My favorite part was when that guy said that "Jerks" are more likely to get the cards they need from the secondary market. Are we all seriously supposed to buy a bunch of packs until we get all the cards we need? And that's no money to wizards?
The end goal of wizards of the coast is to sell packs. Whether they sell said packs to Star City Games or little Jimmy down the street; whats the difference? The pack is sold. It's in fact that secondary market that keeps Magic alive, as I'm sure most packs are cracked by corporate entities then individuals.
That said, the banning issue really does bring to light the underlying disdain between casuals and grinders, and here's the little problem you have. Wizards loves you guys good for you, hooray. Now they'll print more dogcrap for you like dual decks and the laughably weak EDH decks. But the grinders, on the other hand, are loved by entities like SCG and TCGplayer that comprise the secondary market, and I'm willing to bet that Wizards loves them a lot more then you. Let Aaron, Lapille, and the rest of the stick developers keep printing garbage while banning whole strategies from MTG. See what happenes when they suffer a backlash from the players who actually are the lifeblood of this game.
Uh, how are pro's the life-blood of the game? Last I checked, MTG existed before Pro-Tours. And thrived.
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"If you don't wear your seatbelt, the police will shoot you in the head."
- To my youngest sister when she was 6.
Everyone knows that good luck and good game are such insincere terms that any man who does not connect his right hook with the offender's jaw on the very utterance of such a phrase is no man I would consider as such.
Uh, how are pro's the life-blood of the game? Last I checked, MTG existed before Pro-Tours. And thrived.
what hes saying is right tho, ptq grinders cause more packs to be opened per person than casuals, theres just more of you. It doesnt matter how you get your 4 mythics they have to be opened by someone. The problem is most casual players really don't cause as much product to be opened. The biggest reason people dislike the ban is that basicly the best deck in the format instead of being skill intensive to play and involving thought has been changed to a deck that involves almost no thought.
It's not only that. As a grinder myself, I really dislike how they handled the ban. Casual players don't even play in tournaments, and they were the ones whining about Jace and SFM. Why should they get to decide the standard metagame. The whole thing is a joke. Now instead of a skill intensive metagame, we have a dumbed down format with no strategy. Thanks casual players for ruining magic for us again
It's not only that. As a grinder myself, I really dislike how they handled the ban. Casual players don't even play in tournaments, and they were the ones whining about Jace and SFM. Why should they get to decide the standard metagame. The whole thing is a joke. Now instead of a skill intensive metagame, we have a dumbed down format with no strategy. Thanks casual players for ruining magic for us again
Deck diversity > Skill intensive. To say it more precisely, more people prefer diverse top decks rather than 1 dominating deck no matter how skill intensive it is. If you say that can be debated, you only have to look at tournament attendance.
Maybe you shouldn't be a grinder since you can't handle the removal of two cards in the Standard pool. True "Pros" just quit whining and move on.
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"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken
First of all, as a person have said, "Wizard will now print a lot of garbage for you casual players", in fact, until now most of cardpool was considered garbage because a small number of overpowered cards were doming the metagame and lots of strong cards were dumped because they were no strong enoght to compete with the meta.
I can just give a list of strong cards that were dumped during caw blade reign: abyssal persecutor vengevine lodestone golem
These are just three examples. And talking serious, if you REALLY think the three cards I listed above are garbage you seriously dont have any idea how to build a deck or even play magic.
The only reason the metagame became less skill intensive is because now valakut is going to domine the meta, but telling the truth, I find it easier to side agains a mindless deck. I just use 9 slots of my sideboard against ramp in general and I also keep some anti-meta cards main deck.
Valakut is a mindless deck and you can easily beat it with the use of proper sideboard or a decent aggro or control strategy.
Some people also forget that the skill involved to play magic is not only the skill to make the right moves, it is also considered skill to build/adapt/change a deck and sideboard according to the local and international meta.
And this is the part the grinders dont know, so, just because they lost a "skill intensive deck" they now say that the game became mindless. You are just giving an excuse to your failure as a magic player. With M12 comming this is the time when the PROS will be brewing the next buttkicking deck, and the grinders will just whinne until they see the next top 8 list. (And by the way, I playtested Caw blade when it came out to undertand the deck and I didnt felt like playing anything complicated. In fact the deck is pretty simple and straightfoward strategy, any decent player can use it properly. In the other hand Kred was one of the hardest decks I've playtested, seriously)
And by the way, Casual players buy boxes (I have 3 friends that each buy one box whenever a new set appears), and go to drafts and pre releases.
