So... one Magic card bought a whole crap load of Pokemon cards?
That doesn't surprise me. Magic is a far superior game.
One U.S. dollar can buy a crap ton of stuff in some third world country. See what I'm saying?
I honestly can't tell if this is troll bait or not. I mean, if that's all you got from it, you either didn't read it all or didn't understand it.
But I'll bite. Superior in whose eyes? Yours? Mine? Because I can go outside and round up 10 people that think i'm an idiot for buying 60 dollar pieces of cardboard. I also can't convince my 7 year old how superior that Gideon was to the pile of packs I handed her. Plus, she busted a $20 EX card. So no, I don't see what you're saying at all.
Well those 60 dollar pieces of cardboard are 80 or 100 dollar pieces of cardboard when I sell them. So I think it's your 10 people who are really the idiots.
And why are the cards worth so much? The market. Wizards doesn't decide how much they're worth, the people do.
I mean...congrats? None of that has much of anything to do with what I was talking about in the OP. I was referring to the avenues other CCG's are opening up to attract their players and make them feel like they've gotten value from their dollar, as opposed to the litany of strange practices Wizard's has done to make the community feel a loss in value. Prize walls, watered-down Standard fodder, discontinued rewards programs, I mean just read the thread. This isn't a price discussion complaint, it's a value complaint.
And to be clear, I play the game. When I said '10 people' I meant people outside the game have a hard time wrapping their brains around it unless you equate it to sports cards, and even that's kind of an old-timey reference at this point. So while you're celebrating your $20 margin gain, to those people what we're doing is a silly/foreign concept. Like all collectible hobbies, I imagine.
So... one Magic card bought a whole crap load of Pokemon cards?
That doesn't surprise me. Magic is a far superior game.
One U.S. dollar can buy a crap ton of stuff in some third world country. See what I'm saying?
I honestly can't tell if this is troll bait or not. I mean, if that's all you got from it, you either didn't read it all or didn't understand it.
But I'll bite. Superior in whose eyes? Yours? Mine? Because I can go outside and round up 10 people that think i'm an idiot for buying 60 dollar pieces of cardboard. I also can't convince my 7 year old how superior that Gideon was to the pile of packs I handed her. Plus, she busted a $20 EX card. So no, I don't see what you're saying at all.
There is an simple (but unfortunate) answer for why.
WotC makes most of its money off of two formats, Standard and Limited. Limited requires fresh packs and Standard requires a quickly rotating collection of current cards (from fresh packs). From a corporate point of view, this is all that matters, as it is what makes the most money (WotC has not been a game for the players for a long, long time now, the people with the real power there are all pointy-haired bosses & accountants).
Modern, Vintage and Legacy make WotC almost no new money, so they do as little as possible to support it. Sure they offer pro tours, etc. with them, but that support is less and less every year, and its just enough to keep interest in the overall game. There is absolutely no incentive to add any additional support or a large & cheap influx of cards, because anything they do could (and would) steal away from Standard or Limited play (and ultimately profit).
Imagine an environment where Modern/Vinatge/Legacy decks average $300 or less and those tourneys are filled with two or three times the amount of normal players that attend them now. Sure the exposure & support for these formats would grow, but all these cards being used were sold long ago, and make absolutely nothing for WotC now. Even if the did support it with a bunch of new cards, because the formats do not rotate, once people have a good base of 1-4 decks they tend to stop buying additional cards. Or worse they only new a few new cards here and there to fill out their current decks. Either way they can continue playing in one of the formats with a limited amount of additional funds for as long as they like. So any way you look at it, there is no way for WotC to make as much money as pushing Standard and Limited does (which is why they don't).
Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE for a proper Modern Masters or Vintage/Legacy Masters set with nothing but quality cards to lower the prices overall (where an average high card would be $20-25 at max.), but it will never happen. Standard and Limited would have to be... abandoned for that to happen and people (however much they hate it) support those formats as they have to if they want to participate in fairly regular play.
It does suck, I will fully agree with that. As someone who loves to build lots of decks, I hate that there are so many cards I would like to build around, but will not buy due to the insane costs.
I wish there was a way for them to make money (hey why not), yet still have easily accessible cards for everyone. I'd also like to win the lotto, but that hasn't happened so far...
To be honest, I really think this is yet another myth we're accepting as truth. Look, I've seen in the major LGS's I've played with (I've bounced around a few major cities in the past decade) new players coming and going, but the old guard does it, too. Hell, there's 2 guys at our LGS that sell off their pieces and disappear from the game for months while dealing with real-life stuff and suddenly come back and buy into Commander, Standard, Modern, or all 3. Some of us don't let the 'keep it and hold it forever so it gains imaginary value' mantra control us, so they're constantly rebuilding their decks.
So, you have new players, old players buying back in. The market is there if the product is solid. Also, this argument about 'Standard and Limited pays their bills' doesn't hold water for other reasons. Limited, especially lately, is a very hard sell in some regions, like mine here in Charlotte. Some LGS's do better with it, most don't. I can't stand limited, personally, but that's more to do with crap-quality sets to draft with. You offer me M11 draft and I'm in, BFZ...not so much. Standard is in a shifting period as we go to the new block structure, and I've seen more than a few people kinda gunshy about it. They're sitting on their current deck because they can't justify $45 Gideons and $80 Jaces without knowing how fast and how hard the prices tank in this new rotation cycle.
