MTG Salvation

I love browsing this thread, and it just got so far down that I thought I could share my spoils from GP Minneapolis this weekend. I got to meet Jesper Myrfors and get some of my favorite classic cards signed, and then was able to trade some Modern staples into a few other gems that I had been wanting for awhile.

I never like to throw mine away because there is always someone just getting into the game who will appreciate anything you're willing to give them that will expand their knowledge of the game, whether through bad cards or good.

I just think the reserve list hate is irrational. It's about entitlement and jealousy. It's about the sticker shock of seeing the price of a Beta BGS 9.5 Lotus and thinking "wow that's crazy"

Wizards already has Modern and Standard. And it's been clear for a long time now that Modern is really the eternal format that Wizards wants to move forward with. Wizards has total control of the pricing market of Modern because they can simply reprint any card within modern. Modern is a slower format than legacy, cheaper to get in, and less powerful, meaning more cards get to see play.

I love legacy. But the simple fact of the matter is we don't need many cards from each new set. The power curve is so high that in order for each new set to be truly interactive with legacy, they're going to grossly up the power level of cards. This means that pandering to the jealousy and entitlement of seeing high priced dual lands, and for what? To support a format that regularly has turn 3 kills? To build around a format with a level of power orders of magnitude beyond standard today? To completely uproot the pace of new sets simply to pander to some 20 year old cards from a bygone era?

I don't want Wizards to balance around vintage or legacy. The future of magic is a slower more interactive game. Wizards to their credit understands that.

Here's the point.
If Wizards isn't going to go out of their way to build the future of magic around legacy, then the issue of breaking up the reserve list becomes a moot point. It becomes ONLY about bringing down the price of dual lands and the power nine. That's it. Nobody is blaming the reserve list because the price of the rest of the junk on there is too high.

So then abolishing the RL is about getting power nine and duals into players' hands. Imagine Wizards does crash the price of ancestral recall to 5 dollars a copy. Great. Then what? You're going to build decks around ancestral? You want your playerbase to build decks around ancestral? You honestly want that level of power moving foward?

If it's not about supporting a format going forward, then its about the jealousy of duals and power. And frankly, many mtg players have already bought into legacy based on the trust of the reserve list. God knows how many times magic has almost died. And I'm sorry to say this but players are fair weather fans. They'll stick around for a few seasons before moving on. The collector who sunk thousands into mtg is the one here to stay. Maybe not with the fervor of the new player, but with loyalty that's lasted much longer.

I guarantee if Wizards takes out the reserve list, the following will happen. Wizards will blossom for a time, selling power like hotcakes. But it wont take long before the allure of every player owning cheap power and duals takes away the allure and mystique of the most powerful cards. Fair weather players will go their way in a few years, finding another hobby or video game in short time. The only difference is that this time, with the golden goose killed, the collection value of Wizards' most longtime fans decimated, and the mythos of mtg at an end, there will be no one left to keep the flame alive.

I wonder if there is a game at WOTC where they see how many pre cons they can stick Butcher of Malakir into. I am not sure who they are competing against but they are definitely winning.

I have no qualms with people using proxies, proxies are used for a lot of reasons. Maybe I don't want to play with my actual *insert hyper expensive card here*. Proxies can help revive dying formats (my LGS had hardly any turnout for Legacy until they unsanctioned it and permitted 15 proxies, we received 18 players the next time!). What I do have a problem with is proxies that are designed to look as real as possible, then they stop being proxies and start becoming counterfeits. Don't get me wrong, I want my opponents to be playing proxies that look better than slips of paper, but at a certain level, counterfeits become universally harmful to the game for reasons this thread has already covered. Indistinguishable counterfeits would be a serious problem, but fortunately, no one's been able to replicate anything at that level to my knowledge yet.
While I typically don't play with proxies unless it's a hyper-expensive card I simply don't want to play with, for those of you wanting to join the Legacy crowd, encourage your LGS to run unsanctioned 10-proxy tournaments. The players with the real cards will welcome the additional competitors, as along with them comes additional prize support.

My collection is somewhere around $10k as a rough estimate, and that's probably on the low end. There are many out there with more. Yes, we all worked hard for these collections, but what good does it do if we have no one to play against? If you want more competition then you should be welcoming proxies with open arms, but the line has to be drawn somewhere, and hyper-realistic proxies are outside that line.
Funny thing is, the argument against the reserve list is pretty understandable:
"Legacy's barrier to entry is ridiculously insane due to the reserve list and the age and rarity of cards. I'd love to play the format, but I can't afford to, and Wizards refuses to abolish the reserve list so a couple of hoarders can sit on thousands of dollars in duals I can't play with!"
If playing Legacy is what you want to do, then the encouragement of proxy events should be your goal, not the undermining of sanctioned events by the encouragement of hyper-realistic counterfeits. You don't need counterfeits to play proxy events, and if true perfect counterfeits ever came onto the market, you wouldn't be playing Magic anywhere but your kitchen table (where proxies are fine anyway) because the game would suffer an irrecoverable blow. Not for the reasons you might think. Let's examine.