DO you have any idea how much booster packs are opened on each pre-release around the world?
Just at my town we have a small shop and every P.R we open more than 500 booster packs.
Dont say grinders are the source of wizard's profit.
And by the way, Casual players buy boxes (I have 3 friends that each buy one box whenever a new set appears), and go to drafts and pre releases.
DO you have any idea how much booster packs are opened on each pre-release around the world?
Just at my town we have a small shop and every P.R we open more than 500 booster packs.
Dont say grinders are the source of wizard's profit.
That's right, they buy boxes and go to prereleases. THEY DONT PLAY SERIOUS STANDARD. They just whine and whine about expensive cards like Jace and Titan and good cards like SFM. And since Wotc gave in to the whining of people who don't even play their format, it's a joke.
That's right, they buy boxes and go to prereleases. THEY DONT PLAY SERIOUS STANDARD. They just whine and whine about expensive cards like Jace and Titan and good cards like SFM. And since Wotc gave in to the whining of people who don't even play their format, it's a joke.
If you've been following Twitter, it wasn't just "casual players and noobs" that complained about the pre-ban Standard. Chapin said that Jace was more powerful than Necropotence (which I actually agree with), and Kibler literally wrote an entire article complaining about Batterskull on SCG. Those are just a few examples off the top of my head.
If you want skill-intensive games that don't have a lot of diversity, there are other games that more than fulfill that role, such as chess. Magic was never designed to be an extremely skill-intensive game devoid of diversity.
As a six-year casual player, I can tell you something that is seriously wrong about this debate. Several people on both sides of this argument are making assumptions based not on any kind of empirical facts, but rather on the small slice of humanity they are personally aware of.
A few of the fallacies:
1) Casual players don't drive booster pack sales.
--Patently wrong. Many casual players have almost never purchased a single, and most have not purchased a single online. They buy their cards by the pack, or by the fat-pack, or by the precon deck.
2) Casual players were the driving force behind the ban.
--As I stated, most casual players purchase packs, not singles. The price of a single, any single, does not affect the casual player that much, at least not until they begin to move into competitive play, that is: Standard.
3) Pro players had little to do with the ban.
--Nope. See above. Casual players had far less to do with the ban.
Check around on just about any site that gives people advice on how to take their game to the next level (I will not provide links, that would be spamming. A simple search will bring up thousands of candidates), and one of the first nuggets of advice is to buy singles instead of packs. Why, they say? Because purchasing packs is a great way to beef your collection, but the majority will sit on your shelf and never be used (I know this to be a fact, I have a about a thousand active cards (in decks), and about 40,000 cards sitting in boxes in the closet.). Economically speaking, purchasing singles instead of booster packs will, in the long run, save you lots of money (again, personal example: I purchased 4 Worldwake booster boxes and did not draw a single JtMS).
Pro players drive singles sales, casual players are far more likely to purchase boosters.
Since casual players outnumber pro players by a factor of about a million to one, if the average pro player causes Star City Games to open 5 booster boxes in order to get the cards he/she wants, and the average casual player gets 1/2 of a booster box...which one has driven the sales? Honestly? (I'll do the math, the pro player has accounted for 5 booster boxes, and the average casual player has accounted for 1/2 of one. That means, for every 5 booster boxes opened because of the pro player, there are roughly 500,000 boxes opened because of casual players. These players may never attend a draft or a tournament in their lives, they play for the enjoyment of the game. And you know what? To some of them, part of the enjoyment is opening up a booster pack and checking to see what the rare is.
Jace is banned in Standard. Stoneforge Mystic is banned in Standard.
Learn to live with it, whether you like it or not. Hell, folks, they were going to rotate in a few months anyway. Wizards did not "break the system". They just moved the calendar forward a few months.
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Currently playing:
Standard: WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern: UR Twinning RU G Venus Fly Trap G U Artifacts Aggro U
one of the first nuggets of advice is to buy singles instead of packs. Why, they say? Because purchasing packs is a great way to beef your collection, but the majority will sit on your shelf and never be used (I know this to be a fact, I have a about a thousand active cards (in decks), and about 40,000 cards sitting in boxes in the closet.).
