Also, the prices on ebay are usually worse than you'd get from online stores, which blows my mind. Not just BINs either, I often see cards bid higher than the tcgplayer price that I could buy it at immediately, without and bidding nonsense. I remember the good old days, when you could get a pretty solid discount on random old rare stuff - ebay is where I got all my duals and whatnot.
Yeah... eBay was great way back when. I bought my 5 duals (should have shot for full play sets but I was an idiot), Antiquities, and a number of other cards from eBay. All of that was before places like TCGPlayer even existed. So...
I think the very last thing I bought was a box of Havik: The Bothering. Like anyone is going to fake thise.
Yeah... more to the point, eBay is bad now. You can't spot shills, fake feedback or protect youself from bid cancellations after they started hiding names. It's almowt entirely a sellers game. Even the few buyer protections that are in place are either not enough or over the top. Remember that ex I told you about? She tied the eBay account to my checking account and she racked up fees. I caught on and tried to get eBay to at least remove my information but they refused unless I filed a police report and sent in copies of my drivers license and... something else, a bill or some B.S.
I just closed my bank account instead and quit doin business with eBay unless it's for something I can guarantee as good and can't get anywhere else. Like old tomes or something. Which is to day, it's been years.
I doubt sleeving takes nerd points away. I sleeve cards all the time and rarely unsleeve (the inner sleeves) them when I rebuild my decks. About 2/3 of my collection sits in either inner or penny sleeves regardless of the value of the individual card.
Anyways, my ex used to do what you described. She spent most of her free time prowling yard sales and er... I forget what it's called. Where you buy the trucks full of lost mail from the UPS and USPS. All of this before sites like Alibaba existed. Make no mistake, these people spend a lot of time researching the worth of their purchases and eeking out the maximum value from their sales. IIRC at its peak, my ex was pulling in close to $5,000 a month just doing it casually. The truck purchases were the worst, she would stash that junk everywhere, bedroom, kitchen, everywhere and it would take months to process and sell it all. When she mistook my comic collection as one of her things to sell, I had to rent a storage unit just to keep all my stuff separate.
One thing she loved to do was to combine a good item or two with a handful of junk. For instance a popular video game with two junk games, she always got rid of it for a little extra cash.
I'm curious as to the state of things now so I'd like to see what the score is when your stuff comes in.
why just target player? Why not target player, Planeswalker or creature?
WRT damage, target player and planeswalker is pretty much the same. Your Sunscorched Deserts though are not the answer to Leyline of Sanctity, however.
Well... regardless, why not creatures? You're trading away your landfall, card advantage and mana for a measly 1 point. At least make it flexible.
Wait what? My Scorched Desert? I don't want it.
You're trading nothing. You still get your land drop and mana, it just produces colorless mana instead of colored mana. You're not giving up card advantage, you're gaining card advantage. You get to keep a card in play, while killing an opponents creature. The only possible thing you lose, and more often than not you won't lose it, is tempo. That will only happen if you want to kill their creature with your land drop, and because of the land being colorless, it prevents you from casting a spell another land would have allowed you to cast.
This is the same problem that Desert had, just on a smaller scale, and it was discussed at length as to how Desert can warp both a limited and standard environment in this thread.
Whoops I remembered Sunscorched being sacrifice not ETB to do 1 point. But it absolutely does not hit creatures. Players only.
The take away I had about the Desert discussion in Standard is that A) it's repeatable damage B) uncounterable and C) hard to destroy. All of which is "unfun". Is that not indicative of the root problem with Standard that what is considered an OK card in any other format is considered warping in the very set it fits flavorwise?
why just target player? Why not target player, Planeswalker or creature?
WRT damage, target player and planeswalker is pretty much the same. Your Sunscorched Deserts though are not the answer to Leyline of Sanctity, however.
Well... regardless, why not creatures? You're trading away your landfall, card advantage and mana for a measly 1 point. At least make it flexible.
FoW stands for Force of Will, the game, not the card. It's basically a Manga driven game that seems to largely target the male population based on its art consisting of scantily clad characters. I could be wrong about the male population part, I dunno.