Also, Modern is not only attracting new players all the time, it's getting new cards. Eternal does not mean buy a deck and never give Wizards a dime ever again. Wizards is using that model, not the players. We're shelling out cash to LGS's, Ebay, Troll and Toad, SCG, and about a billion others for cards that haven't been reprinted in years. That's on Wizard's, not us. It used to be that your staples like Counterspell, Lightning Bolt, and Dark Ritual were reprinted every set. New artwork for the people that have theirs, and easily accessible for those that don't. We can't even get a full set of utility staples in a block anymore (ie. no practical graveyard hate in Standard, no Doom Blade-esque cards, no 3 for 2 red instant).
So maybe the problem isn't the cash cow everyone thinks Standard and Limited are, maybe the issue is the New World Order was a catastrophe of design - it's inelegant, it concentrates value into upper rarities, it leaves a lot of dead trees on a table after draft is over, and it makes everything feel watered down. Eternal players don't need what they have to give.
Let me just throw this out there - Pernicious Deed at Mythic in Conspiracy...was anyone crying? Did it bring Magic to its knees? What if it was Wasteland? Force of Will? Crucible of Worlds? City of Traitors? At what point do the reprints 'kill magic'? When is a set 'too good' that it screws everything up? On the other side of the coin, if those cards were in there, would you and I still be cracking packs? Pretty sure the answer is yes.
The defense that they had to "save some stuff for MM3" is one that has always annoyed me. For one thing, MM2 already had the pre-Innistrad cutoff so there was already plenty saved for MM3 by default. But for another thing, MM3 isn't the set they were trying to sell us, MM2 was. The ONLY worthwhile common/uncommon was Remand. If you're feeling generous you could name Expedition Map or Lightning Bolt but those won't save a pack from failing. I'm not even advocating "going full Yu-Gi-Oh!" Nobody's saying reprint Tarmogoyf at uncommon, and I already said the set had good stuff at the highest bands. Distribution in the other bands was the issue.
But that's also part of the argument I was making to begin with. We've been drinking this Kool-Aid about how the market can't handle this and the LGS's can't handle that...and there are 2 CCG's doing those exact same things others on here swear can't be done. Their game isn't dying, it's thriving. There's been a recent resurgence of interest in the Pokemon CCG, and while some of us might regard Yu-Gi-Oh players as 'weird', they're certainly not underground. These games are taking up more shelf space at your local Wal Mart than Magic does most of the time.
Would I say we can't have Tarmagoyf at uncommon? Yes, I'd agree that's a bit much. Rare? Part of a special 'Modern Event Deck'...well, yeah. Having the damn card as a 4-of has been necessary since the beginning of the Modern format for 90% of decks running green, so why are we cutting off the player base with this ridiculous artificial price barrier?
You know what happens to $100 cards in the other CCG's? People buy them up early, then they get reprinted in tins a few months later, everyone gets the overpriced card they wanted, everyone's happy. The reprint is at like $5, the original is still $15-20. This whole concept of letting LGS's charge a forever-increasing premium on a card because it goes without meeting reprint demand year after year is ridiculous. I always knew that, but now I'm starting to learn that this has only become the status quo with THIS game.
I was kinda gearing up to argue against you for comparing a extremely small, casual example of Pokemon against the entirety of Magic, but to be honest I don't have as much fight in me as I thought. I gotta agree, WotC has been a bit terrible lately.
I'm an avid collector of the game. Playing since Masques Block, I have every expansion since Arabian Nights (Beta's kind-of a long-term project...) and every promo - up to a point. A few years ago, I dropped out of competitive Magic to focus on collecting, and played Commander and draft exclusively. I'm a completionist - I want one copy of everything.
Then Force of Will hit. WotC actively printed a hyper-rare, hyper desirable card that can't be had for less than $600. Power 9 is one thing; this was a brand-new, REPRINT card that goes for AAA pricing, well beyond what I could justify. It was soon followed by Elesh Norn. Since then, Judge promos have started out at around $100 when it used to be $30 and few stray much lower. After much agonising, I decided to not go for Judge promos. Better to have none than a few with loads of gaps I could never fill.
Then Modern Masters hit. MM1 wasn't too bad, but MM2 values were so woefully skewed towards high-value mythics that, again, I couldn't justify third copies of 'Goyf, Bob when their prices weren't being affected at all. So I skipped MM2 and, for good measure, broke up my part-complete MM1. That's fine, they were reprint sets, even though I had every core set I convinced myself my collection could survive.
Then Khans hit. Forty prerelease promos. Alt-art precon foils. I dropped out of collecting promos entirely.
Then Zendikar. Not only was EVERY rare and mythic available as a promo (and as an EDH player, bling is important to me), making collecting the regular set kinda pathetic, but the Expedition cards straddle the line between actual set and promo. And those prices are beyond mentioning.
As it stands WotC have killed my interest in collecting their game by making it nightmarishly difficult, through the sheer number of promos, the engineered prices of the higher-end ones, and the ineffective reprinting of high-demand old cards. I've capped it at Khans, the final old-style block.
Wow, dude. I could have written your post. I'm a psychotic completionist with a special fancy for promos. I feel your pain, man. I opted out of Judge Foils for the same reasons, then Khans broke my heart, and Zendikar can get bent. I still love my FNM cards and MPR's, Gateway, older prereleases and launch cards, so I'm refocusing myself on filling in those missing holes.