.
This brings us to another kind of discussion:
The problem behind the cards sitting on your shelf has two reasons.
1. Wizards usually fail to balance cards and the metagame gets domined by a few powerful cards leaving the rest (sometimes even good cards) unplayable.
2. Have you ever counted the number of cards in each set that you cant EVEN USE IN THE MOST CASUAL OF DECKS? I have hundreds of cards just from this years that are literally trash! And when I talk about trash Im talking about things in the same level as storm crow and phyrexian hulk.
Why does wizard print those cards?
This is the main reason I stopped buying packs. Usually when I win an FMN I sell my boosters to buy singles.
Since casual players outnumber pro players by a factor of about a million to one, if the average pro player causes Star City Games to open 5 booster boxes in order to get the cards he/she wants, and the average casual player gets 1/2 of a booster box...which one has driven the sales? Honestly? (I'll do the math, the pro player has accounted for 5 booster boxes, and the average casual player has accounted for 1/2 of one. That means, for every 5 booster boxes opened because of the pro player, there are roughly 500,000 boxes opened because of casual players. These players may never attend a draft or a tournament in their lives, they play for the enjoyment of the game. And you know what? To some of them, part of the enjoyment is opening up a booster pack and checking to see what the rare is.
Where are you getting your stastics from? Since you are using your 1:million ratio with box ratios that pros/casual players buy it seems like you believe that ratio is somewhat correct.
From market research it has been suggested there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 million magic players. By your ratio that means there are 6 pro players. Which means the Ruel brothers account for roughly a third of the competitive metagame.
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That's the remarkable thing about life. It's never so bad that it can't get worse
Calvin and Hobbes Cube Tutor
As a six-year casual player, I can tell you something that is seriously wrong about this debate. Several people on both sides of this argument are making assumptions based not on any kind of empirical facts, but rather on the small slice of humanity they are personally aware of.
Since casual players outnumber pro players by a factor of about a million to one, if the average pro player causes Star City Games to open 5 booster boxes in order to get the cards he/she wants, and the average casual player gets 1/2 of a booster box...which one has driven the sales? Honestly? (I'll do the math, the pro player has accounted for 5 booster boxes, and the average casual player has accounted for 1/2 of one. That means, for every 5 booster boxes opened because of the pro player, there are roughly 500,000 boxes opened because of casual players. These players may never attend a draft or a tournament in their lives, they play for the enjoyment of the game. And you know what? To some of them, part of the enjoyment is opening up a booster pack and checking to see what the rare is.
Where are you getting your stastics from? Since you are using your 1:million ratio with box ratios that pros/casual players buy it seems like you believe that ratio is somewhat correct.
From market research it has been suggested there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 million magic players. By your ratio that means there are 6 pro players. Which means the Ruel brothers account for roughly a third of the competitive metagame.
That was exactly the point I was making, Pringles. The fact that all of the statistics in this thread were pulled out of someone's butt, rather than based on any kind of market research.
You have helped prove my point by calling attention to the statement, however, you hesitate to ask the others where their statistics come from.
STILL, and this is indisputable, casual players significantly outnumber pro players, and they are the ones that drive booster pack sales, where the pro players drive secondary market prices.
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Currently playing:
Standard: WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern: UR Twinning RU G Venus Fly Trap G U Artifacts Aggro U
I'm sorry if my logic is too hard to follow. I'll try to explain it again.
Casual Players buy booster packs
Good players buy card singles
So yes, in regards to direct sales from wizards to consumers, casuals outpurchase good players. You are correct in this. However, lets look at this again.
Good players buy card singles
Card singles are purchased from LGS and large online retailers
Card singles come from booster packs
So then, obviously LGS and large online retailers purchase booster packs.
One more small point-
Sometimes good players play in limited events and prereleases too.
So, what you're saying is that just because you and your small cluster of friends buy a booster box here and there, you can say with confidence that casual players purchase more product then TCGplayer, Starcity games, and channel fireball, who need to open case upon case to keep their inventory full of card singles??
Yup. Some casual players do, too, but the bulk of a casual player's collection is from boosters. We aren't arguing on this one.
Card singles are purchased from LGS and large online retailers
Card singles come from booster packs
So then, obviously LGS and large online retailers purchase booster packs.