Good point on #1. The cards are pages out of a tome and I always felt those pages were written by different people and the art reflected the world as viewed through their eyes. Did you know there is no known accurate zoological depiction of a Dodo bird? Every image we have is derived from drawings or paintings, many of which were drawn by people with no training. The modern Dodo is derived on modern understanding and theory of biology in much the same way we depict Dinosaurs. So every drawing or painting of a Dodo is based on that artists perception.
It never bothered me that the art was different because I figured it was a story as written by different people with different viewpoints. Sure there are a few gaffs but eh...
Now, I don't feel like I'm looking at pages out of a tome but rather looking through a monitor at a video still or photo. The modern frames seem to strongly enforce that idea. Ever notice the image size changed from a square to a "wide screen" format? This is hugely evident comparing the Ice Age cards to their reprints in Coldsnap that show the same art but different card frames.
It's not that I feel one is better than the other. It's that there was a certain... charm that has gone out of the game.
The Eldrazi always felt out of place to me. Like this weird experiment a buddy and I did by gabbing some junk cards from other CCGs and applying MtG rules to them. Like they were some kind of experimental CCG WotC never published but opted to use elements from.
I tried to read the story of Gideon today.... It was complete and utter garbage. I made it to... I dunno some nonsense about him being a prisoner and taught how to wield magic or something before I stopped reading. I had to read the paragraph about his name change twice before I understood it was talking about the same character. Is this how the rest of the background stories read?
I dunno. Some shops seem to be dropping MtG and Pokemon in full favor of FoW and YGO. Of the four closest to me, two dropped their MtG singles stock offering the same tired singles for, at least, since SOI was released.
I can't stand YGO as a game and I don't know how I feel about FoW. So I tend to avoid those shops in general. I'll drop by once in a while to see if anything changed or someone liquidated their collection but otherwise...
I guess Land Leeches can be considered a type of vampire. But there's plenty of real life examples to take from like the Vampire Finch that might fit green.
But with all the top down design WotC is doing I can'timagine we'll see such ilk again.
I learned magic with powerful (playable) counterspells, I teached friends the game with powerful counterspells, and neither of us has quit, because bis spell was answered. Oh, and those counterspells used to be 2-mana commons and uncommons, not 3-mana rares ...
But Essence Scatter is a step in the right direction I guess.
Note that I said in general...
I've seen more than one beginner player get upset when I Boomeranged his CoP then push through with a direct damage spell. Or Stasis out his lands to make his spells dead cards. It seems like WotC considers Counterspell anything is unfun and that's bad for beginners....
Getting upset at a Stasis lock is fairly understandable. Prison is the epitome of bad game design. Not sure why Boomeranging a CoP would be any more upsetting than Naturalizing it, though.
Because I didn't play Disenchant? Seriously, one of the mistakes that many beginner players make is to include CoP's for every color in a deck. That's 20 freaking card slots taken up, 24 if they remember to include Circle of Protection: Artifacts. Back then, not now anyways. So playing Ux means you focus on whatever color x is dealing damage. It frustrates the heck out of beginner players to see their CoPs doing jack as you ignore the irrelevant colors. I recall plopping down a Su-Chi once amidst a full five colors of CoP and watched as my opponet struggled to find the Disenchant.
To wit, my point is that current Standard games seem to play more like Cyberball instead of Wizards dueling. New players seem to like playing creatuers vs creatures games. Counter spells? Direct damage? Oh no... those are no fun. They're fine fodder for Tarmogoyf though.
Give it time, it'll be Magic-Gi-Oh to entice YGO players.
The other major problem is the planeswalkers and the whole idea of the "spark". Urza, the original planeswalker, gained his ability through one of the most devastating events in the entire story of magic, which was the brothers war. The reason he got to become a planeswalker is that magics and artifice used were so world shaping that the end result morphed Urza himself. The newer walkers all basically earned their abilities through personal crisis, so I suppose that means that the universe just happened to grow sentient and decided that if some random joe has a serious mental break down and is a mage that is good enough to be a walker? Or they just really like to hunt a lot?
