- Jack Power
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Member for 19 years, 2 months, and 25 days
Last active Wed, Feb, 9 2022 18:51:21
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RedGauntlet posted a message on Core Set Promos on Mothership! Reliquary Tower, Guttersnipe, new blue mythic, othersPosted in: The Rumor Mill
It will never go away.... -
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Serafiend posted a message on Thunderherd Migration Ben Hayes TwitterIt truly is an all or nothing mentality at R&D's when it comes to designing magics standard environment. One season folks duke it out with absurdly efficient, futuristic helicopters and turn four Ulamogs, and in the next season, rampant growth is being considered as too good.Posted in: The Rumor Mill -
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Fiveod posted a message on Commander 2016 4 Colour CommandersPosted in: The Rumor MillQuote from DirkGently »
Let me ask you this - say you spend a modest amount - a hundred or two - to put together one of the better standard decks.Quote from Fiveod »The "collectible" aspect and the "game" aspect are at odds with one another. As a game, I think Magic is one of the most consistently well designed and fun games ever made. However, the game hasn't been designed with rarity in mind since Alpha. Constructed Magic design assumes that rarity and price are not factors. When one player can have a massive advantage over another simply because they are willing and/or able to spend more money on their deck, the game becomes less fun. That is not good game design. Most people don't accept pay to win elements in video games, why do they accept it here?
Asking for reprints to ease prices is not entitlement. It's consumer feedback. I like how requesting that a company create a product that can be purchased at a fair market price to satisfy demand is dismissed as "entitlement" in the Magic world. Only here. You know what is entitlement? Demanding that your speculative investments or collectibles stay scarce in order to inflate their value. Desiring to keep game pieces artificially scarce so that only some may derive enjoyment from them. There's your entitlement.
Ironically, the resistance to reprints is what is going to eventually kill the secondary market. High prices drive demand for counterfeits, and once they get good enough they will kill confidence in the market. It's really just a matter of time, the demand is high enough that it is profitable for counterfeiters to work on perfecting the process.
A week later, wotc prints the entire thing available as a precon for $10.
Would you not be annoyed? Because that's sort of what it's like watching wotc reprint cards for those of us who have a lot of the old stuff. Best example being the P3K legends, which I spent a lot of time, money, and trade value tracking down, only for most of the good ones to be reprinted, tank in value, and be boringly easy to obtain. But what's the alternative - never get the cards I want for fear they'll get reprinted and tank?
I think wotc has some responsibility to keep the secondary market reasonably stable. Otherwise I think a lot of people would be less likely to want to buy cards if they think they're going to tank in value at any given moment. Standard rotation and such is bad enough, and is a big part of why so many people migrate to eternal formats, and why they reverted the rotation policy.
Imo for EDH, rarity is part of the fun. Admittedly, sure, I have an advantage by having access to more cards, but it's a casual format - I'm not trying to make the best deck possible anyway, just something fun, and having more cards gives me more options. And I think collecting, rarity, and finding cool stuff can be part of the fun in a casual format. Which is what these products are - not "reprint all the modern staples people are whining about" decks.
In limited, rarity is an important part but not in a pay-to-win sense, obviously.
And then all the other formats are dumb (jk) (sort of).
I agree that stability is important, but we don't have stability now. The secondary market is subject to price spikes all the time, not to mention price manipulations which seem to be happening more frequently. Magic is a risky "investment" for sure. Some people act as if the Holy Venerated Secondary Market is just the natural order of things based on theory half-remembered from Microeconomics 101, but it's not. There is a company that has monopoly control over the supply of cards and can increase the supply any time. And they have, since the very beginning. Reprints have been around since the start of Magic, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone when a card is reprinted. There have even been a number of high value reprints recently, and somehow Magic didn't die!
You admit that having access to more cards, and therefore more options, makes Commander more fun. I agree. Is it not selfish to value the enjoyment you derive from having "rare" (expensive) cards more than the enjoyment that others would get by having more options? Isn't this entitlement? Would playing the game be more fun if you and your opponents were on an even playing field?
I have no problem with rare, difficult to obtain premium cards. Premium cards don't affect the game. Let collectors and speculators get hard over premium cards, rarity shouldn't hinder access to play a game. I find it profoundly ironic that people insist on Magic being an exclusive elite club for people with lots of disposable income and then accuse anyone who questions this of "entitlement". -
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Singe posted a message on Gathering Magic preview card - Tamiyo, Field ResearcherDrop this with Doubling Season out and it's all free onward.Posted in: The Rumor Mill -
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orlouge82 posted a message on Blogatog Preview Card - Howlpack ResurgencePosted in: The Rumor MillQuote from Vorthospike »
Yeah, MaRo Was talking about this. Green is all about abundance so starting next Block all commons will be Green. They're also adding a fifth rarity called "Epic Rare" which will have only tournament-staple Blue cards.
Fixed that for ya -
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Canadian Guy of Wrath posted a message on "Fears" set is Eldritch MoonPosted in: The Rumor MillQuote from ThoObe »What's going on with that set's font and color?!
Looks like Wizards wants some more little girls playing their card game. Also fits with their Twilight theme.
