MTG Salvation

Quote from Algernone25 »

Trying to abolish the Reserved List means you have to acknowledge the secondary market exists, and the rest falls into place as Wizards has to tantamount admit to have been running a gambling scheme directly advertised at an underage target market. That's why they aren't allowed to talk about the reserved list (and why they can't talk ab out why they can't talk about it) - because doing so would fundamentally undermine their legal capacity to continue selling cards to people under 18. I'll also remind you that two European countries (Germany and Austria) can't have high-level Magic events held there because their governments have ruled that MtG is a form of gambling.

Quote from R_Lancer »

Quote from Avatar »

It would mean less tournaments and less people going in the game, losing even more visibility

That's the fear. Video store rentals are not existent today, but there is redbox. I do think most cardshops need to look beyond FNM.

Quote from Tara Sophia from MagicalTabletopGirls »

We're going to be talking about the Amazon conundrum going on in the Magic Community right now. I could have come out and did my song and dance when they had the article first posted saying, "Hey I was right I called this!" This is what I said that Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro should've done over a year ago and they did it "huzzah!" but I really wanted to just wait to hear what the feedback was from the Magic Community and see what other Magic YouTube Content Creators had to say about it because I had a feeling that I would've been on the opposite end of the spectrum and as it turns out I am, dun dun dun!

So over a year ago Rudy from Alpha Investments put out a YouTube video titled, "Remove all Distributors for Magic The Gathering!? and sell DIRECT to the players" and this was on March 6th, 2017. Of course the number one comment on that YouTube video was, "0% chance. They can't even keep standard workable, let alone handle a complex logistics operation." I said the next day in my YouTube video that Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro should not only do that but what they should do is If they don't want to handle the logistics themselves then they should do it on Amazon.

So what is my opinion on this whole Amazon kerfuffle, why did we get here, how did we get here? So it was the right thing to do. They absolutely had to sell on Amazon. So basically what started happening was that you had this explosion of Magic around Khans of Tarkir. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that both to their benefit and detriment they repeated what they reprinted the Onslaught Fetchland cycle which ginned up a lot of interest from people who played in the Onslaught block. Of course I was one of those people and I did come back to playing Magic at the time of Khans. Anyway the point is that they reprinted the original Fetchland cycle from Onslaught and it was also a three colored set.

Now there was a small time period when I was on hiatus from Magic where they didn't really have a lot of multicolored sets like that. They had the whole Return to Ravnica thing, but it was Ravnica. You had original Ravnica and Return to Ravnica being multicolored sets, so Tarkir was something new. It was a new plane with multicolored tricolors and stuff like that. So it was very interesting, it was bold, it was new. It was actually something really new for Magic to go that balls deep into tricolor. There was also a lot of really good themes and Dragons were cool, so it was a win-win. Khans was a win. You had powerful cards and a powerful land cycle to actually help sell the set.

Now where things went wrong was when they got to Dragons of Tarkir. Now by that point Magic was booming, lots of people were making money hand over fist. The buyouts started happening in the MTG Finance avoiding tax community and what started happening at that point was the price of Standard / Modern legal decks had gone up to about $1,200 in order to be competitive due to running 12 Fetchlands. Of course you had the whole Siege Rhino thing including the Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise nonsense. But by the time Collected Company was printed in Dragons of Tarkhir, things really went downhill fast.

Now a few moves were made by Local Game Stores at the time including Online Content Creators, so forth and so on that really pissed off the employees who work at Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro in their more business focused apartment which is what I want to hit on for the first half of this discussion. So they released a deck that had Siege Rhino in it and a lot of the Online Content Creators complained because they were making a lot of money by opening booster packs of Khans of Tarkir while selling Siege Rhino's at an insanely high price. So with them printing it even though it had different art and curly, God those cards curled horribly bad because this is like the beginning of when Magic was starting to have card stock quality issues.

So that was when Magic started taking a nosedive with Dragons of Tarkir. However they came out with this product and it had Siege Rhino. People were complaining due to their speculations so then they printed this new card at the time called Hangarback Walker which got people upset. Not the players as they were joyful that they had a chance to get a hold of some of these expensive cards and one of these products had Windswept Heath in it. So the players were happy as Wizards of the Coast was making money off of it. It's one of those situations where the vocal minority was extremely negative about it and the same vocal minority was getting From the Vault products and selling them on eBay for $200.