Arguably, the problem you speak of predated the planeswalker card type. Remember that the players themselves are taking the role of planeswalkers. Have been since the game was conceived of, before Urza was written to have become one. And I don't think you can come up with enough Brothers' War-caliber crises to explain the numbers, not without wrecking the Blind Eternities themselves. (Now, had they let the players take the role of more modest mages...Then again, I wonder how much distinction Garfield put between mages and planeswalkers.)
As to the financial issues...{sigh} I never was a fan of the mythic rarity, but that one isn't entirely WotC's fault. I think I remember Rosewater saying that it was impelled upon them by Hasbro, as a way to catch up to the industry standard of more than three rarities (a train of logic I still can't fathom. What's so important about being standard?). Although I think my objection was/is more on the unique side, that it reduces the number of cards a set can have (q.v. how rares and mythics are laid out on the rare card sheet). Now, regarding the dispelling of the core sets...I'm not sure why its sales were lower than expansions', or if it was so much lower that it would really justify changing to the new format (although, I'm not convinced creative was having that much trouble extrapolating new mechanics into three-set blocks. At least, I didn't see anything to suggest it. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough?). Were Hasbro's shareholders threatening to jump ship?
EDIT: Now I remember the situation with the changing of the nature of the spark--WotC's writers were finding it difficult to write planeswalkers in a way players could identify with, so they lowered the spark's potency. (I still don't get why vicariousness is something to assign importance to...) Although given that the Kamigawa and Ravnica storylines did just fine without a planeswalker in sight, I suppose they could have just made planeswalker appearances more sparing, instead.
I tried to cut out text but my phone isn't cooperating with me. Sorry.
Isn't Mythic Rare a direct result of the Yu-Gi-Oh nonsense with its ultra-rare and secret-rare and double secret rare garbage they foist on collectors? I perceive some of the more recent power creatures like Eldrazi as spin offs from YGO's super mega triple monsters that refuse to die under any circumstance as well. In addition, didn't YGO break some world record with the highest attendance at a tournament? Not sure when that was.
All of these must be influencing WotC more than anyone cares to admit.
I learned magic with powerful (playable) counterspells, I teached friends the game with powerful counterspells, and neither of us has quit, because bis spell was answered. Oh, and those counterspells used to be 2-mana commons and uncommons, not 3-mana rares ...
But Essence Scatter is a step in the right direction I guess.
Note that I said in general...
I've seen more than one beginner player get upset when I Boomeranged his CoP then push through with a direct damage spell. Or Stasis out his lands to make his spells dead cards. It seems like WotC considers Counterspell anything is unfun and that's bad for beginners....
I don't see why they won't print another Counterspell-Esque card for standard.
My personal belief is that considering standard is a constantly changing format, they should have at least different deck types taking the spot light from time to time to mix things up. Why can't Control be powerful for a season? Other deck types get to be powerful. The last "control" deck I got to play was Seasons Past; but it was short lived due to the rotation of Dark Petition.
I think there will be a good Counterspell printed soon. I just don't know when and why they are so afraid of it.
Because Countereqsue spells are scary to new players in general? Why else would they print a comfort card like serpopod? Can't be countered? Creature spells can't be countered? First time I saw that text I thought I was looking at a custom card. Also doesn't seem like they're trying to appeal to Standard players here.
Yeah... eBay was great way back when. I bought my 5 duals (should have shot for full play sets but I was an idiot), Antiquities, and a number of other cards from eBay. All of that was before places like TCGPlayer even existed. So...
I think the very last thing I bought was a box of Havik: The Bothering. Like anyone is going to fake thise.
I just closed my bank account instead and quit doin business with eBay unless it's for something I can guarantee as good and can't get anywhere else. Like old tomes or something. Which is to day, it's been years.
Anyways, my ex used to do what you described. She spent most of her free time prowling yard sales and er... I forget what it's called. Where you buy the trucks full of lost mail from the UPS and USPS. All of this before sites like Alibaba existed. Make no mistake, these people spend a lot of time researching the worth of their purchases and eeking out the maximum value from their sales. IIRC at its peak, my ex was pulling in close to $5,000 a month just doing it casually. The truck purchases were the worst, she would stash that junk everywhere, bedroom, kitchen, everywhere and it would take months to process and sell it all. When she mistook my comic collection as one of her things to sell, I had to rent a storage unit just to keep all my stuff separate.
