Being someone whose sibling and best friend were once in a romantic relationship, I can tell you the relationship itself isn't awkward at all so long as you're not a perv about it.
The break up, on the other hand, is the absolute *****s.
If by chance this is more than a hypothetical on your part, please, please, for the sake of the third wheel: keep your pants on until you're 100% sure you want to be married to the other person.
It really, really sucks when the third wheel loses its best friend and sibling. Think about the well being of the third wheel, please.
InQuest went under several years ago, so I'm not sure where to find issues online other than buying the physical copies off eBay or something. What you describe kind of reminds me of the old Rack control decks. Here's a link to the 1995 world championship deck list which might be along the lines of what you're talking about:
It would be nice if Wizards had an online store for some of these things to sell to consumers at MSRP. Maybe they can list this at hasbrotoyshop?
This would go leagues towards solving some distribution and supply problems and would additionally greatly aid them in accurately gauging demand (which would also lead to profit optimization). Even selling them through an online subsidiary at a 10% markup over MSRP would be adequate towards achieving this aim.
I also find Roy Bruno Mitchell's tweet, as shown in the article, to epitomize everything that I dislike about people nowadays. Support a policy whose basic underlining is that everyone should be allowed their rights and be treated with respect and understanding, but then pounce on others as soon as they do something you don't like. Also assume many nasty things about them without any cause whatsoever, merely on the basis of 1 information that really means nothing if you actually took the time to think about it.
Yup. Sounds right.
Most people behave in a vapid, shallow, and selfish manner. Being "star-struck" doesn't excuse someone fawning over a tin-pot tyrant, but exploding with a public display of an infantile fit of rage is just a step lower.
Think of intelligence and the ability to reason like this:
Vegetables<Insects<Humans
While we all have the ability to reason as the human beings we are, the vast majority either do so at the level of insects (like the Olympian) or vegetables (Mitchell). A fortunate and blessed few like us operate somewhere in the general vicinity of our potential.
Take a look at the thread about risky sex behavior. Most of the population goes through life as a function of degrees of dumb****ery.
Cant you see the big picture? There is NO middle ground for discussion.
I would say there is a middle ground though. It just requires creative solutions. Imagine this:
Every expansion has two subsets - "From the Aether" (FtA) and "From the Twisting Nether" (FTN)
They function a bit like "From the Vault" (FtV). They'd be composed entirely of reprints. FtA would be Modern format reprints and FTN would be Legacy format reprints. Each subset would consist of 20 cards each. If creative at WotC wants to, they could make up some silly tidbit to add into the storyline like they did with the "treasures" in Zendikar.
FtA would be 1:36 packs (1 per box) and FTN 1:216 packs (1 per case). This would limit the print runs to a couple dozen thousand cards per FtA inclusion and a few thousand per FTN copy. That's not going to come anywhere near to the original print runs, even for cards like dual lands.
This would have two benefits. The first would be to stabilize the prices (or at least flatten out their parabolic price curves). The second is it would boost sealed product values. They could put out a set as crappy as Homelands and distributors wouldn't get burned by secondary market prices falling below wholesale. For good sets the product would practically fly out of warehouses. And imagine if there were foil parallels to these subsets like for regular cards with 1:20 cards being replaced by a foil. The value of a foil Underground Sea that only had a few hundred copies printed would be astronomical; it'd be rarer than an Alpha Black Lotus.
If I can think that up in a few minutes, certainly teams of people who make a living creating and marketing Magic can do better.
CPI numbers and actual inflation are different animals. CPI ignores a lot of goods that people routinely buy, which causes the real inflation rate to be considerably higher. Most of the money supply has also remained concentrated near the top so while prices of goods have gone up, incomes haven't also gone up to match.
True, but if incomes among the middle class and working poor had gone up, demand would have been stimulated and the increased goods produced to match it would have diluted the money supply. My point wasn't that QE doesn't create any inflation, only that they aren't in lockstep. If you look at the truly apocalyptic instances of hyperinflation (Weimar Germany, post-war Hungary, etc.), the inflation rate far exceeded that of the growth in money supply. At one point in Hungary the velocity of money was so great that the entire money supply was being turned over around ten times per day. That's never going to happen with Magic cards, because they're game pieces, not consumable necessities. And a doubling of supply wouldn't result in a halving of price as more people bought them to play the game.