But yeah, I thought I'd be alone in complaining about it, which is why I didn't mention it. I'm actually really annoyed by their new stance on promos. There's no alternate artwork, they're literally stamping a regular foil with a date for every rare in the set? Screw that. Now there's even less desire to play in store events like prereleases and launch weekend. At least I have Game Day, for now...
Dang, sir. I knew Wizards did a horrible job with some of their international markets, but I had no idea it was that bad. Thanks for sharing that perspective.
It's kinda depressing. I even checked out the tournament scene for that Pokemon CCG. There were like 6 'for beginners' threads, and every one of them said 'just go buy 4 copies of this theme deck, you'll have a playset of almost every staple card you need'. I was blown away. You mean I'm giving my money to the company that makes the product and not some 3rd party that tells me to buy singles at a rate that goes up based on whether the card saw play last Saturday or not? AND I can use them online, too?
If you listen to most people in the 'Price Discussion' threads on here, you'd hear a model like this would destroy the game and the company would go out of business.
Sometimes, being in the thick of the tournament scene make you get blinders to the rest of the world going on around you. So tonight I just got a real eye-opener. This might run a little long, sorry if I rant.
My daughter is 7, and she's really shown an interest in playing games with me. After months of telling her she needed better math skills to play the Pokemon TCG, she progressed enough for me to stab at it. I picked up a cheap two-person set. She picked up on the rules right away (I haven't played it since 2001), and most important, she really enjoyed spending time with me.
I went to my LGS tonight for FNM. I busted my prize packs, and there's a Gideon I didn't need. I traded it in and grabbed a bunch of Pokemon packs for my daughter. Inside the pack was a code. I went home, turned on Pokemon Online, put in the code, she got an online pack to go with her real one. She also got a theme deck, a bunch of rares, and 5 packs to get her started. The game moved flawlessly and it has an attractive GUI.
That one Gideon bought my daughter 4 packs of real cards, 4 packs of Online cards. Plus the 5 packs and the theme deck she got free. Wizards wants me to buy my cards twice, in two secondary markets they don't control. They attract new players through a poorly built Steam game that only sorta-kinda emulates real Magic. Players get there and find the best decks in the room are hundreds of dollars (God forbid they come on Modern night). Your store determines the prize support ranging from only Top 8 to everyone gets a pack, to store credit. Wizards is kind enough to hook you up with 1 foil for Top 4 of an uncommon that may or may not see play in the format it's in. High-demand reprints like Modern Masters are printed in low supply and mixed with a lot of chaff no one ever asked for.
I'm not saying Magic is bad or Wizards is trying to kill the game, nothing like that. I just haven't been to any big-box store lately and not seen/heard of every other CCG in the world putting out tins of in-demand reprints, or finding new ways to add value in the online space. While these games have been trying to claw their way into a crowded market over the years, this is what Wizards gave us:
- Discontinued Magic Player Rewards
- Switched to an MTGO client every beta tester said was not up to snuff
- Started printing low-cost staples at mythic (Voice, Warden, etc.)
- Discontinued Gateway promos/league
- Let Legacy die rather than abolish a foolish promise
- A 3-year trend of watering down the standard pool, making sets that are top-heavy with almost all value in 2-4 mythics
- Released not one, but 2 Modern Masters sets with dramatically reduced availability and a mixed-bag of needed reprints vs. 3/4 chaff
- Let SCG run willy-nilly as the price-setter of the secondary market, driving up pricing through buy-outs and generally harming the ability to attract new people to formats
- Removed mythic Pre-Release foils (finally going back on this...by turning it into a lottery)
I've complained about some of these topics before, but it didn't leave such a bad taste in my mouth until now. Taking a step back made me realize at some point after I started loving Magic, Magic stopped loving me. I have to pay for every little thing I want to do with their game, and the pricing is absurd. I used to get all sorts of rewards and thanks for playing, and 'get psyched for the next set, here's the pre-release foil bomb!' and packs felt worth opening. Now I take 5 prize packs and leave 50 cards on the table for anyone who wants it, and throw the rest in a binder with the other 30-40 cards I've cracked that no one wants.
So, rant over. I have my decks for the format I play in, maybe I'll just start playing for store credit and add to my daughter's new collection.
I got what I wanted, and then you know what happened? I stopped giving a crap about magic.
I wasn't the only one. Scores of players dropped magic. Junk bins of magic piled up.
I stopped playing and collecting a short while after Mirage. One of those reasons was I was tired of buying crap power level cards while everyone else that played and collected 6 months before I started had their Power 9 and duals. I couldn't compete so I gave up until basically Time Spiral. Its also the reason I don't play Legacy or Vintage. I don't have the power cards to compete and I'm not going to spend thousands of dollars to do so. That format is dead to me. Unless Wizards does something that format will shrink (in Paper) until there are none left to play it. There has to be a happy medium somewhere. With what is happening now, I don't see those formats making it another 5 years at this rate. A balance needs to be maintained between playability and collectibility imho. It seems it is leaning FAR towards collectibility right now. Just my opinion.
I think that's pretty much it right there. Since WotC seems to care more about how SCG is doing and not their own player base, SCG basically ran the market and monopolized the secondary market pricing structure. They pushed up the value of ABU duals, milked the Legacy format for whatever last droplets of cash could be squeezed, and pulled the rug out from under the format. With Modern once being affordable and now costing as much as Legacy to enter, they're just doing it again.
