I also disagree with some of Teia's points and I also feel that most people miss one important point. We are going back to Zendikar. People remember the set for fetch lands, landfall and the frist printing's hidden treasures. Those were even more unfair than mythic foils. Most were sold to USA, and it seemed from the data from prereleases that the propability to open one from European made boosters was about one third of the propability in US.
But consider WotC's personel considering those facts, which their market research backs up. First they bring in Landfall and fetches, but allied fetches were just printed and tehy would loose huge amount of reprint equity if they printed enemy fetches so soon. That leaves hidden treasure gimmick left out of the three big hits. When somebody suggests putting enemy fetchlands as hidden treasures, it just clicks. It's a slam dunk idea and much cheaper than purchasing a new batch of old cards to insert to boosters. Making them foils actually makes inserting them into boosters easier and mythic rarity makes them glamorous, so a win all around.
While the reprint cycle has decreased due to demand, (Lot of vocal people have been asking for reprints, as there are so many new players and WotC has seen what dual prices have been doing to Legacys popularity.) I don't see this round of fetches and Shocks as a reprint round, but more of a sequel to hidden treasures. The amount released will be minuscule compared to normal printing, so it will keep the enemy fetches reprint equity high for future sets.
As for the distribution being elitist, these are not really different from foil mythics. One is bit more likely to get one of these than any random foil mythic. Buying a case to draft with friends, will have 1+ of these. These are about twice as rare as any random Mercadian Masques foil rare. During the early foils there was only 40 % chance to open a foil rare in a box.
So while opening one of these is nice, nobody needs specifically these cards to play the game. Just like nobody needs the SDCC planeswalkers to play this game. Feeling disjointed from wanting something you cannot afford and can replace with functionally similar product isn't injustice or unfair. We have to accept that there are pimp cards that are not meant for us and there will be some players who will get four of each to display beside their GURU lands.
WotC has been very good about never printing any promos we have to have to compete, like some other games have done. There's always a set version availlable and while those are not always cheap they are availlable at significant discount compared to the rare promos, like the Judge Force of Will, or even more extreme, Judge basic lands.
So in brief I think you were bit hasty on analyzing the data. I would compare this to the Hidden Treasures gimmick and feel that this printing will not eat the reprint equity at all. I actually suspect that the normal RTR shocks will go up due to new players finding out about them and the mythic foils will add to the mystique of all the cards reprinted this way. I also don't think these cards are any less fair than the mythic rarity in it's totality. Magic is about collectability and with the huge print runs these days there needs to be something to aim for. Only 1100 people can own an alpha Black Lotus and additional 3300 a beta one (And the number should propably be cut by at least 33 % due to damaged and destroyed cards) so WotC needs to have cards that capture the same feel and I believe that Expeditions is a nice way to do so.
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Sep 1, 2015Default User posted a message on The Magic Street Journal: Glitter, Gimmicks, and Glamours - Wizards' Reprint ShenanigansPosted in: Articles
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Aug 22, 2014Default User posted a message on Off Topic: Gaming the $ystem for ValueOne thing that can alleviate the slow availlability of redeemed sets is that uncracked sets will appreciate in value after the redemption window closes. Sealed sets of older expansions will start going up. Some faster than others.Posted in: Articles
For example I use MCM values:
Journey into Nyx sealed set 99,99 €
Born of the Gods sealed set 94.95 €
Theros sealed set 115 €
Return to Ravnica 119 €
Avacyn Restored Sealed 139 €
Dark Ascension sealed 69.99 €
Innistrad sealed 150 €
New Phyrexia sealed 199 €
Mirrodin Besieged sealed 150 €
Scars of Mirrodin 150+ € (No sealed sets availlable)
Rise of the Eldrazi sealed 316,5 €
Worldwake sealed 199 €
Zendikar 375+ € (no sealed sets availlable)
Shards of Alara-block 99-139 € for sealed sets. Foil sets are also very cheap due to the all-foil boosters. Without a lot of the big cards having seen reprints in MMa, these sets would be somewhat higher.
Eventide, Shadowmoor, Morningtide nor Lorwyn doesn't have any sealed sets on sale currently,
Future Sight sealed 240 €
Planar Chaos doesn't have any sealed sets availlable, but should be around 130 €.
So after Zendikar the availlability becomes an issue, but even the sets that were lowest of the low to redeem (and didn't need the extra 25 $ ticket) sells for over 100$ mark now. Well poor old Dark Ascension, where foil sets sell nicely, but the value of regular sets is really low.
But if WotC will not reprint double sided-cards in MMa2 or 3 and some of the cards keep seeing play, I really doubt that the value will stay that low for long.
