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.
My own worst mistake, that actually kept bugging me for a while was a tight game during Onslaught-block sealed PTQ. Board was locked up, my opponent had 36 life and time was low. I knew I had three turns to win. I saw a path to do it, but due to long turns and rush, passed once too fast at my opponents end-step and ended needing to use Starlit Sanctum on that turn to kill my opponent two turns later.
And I had already scripted my plays to do just that. Spent just the exact amount of mana to have Sanctum mana open and had we had one single turn more I would have won. That single mistake shook my belief that I was pretty good player for several months, before I managed to regain the trust in my own play.
If the opponent tanks on simple situations, I will point this out when this happens for the second time, but if there's a chance of hidden info being a major part of tanking, I will simply point that we have a time limit, but if it's obviously spinning wheels, I will ask my opponent ot keep a reasonable pace and call a judge on if this happens again. Examples are people trying to calculate propability of drawing a land on simple board on turn two before just drawing or just daydreaming about something repeatedly.
If the opponent is just slow in everything I will try to call a judge the moment I see this as a problem. Before it becomes a problem I try to talk to the player about the issue. Sometimes it's their medication or sleep deprivation, but I will still call a judge if I think that there will be a problem.
As a former judge I was propably the one judge who gave cautions and warnings about slow play back in the day (early 99-2004) locally. At that time using the clock to gain unfair advantage was not too rare and it really feels wrong to loose/be forced to a draw just because you gave your opponent a benefit of thinking more than you. The time you both have is a common utility, which should be divided somewhat evenly. If you give your opponent more of it, you should not be punished for it.
I sometimes need to tank and more complex the board becomes more computing I need, but I will also tell my opponent that I will tank for a while. Being polite and communicating is often the key to teach some players what is OK and what is considered slow play.
What might shed some light is that the cards were printed in two batches in Belgium, with very strict schedule, this made the quelity control somewhat lax. Also at the time all cards were sent over in physical form, in four color films, which were then used to make the printing plates. Later on the data started to be transmitted electronically, so data loss became lesser issue, but in 1994 the world was very different place than it's now.
The white text is made by leaving the card blank on those places and if any of the four printing steps was even slightly off, the font becomes bit blurry on the edges. So all these issues are more properties than mistakes, so enjoy these pieces of history and 21 year old cutting edge printing technology.
And to give some anecdotal evidence that I believe what I said here, I traded my first Oath of Nissa away for an Eldrazi Displacer on release day and added a random Oath of Chandra as a trade sweetener, being certain that I was getting the better side of our trade. For couple of weeks it looked like I might have been wrong, but turned out I was just well ahead of the market. Not a huge deal, but it feels good to be right on valuation of cards.
As the above poster stated the booster packing print quality does not affect the card quality in any way, as the wrapper material is printed by different company and delivered to Carta Mundi to use.
The files you uploaded are uploading, but having 747 MB worth of files for 3 scans might be bit excessive.
Old sets had lot of small printing 'errors,' darker versions, slightly offset colors etc. The slightly darker LED is most likely normal, as Mirage had pretty large differneces betwen different print runs, but not as bad as the dark Visions, which was legendary among misprint collectors at one point.
On quick check the cards in your pic 3 are legit, but the center Tarn is better focused than the other two, it's hard to say if there's some off-setting in the print or a feature of the scanner at 1200 dpi. Here the way scanner mechanics and software work really do affect the pic a lot more than on lesser accuracies. The rightmost one looks really blurry and I think it's from how ther scanner has focused, but cannot tell for sure. Only the right edges show, so that makes looking for few telltales of fakes much harder.
On image 4 all cards look legit, altough naturally I can only see the right edges of the Tarns. This was the smallest pic at only 230 MB.
Image 5 again has only small segment of each card showing, so I cannot check artist credits, card name font and positioning, left edge borders or measure the border widths, which are often the easiest way to check for at least the first four versions of the chinese fakes. All dual land dot patterns were within normal variations, but as stated not comprehensively mean that these are real either. The Trop looked real on a glance.
So I spent 31 minutes downloading the files and waiting for my old work computer to check them for viruses, handle the files and due to cards not being shown fully cannot say anything concrete about anything but the print pattern and expansion symbols of any but the top cards of each pile... All cards look real, except on the first pic (3) which is somewhat blurry on parts of the scan, so one Tarn looks bad.
I humbly suggest that you start using some lower size files, as I never needed more than 33% magnification to get to reasonable detail level and using 1200dpi, you literally stop 90% of the people usually willing to help you from opening the files, as people are lazy by nature. 600 dpi scans are nearly always enough for anybody. And if you want good info about authenticity, please show the whole card. Looking at 5mm portion of the card just makes it so much harder than it has to be.