WotC needs to get aggressive about reprints. It's their damn game, they should take it back. As far as I'm concerned, from a business perspective, reprints put money in their pockets from pack sales, makes players happy, and grows their formats. Letting the secondary market explode like this and starving the would-be players and scaring them off formats is detrimental to the health of the game. If even one person looks at getting into a format that can be reprinted to demand en masse and says 'it's too expensive, that format is dead to me', then they have failed to grow their business in favor of the secondary market.
I mean, seriously...would anyone really complain if 1 block every other year was a re-release? Khans-Lorwyn Standard, imagine it. People get Cryptics and Thoughtseizes and a more powerful Standard for a bit. I know I'd be at FNM every damn week.
You guys are arguing exactly why I'm a modern only player. I spent 700 bucks and I have a tier 1 deck that isn't going away. I'm not playing non tier 1 decks because I would be pissed if I lost because I wasn't P2Wing, therefore I don't play standard and I don't play legacy.
Just because I COULD win with a budget legacy deck doesn't make it remotely worthwhile. If I can't play tier 1 I'm not playing. It's not worth my time or frustration.
That's almost the same amount of money I used to build Legacy Merfolk. As a bonus, most of the cards in the Legacy list are also playable in the Modern version. I think you're not really being fair in regards to how much a competitive Legacy deck can actually cost. There are some really expensive ones, but on the other hand, Jund in Modern is like 1800$, so it's not as if there's a galaxy of distance there.
Except there was. Check Modern prices at the start of last year vs. now. The gulf was enormous. Jund is an outlier, it's always been the most expensive deck in the format. But there was a point where many competitive decks could be had without spending much more than you would on a Standard deck. Not to mention, Standard trades into Modern easier. The guy with his 5th Geist is more likely to part with it for, say the new Gideon than a Legacy player is going to cough up a FoW for a pair of Gideons.
The real crime here is that SCG has basically become the benchmark for pricing and they are very irresponsible with that power they've come to have. Remember at the beginning of this past Modern season there was a RUG deck that ran 4 Disrupting Shoal? That card went from 50 cent bin to $10 overnight. You cannot tell me that they had a run on the card. That was purely preemptive gouging. It's gotten to the point where cards that see fringe to zero play in Modern are now commanding prices in the $8-12 range with absolutely no justification at all. Sure Modern season is over, but they've hedged their bets. Prices are cooling now, but never to where they were a year ago. This constant, exponential growth in prices doesn't match my paycheck's growth, I can tell you that. They can't keep compounding the price barrier on every format like this and expect it to stay healthy. Unfortunately, WotC hasn't seen fit to see it for what it is and be more aggressive with value reprints, so you have things like this blow to Legacy taking place (which I really do feel bad about, even not being able to play much of it).
I've been saying it for years, that these tactics were affecting the long term health of the game. Really sad to start seeing it taking place.
Is it really an outlier though? Just doing a quick look at the Modern metagame, we find all of these decks, with plenty more hovering aroung 800$. All of these could just as easily be competitive Legacy decks.
It was, definitely. Not so much anymore. As it stands right now, which you can see in the Modern prices discussion, the argument has been for a while that this increase in price is not healthy. I mean, look at this:
A 4th printing of a card that rarely makes more than 2-of in 5/18 of the tier-1 decks in Modern, and that's what it finally took to make a dent in the price tag...yet it's still not back to the pre-2013 price when it only had 2 printings...how is that even possible? Supply went up, demand went down. This card should have cratered to $10 by now, yet you still can't get it for the $25 it was prior to GP Richmond. Since that event, SCG has been fixing secondary market prices on Modern with the trend always heading up. Legacy, too, but that bubble had to burst. Modern will, too...it's just going to take longer.
You guys are arguing exactly why I'm a modern only player. I spent 700 bucks and I have a tier 1 deck that isn't going away. I'm not playing non tier 1 decks because I would be pissed if I lost because I wasn't P2Wing, therefore I don't play standard and I don't play legacy.
Just because I COULD win with a budget legacy deck doesn't make it remotely worthwhile. If I can't play tier 1 I'm not playing. It's not worth my time or frustration.
That's almost the same amount of money I used to build Legacy Merfolk. As a bonus, most of the cards in the Legacy list are also playable in the Modern version. I think you're not really being fair in regards to how much a competitive Legacy deck can actually cost. There are some really expensive ones, but on the other hand, Jund in Modern is like 1800$, so it's not as if there's a galaxy of distance there.
Except there was. Check Modern prices at the start of last year vs. now. The gulf was enormous. Jund is an outlier, it's always been the most expensive deck in the format. But there was a point where many competitive decks could be had without spending much more than you would on a Standard deck. Not to mention, Standard trades into Modern easier. The guy with his 5th Geist is more likely to part with it for, say the new Gideon than a Legacy player is going to cough up a FoW for a pair of Gideons.
The real crime here is that SCG has basically become the benchmark for pricing and they are very irresponsible with that power they've come to have. Remember at the beginning of this past Modern season there was a RUG deck that ran 4 Disrupting Shoal? That card went from 50 cent bin to $10 overnight. You cannot tell me that they had a run on the card. That was purely preemptive gouging. It's gotten to the point where cards that see fringe to zero play in Modern are now commanding prices in the $8-12 range with absolutely no justification at all. Sure Modern season is over, but they've hedged their bets. Prices are cooling now, but never to where they were a year ago. This constant, exponential growth in prices doesn't match my paycheck's growth, I can tell you that. They can't keep compounding the price barrier on every format like this and expect it to stay healthy. Unfortunately, WotC hasn't seen fit to see it for what it is and be more aggressive with value reprints, so you have things like this blow to Legacy taking place (which I really do feel bad about, even not being able to play much of it).