So in short, altough online redemptions are not the optimal way to get cards for playing standard, it is a good way to get your modern cards and a great way for dealers to get stock after the initial set of singles they open from (mountains of) packs starts drying out. Also getting few extra sets redeemed can lead to nice gains in value, if you just sit on popular sets for some time. Also big sets are better than small sets, unless the power levels say otherwise.
Sealed foil sets are another interesting avenua for nice gains. I certainly regret I didn't pick foil sets of new Phyrexia up at 240 €, when they were at thei lowest. (And yes I chose the biggest winner set out of the bunch, or maybe Roe ties the title. Full foil set of RoE was 230 € at MCM when the set was 'old news'.)
There was some good info on this going around when SCG bought a pretty unique collection of redeemed foil sets few years back. It had all the redeemable foils sets of the early MTGO, starting from 7th edition into IPA and onward. As those were enough to get SCG buyers really stoked up, one should be able to guess how rare those old sealed foil sets can be. -
Feb 5, 2014Default User posted a message on Launch Giveaway!I love some old cards, but my undying love for Shahrazad is only dampened by the fact that card that is banned in every format can still be worth 40$. Luckily I also like Camel a lot and those are much more affordable so I own 7 Shahrazads and 150+ Camels. But my favourite card is Shahrazad.Posted in: Announcements
Long time ago I tried to break the card in Vintage. Before every monthly Vintage-tournament I would email then Rules rep Rune Horvik and ask him how the rules would work that month. I then mailed his reply to the HJ to get his OK for the conclusions. Last time I tried this Runes reply was: "Let Pasi (The HJ) decide, the card is so strange that we will not rework the rules for making it work."
That was while one could Burning Wish for a Shshrazad which was still resolving in the main game during subgames and Wishing for SB cards got both the Wish and the SB card shuffled into the main game deck after a subgame. I lost 78 points of my Vintage rating due to the card, 1518 rating for the win. I did win a few matches. Or at least two... I even got to a situation where losing matches to decent players didn't lower my rating anymore. For some reason I dropped the deck after half a year of trying and some rules changes made the deck much less robust. - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
MCM uses the 'old standard' grading, mint, nm, ex, good, played and poor with their own grading guide. I just generalized to the SP/MP categories.
In US we have TCG-player and eBay, both, which take larger fees and if you don't have an american bank account incur pretty large fees, when you try to get real money out of PayPal.
I ran the numbers several times, seeing if I could start selling cards bought from MCM on eBay to make any money and found only few random cases where the shipping and fees actually allowed me to earn any money, and even those were cards, where the supply of cheap copies were already dwindling (Like Nm-/SP Italian Mana Drains for 40 euros each. After the first eight the price was nearly 50 euros and the profit margin became much less appealing. Also four of the eight were misgraded, and were MP instead of SP). The other card-set were foreign fbb dual lands, where the sales times were pretty long and insured shipping to US kills the profit margins.
In the end I can make playing this game pretty affordable just buying and selling on MCM, so why go through all the trouble to start creating a good eBay reputation, when it will not even earn me the minimum wage. And after I sat on the Drains for 18 months, the value for even MP copies has gone up 50% on MCM, and selling is much easier.
Luckily that lasted for a week or three before I found the beuty of Kird Apes, Chain and Ball Lightnings alongside Lightning Bolts, when we found out that all games must not be 3-5 player grand melees. Chain Lightning was the first single card I bought.
Still the first memories are multiple players grumbling that they cannot find the sixth or seventh land to cast their cards, as we all had 100 card decks with 18 or so lands. We actually had to play lot of extra games just that the one guy with the Dakkon could actually cast it. Sol'kanar the Swamp-King was a beating as were all landwalkers as we all had 5-color decks at the beginning.
Later on I got lot more cards, dual lands and power, but none of those feel quite as special as those early cards did. I still play and collect, but the beginners joy of discovery is impossible to recapture.
From the pics the cards look real, but again these are pretty hard to tell from just pictures these days. As for the corner irregualrities these are a result of how the cutting is made and even cards cut in the same batch can have differences due to their position on the die-cutting machine. I have plenty of cards with only three rounded corners and the fourth being either slightly clipped or completely uncut.
So pretty certain those are real.