So these Local Game Stores were given these Premium products to sell and they were either breaking them down and selling the card singles at a huge markup or they were selling like From the Vault and stuff like that at a Premium online instead of selling them to their customers at MSRP. Then the Masters sets came along and that became horrible from the very beginning with the reselling online and stuff like that as it really peaked with Modern Masters 2017. It peaked so high that they made the next two Masters sets terrible. A lot of that had to do with the fact that these Local Game Stores were buying up these cases, opening them up, and then selling them online as they were never getting into the hands of these customers.

So you guys have to understand that a lot of this is the Local Game Stores' own fault and it gets worse because that's not the only thing they're guilty of. They're guilty of selling the FNM Promos and Prize Boxes that you get for booster drafts and stuff. Then during the Khans of Tarkir period you had FNM Promos like Path to Exile and Serum Visions so people were creating "Fake Local Game Stores" by running Fake FNM Events that didn't really exist to get these Promos to sell on eBay on the Secondary Market which ended up artificially inflating the price on these cards as it ends up screwing up the print run sizes.

Now you got Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro printing more Magic products to help maintain a demand that doesn't really exist because it's been screwed over. So you had all that going on even though Magic YouTubers like Kevin from Rogue Deckbuilder and MTG Lion calling this out. Kevin owns a Local Game Store and he doesn't like Local Game Stores violating WPN laws cause he knows that it would make things bad for him and it did. There were a lot of really bad actors that effectively ruined his livelihood. There could've been activities that he might of been able to engage in, he had the ability of course but he chose not to because he did the right thing but other Local Game Store owners and staff members didn't.

It doesn't really teach you the life lesson of being able to cheat to get ahead but morally Kevin did the right thing though unfortunately it didn't really help him out in the end now did it? So these people are completely screwed now though luckily Kevin still has a job. So what Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro did as a response to that was they just stopped printing good FNM Promos by switching over to Foil Creature Tokens and stuff like that. Then to make sure that the Foil Creature Tokens at FNM weren't special at all, they also printed the Foil Creature Tokens in Unstable. So now there was no reason to go to FNM since you really weren't getting anything special. So now there's no reason for you to even go to your Local Game Store for the Promos.

Then it turns effectively as I've said before in past YouTube videos, I'm not a Local Game Store owner. I don't own a store, I'm not responsible for a store succeeding. If I'm not interested in going to your business then I'm just not interested in going to your business. I don't owe you anything, I shouldn't have to be paying more for my products because you suck at running your own store. There is a Local Game Store that I do like to go to in the state. There were two actually, one of them went out of business because they were operating at the margins shortly after the release of Dominaria. The other Local Game Store I like to go to does everything. They do Magic, Pokémon, Anime Games, stuff like that.

They also do Tabletop Board Games, since they actually host Board Game Events like we're different ya know? Local Statewide Game Designers and stuff like that come and they bring their new Board Games and Card Games and stuff like that so they can play. It's like a fair cause they have the floor space for it. They were very smart since they bought this location in a rundown dirt mall that was probably built in like the '60's and they cleaned it up, it's huge. It's like what a Big Lots used to be. Cleaned it up with new carpet, new glass, all nice and clean as the restrooms are brand new but they do everything. They could hold a Grand Prix If they wanted to. They even have a setup shop for miniature painting.

When I used to participate in Magic Draft events, not only would I get three or four tables to draft. They would fire a second Draft event during FNM at 10 p.m. after the first one had already finished. So people would usually be there until around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning to play Magic. They were making money hand over fist and they still are they're still open, it's still fine they do alright because they did everything, they hedged their bets, and when you can literally walk out their door across the street and get something for like 50 cents or a dollar. I think they need to fix their pricing on that because they're losing business (chuckles) but regardless they do sell snacks and yes Rudy they do need to be a 7-Eleven convenience store. YOU HAVE TO and sadly I think that's the future of the Local Game Store.

It's basically becoming like a Chuck E. Cheese's for adults, that really is the future. So regardless the point is that it's not Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro's responsibility to get butts into your door since that's your responsibility as a Local Game Store owner. But they used to give you those things and unfortunately people abuse it by taking advantage of it as they put themselves into a situation where Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro decided to pull the plug on them and then they pull the plug on Direct-to-Store Sales. So even If you're in the WPN program you're unable to get Magic product directly from Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro since you have to get it through a regular distributor. Why do you think they did that?

They did it as a punishment to all those people who had been operating in the wrong. The other side of it is that Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro doesn't want to deal with the Local Game Store anymore AT ALL. Certainly not after all the scandals that took place in recent years, they don't want to deal with it. They don't want to deal with the Judge Program, I mean they're being sued at least once or twice. They don't want to deal with all the inappropriate behavior that goes on with Local Game Stores anymore as they'd be more than happy to see all of them go out of business and unfortunately that means that there's going to be good people like Kevin from Rogue Deckbuilder who did the right thing that go out of business or completely change their business model.