I've been saying it for years, that these tactics were affecting the long term health of the game. Really sad to start seeing it taking place.
That's like saying you can show up to a street race with a junker. Sure, you can spend money on the junker, lose and have a terrible time, but at least you got to play, right? This argument, this entire line of reasoning needs to stop in the community.
where he called cheap decks junkers and said that you can't win with them and that simply isn't true.
Context, sir. That was part of an overarching point about this stance the community, especially Legacy players, has defaulted to - this concept of 'take the cheapest decks and just be glad you get to show up at all'. It's a deflection of the problem that was at the heart of Legacy: cost barrier to entry. Instead of raging at SCG and their pretty scummy tactics, you blame the player that wants to play in your format but can't afford it.
I'm a pretty damn good player if results are any indication. That said, I've never played a burn deck in my life, and I suck at dredge decks. Delver, RUG, Maverick, Miracles are much more my playstyle, but all 4 of them require an investment I'm not willing to make. I probably would have tried if the format was healthy in Charlotte, but it just wasn't. The money isn't there for the players, and a lot of the up-and-coming players in the area are new blood that have only been playing the past 5 years or less. I've been playing since CHK-RAV, so I missed the boat, too. I have little pieces here and there, but nothing I can finish a deck with.
Look at it this way - if I said 3 years ago I'm going to start working toward a Legacy deck, Underground Sea was at $170 (which is still ridiculous for a land), so I start trading up, saving money, etc. By next year, it was hovering around $222. A year later it was at $409. Prices are finally starting to cool again, but they're still at $290. I'd have been chasing a monster. Meanwhile, these collectors were like 'Don't reprint, it's worth $180. Now you really can't reprint, it's worth $220. Now you better never reprint, it's at $400.' The bubble had to burst eventually, unfortunately it took the format with it.
Not sure where you compare an $80 Heroic Deck to a $2500 Delver deck. In standard most players don't have complete lists and a lot of players have to budget, but you can still be in contention with a budgeted deck. In legacy budgeting means spending $1000 on a deck instead of $1800 not to mention there are far fewer legacy tournaments and the disparity between a real legacy and a budgeted legacy deck is astronomical when you compare it to the same disparity in standard.
And legacy may be cheaper in the long run after years, but that means years of not playing magic as you save up for a legacy deck. In standard you can pop $200 and have a deck capable of placing in tournaments, maybe not necessarily conquering them, in legacy $200 gets you a land.
What happens is WotC listens to everyone complaining, squeaky wheel gets the grease, enough people must have complained to keep the reserved list, that'ds the bottom line. I'd love to take a shot at legacy but it's completely cost prohibitive no matter what legacy players say.
There are legacy decks cheaper than modern decks. You can go with Burn, and manaless dredge variants. There are cheap options. They are not tire 1 decks per say, but they show up in the top 8 once in a while, so they aren't junk either.
That's like saying you can show up to a street race with a junker. Sure, you can spend money on the junker, lose and have a terrible time, but at least you got to play, right? This argument, this entire line of reasoning needs to stop in the community. Playing 'a deck' is not the same as playing 'a format'. I look at my collection against the top 8 of the last few opens. I have literally 80% or better of every list there. The pieces I don't have (ABU Duals, FOW, LED, Gaea's Cradle) total 6 months rent. For a house. With more than 1 bedroom. That's stupid.
I don't like that the format is basically getting shelved. But whatever powers that be, whatever vocal minority put pressure on WotC to not get rid of the RL, did this. The writing should have been on the wall for Legacy players right then and there. You didn't make WotC change their mind, now you're seeing the first signs the format dies. It's sad, but it was also preventable. There isn't much use complaining about tournament support now when the format's required staples were held under a no-reprint lock and key for years.
If you think monocolored decks or manaless dredge arent viable you haven't been playing real legacy.
I didn't say anything about viability. Neither did he. What are you talking about?
Not sure where you compare an $80 Heroic Deck to a $2500 Delver deck. In standard most players don't have complete lists and a lot of players have to budget, but you can still be in contention with a budgeted deck. In legacy budgeting means spending $1000 on a deck instead of $1800 not to mention there are far fewer legacy tournaments and the disparity between a real legacy and a budgeted legacy deck is astronomical when you compare it to the same disparity in standard.
And legacy may be cheaper in the long run after years, but that means years of not playing magic as you save up for a legacy deck. In standard you can pop $200 and have a deck capable of placing in tournaments, maybe not necessarily conquering them, in legacy $200 gets you a land.
What happens is WotC listens to everyone complaining, squeaky wheel gets the grease, enough people must have complained to keep the reserved list, that'ds the bottom line. I'd love to take a shot at legacy but it's completely cost prohibitive no matter what legacy players say.
There are legacy decks cheaper than modern decks. You can go with Burn, and manaless dredge variants. There are cheap options. They are not tire 1 decks per say, but they show up in the top 8 once in a while, so they aren't junk either.