One thing she loved to do was to combine a good item or two with a handful of junk. For instance a popular video game with two junk games, she always got rid of it for a little extra cash.
I'm curious as to the state of things now so I'd like to see what the score is when your stuff comes in.
Whoops I remembered Sunscorched being sacrifice not ETB to do 1 point. But it absolutely does not hit creatures. Players only.
The take away I had about the Desert discussion in Standard is that A) it's repeatable damage B) uncounterable and C) hard to destroy. All of which is "unfun". Is that not indicative of the root problem with Standard that what is considered an OK card in any other format is considered warping in the very set it fits flavorwise?
Well... regardless, why not creatures? You're trading away your landfall, card advantage and mana for a measly 1 point. At least make it flexible.
Wait what? My Scorched Desert? I don't want it.
why just target player? Why not target player, Planeswalker or creature?
It never bothered me that the art was different because I figured it was a story as written by different people with different viewpoints. Sure there are a few gaffs but eh...
Now, I don't feel like I'm looking at pages out of a tome but rather looking through a monitor at a video still or photo. The modern frames seem to strongly enforce that idea. Ever notice the image size changed from a square to a "wide screen" format? This is hugely evident comparing the Ice Age cards to their reprints in Coldsnap that show the same art but different card frames.
It's not that I feel one is better than the other. It's that there was a certain... charm that has gone out of the game.
I tried to read the story of Gideon today.... It was complete and utter garbage. I made it to... I dunno some nonsense about him being a prisoner and taught how to wield magic or something before I stopped reading. I had to read the paragraph about his name change twice before I understood it was talking about the same character. Is this how the rest of the background stories read?
I can't stand YGO as a game and I don't know how I feel about FoW. So I tend to avoid those shops in general. I'll drop by once in a while to see if anything changed or someone liquidated their collection but otherwise...
I would love to see Fallen Angel with the old art again. Not a huge fan of Desolation Angel or Crypt Angel though.
I guess Land Leeches can be considered a type of vampire. But there's plenty of real life examples to take from like the Vampire Finch that might fit green.
But with all the top down design WotC is doing I can'timagine we'll see such ilk again.
Because I didn't play Disenchant? Seriously, one of the mistakes that many beginner players make is to include CoP's for every color in a deck. That's 20 freaking card slots taken up, 24 if they remember to include Circle of Protection: Artifacts. Back then, not now anyways. So playing Ux means you focus on whatever color x is dealing damage. It frustrates the heck out of beginner players to see their CoPs doing jack as you ignore the irrelevant colors. I recall plopping down a Su-Chi once amidst a full five colors of CoP and watched as my opponet struggled to find the Disenchant.
To wit, my point is that current Standard games seem to play more like Cyberball instead of Wizards dueling. New players seem to like playing creatuers vs creatures games. Counter spells? Direct damage? Oh no... those are no fun. They're fine fodder for Tarmogoyf though.
Give it time, it'll be Magic-Gi-Oh to entice YGO players.
I tried to cut out text but my phone isn't cooperating with me. Sorry.
Isn't Mythic Rare a direct result of the Yu-Gi-Oh nonsense with its ultra-rare and secret-rare and double secret rare garbage they foist on collectors? I perceive some of the more recent power creatures like Eldrazi as spin offs from YGO's super mega triple monsters that refuse to die under any circumstance as well. In addition, didn't YGO break some world record with the highest attendance at a tournament? Not sure when that was.
All of these must be influencing WotC more than anyone cares to admit.
Note that I said in general...
I've seen more than one beginner player get upset when I Boomeranged his CoP then push through with a direct damage spell. Or Stasis out his lands to make his spells dead cards. It seems like WotC considers Counterspell anything is unfun and that's bad for beginners....
Because Countereqsue spells are scary to new players in general? Why else would they print a comfort card like serpopod? Can't be countered? Creature spells can't be countered? First time I saw that text I thought I was looking at a custom card. Also doesn't seem like they're trying to appeal to Standard players here.