This isn't a move that was done like, "Oh man we gotta like destroy the glory and sanctity of the Local Magic Card Store". It's that the Industry has been corrupted for years and this is just the ultimate final nail in the coffin. Remember the Challenger decks in Magic? That was probably one of their highest selling products this past year and the Local Game Store owners just complained about it saying, "Oh you put Chandra in here and now we can't sell the Chandra singles at $40 a pop." You know so now why are we opening booster boxes anymore? It is true that when you drop the price of a card single like that from $40 to $20 by printing it as a specialty product then the point of opening a booster box becomes less.

The odds of you breaking even on a booster box are greatly diminished so there's that. So If you don't want to deal with these Single Sellers then that's how you get rid of them by printing products and supplemental product so that way players can actually get the cards and I think that's the other side of it. Now what they have not done yet is actually destroy Star City Games and Channel Fireball since there's been a lot of accusations over the years of insider trading regarding knowledge about certain Magic cards being reprinted like Tarmogoyf and other special treatment like these Guilds of Ravnica: Mythic Edition booster boxes that Channel Fireball is going to be giving out to those attending Grand Prix's.

There have been all these things, look at the "God book of Magic: the Gathering" and what that was back in the day. Now a lot of these stores like Star City Games and Channel Fireball were given preferential treatment in other ways and some of them you just can't prove. However the data would suggest that a lot of people knew things that they shouldn't have known in advance and so they were able to do certain things. It's direct market manipulation and what we haven't seen is the complete devaluing of Modern legal Magic cards to the point where it's actually a consumer friendly game. The reason why that hasn't happened yet is because Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro is in bed with Star City Games and Channel Fireball.

Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro wants them to succeed so that they can continue to keep the price of Magic cards escalated or create a form of "scarcity" as Mark Rosewater puts it to directly benefit the big boys so basically they're creating a Walmart / Target scenario. If you guys haven't figured it out yet that's what's going on here. They do their moves based on the demands of MTG Finance. That's why it's very weird that Kevin from Rogue Deckbuilder would even open a brick-and-mortar store other than for his love of the game. If you want to get into MTG Finance you don't need a brick-and-mortar store to do that but it's really because everything they've done as far as to how terrible Magic Standard booster sets have been to the benefit of MTG Finance.

That's why the Masters sets were so terrible for MTG Finance. So If you're a part of MTG Finance how can you be mad about the Masters sets? Well that's how you find yourself wearing too many hats. Unfortunately Kevin found himself in that scenario where it's like he's trying to run a store and he's trying to run a business and his entire business isn't MTG Finance. So it's like what happened? Well you had these two Masters sets (Iconic Masters and Masters 25) well they're terrible. So that means your old cards, your investments, your speculations, well those stay high in price but now you got this terrible product that you can't make any money off of that's selling on Amazon and eBay for $130 or $140 when the MSRP was $250.

Masters sets used to be sold for about $300 to $400 and that's what happens when you print good cards in them and you guys don't want them to print good cards! I mean Kevin's not that bad, I praise him when he needs praise however I disagree with a lot of his MTG Finance stuff. But even he and even Rudy from Alpha Investments has chimed in at this point saying, "Eh these prices are really getting out of control." You can get to a point where you self-sabotage which is effectively what that boils down to and that's what MTG Finance has done, they did it and that's what created Iconic Masters and Eternal Masters. Right now Magic products are terrible, they aren't selling, can't sell them at Big Retail Stores, and certainly you can't sell them at Local Game Stores because that customer is much smarter than the customer whose just buying a booster pack for $4 at Walmart.

Now sometimes I've heard that people live in an area where they don't have a Local Game Store and it's a matter of convenience. However that same customer could literally buy that same product at an online retailer for about $74 to $100 right? It's not just Sports and More, I've been buying all my booster boxes online from online retailers for years. So my pack price usually averages to about $2.35 to $2.50 a booster pack. Now I haven't bought any in a while since I did my whole boycott and then I've done my whole, "I've tried Dominaria, the card quality was a little better" but now the set design is so terrible that I'm not even buying anymore Magic product.

The point is that the recent Magic Standard booster sets are so poorly designed now that the savvy consumers aren't paying $4 a booster pack. So what choice do they have but to sell to normies? Well they use Amazon, they go to Walmart, and then they go to Target. They're not buying this product. The only valuable cards in Magic Core 2019 are what Scapeshift, Nicol Bolas, the Ravager, Liliana, Untouched by Death, and that's really about it? The only cards worth more than five bucks in the set. Now I think $5 is a good price, I wish all Magic cards were about $5 but in order to get there you got to sell on these outlets like Amazon to help turn Magic: the Gathering back into a Trading Card Game where it's just like Pokémon TCG.