That's like saying you can show up to a street race with a junker. Sure, you can spend money on the junker, lose and have a terrible time, but at least you got to play, right? This argument, this entire line of reasoning needs to stop in the community. Playing 'a deck' is not the same as playing 'a format'. I look at my collection against the top 8 of the last few opens. I have literally 80% or better of every list there. The pieces I don't have (ABU Duals, FOW, LED, Gaea's Cradle) total 6 months rent. For a house. With more than 1 bedroom. That's stupid.
I don't like that the format is basically getting shelved. But whatever powers that be, whatever vocal minority put pressure on WotC to not get rid of the RL, did this. The writing should have been on the wall for Legacy players right then and there. You didn't make WotC change their mind, now you're seeing the first signs the format dies. It's sad, but it was also preventable. There isn't much use complaining about tournament support now when the format's required staples were held under a no-reprint lock and key for years.
Well, we've seen Theros without Serum Visions and (possibly) Daybreak Coronet, Khans come and go without Enemy fetches, then we saw Zendikar, which seemed like a no-brainer for them and the entirely too expensive Goblin Guide, still nothing. MM15 was a gigantic blown opportunity with 3/4 of the rares still sitting from their original sets in the 50 cent bin at your LGS. Then there's shady stuff SCG has done like the enemy fetch buyout or the Noble Hierarch price adjustment weeks ahead of it getting spoiled for MM15.
I think it's painfully obvious the writing is on the wall that there is at least some collusion taking place between WotC and SCG. One or both want Legacy to go away at this point, and so it shall.
I think it's also kinda curious that this is 'a year of stabilization' as WotC put it when explaining the reduction in events. Because after a ton of growth, you shrink unexpectedly. Last I checked, that's not what stabilization means.
My favorite card is Merieke Ri Berit. She's my favorite general in Commander, with a simple, elegant ability that can be strong or used with shenanigans.
I mean...congrats? None of that has much of anything to do with what I was talking about in the OP. I was referring to the avenues other CCG's are opening up to attract their players and make them feel like they've gotten value from their dollar, as opposed to the litany of strange practices Wizard's has done to make the community feel a loss in value. Prize walls, watered-down Standard fodder, discontinued rewards programs, I mean just read the thread. This isn't a price discussion complaint, it's a value complaint.
And to be clear, I play the game. When I said '10 people' I meant people outside the game have a hard time wrapping their brains around it unless you equate it to sports cards, and even that's kind of an old-timey reference at this point. So while you're celebrating your $20 margin gain, to those people what we're doing is a silly/foreign concept. Like all collectible hobbies, I imagine.
I honestly can't tell if this is troll bait or not. I mean, if that's all you got from it, you either didn't read it all or didn't understand it.
But I'll bite. Superior in whose eyes? Yours? Mine? Because I can go outside and round up 10 people that think i'm an idiot for buying 60 dollar pieces of cardboard. I also can't convince my 7 year old how superior that Gideon was to the pile of packs I handed her. Plus, she busted a $20 EX card. So no, I don't see what you're saying at all.
To be honest, I really think this is yet another myth we're accepting as truth. Look, I've seen in the major LGS's I've played with (I've bounced around a few major cities in the past decade) new players coming and going, but the old guard does it, too. Hell, there's 2 guys at our LGS that sell off their pieces and disappear from the game for months while dealing with real-life stuff and suddenly come back and buy into Commander, Standard, Modern, or all 3. Some of us don't let the 'keep it and hold it forever so it gains imaginary value' mantra control us, so they're constantly rebuilding their decks.
So, you have new players, old players buying back in. The market is there if the product is solid. Also, this argument about 'Standard and Limited pays their bills' doesn't hold water for other reasons. Limited, especially lately, is a very hard sell in some regions, like mine here in Charlotte. Some LGS's do better with it, most don't. I can't stand limited, personally, but that's more to do with crap-quality sets to draft with. You offer me M11 draft and I'm in, BFZ...not so much. Standard is in a shifting period as we go to the new block structure, and I've seen more than a few people kinda gunshy about it. They're sitting on their current deck because they can't justify $45 Gideons and $80 Jaces without knowing how fast and how hard the prices tank in this new rotation cycle.
Also, Modern is not only attracting new players all the time, it's getting new cards. Eternal does not mean buy a deck and never give Wizards a dime ever again. Wizards is using that model, not the players. We're shelling out cash to LGS's, Ebay, Troll and Toad, SCG, and about a billion others for cards that haven't been reprinted in years. That's on Wizard's, not us. It used to be that your staples like Counterspell, Lightning Bolt, and Dark Ritual were reprinted every set. New artwork for the people that have theirs, and easily accessible for those that don't. We can't even get a full set of utility staples in a block anymore (ie. no practical graveyard hate in Standard, no Doom Blade-esque cards, no 3 for 2 red instant).
So maybe the problem isn't the cash cow everyone thinks Standard and Limited are, maybe the issue is the New World Order was a catastrophe of design - it's inelegant, it concentrates value into upper rarities, it leaves a lot of dead trees on a table after draft is over, and it makes everything feel watered down. Eternal players don't need what they have to give.
Let me just throw this out there - Pernicious Deed at Mythic in Conspiracy...was anyone crying? Did it bring Magic to its knees? What if it was Wasteland? Force of Will? Crucible of Worlds? City of Traitors? At what point do the reprints 'kill magic'? When is a set 'too good' that it screws everything up? On the other side of the coin, if those cards were in there, would you and I still be cracking packs? Pretty sure the answer is yes.