Yes, they do.
Still don't see where this is leading. There are still far more casual players than competitive players, thus casual players will, over the course of a set's total time on the market, spend more than the competitive players on Magic cards in general.
And again, casual players do not, in any way, drive the cost of card singles. Competitive players do. It is not the guy buying a booster box and building decks from what he drew that drives the cost of certain singles, it is the guy who sees a net deck with 4X Jace, the Mind Sculptor and trips over to Star City Games and orders 4X Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Be that person competitive or a wannabe, the bandwagoners are the ones driving the prices up.
One more small point-
Sometimes good players play in limited events and prereleases too.
No argument here, either.
So, what you're saying is that just because you and your small cluster of friends buy a booster box here and there, you can say with confidence that casual players purchase more product then TCGplayer, Starcity games, and channel fireball, who need to open case upon case to keep their inventory full of card singles??
I maintain that the majority of overall sales of booster packs and boxes will be to casual groups. This includes the local card shops, Wal-Mart, and, yes, even Star City Games. Why do I say this? Simple. The majority of players are casual.
Oh, and by the way-
Abyssal Persecutor is terrible
Lodestone Golem is terrible in standard
Vengine is an awful meta choice
I have had good luck with my Lodestone Golem, he synergized will in my deck, and has absolutely SHUT DOWN quite a few agro decks, buying time for me to get my big guns out, or just smacking away while they don't have enough mana to play a 1/1 Soldier because it now costs 6 mana, as I have an army of 4 Lodestones out.
Of course, if you are playing Vintage/Legacy, it is possible to cheat the non-artifacts past the Lodestones by playing a Belbe's Portal, which is an artifact, and then playing the creatures using Belbe. And, this will be possible again with one of the cards from M12.
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Currently playing:
Standard: WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern: UR Twinning RU G Venus Fly Trap G U Artifacts Aggro U
And again, casual players do not, in any way, drive the cost of card singles. Competitive players do. It is not the guy buying a booster box and building decks from what he drew that drives the cost of certain singles, it is the guy who sees a net deck with 4X Jace, the Mind Sculptor and trips over to Star City Games and orders 4X Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Be that person competitive or a wannabe, the bandwagoners are the ones driving the prices up.
Casual players don't drive the secondary market? Tell that to Akroma's Memorial and Doubling Season.
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That's the remarkable thing about life. It's never so bad that it can't get worse
Calvin and Hobbes Cube Tutor
Casual players don't drive the secondary market? Tell that to Akroma's Memorial and Doubling Season.
After hearing that, I ran over to SCG to sell my Akroma, just to find that they are only worth $16. Once you point out a "casual" card that rivals Jace in price, then it might be more believable.
The math of Jace kind of rivals anything casual; you have to open more packs to get him, and he has a much higher demand. He is a card that every player wants four of, regardless of what format they play.
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"If you don't wear your seatbelt, the police will shoot you in the head."
- To my youngest sister when she was 6.
Everyone knows that good luck and good game are such insincere terms that any man who does not connect his right hook with the offender's jaw on the very utterance of such a phrase is no man I would consider as such.
After hearing that, I ran over to SCG to sell my Akroma, just to find that they are only worth $16. Once you point out a "casual" card that rivals Jace in price, then it might be more believable.
The math of Jace kind of rivals anything casual; you have to open more packs to get him, and he has a much higher demand. He is a card that every player wants four of, regardless of what format they play.
thats because jace is wanted 4x by all the competitive players as well as the casuals
The level of self-delusion is totally beyond my comprehension here.
Why are there so many people whining about two pieces of cardboard being prohibited from a game?
There are a few things that were made quite clear in Wizards post:
1) Magic: the Gathering is supposed to be a GAME.
2) Games are supposed to be fun.
3) When players wanting to go to the next level were faced with a choice: either a) Take a serious clobbering against multiple virtually identical decks when you to to a game, or; b) Spend about $600 to make that same deck, so that you are a clone of everyone there at the table, then the game is just not that much fun any more.
4) In order to make the game fun again for a greater number of players, the keys to the cloned deck was nerfed.