You never really ask the question in Pokémon TCG, "How much is this card worth?" No you wouldn't do that. You might but If a person really asked you how much a card in Pokémon TCG was worth then you know they play Magic or had played Magic at some point in their lives. But anyway the point I'm getting at is savvy consumers aren't buying Magic product because they know they don't have any monetary value in them. If they put monetary value in them then you're back to the situation of these MTG Finance people breathing down your throat where they're like, "It's the card value I can't do anything" but If you're a Singles Seller then it's the only motivation you have of buying a booster box, so If there's no motivation to open a booster box, then you're not selling card singles.

Why the heck would anybody want to deal with this when they can just sell to normies on Amazon out of anywhere for $75 to $100 a booster box? I've said for a long time now that the manufacturing cost for these booster packs are about 5 cents a card which is 80 cents a pack. So even If I'm paying $2.50 I'm paying more than double the actual price it is to manufacturing when I say the manufacturing cost I mean everything. That includes everything from designing, printing, and packaging the card. So I think it's great that they're on Amazon while the problem is that their product still sucks.

So they're only going to be able to sell it to people who are the bitter clingers that are hanging on in the hopes that Magic product will get better but I will not be purchasing a single booster box of Magic until they get it right when the card quality is back to what it used to be. Until the set design is actually good and not broken by requiring ban after ban after ban. Until we get solid reprints that we need for multiple formats that has new cards that I want to use in EDH / Commander. Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro needs to stop making products that literally just go in on a thousand count of VCG boxes never to be seen again.

I want cards that go in my decks and If you print enough of them into a set I will buy that set to get those cards. I won't be buying it from an online retailer. I will be buying it from you by buying the booster boxes and acquiring the packs like I did for almost 20 years but you're not doing that Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro so who cares? So who cares If they sell on Amazon to normies who are literally buying landfill trash for $100 a pop. The only people who really care are the ones that will be financially affected by this but you got to account everything that has led up to this situation and understand that it was inevitable. If Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro were still printing good products and designing good sets you'd still have people in your doors playing Standard. You'd have people at your Local Game Store wanting to engage in Magic events and the reality is that they don't.

It's why they don't have a clientele to stick with them through this mess. A lot of these Local Game Stores have been chugging along just because they can, you know? Not from effort on their part to cultivate and build an active community. Now I know Kevin has, but you know the whole Magic Community isn't Kevin people. There are really a lot of bad Local Game Store owners and staff members out there. I've been to places where I've been in their restroom and I'm just never coming back here again. You gotta think that those Local Game Stores that give the business a bad name deserve to go. They deserve to go out of business. And they will but unfortunately some good ones will go as well.

If I was Hasbro now would be the time to do layoffs for Wizards of the Coast employees. I would cut cost and do massive layoffs to lead to nice little profits. If anything I would ultimately get to the point where you may only want to run one or two distributors nationwide like whatever distributor deals or handles Walmart and Target. I think Rudy already worked something out with MJ Holding, but I would sell to these distributors so that they can stock whatever retailer spots are left at this point when it comes to Wizards of the Coast. I would do mass layoffs. I'd get rid of all the bloggers who are ruining the game. I guarantee it's not worth keeping these people around. I would just fire all of them and I would sell these really poorly designed MTG Finance sets on Amazon.

There you go you can sell your landfill trash on Amazon for $75 to $200. You'll sell them to normies as the normies will buy them and they can turn a profit. Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro can keep releasing junk set after junk set after junk set. The ultimate goal is to dumb down Paper Magic for Magic Arena to make Magic more and more normie friendly. The mechanics are getting dumbed down and anything that's broken is banned because they don't put enough time and effort into designing the sets to prevent that from happening, and they'll just make it simpler so that way normies can play it on Magic Arena while selling it to a dumber consumer. It'll be a dumber product for a dumber consumer.

We want Magic to be great again but we just have to accept it. We're in the five stages of grief. For the past year I did the whole anger thing and now it's time to get to the acceptance part of the five stages of grief because we should be there and If you're not there then I'm sorry but we just have to accept it. Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro is run by people who have no interest in designing a solid product within the scope of what Magic is and that's unfortunate but yeah what are you going to do? So I hope you guys have a great day and I'll see you later.

Quote from Yatsufusa »

As a player of the game myself, I understand the essence of where you're coming from, but at the end of the day, times have changed and WotC is already lagging behind in many aspects.

