell them... You just alphabetize them and hope they become something more down the road. (Or junk cube them!)
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This is why I started playing magic in the first place. It wasn't PT aspirations just making noobs cry by doing things that are perfectly fair.
You answered your own question. They are crap, and they are the majority of the worth of a booster pack. I want my boosters to have a trade value of at least what I payed for it.
It's really too bad that stores will undercut each other when selling bulk rares. In a perfect world, you would be able to buy a pack and sell the rare for at least $1, the uncommons for 50 cents, and the commons for 25 cents. But it seems that if you're a player the best you can do is trade away the good commons/uncommons at the going rate and trade the crap rares for at least $1. If you're a store, you can get away with selling cards at these prices. If you want to sell bad cards for cash, the most you can get is 10 cents per rare and $3-5 per 1000 commons uncommons. I'm glad my LGS takes bulk rares at 20 cents in store credit and 1000 bulk commons/uncommons at $5 in store credit.
We need more sets like Mirrodin Besieged, New Phyrexia, and Dark Ascension where you can open uncommons worth at least $1.
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(I can of course see why Johnny junk rares don't appeal to everyone, even if I adore them; but that's a separate question.)
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- To my youngest sister when she was 6.
However, a lot of "crap" rares are really good in limited, hence why you should only buy packs for limited.
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But an unopened booster pack is always (taking into account transaction costs on the singles market) going to cost the expected value of its contents, and the number of packs you'd have to buy to get the Constructed cards you want (if making the incredibly inefficient choice to crack packs for that purpose) goes down as the number of bad rares rises. (I trust that if you buy singles the financial advantage of good cards being at lower rarities is already obvious.)
Johnnies. (And: Rare is obviously the place to put things that are unplayable in Limited.)
Tons of corner case, "crap rares", that are fun for casual/edh/etc. are cheap as hell when you get them in bulk from a vendor like CFG / SCG.
Really, though, the place where cool/valuable cards should fall is at uncommon. Yeah, having some splashy rares/mythics drives sales, but satisfying booster cracking (at least in my experience) comes from opening solid uncommons. The cards that you will inevitably need for decks, that will show up in multiples, and are true staples.
If crap rares didn't exist then nobody would get excited if they actually got something they wanted.
aka Prey Upon
I think the extent to which "Junk" Rares can be written off as "Johnny-fodder" has been very overstated. To me as a Johnny (Johnny/Spike for limited), cards like these seem like they're being pulled in two directions. On one side R&D says here Johnny have this cool new toy to play with and on the other side, they nerf the ever living crap of out it to keep it out of the hands of spikes and therefore make it unplayable, even by Johnny standards. That seems like a disconnect, doesn't it?
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Look at Village Bell-ringer, just a pretty good Innistrad limited wall / combat trick. I was saying for the longest time, "all you need is a critical mass of Elf-wave pieces for this to be playable in a standard elfball deck." Just one little missing piece, Arbor Elf, and for a time now you sometimes seen in it a functional elf wave deck (that will see a lot of pieces rotate pretty soon unfortunately )
All you need is some aura like Presence of Gond in standard, and you will have an infinite token combo like Squirrel Nest / Earthcraft.
Wasn't Seismic Swans another one that just kind of popped up unintentionally out of nowhere. Combo is like that, it's sort of like a fever that takes hold once someone puts the mysterious pieces together.
That being said, I'm a huge fan of constructed and a lot of the Johnny rares are very playable / slammable in limited. The only times that I will get riled up over a "crap rare" is when people try to tell others that one or more of these "crap rares" will be playable in constructed formats (ESPECIALLY eternal formats).
Don't get me wrong though. Something like Sphinx of Uthuun still provides CA and couldn't exist at a lower rarity, but it's still something I don't think I'll ever have much use for.
As of now, I have no idea what to do with stuff like Redirect or Diabolic Revelation. U/B control? :|
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Some, however, are just awful (like the Purelace cycle, or Pale Moon).
Ignoring limited for a second, are we happy that Bonfire of the Damned is a Mythic? Sure it's a chase card and is more exciting to open because of its price but if it were an uncommon its availability would skyrocket and it would be affordable enough for the average player to use.
There can only be a certain percentage of constructed playable cards at a given time, some cards will just end up better than others. I'd rather have a few junk rares and some solid commons/uncommons than have all the playable cards be rares just to increase my pack's trade value.
EDIT: Also, as a Johnny I love crap rares even without taking into account their being good for the health of the game.
Buying Magic packs is like playing the lottery and it shouldn't be. You should get at least $4 of value in every pack. But you don't.
That's why we hate bad rares.
Is this such a difficult concept to understand?
