MTG Salvation

Quote from Tanro

[quote from="Cortar" url="http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-general/545324-do-you-have-to-be-a-bad-player-to-win-a-gp?comment=1"]To be quite honest, it isn't the people making mistakes who are bad at magic, it is the people on the other side of the table that are not catching mistakes that are bad at magic. I can't say how many game wins I have gotten because my opponent did not present his sideboard, presented a 17 card sideboard, drew an extra card from x draw effect, presented a 59 card deck (usually post sideboard), or other things. However, if an opponent plays a shock land untapped, or thoughtsieze, or whatever, I always tell them "take 2 damage" and annotate on my score sheet. (-2 SL) (-2 TS) (-2 ComDam) etc. On the same token, if I were to play divination, ask my opponent "drawing 3?" and they say "go ahead" then they failed to catch my mistake, and a turn or 2 later is to late for them to call the judge. If they do, I just claim to have forgotten that it was 2 instead of 3, and that I ask the opponent to confirm my draw, and he said fine to draw 3. It was on him.

These GP and PT players that don't catch mistakes are handing the opponent the game. It is no longer cheating once your opponent lets you continue the game. It is cheating if they catch with 5 cards hidden under your leg or up your sleeve, or a 20 card sideboard. Or intentionally putting a permanent into play without paying mana cost when the opponent is looking through his hand. That is cheating, making a mistake your opponent should be able to correct you on and return the game to a proper legal play state is not cheating.

If it was intentional and not an honest mistake, it's still cheating. Saying otherwise is like saying a pickpocket isn't a thief just because his target didn't notice his wallet was missing until he got home. The pickpocket is a thief one way or the other. Anyone intending to get away with making a bad play is cheating.

Now if it was an honest mistake and the opponent didn't catch it, then yeah, he's just kind of SOL.

Quote from aokiji99

are we going back to oriental theme???

I hope so. And it's northern Asia. I'll squeal if we get full art snow-covered lands.

Quote from Casual Deck

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.

Quote from Aazadan

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.

Quote from Aazadan

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).

Quote from Aazadan

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?

Quote from Ebonclaw

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.

Quote from Ebonclaw

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.

It has to do with the way the collation machines operate. The part of the machine that distributes basic lands either ran out or jammed. It's extremely costly to shut those machines down, so rather than that they are programmed to distribute the next most significant card that would result in a pack having the proper number. The possibilities were the four foils, rares, mythics, and tips/tokens. Someone getting two tip cards might be annoyed, so to avoid customer dissatisfaction without increasing production costs foil commons went out.

My guess is this happened at shift change and someone didn't catch up with their machines in time.

Quality control has gotten better, which is why these sorts of things happen less frequently than in the past. I remember one guy getting a box of Revised that had 3 uncommons (with the occasional basic land) and 12 rares in each pack. These days the machines are probably programmed to just shut down in the event the supply of commons or uncommons available to it run out. Though in theory if everything but foil mythic rares ran out they could continue to produce 15 card packs of just those.

EDIT: Awesome finding that box by the way.

For what it's worth, I can tell you it is quite obvious to me your son is loved beyond words by his parents. Were that to be his only blessing, he would be more blessed than most. But for that blessing I know he'll have many more.

You say your journey has been inspiring; please know seeing the three of you travel it with such grace and dignity is inspiring to others.

Quote from 9909

your son is the cutest little button that I have ever seen.

This as well.

Quote from VikingDruid

Crypto-currency will influence the world more than the internet has/will. The internet is essentially communication and knowledge with gatekeepers cut out. Crypto-currency will cut the gatekeepers or at least de-power them(by giving them valid competition they can't cheat away.

I take no joy in squashing dreams and hopes, but no, cryptocurrencies won't influence the world more than the internet. There is not necessarily a physical need to exchanging information. You tell a joke, I tell a joke, we laugh, and value is derived. For the exchange of money to be involved, there is always a physical component. That's where the "gatekeepers" insert themselves as middle-men.

Unless you know of a way how or a time when bitcoins, litecoins, or whatever can be used to buy aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and armored vehicles, the middle-men will remain. I'd even accept your argument if you could posit a plausible scenario in which you could clad a few thousand people in kevlar and arm them with tear gas and then somehow get them all to accept bitcoins in payment of salaries. For as long as I can foresee, those people will be paid with dollars derived from taxes. Crash the dollar and all those armed people suddenly can't pay the rent or buy food. If there's not enough dollars to pay them, it's because people are using bitcoin to evade their taxes, which will land you in prison quicker than murder or rape (I'm not making fun, that's just a sad fact). Most likely if bitcoin or something similar were ever to pose a material risk to vested interests, it would either be crushed or subverted.