Quote from Yatsufusa »

It's not about a matter of WotC choosing to compete with video games, it's that gaming itself has changed to cover so much of a demographic thanks to the advent of technology (basically mobile games) that by default MTG (and all TCGs as well) are automatically in competition with the games of today for time. More and more people say "Why travel to a LGS to play Magic when I can stay in the comfort of my home and play X Mobile Game?" You may have defined the card game as "it must have the social aspect to be considered one", but apparently the majority of the gaming market (which all TCGs are a speck of dust of) beg to differ, so the "cards games of today" don't need the social aspect.

Quote from Yatsufusa »

"The fault of the next generation of players" really just sounds like an "Old man yelling at cloud" argument. I mean it's easily flipped around that the next generation can just say "It's the fault of the former generation of players for not realizing the advantages of modern gaming (e.g. less time traveled = more time playing... and I can even play while travelling literally) and not pushing for change of the future" and that "WotC is so slow to the latest trends because of their pandering to the old vocal minority of "social" players slowing being isolated to oblivion anyway".

Quote from Yatsufusa »

Your sad reality scenario is indeed true (that gaming is inherently becoming more and more asocial), but that only means that's where all the money is at. Turns out people who don't want or are too lazy/tired to socialize are becoming more and are willing to spend more money overall. WotC's interest is only in following the money where it goes, because seriously who wants to spend their own resources going against the tide, especially when you have thousands of other competitors who will obliterate you by going with the tide and taking most of the business with them.

Quote from Yatsufusa »

Will the next generation of players get something less rewarding? From our perspective, yes. But since they've never experienced it, does it matter to them? No... and on top of that whether an experience is rewarding is actually very subjective, it's never correct to say "old-school tcgs are 100% more rewarding than the new era of gaming". Someone who had nothing but terrible LGS experiences would easily say new gaming is the best thing that ever happened to him and from his or her perspective that's not wrong at all.

Quote from Yatsufusa »

Long Story Cut Short, Gaming is effectively becoming asocial and WotC either adapts to cater to this crowd, or can let the game die/enter low tide for a decade plus otherwise, because there's literally no such option as causing a resurgence mentality of social gaming to all gamers - if they had such powers, everyone would have started playing DnD instead of MMORPGs back in the 2000s when the similar case happened to MTG's older sibling. That being said, MMORPGS had its own flaws and you did point out OCGs have theirs as well, but it also took about a decade plus for MMORPGs to fall out of favor (and DnD didn't really gain too much from their fall either) and we've only started the era of OCGs... although it still doesn't help indirectly Mobile games are a threat to anything that aren't mobile because convenience is a master at spoiling the audience.

Quote from Yatsufusa »

The social aspect of old-school gaming may be a major reason for you to have gotten to the game, but it was always a side-benefit of the nature of the game (which like I said was considered costly to them and hence a band-aid) and was never a priority to its creators like it was to your demographic of players. Technology opened up another demographic of players that needed less maintenance cost and so that's where the industry is headed towards instead. So crudely put, the "unique social aspect" important to you isn't important to the other demographic, but your aspects have overhead costs creators don't want to bear, so they changed their demographics instead (helps that asocial lazy gamers would more likely pay more to get ahead, which led to the one aspect of RNG packs that TCGs originally had to leak into the Loot Boxes of today).

Quote from Colt47 »

I don't have a problem with Pro play that much. Rather, the issues I have with pro play are the people that cater the events, rampant cheating, etc. It's probably for the best if WoTC started moving professional level play to the online medium using something like Arena, as it's impossible for someone to cheat and the games are much easier to broadcast and watch.

This game is fun, but... it's got a lot of history and that history is a curse to the company and the people playing it.

Quote from RxPhantom »

I absolutely love Magic, but watching other people play it on the internet is the most boring thing imaginable. I've encountered a couple pros when I go to the occasional large event. Some are fine, but others think that you should give a ***** about them. I definitely do not.

Quote from Colt47 »

Nissa is a racist whiny elf that believes elves are the pinnacle race of the multiverse, got retconned into the zendikar nature hippy fest we have today, and I'm pretty sure hates artifacts and unnatural things as an extension of it. Gods help us because I think they are trying to do yet another one of these one note green walkers with Vivien.

Quote from m_pathogen »

Digital Magic is not at an acceptable level to replace paper yet, imo.

The question is will it be enough to reach that $1,000 a month threshold in order to break even.

Quote from Ryperior74 »

For this, I think Walking Ballista would have been a better card to use for this art through hangarback walker reprints are always welcome though

they really really need to bring msrp back