To my last point, besides fresh demand from new players as the cards become more affordable, there would be additional incremental demand from existing players. I have three burn decks. I play a full set of Lightning Bolts and Chain Lightnings in each, but whereas I own 12 Lightning Bolts, I only own 4 Chain Lightnings. That's part of why Lightning Bolt is still over a dollar card despite having been printed as a common in four different heavily printed base sets as well as seeing additional printings in box sets, precons, ABU, and as promos. There has to be well over 10 million copies floating around. If every person that played them only had four they should be a dime or quarter card.
I don't think they'll run the game into the ground, but I think they're going to become a victim of their own success. If you're an MMO gamer are you aware of what happened with EverQuest? I was one of the top players in that game, and eventually worked on it so I'm pretty familiar with their story and I see analogues to Magic there too. EQ was the first game to the market and had what at the time was runaway success, in the first couple years after it's release there were a handful of competitors that tried to keep up but they just couldn't do it. Eventually World of Warcraft came out and was designed specifically to compete. SOE however didn't want to compete, they wanted to generate more incremental revenue from the players that stayed, and they didn't want to dump money into the game in order to keep it competitive. This is how I see WotC right now. While doing better than ever they're not expanding their design and development teams, they're adding more products which inevitably means less time to focus on the main ones since there's only so many man hours, they're not trying to make the more complex formats accessible but instead just trying to simplify the entry product, and their tournament support is pitiful in coverage quality, tournament frequency, and prize pool. In the past couple months there have been 4 or 5 digital games which have almost every advantage on Magic (other than instants and for the moment, deep card pools).
They won't go out of business, but MTG is a game that has never had any serious competition. That is changing however with the introduction of free to play digital card games and WotC isn't making the necessary moves to stay current.
These two points strike right at the heart of the issue. Everquest is now a free to play game after being subscription for over a decade. That would be like a CCG going from being sold in booster packs, precons, etc. to box set only. Millions of people played EQ and now there's what, a few thousand on a couple of servers?
The farther you get from the damned border, the nicer Mexico gets.
This is spot on. If you're worried about the sorts of crimes that happen in every large city on the planet (muggings, snatch-n-grabs, etc.) just go to Wal-Mart and spend twenty bucks on a couple pairs of generic blue jeans and Hanes pocket tees. Wear the crappiest pair of shoes you have. Leave all your jewelry (including watches) at home. Don't fiddle around on your $400 smart phone in public; keep it in your pocket. Carry everything you need in an old, grungy ruck sack. Keep two sets of money - the bulk in an interior pocket, and then just enough in your front pocket to pay for a cab or a small meal. That way you're not flashing a giant bankroll every time you go to pay for a ten peso bottle of water.
In addition, don't:
1. Get piss drunk and act like an asshat.
2. Insult people with gang tattoos.
3. Walk down poorly lit alleys at night.
By your logic, the government could solve our economic problems by merely printing and distributing more money. It's only PAPER. Why do so many people balk at the notion that Magic cards in particular have no business being valuable? It's valuable for the exact same underlying reason paper currency works- that is that people put faith that a $100 bill is worth a given amount of goods and service because enough people agree it is an it's backed by the faith of the U.S. Government.
The government is printing more money and distributing it via deficit spending, and they call it quantitative easing. In the past decade the money supply has doubled, yet there has only been ~25% inflation during that time period. No reasonable person expects WotC to hand out the best cards like candy. They're not a charity. But the notion that they somehow can't reprint cards in a reasonable quantity without obliterating their reputation, half the game shops in the country, and the entire game is ridiculous.
By the way, even though I think that $1,000,000 is a lot to pay for a car and I personally wouldn't, somehow, whenever Bugatti releases a new multi-million dollar model, they always manage to sell out within days of the announcement.
Bugatti makes around $100,000,000 per year in profit. Toyota makes roughly $10,000,000,000, or 100x as much. The gap between revenue is even greater. If WotC wants M:tG to remain a niche product, that's fine, no quarrel. But the opportunity exists for it to be much bigger, but if they don't make it reasonably accessible to a greater number of people it will be more like Bugatti - a luxury that a few people play with, but has no substantial standing in the marketplace. And in the broadest definition of the entertainment industry, Magic is tiny.