They did not do this for the players who had jumped on the bandwagon and ordered a full (or multiple) playsets of Jace, the Mindsculptor. They did not do this for the people who copied Caw-Blade decks off of the internet. They did not do this for the people who have an overwhelming hunger to pound the poor noob that shows up to Friday Night Magic into the dust and gloat over his poor crestfallen misery at having lost to his sixth Caw-Blade deck that night.
Wizards did this for the player that wants to have a different game every time they open up their deck box. Attendance was down at events (according to Wizards, who was given this information from the retailers, who would be the ones in a position to know). People were citing the abundance of identical decks as the reason. Wizards saw the same decks at the tournaments, and, any time in history when that many of the decks that were submitted were of a single type, or that many decks of a single type were successful, they do something about it (I remember a similar response to Tooth and Nail a while back).
Sounds like a logical thing to me. I really can't quite understand why it took them so long. I am guessing that they figured that doing it now would be able to increase the attendance at events revolving around the drop of M12.
But it really falls back to one simple fact: Jace and Mystic are banned in Standard play. Deal with it. If you are a "professional" (the full word for Pro, by the way), act like it, and make another deck to win with. And, be inventive this time, don't just jump on a bandwagon. Bandwagons can only hold so many people at a time before the axle starts to bend, and Wizards gets the idea to ban that wagon, too.
ps: Another thing, and some people REALLY need to wrap their heads around this one. Wizards of the Coast OWNS Magic: the Gathering. They own the intellectual rights to it, lock, stock and barrel. Richard Garfield, who invented the game, sold it to them. He occasionally works for them on a set, but THEY own it. It is their world, and they let us play in it. THEY make the rules. Pure, simple, and elegant.
If we want to play Magic, we do it by their rules, or we are nothing more than card collectors.
1) Magic is more then just a mere game to some. Look at the vendors, look at the pros, look at the article writers. This game is their livelihood, and therre are plenty of people who would like to have their day in the sun and break into that world. Viewing it as only a game, and not as an opportunity, is one of the core differences between a grinder and a casual.
2) Fun is subjective. Plenty of people found cawblade fun.
3a) No one forced you to play cawblade. There werre plently of other options available to you. RDW, UG infect, plenty of cheap decks with actual favorable matchups against cawblade.
3b) In case you don't understand how metagames work, there are always going to be a fairly limited number of viable decks out there, so you are never going to have a situation where you "have a different game every time you open your deck box."
Yes, Jace and Stoneforge are banned. I understand that. My problem now is that Aaron and Lapille are not only going to get away with this situation unpunished, but morons actually hero worship them for the banning, when it's their stupid design philosophy that created the situation in the first place. Not only that, but now there is a precedent where wizard's might take the ridiculous "ban x card" thread seriously. That is a frightening prospect, as donks and sticks are an extremely vocal minority.
Uh, how are pro's the life-blood of the game? Last I checked, MTG existed before Pro-Tours. And thrived.
- To my youngest sister when she was 6.
what hes saying is right tho, ptq grinders cause more packs to be opened per person than casuals, theres just more of you. It doesnt matter how you get your 4 mythics they have to be opened by someone. The problem is most casual players really don't cause as much product to be opened. The biggest reason people dislike the ban is that basicly the best deck in the format instead of being skill intensive to play and involving thought has been changed to a deck that involves almost no thought.
Deck diversity > Skill intensive. To say it more precisely, more people prefer diverse top decks rather than 1 dominating deck no matter how skill intensive it is. If you say that can be debated, you only have to look at tournament attendance.
Maybe you shouldn't be a grinder since you can't handle the removal of two cards in the Standard pool. True "Pros" just quit whining and move on.
- H. L. Mencken
French Duel Commander
WBR Kaalia of the Vast WBR
RUG Maelstrom Wanderer RUG
First of all, as a person have said, "Wizard will now print a lot of garbage for you casual players", in fact, until now most of cardpool was considered garbage because a small number of overpowered cards were doming the metagame and lots of strong cards were dumped because they were no strong enoght to compete with the meta.
I can just give a list of strong cards that were dumped during caw blade reign:
abyssal persecutor
vengevine
lodestone golem
These are just three examples. And talking serious, if you REALLY think the three cards I listed above are garbage you seriously dont have any idea how to build a deck or even play magic.
The only reason the metagame became less skill intensive is because now valakut is going to domine the meta, but telling the truth, I find it easier to side agains a mindless deck. I just use 9 slots of my sideboard against ramp in general and I also keep some anti-meta cards main deck.