That or scare away insecure males which this game has way too many of. -
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Jay13x posted a message on "Fears" set is Eldritch MoonKnock off the sexist nonsense, people. The font color is irrelevant to the set.Posted in: The Rumor Mill -
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Bork posted a message on An open letter to Trick JarretDear Trick:Posted in: Rumor Mill Archive
I call bull on your article bemoaning leaks. Your goal is understandable, but your analogies are false, and your blame is way off target. I am not a leaker, and I never have been. But I read MTG Salvation more than your website (especially since the recent "improvement" which makes it almost unreadable).
A leak is a WOTC failure. Not our moral failure for being fans. No, I don't agree that you are telling a story that we would all enjoy better if there weren't these pesky leakers. You are trying to control the narrative. But the real world is in your way. You have to let stuff out before the big day, because you physically have to make and ship stuff in advance. Even to Russia. As long as you make a good product (and no, marketing doesn't do that), there will be a tremendous interest in it. You fan it (marketing DOES do that). All that fanning has a cost: the desire to learn what it coming. You create the pressure, the force that draws leaks out. So don't point this way. Look in the mirror.
Do you really think we are getting an unfair advantage? Then why were you sending out the God Book to pros for years? Didn't you have the same philosophy then? No, you had hype in mind. You didn't care about the advantage those article-writing pros got, you wanted hype. It was a WOTC failure that sent out complete set information all over the world for a little hype.
Don't cry to us that we ruined your hype. You are driving it. And no, I don't like the WOTC-controlled narrative since you clamped down on Rancored Elf et al. Having you control every leak is pretty bad, actually. It isn't nearly as exciting as the old days. Look at the number of posts on boring old colorless mana! Your announcement wouldn't have done that!
I could go on, but I will spare you; if you want to control leaks, then don't send stuff out before you discuss it. If you can't do that, then accept that your security will not be 100% and you are making a product where advance info is "worth" leaking by some segment of the population, and worth reading by a huge segment of your customers.
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rowanalpha posted a message on Nissa, Voice of ZendikarFinally, a planeswalker for my hardened scales deck!Posted in: New Card Discussion -
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Lakanna posted a message on Do Not Turn Magic into Yu-Gi-OhNothing to do with power or creatures. If you're seeing it in finance, then it references YGO's very, very liberal reprint policy.Posted in: Magic General
yu-Gi-Oh doesn't coddle speculators or investors. Cards are reprinted quite frequently, and some have gone from being ultra-rare tournament staples to being reprinted at common just months later: the secondary market is effectively nonexistent.
Note that this doesn't affect collectors: it actually makes things EASIER to collect. Older versions of cards are naturally more expensive, but without artificial scarcity to prop up their prices, you don't get cards worth thousands of dollars simply because they won't be reprinted ever. Good cards wind up in the hands of the players and collectors, while those who want to speculate on the value of cards just gave up long ago.
So, when people are saying they don't want M:TG to be YGO, what they want is a secondary market where card values are kept high, to the benefit of the secondary market and the detriment of the people who want the cards to play with. They want a commodity, not a card game, and they're perfectly fine with the idea that if people can't afford to invest money in the cards, then they just can't play. It treats the game itself as secondary to the profit potential. - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
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One of the major complaints that I've lodged as of late is the lack of support for good-to-great mechanics from the large set going forward into the small set of a block (examples: Investigate, Converge). WotC seemed to want to treat the small set of a block as a big set lite - trying to make it its own thing but still trying to fit in stuff from the mother block. And my response to this was "Then why have a small set? Why are you putting forth a two-set block paradigm but still trying to treat it as two individual sets with their own identities?"
Looks like that question has been answered. This change in release makes it more like the pre-Visions days, where all sets were standalone, but this time done more patiently.
And I'm glad core sets are kinda-sorta coming back. One of my ideas for fixing Standard was to just have a list of 100-150 cards that were always Standard legal, to be adjusted as circumstances warrant. That would like have been unfeasible, but this works too. With this new pseudo-core set, they can look at the FFL and see what possible problems arise and keep tabs on the current meta and see what answers are needed, and be able to supply those answers without trying to force it into a specific storyline or mythos.
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(Side note: this is also why Standard has become either playing a Bant deck that plays Collected Company or playing against a Bant deck that plays Collected Company, but I digress)
So, Wizards decided to find ways to get people to buy packs. And why create more quality cards when you can print hundred dollar bills (with a few twenties, tens, and fives for good measure) to mix in with your card pool? To continue the scratchoff comparison, this is Wizards basically making a jackpot for their lottery game. Yeah, they'll sell more packs, and all it'll cost them is their goodwill and people's love of the game, especially if this carrot-on-a-stick incentive is being used as a replacement for putting out, you know, quality, which is what it's looking like.
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So much flavor, so much potential, all the gameplay and design experience of a Design and Development team that should know better. This should have been the greatest Magic set of all time.
It is considerably less than that. "Disappointing" doesn't even begin to describe it. "Infuriating" is closer.
I can see in a few cards (Lone Rider in particular) what this set really wanted to be and should have been. But, as I believed to be the case from the beginning, it ended up being a handful of chase cards buried in a pile of delusions of mediocrity.
Saying that Wizards "dropped the ball" doesn't go far enough. More accurately, they dropped the ball, booted it onto the freeway, and caused a 26-car pileup.
This set is bad, and Wizards should feel bad.
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