I would try to get somebody who really knows his cards to take a look of the card in real life, so you would get their opinion. As for the price of the card, it used to be the most expensive card from Mirage before LED took the lead, so I wouldn't bee too surprised to see it faked. In your pictures there's a pretty real looking rosette-pattern on the possibly fake card, really clean lines and crisp expansion symbol, so without the light test I would say it's pretty likely real, but the light test makes me bit hesitant. There's one pretty easy way to check if there are other similarly thin US printed Mirage-cards, if you live in US. Just take 50 Mirasge commons and do the same light test on them too. If some let similar amount of light through, it's an issue with the US printed cards. If you live outside US, where most product is printed in Belgium, sorry.
As a fun fact the easiest way to tell if the booster was printed in US or Europe used to be seeing how the booster wrappers vertical seal on the back was made. The early US versions used a line pattern to weld the packaging shut, when the Belgium packs used a checkerboard or waffle pattern. Under that fold there's also manufacturing info on really small font, so it was relatively easy to check too, but not many bothered.
Weighting cards is one way to spot fakes, but quite often you need much more accurate scale than the one you propably use. Rebacked cards might show using two digits, but those you can feel already holding the card in your hand.
Good tests for spotting fakes.
1) feel the card and compare to real cards from the same set. Notice that playwear and age do affect cards. Some get dirty or end up greasy from being played without sleeves. Rebacked fakes are usually stiffer than normal cards and sometimes bit thicker. Newer fakes are often bit shinier and slicker.
2) check the print quality, fonts and the black border. Straight lines should always be continuous and not serrated or clearly formed from seperate line segments.
3) check edges and corners for marks of the card being rebacked (a collectors edition card with sanded back glued to another card.
4) do the light test and compare the results to a known real card from the same set. Both should let similar amounts of light through, as long as the areas you shine the light through are not too differently inked (lighter areas let more light through).
5) get a loupe and really check the dot-patterns and smaller details of the card.
Those tests are all non-destructive and should help to ease your worries.
I have bought seven Black Loti over the years and the days when I would blindly buy one at relatively cheap price are long gone. At nminimum I ask the seller to send me fresh scans or pics with the current date in the pics, this usually works to weed out the normal scammers, as they don't have the card in hand, or have a fake that's different from the ripped images (some of the wear just isn't there suddenly...)
Kind of sucks that we have to do this, but at least it forces the scammers to work bit more for their money.
I know there are several Archenemy sets availlable at reasonable price (170 for all four selaed sets) and FtV:exiled start around 120 euros for sealed if I remember correctly (For some reason full opened sets cost more last time I checked, so that's why I kind of remember the price range).
Hopefully that helps
For being really sure ask for 600 dpi scans and compare to known real cards. You can also ask for light test, but newer fakes are pretty good at coming close to normal MtG card. The good thing is that the foreign copies are more likely real, as most fakes are in english (not all, but most). So good luck.
I suspect that for MCM users the bottom is still waiting, as lot of sellers update on weekdays, so further supply should be incoming yet and there's still plenty of downward movement going on. So the best period will be during the next week or gamble a bit and wait for three-four weeks to see where the bototm was/is. Propably the best strategy is something betwen these two, get what you absulutely must and cards you identify as underprized soon and wait a while on the rest.
I mainly checked the foils, as I'm tempted to get a foil set of EMA together, but know that I shouldn't...
I haven't had a chance to examine the latest batch of fakes, but I doubt that all these mistakes have been fixed, as after certain quality level all extra work just starts costing fakers more than they can make. Also network with other players and if you find somebody who knows how to check for fakes, ask them to teach it forward. That way we can get as many players to be able to spot fakes as possible, making selling them no longer profitable and solving lot of the problems we now have.
We are also at the point where one can get pretty accurate estimate of the card age by spectroscopy. There isn't a proper off-the-shelf machine able to do this for cards, but the new femto-laser analyzers are already affordable and make only a tiny black dot on the material we want to analyze... The methods are being developed to spot art forgeries fast and should actually be directly usable for cardboard. The machines are aleady below 30K euros from the 2M they used to be eight years back...
The one way to check if the cards are really ok is to take a known real revised card, measure the borders (from both sides, so centering issues get noticed) and compare the edge widths of these to that one. The Chinese fakes have had slightly larger borders (up until the last batch I've seen). This also allows you to check the corners, but remember that the corner size is entirely depending on the settings and condition of the cutting die at Carta Mundi when the cards were printed, so there are lots of variation within revised. Also revised had lot of variation on the color depth, but as SDL mentioned having both bit rounder corners and relatively dark card back usually should lead to checking the card over bit more carefully. If the card feels real when you handle it without sleeves and the borders are the correct width, I would strongly suspect it to be real.
Hope this helps,
Rebacks are official WotC products, so they have 'real' print quality. They also used to be the most common types of fakes before decent laser printers became cheaper...