Valakut is a mindless deck and you can easily beat it with the use of proper sideboard or a decent aggro or control strategy.
Some people also forget that the skill involved to play magic is not only the skill to make the right moves, it is also considered skill to build/adapt/change a deck and sideboard according to the local and international meta.
And this is the part the grinders dont know, so, just because they lost a "skill intensive deck" they now say that the game became mindless. You are just giving an excuse to your failure as a magic player. With M12 comming this is the time when the PROS will be brewing the next buttkicking deck, and the grinders will just whinne until they see the next top 8 list. (And by the way, I playtested Caw blade when it came out to undertand the deck and I didnt felt like playing anything complicated. In fact the deck is pretty simple and straightfoward strategy, any decent player can use it properly. In the other hand Kred was one of the hardest decks I've playtested, seriously)
And by the way, Casual players buy boxes (I have 3 friends that each buy one box whenever a new set appears), and go to drafts and pre releases.
DO you have any idea how much booster packs are opened on each pre-release around the world?
Just at my town we have a small shop and every P.R we open more than 500 booster packs.
Dont say grinders are the source of wizard's profit.
That's right, they buy boxes and go to prereleases. THEY DONT PLAY SERIOUS STANDARD. They just whine and whine about expensive cards like Jace and Titan and good cards like SFM. And since Wotc gave in to the whining of people who don't even play their format, it's a joke.
If you've been following Twitter, it wasn't just "casual players and noobs" that complained about the pre-ban Standard. Chapin said that Jace was more powerful than Necropotence (which I actually agree with), and Kibler literally wrote an entire article complaining about Batterskull on SCG. Those are just a few examples off the top of my head.
If you want skill-intensive games that don't have a lot of diversity, there are other games that more than fulfill that role, such as chess. Magic was never designed to be an extremely skill-intensive game devoid of diversity.
A few of the fallacies:
1) Casual players don't drive booster pack sales.
--Patently wrong. Many casual players have almost never purchased a single, and most have not purchased a single online. They buy their cards by the pack, or by the fat-pack, or by the precon deck.
2) Casual players were the driving force behind the ban.
--As I stated, most casual players purchase packs, not singles. The price of a single, any single, does not affect the casual player that much, at least not until they begin to move into competitive play, that is: Standard.
3) Pro players had little to do with the ban.
--Nope. See above. Casual players had far less to do with the ban.
Check around on just about any site that gives people advice on how to take their game to the next level (I will not provide links, that would be spamming. A simple search will bring up thousands of candidates), and one of the first nuggets of advice is to buy singles instead of packs. Why, they say? Because purchasing packs is a great way to beef your collection, but the majority will sit on your shelf and never be used (I know this to be a fact, I have a about a thousand active cards (in decks), and about 40,000 cards sitting in boxes in the closet.). Economically speaking, purchasing singles instead of booster packs will, in the long run, save you lots of money (again, personal example: I purchased 4 Worldwake booster boxes and did not draw a single JtMS).
Pro players drive singles sales, casual players are far more likely to purchase boosters.
Since casual players outnumber pro players by a factor of about a million to one, if the average pro player causes Star City Games to open 5 booster boxes in order to get the cards he/she wants, and the average casual player gets 1/2 of a booster box...which one has driven the sales? Honestly? (I'll do the math, the pro player has accounted for 5 booster boxes, and the average casual player has accounted for 1/2 of one. That means, for every 5 booster boxes opened because of the pro player, there are roughly 500,000 boxes opened because of casual players. These players may never attend a draft or a tournament in their lives, they play for the enjoyment of the game. And you know what? To some of them, part of the enjoyment is opening up a booster pack and checking to see what the rare is.
Jace is banned in Standard. Stoneforge Mystic is banned in Standard.
Learn to live with it, whether you like it or not. Hell, folks, they were going to rotate in a few months anyway. Wizards did not "break the system". They just moved the calendar forward a few months.
Standard:
WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern:
UR Twinning RU
G Venus Fly Trap G
U Artifacts Aggro U
Legacy:
B Reanimator B
WU Stoneblade UW
EDH
WBGGhave, Guru of SporesGBW
URGRiku of the Two ReflectionsGRU
WUBRGScion of the Ur-DragonGRBUW
Casual
Far too many to list
This brings us to another kind of discussion:
The problem behind the cards sitting on your shelf has two reasons.