But that's also part of the argument I was making to begin with. We've been drinking this Kool-Aid about how the market can't handle this and the LGS's can't handle that...and there are 2 CCG's doing those exact same things others on here swear can't be done. Their game isn't dying, it's thriving. There's been a recent resurgence of interest in the Pokemon CCG, and while some of us might regard Yu-Gi-Oh players as 'weird', they're certainly not underground. These games are taking up more shelf space at your local Wal Mart than Magic does most of the time.
Would I say we can't have Tarmagoyf at uncommon? Yes, I'd agree that's a bit much. Rare? Part of a special 'Modern Event Deck'...well, yeah. Having the damn card as a 4-of has been necessary since the beginning of the Modern format for 90% of decks running green, so why are we cutting off the player base with this ridiculous artificial price barrier?
You know what happens to $100 cards in the other CCG's? People buy them up early, then they get reprinted in tins a few months later, everyone gets the overpriced card they wanted, everyone's happy. The reprint is at like $5, the original is still $15-20. This whole concept of letting LGS's charge a forever-increasing premium on a card because it goes without meeting reprint demand year after year is ridiculous. I always knew that, but now I'm starting to learn that this has only become the status quo with THIS game.
Wow, dude. I could have written your post. I'm a psychotic completionist with a special fancy for promos. I feel your pain, man. I opted out of Judge Foils for the same reasons, then Khans broke my heart, and Zendikar can get bent. I still love my FNM cards and MPR's, Gateway, older prereleases and launch cards, so I'm refocusing myself on filling in those missing holes.
But yeah, I thought I'd be alone in complaining about it, which is why I didn't mention it. I'm actually really annoyed by their new stance on promos. There's no alternate artwork, they're literally stamping a regular foil with a date for every rare in the set? Screw that. Now there's even less desire to play in store events like prereleases and launch weekend. At least I have Game Day, for now...
If you listen to most people in the 'Price Discussion' threads on here, you'd hear a model like this would destroy the game and the company would go out of business.
My daughter is 7, and she's really shown an interest in playing games with me. After months of telling her she needed better math skills to play the Pokemon TCG, she progressed enough for me to stab at it. I picked up a cheap two-person set. She picked up on the rules right away (I haven't played it since 2001), and most important, she really enjoyed spending time with me.
I went to my LGS tonight for FNM. I busted my prize packs, and there's a Gideon I didn't need. I traded it in and grabbed a bunch of Pokemon packs for my daughter. Inside the pack was a code. I went home, turned on Pokemon Online, put in the code, she got an online pack to go with her real one. She also got a theme deck, a bunch of rares, and 5 packs to get her started. The game moved flawlessly and it has an attractive GUI.
That one Gideon bought my daughter 4 packs of real cards, 4 packs of Online cards. Plus the 5 packs and the theme deck she got free. Wizards wants me to buy my cards twice, in two secondary markets they don't control. They attract new players through a poorly built Steam game that only sorta-kinda emulates real Magic. Players get there and find the best decks in the room are hundreds of dollars (God forbid they come on Modern night). Your store determines the prize support ranging from only Top 8 to everyone gets a pack, to store credit. Wizards is kind enough to hook you up with 1 foil for Top 4 of an uncommon that may or may not see play in the format it's in. High-demand reprints like Modern Masters are printed in low supply and mixed with a lot of chaff no one ever asked for.
I'm not saying Magic is bad or Wizards is trying to kill the game, nothing like that. I just haven't been to any big-box store lately and not seen/heard of every other CCG in the world putting out tins of in-demand reprints, or finding new ways to add value in the online space. While these games have been trying to claw their way into a crowded market over the years, this is what Wizards gave us:
- Discontinued Magic Player Rewards
- Switched to an MTGO client every beta tester said was not up to snuff
- Started printing low-cost staples at mythic (Voice, Warden, etc.)
- Discontinued Gateway promos/league
- Let Legacy die rather than abolish a foolish promise
- A 3-year trend of watering down the standard pool, making sets that are top-heavy with almost all value in 2-4 mythics
- Released not one, but 2 Modern Masters sets with dramatically reduced availability and a mixed-bag of needed reprints vs. 3/4 chaff
- Let SCG run willy-nilly as the price-setter of the secondary market, driving up pricing through buy-outs and generally harming the ability to attract new people to formats
- Removed mythic Pre-Release foils (finally going back on this...by turning it into a lottery)
I've complained about some of these topics before, but it didn't leave such a bad taste in my mouth until now. Taking a step back made me realize at some point after I started loving Magic, Magic stopped loving me. I have to pay for every little thing I want to do with their game, and the pricing is absurd. I used to get all sorts of rewards and thanks for playing, and 'get psyched for the next set, here's the pre-release foil bomb!' and packs felt worth opening. Now I take 5 prize packs and leave 50 cards on the table for anyone who wants it, and throw the rest in a binder with the other 30-40 cards I've cracked that no one wants.
So, rant over. I have my decks for the format I play in, maybe I'll just start playing for store credit and add to my daughter's new collection.
I think that's pretty much it right there. Since WotC seems to care more about how SCG is doing and not their own player base, SCG basically ran the market and monopolized the secondary market pricing structure. They pushed up the value of ABU duals, milked the Legacy format for whatever last droplets of cash could be squeezed, and pulled the rug out from under the format. With Modern once being affordable and now costing as much as Legacy to enter, they're just doing it again.