Quote from Merriam-Webster Dictionary »

re·al·po·li·tik
noun, often capitalized \rā-ˈäl-ˌpō-li-ˌtēk\

: a system of politics based on a country's situation and its needs rather than on ideas about what is morally right and wrong

So the other day at FNM, after swiss rounds, one of my friends asks me, "Hey man, do you have a Thassa?" And I replied, "nope, sorry." And he asked, "well, if you pull a Thassa, can I have it?" I replied, "sure. I don't really have a use for her anyways." And when I got my booster for prize support, I opened it up and surely enough, it was a Thassa, which I gave to him and he was really happy afterwards. I am just wondering, how random is this?

Also, there were two other similar instances. One was during one of the first weeks of Theros FNM, where I was like, "now wouldn't it be funny if I pulled a Thoughtseize," and surely enough, I did. And during the first week of Born of the Gods FNM, this guy was like, "you're going to pull a Brimaz." And then I opened my booster and surely enough, there was a Brimaz. How come this never worked for Magic 2014? It would've been cool to get this lucky with Chandras and Mutavaults, you know, cards I actually use in my deck.

They could kill the reserved list if they wanted to. It may hurt them in the short run, but they could do it.

Quote from Plaguefather

Wow, so much of that last sentence is SO untrue... It's not players keeping the reserved list alive, it's hoarders... I'm sure Vintage players would love to have more people to play, just like I'd love to have more people playing legacy...

I apologize for the confusion, I did not mean to broadly target all Vintage/Legacy player, I was referring to those who are more concerned with the value of their Vintage/Legacy collection rather than the growth/health of the format and accessibility to players that haven't been playing since the beginning.

Player: "Let's open the reserve list and everyone can play and be friends! (rainbows and butterflies in the background)"

Vintage/Legacy Hoarder: "Noes! they musentiz openz this. It must alwayz be mines alones! No one else must ever have! (gloomy background while everything around them dies and fades away)"

Quote from enollava

There are a million competitive decks out there that are easy enough to acquire if spending 1000+ on lands wasn't an issue. So Mr. Wizards, please print away. Crush the value of my staples and bring competitive play to the masses. You have my support.

It's too bad the rest of the vintage mtg community are not as reasonable and open to this change as you! Vintage/Legacy will inevitably die unless WOTC gets rid of the reserved list. I bet these players will be real happy when they realize their selfishness that kept the reserved list alive killed their format and left them playing alone

Quote from Pulsemage

most magic players dont have tons of money, and cant afford to own full sets of duals, fetches and shocks. let alone have playsets of foil goyfs, bitterblossoms, all the swords, bobs, just about anything you can imagine. all i would have to say is screw those people. not my fault your poor and cant afford cards, while people like myself have to suffer every time they print new crap like this.

How are you suffering if Wizards reprints staples? Sure their trade value goes down, but their play value doesn't decrease. And look at Goyf, they printed him in modern masters and all that happened was his price went up. I started playing magic in 93 and I would be excited if they would finally get rid of the reserved list and printed the ABUR lands and other staples like Gaea's Cradle and Show and Tell. I am not really worried if my underground Seas drops in money value from 200 a pop to whatever since I'll have more people I can finally play those cards with. As it stands it is hard to find people to play legacy. At the very least, things that produce mana should be removed from the reserved list and made more available. You can't compete if you don't have lands. There are a million competitive decks out there that are easy enough to acquire if spending 1000+ on lands wasn't an issue. So Mr. Wizards, please print away. Crush the value of my staples and bring competitive play to the masses. You have my support.

Quote from Wind of Endless Plains

Is there a website or spreadsheet somewhere that lists what all languages every set has been printed in?

Something like this?

Unsurprisingly, we've veered well off-course from any amount of constructive posting, so I will go ahead and shutter this.

Comment Hidden

Quote from BeardTron

Forgive me if this is a stupid question...Did Modern Masters really help the affordability of the format? Goyf, Bob, Cryptic Command, etc aren't any cheaper. My shop had such a limited supply that box pre orders were sold out within a day and by lunchtime of release there were no more packs for sale. And they didn't let one person buy the whole loot, there were limits so numerous people could be a part of it.

And my shop didn't even up charge but I imagine plenty doubled MSRP ...

I really don't know how this helped the affordability of competitive Modern play? Even for casual play, the set was so limited (and not often at MSRP) that it priced many casual folks out.

The reprinting of Thoughtseize in Theros certainly helped...but MM didn't appear to alleviate the financial constraint that some players are feeling trying to get into the format.

No, Modern Masters barely made a dent in Modern card prices. Wizards is and has always been paranoid of Chronicles (which I, along with most of current Magic players, were not even around at that time) that they kept the print run to be extremely limited. And Tarmogoyf's price has actually increased since Modern Masters barely increased supply while drastically increasing demand from people getting into the Modern format. I don't mind if my value cards tank. For instance, I own a playset of Snapcaster Mage, and I am okay with the value of that card going down to a couple of dollars, if that means Wizards has come to their senses and appeal to the players rather than the speculators and "investors." I personally think "investors" in Magic can go to hell. I buy cards to play this game, not to "invest." If you want to invest, that is what the stock market is for.