1. Wizards usually fail to balance cards and the metagame gets domined by a few powerful cards leaving the rest (sometimes even good cards) unplayable.
2. Have you ever counted the number of cards in each set that you cant EVEN USE IN THE MOST CASUAL OF DECKS? I have hundreds of cards just from this years that are literally trash! And when I talk about trash Im talking about things in the same level as storm crow and phyrexian hulk.
Why does wizard print those cards?
This is the main reason I stopped buying packs. Usually when I win an FMN I sell my boosters to buy singles.
Where are you getting your stastics from? Since you are using your 1:million ratio with box ratios that pros/casual players buy it seems like you believe that ratio is somewhat correct.
From market research it has been suggested there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 million magic players. By your ratio that means there are 6 pro players. Which means the Ruel brothers account for roughly a third of the competitive metagame.
Calvin and Hobbes
Cube Tutor
lol can someone say irony?
That was exactly the point I was making, Pringles. The fact that all of the statistics in this thread were pulled out of someone's butt, rather than based on any kind of market research.
You have helped prove my point by calling attention to the statement, however, you hesitate to ask the others where their statistics come from.
STILL, and this is indisputable, casual players significantly outnumber pro players, and they are the ones that drive booster pack sales, where the pro players drive secondary market prices.
Standard:
WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern:
UR Twinning RU
G Venus Fly Trap G
U Artifacts Aggro U
Legacy:
B Reanimator B
WU Stoneblade UW
EDH
WBGGhave, Guru of SporesGBW
URGRiku of the Two ReflectionsGRU
WUBRGScion of the Ur-DragonGRBUW
Casual
Far too many to list
Casual Players buy booster packs
Good players buy card singles
So yes, in regards to direct sales from wizards to consumers, casuals outpurchase good players. You are correct in this. However, lets look at this again.
Good players buy card singles
Card singles are purchased from LGS and large online retailers
Card singles come from booster packs
So then, obviously LGS and large online retailers purchase booster packs.
One more small point-
Sometimes good players play in limited events and prereleases too.
So, what you're saying is that just because you and your small cluster of friends buy a booster box here and there, you can say with confidence that casual players purchase more product then TCGplayer, Starcity games, and channel fireball, who need to open case upon case to keep their inventory full of card singles??
Oh, and by the way-
Abyssal Persecutor is terrible
Lodestone Golem is terrible in standard
Vengine is an awful meta choice
Yup, they certainly do. In vast numbers.
Yup. Some casual players do, too, but the bulk of a casual player's collection is from boosters. We aren't arguing on this one.
Yes, they do.
Still don't see where this is leading. There are still far more casual players than competitive players, thus casual players will, over the course of a set's total time on the market, spend more than the competitive players on Magic cards in general.
And again, casual players do not, in any way, drive the cost of card singles. Competitive players do. It is not the guy buying a booster box and building decks from what he drew that drives the cost of certain singles, it is the guy who sees a net deck with 4X Jace, the Mind Sculptor and trips over to Star City Games and orders 4X Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Be that person competitive or a wannabe, the bandwagoners are the ones driving the prices up.
No argument here, either.
I maintain that the majority of overall sales of booster packs and boxes will be to casual groups. This includes the local card shops, Wal-Mart, and, yes, even Star City Games. Why do I say this? Simple. The majority of players are casual.
I have had good luck with my Lodestone Golem, he synergized will in my deck, and has absolutely SHUT DOWN quite a few agro decks, buying time for me to get my big guns out, or just smacking away while they don't have enough mana to play a 1/1 Soldier because it now costs 6 mana, as I have an army of 4 Lodestones out.
Of course, if you are playing Vintage/Legacy, it is possible to cheat the non-artifacts past the Lodestones by playing a Belbe's Portal, which is an artifact, and then playing the creatures using Belbe. And, this will be possible again with one of the cards from M12.
Standard:
WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern:
UR Twinning RU
G Venus Fly Trap G
U Artifacts Aggro U
Legacy:
B Reanimator B
WU Stoneblade UW
EDH
WBGGhave, Guru of SporesGBW
URGRiku of the Two ReflectionsGRU
WUBRGScion of the Ur-DragonGRBUW
Casual
Far too many to list
Casual players don't drive the secondary market? Tell that to Akroma's Memorial and Doubling Season.