I can't help but think that given the current market capitalization of Magic cards is higher than the market cap of Habro's stock, either it's a bubble or WotC truly is one of the worst companies in existence at converting their products and intellectual property into revenue.
They as a company would make less money. They as individuals would make less salary. Their spouses would be unhappy, and their children unable to attend a competitive college. Their genes would gradually be eliminated from the larger gene pool. Darwin would be sad.
I thought the higher up the education ladder people went the fewer kids they ended up having? If the raging hormones at WotC want to propagate their genetics they need to print more combo enabling cards. This would make both Darwin and Machiavelli happy.
I find a lot of people misuse the term "fedora" so sometime it is hard to tell what people are really hating on. I have not see many people ever wearing a true fedora when gaming, rather I see people with Trilbies (pointed in front, small brim snapped down in front) or pork-pie hats (oval shape or pointed front, small brim snapped up all around) much more often. I, myself, have been wearing both styles for more than a decade.
A true fedora has a brim that is at least 2" (5cm) in width, and does look a tad out of place without some kind of suit to match.
Good point, I hadn't thought about that. I've never encountered anyone wearing trilbies, but a couple the pork-pie hats (didn't know that's what they were called). I would guess the latter is a bit regional, as they were all the rage among teenagers in England in the early-mid 80s. So if they've been a fashion here in the States for the last decade or so, that would track.
And I could definitely see fedoras looking strange without a suit, but when done right they can be quite striking. I worked for a while with a geologist that wore them to every social function he attended. Even at 92 he looked pretty snazzy with a starched and pressed suit, hand embroidered silk handkerchief, shoes shined like mirrors, and fine felt fedora with pheasant feathers in the band.
If you have collectibles insured either separately or with your homeowners insurance, owning a safe can lower your premiums. You might try talking to your agent about it.
The break up, on the other hand, is the absolute *****s.
If by chance this is more than a hypothetical on your part, please, please, for the sake of the third wheel: keep your pants on until you're 100% sure you want to be married to the other person.
It really, really sucks when the third wheel loses its best friend and sibling. Think about the well being of the third wheel, please.
http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/25e
It's probably quite alike and if you have a fair amount of cards from the era you should be able to build something similar.
This would go leagues towards solving some distribution and supply problems and would additionally greatly aid them in accurately gauging demand (which would also lead to profit optimization). Even selling them through an online subsidiary at a 10% markup over MSRP would be adequate towards achieving this aim.
No, we wouldn't. But you go on to explain why many would...
Most people behave in a vapid, shallow, and selfish manner. Being "star-struck" doesn't excuse someone fawning over a tin-pot tyrant, but exploding with a public display of an infantile fit of rage is just a step lower.
Think of intelligence and the ability to reason like this:
Vegetables<Insects<Humans
While we all have the ability to reason as the human beings we are, the vast majority either do so at the level of insects (like the Olympian) or vegetables (Mitchell). A fortunate and blessed few like us operate somewhere in the general vicinity of our potential.
Take a look at the thread about risky sex behavior. Most of the population goes through life as a function of degrees of dumb****ery.
I would say there is a middle ground though. It just requires creative solutions. Imagine this:
Every expansion has two subsets - "From the Aether" (FtA) and "From the Twisting Nether" (FTN)
They function a bit like "From the Vault" (FtV). They'd be composed entirely of reprints. FtA would be Modern format reprints and FTN would be Legacy format reprints. Each subset would consist of 20 cards each. If creative at WotC wants to, they could make up some silly tidbit to add into the storyline like they did with the "treasures" in Zendikar.
FtA would be 1:36 packs (1 per box) and FTN 1:216 packs (1 per case). This would limit the print runs to a couple dozen thousand cards per FtA inclusion and a few thousand per FTN copy. That's not going to come anywhere near to the original print runs, even for cards like dual lands.
This would have two benefits. The first would be to stabilize the prices (or at least flatten out their parabolic price curves). The second is it would boost sealed product values. They could put out a set as crappy as Homelands and distributors wouldn't get burned by secondary market prices falling below wholesale. For good sets the product would practically fly out of warehouses. And imagine if there were foil parallels to these subsets like for regular cards with 1:20 cards being replaced by a foil. The value of a foil Underground Sea that only had a few hundred copies printed would be astronomical; it'd be rarer than an Alpha Black Lotus.