You have it completely backwards, actually. The more "chase" cards at rare or mythic in any given set, the lower the average price for each of those chase cards. Return to Ravnica is an excellent example - we have a cycle of shocklands with guaranteed value and playability, abrupt decay, dreadbore, Vraska, New Jace, Angel of Serenity, playable rares like Pack Rat and Lotleth Troll, very solid uncommons like the Dryad Militant, Grisly Salvage, and the Charms, etc. Each successively playable card eats a chunk out of the total demand for the set. Granted, the demand of the set is not a finite thing- if the set is chock full of cards that are going to warp formats outside of standard, then you are increasing total demand for the product. However, the principle still stands when players are given MANY options for constructed-playable archetypes in addition to MANY card choices within those archetypes. The result is that players prioritize their singles purchases, which allows retailers to lower prices while still making a profit margin on their box/case purchases.
In the end, it boils down to this - Retailers have to make sure that buying singles is ALWAYS a more cost-efficient choice than buying boxes for the consumer, otherwise singles demand will drop until buying singles becomes the safer choice to cracking packs and trading rares for rares. This is why Bonfire is a bajillion dollars; the AVR set's value is focused on very few chase cards (essentially the mythic miracles, griselbrand, and resto angel), and the unfortunate fact that it's also a mythic and a 3 or 4-of in a few archetypes means it sits rather high on the value chain. Hopefully, the huge demand for RTR product will force bonfire's price down a bit.
With all of that said, I'm perfectly OK with rares that don't have a lot of constructed value, but contribute towards some other legitimate purpose, i.e. the limited bomb. It's cards like Cast Through Time that really irk me, as they are essentially a waste of cardboard when a card literally won't see play outside of the kitchen table. Casual players should never be the sole demographic in regards to a card design.
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It's not hard to understand the concept; it's just a terribly flawed concept.
If the value of a pack somehow rises above $4 street value (not retailer's sell prices), then retailers will start opening packs (since they can sell the contents of a pack for more than you can, ripping packs is even more profitable for them) until either the value of the cards in the set drops below $4/pack (if there are enough packs in the supply channel to do so) or the price of a pack will go up if there isn't enough supply.
In general, the market will always self-correct to make sure you never get $4 average value from a pack, let alone $4 minimum value.
Important points. Thinking further, I think the math here is a bit more complex than it initially appears and depends on what's crowding out what.
Let's simplify a bit and assume that Wizards has a totally flat supply curve, selling boosters for $4 and printing as many as will sell at that rate. (So obviously this doesn't apply to limited-run products.) Let's also assume transaction costs on the singles market are zero. Then the expected value of the singles in an unopened pack is always $4.
Let's also simplify by assuming that players either quit the game or keep playing, and that better Limited environments or (the appeal of) cheaper Standards only affect the number of players brought in or dropping out, not the amount of product bought per player, and that all players magically know in advance what those environments will look like. Then, even though there's a bunch of interesting math that Hasbro has to consider weighing game health against chasing after chase rares, we only have to look at a simplified player side.
Consider a representative group of 100 players who choose to participate in the singles market to get the cards they want. What's the expected number of packs that will need to be opened to provide them with this? If only Block Constructed exists in our world, how many boosters on average does it take to construct a representative sample of 100 decks?
The worst case scenario (for players) is that every deck in the metagame employs 4 of a certain Mythic. Then players sure do buy (directly or not) a lot of product. They'll buy half as much if there are two decks in the metagame, each of which employs 4 of a certain Mythic. On the opposite theoretical end, if the metagame consists of 100 wildly different Pauper-legal decks, then you don't even need as many as two packs per player to satisfy them. (If you add in transaction costs, then the effects of turning these dials becomes smoother and more intuitive: a metagame where every deck requires 4 of two certain Mythics will be more expensive than one where they all "merely" run 4 of one, &c. But let's continue to abstract from this.)
So I think your analysis is right on two levels:
Whether a player should be disappointed, moneywise, to learn that a spoiled rare is crap, then, depends on what she expects to be more variant: the percentage of cards in the typical Constructed deck that are of higher rarities, or the percentage of cards in the set that are Constructed-playable. If the first is relatively more fixed, she should be disappointed, because each additional crap rare means that the metagame is less diverse and more expensive. If the second is relatively more fixed, she should be happy, because this implies a greater proportion of Constructed-playables are in lower rarities.
Does that seem about right?
IIRC, singles EV of a pack generally very slightly exceeds its unopened price, because of transaction costs on the singles market, but yeah.
It's really too bad that stores will undercut each other when selling bulk rares. In a perfect world, you would be able to buy a pack and sell the rare for at least $1, the uncommons for 50 cents, and the commons for 25 cents. But it seems that if you're a player the best you can do is trade away the good commons/uncommons at the going rate and trade the crap rares for at least $1. If you're a store, you can get away with selling cards at these prices. If you want to sell bad cards for cash, the most you can get is 10 cents per rare and $3-5 per 1000 commons uncommons. I'm glad my LGS takes bulk rares at 20 cents in store credit and 1000 bulk commons/uncommons at $5 in store credit.
We need more sets like Mirrodin Besieged, New Phyrexia, and Dark Ascension where you can open uncommons worth at least $1.