Scenario: True counterfeits have finally surfaced. Outside of a professional grading service, no dealer, including SCG, can tell what's fake and what isn't, let alone individuals. Here's how this plays out.

Day 1: The internet reveals perfect counterfeits readily available for sale. WoTC is powerless to stop them, or if they do, another one springs up overnight. Images of stacks of duals, reserve list cards, and hot standard mythics at dirt cheap costs flood the internet. Dealers freeze their buylists upon confirmation that this isn't a rumor. Thousands of purchases are made from the source. Some people decide to try and get rid of their collections in a panic. Dealers won't take them and listing them on ebay is the best thing they can hope for, but no one wants to buy them at anything more than counterfeit prices, as there's no proof that their cards aren't counterfeit as well.

Day 2: FNM turnout is high. Lots of people trying to move cards to other players at reduced rates, hoping their potential customer is unaware of the counterfeits. Everyone knows though, and no deals are brokered. Every deck is tier 1, but stores are requiring $40 entries to draft, and $30 for constructed events. No one wants to get paid in store credit or buy boosters as everyone knows that whatever mythic they pull can be bought off ebay as an indistinguishable counterfeit for $1. With the inability to use store credit as a form of accepted payout, prize support is heavily wounded. Stores are unable to sell any single in their inventory for more than what it costs for a counterfeit. Stores that try to firesale their cards at 2004 prices suffer terrible losses....if any cards are bought at all by people speculating that the counterfeits are a flash in the pan. Not a single booster is sold that night, and prize payout is done to top 4 only, in cash form, as the store tries to recoup the lack of singles and booster sales it would have normally made.

Week 4: WotC's presses slow down. Distributors sit on hundreds of cases of unsold inventory that card stores can't sell. Any LGS that relied on Magic to stay afloat is either struggling and trying to restructure, or has already closed its doors to cut its operational losses. Magic starts going to the kitchen table exclusively as there becomes fewer places to play it.

Month 5: Big box retailers like Wal-mart have moved Magic product to the clearance aisle where it rots. WoTC, having been unable to stop the counterfeiters, and dealing with a massive decline in sales, has no choice but to start laying off staff. Hasbro starts looking at P&L statements from WotC nervously. Blocks are reduced to having only one large and one small, as printing costs are now a much larger factor than they were in the past. Game stores that have survived have done so by moving towards miniature gaming, not wanting to deal in any kind of collectible cards as the flagship game of that genre has been fatally compromised. Heroclix takes off to new heights with miniatures replacing shelf space where moxen and duals once sat. Counterfeit sales have slowed down as card prices across the board have plummeted and interest in the game, combined with a horrible taste in many people's mouths for it has taken a sharp downturn.

Year 1: Magic is almost exclusively played at the kitchen table. With no stores willing to support GPTs and PTQs, and pro tour players unable to grind them, the pro tour turnout is abysmal. Perhaps cancelled. Some kitchen table groups play on, but by and large, with no new cards to inject new interactions or deckbuilding ideas, it starts to get old, even among the most die-hard. There's not enough people left to justify ordering new counterfeits and building new decks. It's played less frequently and other games start taking their place on weekend gaming nights with friends. Hasbro has issued an ultimatum to WotC that if they don't figure something out, they will sell the company and its assets off and part ways. The counterfeiters have long shut down the operation, pocketed their profits, and slipped under the radar. Even if WotC were to try to recover its staff and go back into business, no one is willing to put faith into a product that at any time could be mass produced by someone else on the cheap.


As apocalyptic as it seems, imagine if counterfeits were readily available for anyone to purchase at $1 a card. This scenario isn't too far from what would probably actually happen if a counterfeiting operation that couldn't be quashed came up. The good news is that no one's been able to do it yet on a large, noticeable scale. I'm sure there are some above-average counterfeits that have scammed some people before, but nothing large scale. Even if this was the case, there's a good chance WoTC would be able to eventually shut it down, and starting another one back up probably wouldn't be easy, but even a month of undeterred counterfeiting while lawyers hack at red tape could be heavily damaging. Even if the counterfeiting company was fined to oblivion, the fact that it even occurred at all would be enough to cause major upsets to every market from the consumer to WotC corporate.


High quality counterfeits might fix your problem of not having duals to play in a sanctioned event, but they create the problem of eliminating sanctioned events to play them in.