WotC needs to get aggressive about reprints. It's their damn game, they should take it back. As far as I'm concerned, from a business perspective, reprints put money in their pockets from pack sales, makes players happy, and grows their formats. Letting the secondary market explode like this and starving the would-be players and scaring them off formats is detrimental to the health of the game. If even one person looks at getting into a format that can be reprinted to demand en masse and says 'it's too expensive, that format is dead to me', then they have failed to grow their business in favor of the secondary market.
I mean, seriously...would anyone really complain if 1 block every other year was a re-release? Khans-Lorwyn Standard, imagine it. People get Cryptics and Thoughtseizes and a more powerful Standard for a bit. I know I'd be at FNM every damn week.
It was, definitely. Not so much anymore. As it stands right now, which you can see in the Modern prices discussion, the argument has been for a while that this increase in price is not healthy. I mean, look at this:
http://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Lorwyn/Cryptic_Command
A 4th printing of a card that rarely makes more than 2-of in 5/18 of the tier-1 decks in Modern, and that's what it finally took to make a dent in the price tag...yet it's still not back to the pre-2013 price when it only had 2 printings...how is that even possible? Supply went up, demand went down. This card should have cratered to $10 by now, yet you still can't get it for the $25 it was prior to GP Richmond. Since that event, SCG has been fixing secondary market prices on Modern with the trend always heading up. Legacy, too, but that bubble had to burst. Modern will, too...it's just going to take longer.
Except there was. Check Modern prices at the start of last year vs. now. The gulf was enormous. Jund is an outlier, it's always been the most expensive deck in the format. But there was a point where many competitive decks could be had without spending much more than you would on a Standard deck. Not to mention, Standard trades into Modern easier. The guy with his 5th Geist is more likely to part with it for, say the new Gideon than a Legacy player is going to cough up a FoW for a pair of Gideons.
The real crime here is that SCG has basically become the benchmark for pricing and they are very irresponsible with that power they've come to have. Remember at the beginning of this past Modern season there was a RUG deck that ran 4 Disrupting Shoal? That card went from 50 cent bin to $10 overnight. You cannot tell me that they had a run on the card. That was purely preemptive gouging. It's gotten to the point where cards that see fringe to zero play in Modern are now commanding prices in the $8-12 range with absolutely no justification at all. Sure Modern season is over, but they've hedged their bets. Prices are cooling now, but never to where they were a year ago. This constant, exponential growth in prices doesn't match my paycheck's growth, I can tell you that. They can't keep compounding the price barrier on every format like this and expect it to stay healthy. Unfortunately, WotC hasn't seen fit to see it for what it is and be more aggressive with value reprints, so you have things like this blow to Legacy taking place (which I really do feel bad about, even not being able to play much of it).
I've been saying it for years, that these tactics were affecting the long term health of the game. Really sad to start seeing it taking place.
Context, sir. That was part of an overarching point about this stance the community, especially Legacy players, has defaulted to - this concept of 'take the cheapest decks and just be glad you get to show up at all'. It's a deflection of the problem that was at the heart of Legacy: cost barrier to entry. Instead of raging at SCG and their pretty scummy tactics, you blame the player that wants to play in your format but can't afford it.
I'm a pretty damn good player if results are any indication. That said, I've never played a burn deck in my life, and I suck at dredge decks. Delver, RUG, Maverick, Miracles are much more my playstyle, but all 4 of them require an investment I'm not willing to make. I probably would have tried if the format was healthy in Charlotte, but it just wasn't. The money isn't there for the players, and a lot of the up-and-coming players in the area are new blood that have only been playing the past 5 years or less. I've been playing since CHK-RAV, so I missed the boat, too. I have little pieces here and there, but nothing I can finish a deck with.
Look at it this way - if I said 3 years ago I'm going to start working toward a Legacy deck, Underground Sea was at $170 (which is still ridiculous for a land), so I start trading up, saving money, etc. By next year, it was hovering around $222. A year later it was at $409. Prices are finally starting to cool again, but they're still at $290. I'd have been chasing a monster. Meanwhile, these collectors were like 'Don't reprint, it's worth $180. Now you really can't reprint, it's worth $220. Now you better never reprint, it's at $400.' The bubble had to burst eventually, unfortunately it took the format with it.
I didn't say anything about viability. Neither did he. What are you talking about?
That's like saying you can show up to a street race with a junker. Sure, you can spend money on the junker, lose and have a terrible time, but at least you got to play, right? This argument, this entire line of reasoning needs to stop in the community. Playing 'a deck' is not the same as playing 'a format'. I look at my collection against the top 8 of the last few opens. I have literally 80% or better of every list there. The pieces I don't have (ABU Duals, FOW, LED, Gaea's Cradle) total 6 months rent. For a house. With more than 1 bedroom. That's stupid.
I don't like that the format is basically getting shelved. But whatever powers that be, whatever vocal minority put pressure on WotC to not get rid of the RL, did this. The writing should have been on the wall for Legacy players right then and there. You didn't make WotC change their mind, now you're seeing the first signs the format dies. It's sad, but it was also preventable. There isn't much use complaining about tournament support now when the format's required staples were held under a no-reprint lock and key for years.
I think it's painfully obvious the writing is on the wall that there is at least some collusion taking place between WotC and SCG. One or both want Legacy to go away at this point, and so it shall.
I think it's also kinda curious that this is 'a year of stabilization' as WotC put it when explaining the reduction in events. Because after a ton of growth, you shrink unexpectedly. Last I checked, that's not what stabilization means.