Calvin and Hobbes
Cube Tutor
After hearing that, I ran over to SCG to sell my Akroma, just to find that they are only worth $16. Once you point out a "casual" card that rivals Jace in price, then it might be more believable.
The math of Jace kind of rivals anything casual; you have to open more packs to get him, and he has a much higher demand. He is a card that every player wants four of, regardless of what format they play.
- To my youngest sister when she was 6.
thats because jace is wanted 4x by all the competitive players as well as the casuals
The level of self-delusion is totally beyond my comprehension here.
Why are there so many people whining about two pieces of cardboard being prohibited from a game?
There are a few things that were made quite clear in Wizards post:
1) Magic: the Gathering is supposed to be a GAME.
2) Games are supposed to be fun.
3) When players wanting to go to the next level were faced with a choice: either a) Take a serious clobbering against multiple virtually identical decks when you to to a game, or; b) Spend about $600 to make that same deck, so that you are a clone of everyone there at the table, then the game is just not that much fun any more.
4) In order to make the game fun again for a greater number of players, the keys to the cloned deck was nerfed.
They did not do this for the players who had jumped on the bandwagon and ordered a full (or multiple) playsets of Jace, the Mindsculptor. They did not do this for the people who copied Caw-Blade decks off of the internet. They did not do this for the people who have an overwhelming hunger to pound the poor noob that shows up to Friday Night Magic into the dust and gloat over his poor crestfallen misery at having lost to his sixth Caw-Blade deck that night.
Wizards did this for the player that wants to have a different game every time they open up their deck box. Attendance was down at events (according to Wizards, who was given this information from the retailers, who would be the ones in a position to know). People were citing the abundance of identical decks as the reason. Wizards saw the same decks at the tournaments, and, any time in history when that many of the decks that were submitted were of a single type, or that many decks of a single type were successful, they do something about it (I remember a similar response to Tooth and Nail a while back).
Sounds like a logical thing to me. I really can't quite understand why it took them so long. I am guessing that they figured that doing it now would be able to increase the attendance at events revolving around the drop of M12.
But it really falls back to one simple fact: Jace and Mystic are banned in Standard play. Deal with it. If you are a "professional" (the full word for Pro, by the way), act like it, and make another deck to win with. And, be inventive this time, don't just jump on a bandwagon. Bandwagons can only hold so many people at a time before the axle starts to bend, and Wizards gets the idea to ban that wagon, too.
ps: Another thing, and some people REALLY need to wrap their heads around this one. Wizards of the Coast OWNS Magic: the Gathering. They own the intellectual rights to it, lock, stock and barrel. Richard Garfield, who invented the game, sold it to them. He occasionally works for them on a set, but THEY own it. It is their world, and they let us play in it. THEY make the rules. Pure, simple, and elegant.
If we want to play Magic, we do it by their rules, or we are nothing more than card collectors.
Standard:
WBRG Aggro-Reanimator Humans GRBW
Modern:
UR Twinning RU
G Venus Fly Trap G
U Artifacts Aggro U
Legacy:
B Reanimator B
WU Stoneblade UW
EDH
WBGGhave, Guru of SporesGBW
URGRiku of the Two ReflectionsGRU
WUBRGScion of the Ur-DragonGRBUW
Casual
Far too many to list
2) Fun is subjective. Plenty of people found cawblade fun.
3a) No one forced you to play cawblade. There werre plently of other options available to you. RDW, UG infect, plenty of cheap decks with actual favorable matchups against cawblade.
3b) In case you don't understand how metagames work, there are always going to be a fairly limited number of viable decks out there, so you are never going to have a situation where you "have a different game every time you open your deck box."
Yes, Jace and Stoneforge are banned. I understand that. My problem now is that Aaron and Lapille are not only going to get away with this situation unpunished, but morons actually hero worship them for the banning, when it's their stupid design philosophy that created the situation in the first place. Not only that, but now there is a precedent where wizard's might take the ridiculous "ban x card" thread seriously. That is a frightening prospect, as donks and sticks are an extremely vocal minority.
. . .
Fun is fun, what's done is done.
If anyone feels they have something compelling to add to this discussion that has not yet been said already, feel free to PM me.