If I can think that up in a few minutes, certainly teams of people who make a living creating and marketing Magic can do better.
True, but if incomes among the middle class and working poor had gone up, demand would have been stimulated and the increased goods produced to match it would have diluted the money supply. My point wasn't that QE doesn't create any inflation, only that they aren't in lockstep. If you look at the truly apocalyptic instances of hyperinflation (Weimar Germany, post-war Hungary, etc.), the inflation rate far exceeded that of the growth in money supply. At one point in Hungary the velocity of money was so great that the entire money supply was being turned over around ten times per day. That's never going to happen with Magic cards, because they're game pieces, not consumable necessities. And a doubling of supply wouldn't result in a halving of price as more people bought them to play the game.
To my last point, besides fresh demand from new players as the cards become more affordable, there would be additional incremental demand from existing players. I have three burn decks. I play a full set of Lightning Bolts and Chain Lightnings in each, but whereas I own 12 Lightning Bolts, I only own 4 Chain Lightnings. That's part of why Lightning Bolt is still over a dollar card despite having been printed as a common in four different heavily printed base sets as well as seeing additional printings in box sets, precons, ABU, and as promos. There has to be well over 10 million copies floating around. If every person that played them only had four they should be a dime or quarter card.
These two points strike right at the heart of the issue. Everquest is now a free to play game after being subscription for over a decade. That would be like a CCG going from being sold in booster packs, precons, etc. to box set only. Millions of people played EQ and now there's what, a few thousand on a couple of servers?
This is spot on. If you're worried about the sorts of crimes that happen in every large city on the planet (muggings, snatch-n-grabs, etc.) just go to Wal-Mart and spend twenty bucks on a couple pairs of generic blue jeans and Hanes pocket tees. Wear the crappiest pair of shoes you have. Leave all your jewelry (including watches) at home. Don't fiddle around on your $400 smart phone in public; keep it in your pocket. Carry everything you need in an old, grungy ruck sack. Keep two sets of money - the bulk in an interior pocket, and then just enough in your front pocket to pay for a cab or a small meal. That way you're not flashing a giant bankroll every time you go to pay for a ten peso bottle of water.
In addition, don't:
1. Get piss drunk and act like an asshat.
2. Insult people with gang tattoos.
3. Walk down poorly lit alleys at night.
You'll be fine.
The government is printing more money and distributing it via deficit spending, and they call it quantitative easing. In the past decade the money supply has doubled, yet there has only been ~25% inflation during that time period. No reasonable person expects WotC to hand out the best cards like candy. They're not a charity. But the notion that they somehow can't reprint cards in a reasonable quantity without obliterating their reputation, half the game shops in the country, and the entire game is ridiculous.
Bugatti makes around $100,000,000 per year in profit. Toyota makes roughly $10,000,000,000, or 100x as much. The gap between revenue is even greater. If WotC wants M:tG to remain a niche product, that's fine, no quarrel. But the opportunity exists for it to be much bigger, but if they don't make it reasonably accessible to a greater number of people it will be more like Bugatti - a luxury that a few people play with, but has no substantial standing in the marketplace. And in the broadest definition of the entertainment industry, Magic is tiny.
I thought the higher up the education ladder people went the fewer kids they ended up having? If the raging hormones at WotC want to propagate their genetics they need to print more combo enabling cards. This would make both Darwin and Machiavelli happy.
I don't know if I'd go so far as to call those discussing here Nazis and pinkos.
Good point, I hadn't thought about that. I've never encountered anyone wearing trilbies, but a couple the pork-pie hats (didn't know that's what they were called). I would guess the latter is a bit regional, as they were all the rage among teenagers in England in the early-mid 80s. So if they've been a fashion here in the States for the last decade or so, that would track.
And I could definitely see fedoras looking strange without a suit, but when done right they can be quite striking. I worked for a while with a geologist that wore them to every social function he attended. Even at 92 he looked pretty snazzy with a starched and pressed suit, hand embroidered silk handkerchief, shoes shined like mirrors, and fine felt fedora with pheasant feathers in the band.
Nah, happened to me one year doing taxes. It took me three days to find 7 cents.
There are 61.