Think the thing we're learning is that the target audience for MTG (and really the holy grail of "target audiences") the 21-35 males with no kids, have a lot of expendable income. I have bought Magic cards at prices I considered to be ridiculous (and they've all gone up since I bought them haha, shows what I know). But honestly, money that I don't save and just have in my bank accuont often just get's blown on stupid crap anyway, so why not Magic? At least you keep a magic card. $50 round of golf, $30 dinner tab, $40 bottle of whiskey are gone once they're consumed. Skip out on a couple of each of those and you can buy a Volcanic Island which will retain at least some of it's value, even if the current price is unsustainable. And there is a solid chance it will go up as well.

First off, I don't think I bragged about my "cardboard purchasing power." Secondly, I don't recall ever using the words "filthy casual." And thirdly, despite the fact I don't necessarily like the direction the game is taking, it's hardly "dying off."

Every hobby has different levels of investment. For cars it's the difference between putting some rims on your ride to overhauling the engine, to hot rods to customized exotics. For football fans it's the difference between watching the game on a tv, or a 60" HDTV, or live and in person at the Super bowl. For photographers it's the difference between your cell phone, a point and shoot and a dslr. I can make more comparisons, but the bottom line is that people generally do not expect that they have as much right to go to the Super bowl or shoot a dslr or drive a fully restored Galaxie 500 as the people that have spent years saving up and working towards thay goal, and that the prices on hot rods, cameras, and super bowl tickets should all fall to a level where everyone who's interested in that hobby can buy and enjoy them. A lot of people like to collect baseball cards, maybe they should just print more Mickey Mantles so the entry barrier to competitive baseball card collecting can fall.
Right now, any player getting into the game can decide their level of commitment, but it seems that you feel any player should have access to whatever deck they want to play in whatever format they want to play, and preferably it should be a forgiving deck that isn't "skill intensive" as you put it, so that newer players and casuals can enjoy other formats. Sorry, but I believe that what you get out of something should equal what you put into it. For everyone else, don't worry, I'm sure you'll be able to cascade into blightning again at some point in standard, or restoration/thragtusk or whatever is next.
Legacy is a competitive format. It is reserved for the people that have the dedication to not only play it well, but are willing to put forth the time and money it takes to assemble and pilot a deck to the best of its ability. I'm sorry if you're butthurt because you're not willing to put in the time and money most of us had to in order to build and pilot the deck you want, but you don't see me sitting here bashing the vintage players cuz I don't have a lotus and how I feel that every player should be able to compete in vintage affordably, on a casual level, and competitivly, with a deck that isn't too difficult or, god forbid, skill intensive.
In my book, if you're a newish player who wants to try out legacy and grow as a player, by all means play a proxy deck against me. Practice with it, learn it, and if you want to play the event and I have the cards, I'll gladly loan them to you. But when I sit down at a legacy tournament, I don't expect the players across from me to be allowed to use fake cards because "they had to remodel a house" or "were scared of losing the investment" when I worked for a year to buy the cards for my deck and then spent another year mastering it.
I see that self entitlement is the other half of the instant gratification combo.
Hope it doesn't get banned, I'd hate for you to lose your investment.

I've been playing since Unlimited. Big into eternal formats, play Vintage regularly. I give you this background because, apparently, this makes me violently not the target audience for this product.

This is wildly retarded. I cannot conceive of any possible thought process that lead anyone at Wizards to say: "You know what we should do next? Let's find a country that will let us mint legal tender with Jace the Mind Sculptor on it." And, in the incredibly unlikely event someone had such a stupid idea, I cannot wrap my mind around a group of people deciding this was a good idea and spending money doing it. HOWEVER -- both of these things happened!

I guess it's at the final step now. Are there people who are actually going to buy Jacebuxx?

Quote from bondafong

Lodestone Golems.
Bought 100. :/

I went in for 4 playsets of Lodestone Golems and still have them. I think I got them at $2.50 a card. It seems like it should see some sort of increase some day, but I guess MUD decks and Vintage decks are not too common.

Quote from Juicy_J

I remember buying a foil Baneslayer Angel right after M10 came out for $75 and not even hesitating for a second. Ouch.

I wish you could have been at our Costa Mesa PTQ. Many months after Baneslayer Angel was in Standard, there was a dealer paying $125 CASH each for Baneslayer Angel FOILs. He was getting it for one of his customers. I almost wanted to illegally buy some from people at the tournament just to sell them to him. I would have been kicked out and missed the top 8 that I ended up getting, but I could have probably made at least $100 profit by buying them for $100 each from people there (who didn't know the dealer was giving that much).

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Why doesn't anyone complain that boxes are always being sold WAY below MSRP?