hi all, I've been out of the loop for a few months. Before getting busy I picked up a modern masters box to stick in my closet with the hope of trading it for something cool eventually. Yesterday a friend asked to buy it off me, starcity is sold out at $350 and from what my local gamestore says demand is expected to rise with modern season. So my question is what should I be asking for it, or should I hang onto it?
Found a kick starter for a physical deck of many things. Figured I'd share since there's a good chance the population of magic players corresponds at least a little with the population of D&D players.
Ive done a lot of things with them. Made about a hundred common/uncommon decks once and drove them down to my local youth center for them to give away to the kids. Donated a few boxes to the charity card houses they build at gencon. Sold a bunch at $10 per thousand on craigs list, gave a bunch to a friend who wanted to get back into the game after several years absence. Mostly though they just go into a large box in the back of my closet until its full then they get disposed of.
a) is assumes all those minimum wage pack crackers (and former employees) are willing to
keep quiet about it.
b) it doesn't take into consideration the added time it would take for the mappers to pull the value packs to get the extra percentage
c) it presents a risk to a large company that frankly I wouldn't be willing to take if I ran the place when there are (as you point out) other ways for them to use their size to strong arm the market.
I'm not saying their saints (not saying anything about them at all actually) just saying of all the ways they could manipulate things mapping packs isn't worth it for an entity of their size. Quite simply why map X cases to hopefully increase your margin on those cases when you could just sell more cases at your existing margin with less risk, time, and effort.
Some people say that the American moon landing was faked too, but just because people fear conspiracies does not mean they actually exist.
Its not a conspiracy though, its a closed market with very defined trends and no regulation. Really its the perfect environment for individual self interest to work against the group. That said if stores figure out people are willing to pay X dollars to get the edge for a standard season they would be silly not to charge X for that edge. End of the day if you don't like it do what a lot of us have done and get off the tread mill. Its unlikely we will ever have an impact on the machine since they are always filtering in new players and it takes some time to learn this but at least we can improve our own situations.
Honestly its only competitive magic that expensive and that's by design so its not likely to change. Casual can be as cheap as you want (I bought 12k cards this week for a hundred bucks and by the time I'm done selling off what I don't need the 2k I keep will likely be free). Heck if you really have a ultra competitive bent with a laser printer and some sleeves you can effectively play black lotuses all day for free. End of the day all Hasbro and the DCI have to sell us is a rating system.
Its pointless for a store as big as Starcity to map just due to the scale in which they open. If you're opening the entire runs several times over to meet your pre-sales why map when they already have channels to move the bulk. It would probably save both them and WotC a fair bit of time and money if they just entered into some kind of partnership where WotC sent them a few skids of loose sets and called it a day. Sure there's nothing stopping them from mapping the packs they sell loose but really its not part of their business model nore is it worth their time. If you only have so many working hours in the day are you going to spend them running your business that generates large profits or mapping a few packs on the side which generates small profits. The bigger issue is individuals and small shops for whom the small fixed profits from a single mythic are worth their time.
How does a guy have all that crap in his house and just forget about it?
THAT'S what boggles my mind.
Previous owner could have died, lost the place in the housing market crash, locked them in that safe in 95 and lost interest in the game when the collection was worth a lot less. No details on that part of the story.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1997853065/deck-of-many-things
http://kck.st/YCOMyl
a) is assumes all those minimum wage pack crackers (and former employees) are willing to
keep quiet about it.
b) it doesn't take into consideration the added time it would take for the mappers to pull the value packs to get the extra percentage
c) it presents a risk to a large company that frankly I wouldn't be willing to take if I ran the place when there are (as you point out) other ways for them to use their size to strong arm the market.
I'm not saying their saints (not saying anything about them at all actually) just saying of all the ways they could manipulate things mapping packs isn't worth it for an entity of their size. Quite simply why map X cases to hopefully increase your margin on those cases when you could just sell more cases at your existing margin with less risk, time, and effort.
Its not a conspiracy though, its a closed market with very defined trends and no regulation. Really its the perfect environment for individual self interest to work against the group. That said if stores figure out people are willing to pay X dollars to get the edge for a standard season they would be silly not to charge X for that edge. End of the day if you don't like it do what a lot of us have done and get off the tread mill. Its unlikely we will ever have an impact on the machine since they are always filtering in new players and it takes some time to learn this but at least we can improve our own situations.
Honestly its only competitive magic that expensive and that's by design so its not likely to change. Casual can be as cheap as you want (I bought 12k cards this week for a hundred bucks and by the time I'm done selling off what I don't need the 2k I keep will likely be free). Heck if you really have a ultra competitive bent with a laser printer and some sleeves you can effectively play black lotuses all day for free. End of the day all Hasbro and the DCI have to sell us is a rating system.
Near as I can figure he is a Texas area player know for trolling the vintage community on themanadrain.com a few years back.
P.S. his wife's comments on the whole thing were amazing.
3 peices of unlimited power
1 unlimited time vault
2 manadrains
1 library
2 mind sculptors
2 FoW playsets
40 rev duals
40 fetches
and a chaos orb
So ya basically my vintage/legacy stuff no surprise there really
Thinking homelands, doubled sleeved in top loaders
Kind of makes me want to abandon a stack of old jank into the next hotel safe I have access to
Previous owner could have died, lost the place in the housing market crash, locked them in that safe in 95 and lost interest in the game when the collection was worth a lot less. No details on that part of the story.