Gideon is really good in multiple formats. Having 7 power worth of attackers on turn 5 (Token and Gideon) is a three turn clock, and when the metagame starts leaning towards control (if it ever does) Gideon surely has a sweet spot on several decks. The ultimate is also pretty good in token decks, which have been playing the card in modern already, so while the card will see a slight dip in value, it propably will not fall too much and can go way up.
Atarka's Command is also the real deal in modern burn. This means that the card will most likely loose some value on rotation, but most likely just drop to 8-10$. All the modes are relevant and having up to 8 Skullcrack effects makes burn pretty scary. Command is also really awesome whenever you get creature heavy draws as it's 6+ damage (Even with just one Swiftspear it's 5...)
So if you need these for standard, buy them, but unless you really need the Den Protectors, I would not buy them just to have them, but if you play with the card, then it's OK.
I have tried the card out few times on EDH and most younger players always imagine the card to be an expensive Legends rare instead of 2$ uncommon, so there will be less resistance to 20$ price point than on any newer uncommons.
Thunder Spirit is still soaring, altough it's back to 60 from the high of 100$, but White Weenie just keeps getting played in 93/94.
I'm also waiting for Unlimited duals to go up following revised duals. They usually follow few weeks behind, so I'm pretty sure Unl duals will end up 20% higher than they were a week ago.
Small variations of color are not the common way to spot a fake. Those have completely different problems, like slightly different font, misplaced letters or special marks, like , ' or -, too thick or too small expansion symbol, badly printed borders, non-continuous black lines on the edges of the text box or art box, wrong ink dot pattern on the card etc.
Naturally the color problems can be a mark of a fake, but more often it's just normal variation of the printing process or betwen print runs.
I'll actually have a different rule: "Always sell into the spike."
If you sell after the spike you either:
-Sell the card instantly and get the top price. (There's still demand, price will soon go up again anyway)
-The card takes a while to sell and you get less than the top price.
-Players are wary of the card and you get holding the card for a long time.
If you sell into the spike:
-You sell the card instantly and get enough money for your troubles.
It's never necessary to hunt for the last few percents of gain if you can reliably sell the cards. I've been greedy few times and it's more common to end up loosing out of a good sale than earning few dollars more.
But anyway, all Rv duals have spiked and Unl duals are slowly following, as some people have sold their revised copies and moved on Unlimited versions causing higher demand. Pretty soon fbb duals will also go up a bit, but that will most likely take a few weeks still. The funny reserved list card going up is Great Whale, which might just be a coincidental result from the Peregrine Drake jump, as people brew casual decks around Eldrazi Displacer.
Just consider that to get your manas worth you have to get in three times before the card starts to be enough above the curve to be really interesting. But if you know you will get three hits in, shouldn't you be playing something that has the opponet halfway dead by then?
The ideal normal scenario is to play a guy on turn two, Claws and equip on turn three getting the first token. SO far 3 mana and a card for 1/1 and one damage.
Turn three you have three mana and a card for 2 damage and two tokens. Decent card by this point.
Turn four you have three tokens and three damage from the equipment. Now you are at Spectral Procession level but which can be played at any color altouh you need some creatures to equip.
The fail state is that you play and equip a creature which gets blocked or even worse removed before you attack. In this case your best outcome is to give another creature +1/0 and maybe get one token when you attack. This is not worth 3 to 4 mana and a card.
Naturally if you are playing an ally-deck all these go out of the window, as triggering all your allies when you attack is a real deal and easily worth three mana. The real issue is that it competes with Retreat to Emeria which is bit more versatile. Unfortunately I doubt that we will get more allies in the next few sets, so unless allies breaks modern and Claws is part of the deck, I doubt that this will cause any significant increase on the cards value.
As for other standard related trends Kalitas is the overall best selling mythic on MCM and nearly twice the price of Kozilek. Kozilek's Return has lost over half of it's price in the last three weeks and is selling less copies than the most popular planeswalker of the set, Chandra, Flamecaller. Nissa has lost over half of her value and is getting closer to Chandra in price, altough it seems that the price at least plateaud on Monday. Today the cheapest Nissa is only 1.8 euros above the cheapest Chandra. The last interesting fact is that one can buy three foil Wastes or two foil Mirrorpools at the same price. Both purchases have similar merits.
There has so far been 6 fake printings and all the lists are findable using a google search.
So ask for a 600 dpi scan of the card and check if the card is real. Remember to check both sides and see if the normal problems are there. Naturally the last test is handling the card, most fakes feel off. Just remember that the stiffness of the card will most likely be pretty much destroyed by the wear.
I wouldn't buy that one, not at 500 or even at 200, as it will only be playable Philippines-style, all cards in top loaders. :)(Does anybody else remember the pics from Tan, where players had these 30 inch piles of top loaders next to them in tournaments...)