Jeffbcrandall: First, my opinion is worth just as much as yours. You don't provide any more proof to your conclusions than I do so don't retort as though your opinion is grounded in any more fact than mine. I intend to justify my conclusions below based on what I've read that is readily available to you. I'm also basing my opinions on what courses, training and education I've had on the subjects of economics, marketing, etc. I don't want to degenerate into a flame war and I fully expect you to have just as much backing on your opinions. Don't tell me to drop it because we contradict each other.
Now, my logically progression stems from what was posted in this thread, MrSoze comment #24. He states his direct conversation with a Wizards representative resulted in learning that Wizards is allocating(limiting) initial orders and then allowing allocated(limited) reorders over the next few weeks to make sure that stores have product in stock at all times. Similar second hand information from posters with direct contact from Wizard representatives can be found in the following two thread links within the first page of comments:
Correct me if I am wrong, but here is how I see the supply system working. Under the old system, Wizards produces 1 million cases(as an example) for sale. Distributors rely on preorders and sales of previous sets to determine how much they want to initially order. They order from Wizards, Wizards ships to them and they, in turn, distribute to the stores where we purchase our cards. In this scenario, there is no scarcity and no increased price for product. Wizards still has plenty of product for restock orders, GP/PTQ events/prizes, etc. Everyone is essentially happy and no one truly loses or gains a tremendous amount on the deal.
Piecing together the current process from secondhand contacts with Wizards and distributors, this is how it works from at least Zendikar forward. Wizards produces it's 1 million cases, or 1.1 because they are now producing more than they previously had. The number really doesn't matter. They aren't opening the full amount to distributors. One of my links sites a number of 40% of the total produced product. This means that if preorders and initial stock orders total more than 400,000 (or 440,000) product needs to be allocated/limited/rationed creating scarcity. Wizards still produced that 1 million cases and they will all eventually be distributed to the public but it's manufactured scarcity.
And since every distributor orders directly from Wizards, guess who knows exactly how much of the total supply gets shipped in the initial order. Wizards does and I bet the demanded percentage is higher than the 40% they allocate to initial orders.
To add further food for thought, let's talk about contracts. Any store owners want to chime in on this subject to provide accurate real life data? To order from certain distributors, stores need to meet purchasing requirements. Sometimes this is ordering at least X amount of dollars in product a month or stocking an entire line. Ask a store owner about Warhammer requirements or the deeper workings of stocking comic books and you'll probably get a groan before a lengthy response (or a "you don't wanna know"). Distributors also have contractual obligations to Wizards. Even though Wizards is allocating (limiting) the initial order, the distributor still needs to purchase their normal amount of product, thus selling all that Wizard's produced.
Notice how Wizards is still producing the same or more amount of product but they are creating initial scarcity for profit. Even though they aren't directly benefiting, the indirect benefits are enormous. Example: You enjoy playing volleyball and a group of your friends get together regularly to play. There is a tournament in an adjacent state that is offering a $5000 cash prize to the winner and your group of friends wants to enter. One of the best volleyball buddies can't cover their costs of travel, hotel, entry fee. Everyone else chips in to cover his costs knowing you stand to gain much more out of the deal should you win the tournament with his help. Now apply that example to Wizards and it's distributors.
"There were shortages of M10 and Zendikar in part because they had a lot of frenzy and hype, so the demand rose while the supply remained low."
I can't contest this statement regarding M10. I couldn't find a simple source in these forums for that. However, my previous link to the Zen Shortage thread shows that Wizards planned the scarcity even before fetchlands and hidden treasures were revealed! Also, frenzy and hype are caused by marketing and who is going to deny that Zen had some of the best marketing of a magic set ever.
Zendikar is still getting sold today. Stores across the globe constantly run sanctioned drafts using 2 Zendikar boosters and 1 WWK which still causes demand for that product. The first 3 set block was released over 10 years ago and Wizards has every bit of information on the sales trends of those sets to plan off of. You are telling me, that they are going to be surprised by newer sales trends? They are going to leave money on the table? They don't have a contingency plan for getting rid of potential waste product?
/sarcasm
Poor Wizards and their mistake for not printing enough product. Here is an extra $20 bucks to your friends for this box. I hope next set won't be such a disaster for you.
/end sarcasm
The idea that wizards creating a shortage for their own product is beneficial for themselves is totally bogus for this reason. They DON'T change the price that they sell their boxes to retailers for. If wizards sells lets say 10(X) number of boxes to a retailer this month, he'll make 10(X*Y) revenue and then that translates into profit down the road. If we tone it down to 5(X) boxes to a retailer, they're still ONLY making 5(X*Y) revenue, Y does NOT change because of a shortage!
As for making the set sell longer in the market, that doesn't stick at all either. If we had lets say 100(A) demand for worldwake at the beginning of the set, the demand for more boosters is going to drop more and more as the set gets older no matter what they try to do, the reason being the cards that people are looking for are already out there. The reason that sales are up so high right at the release is because if you want to get that card you want, your only hope is to pretty much buy a booster box and hope that one or two of the rares in there are the bomb rares that you are looking for in your deck. A few weeks later, there are so many boxes opened already, if you wanted to you could easily just trade for your rares and you don't even need to open another booster to get all the cards you want.
Long story short, the longer they wait the worse for them. End of story. You really need a better understanding of business/economics if you want to participate in the discussion here in any meaningful way.
You gotta think that even though you're running 22 lands, it's really more like 16 lands or 18 lands because of the fetch lands, grim discovery also is just awesome card economy when you've got a fetch land, even if you already have enough mana it's just good syphoning out more swamps out of your deck so you don't get those annoying lands on the topdeck.
Refraction trap was probably the biggest wow, I almost didn't put it in my deck but then when I started using it and realized I could use it against defending creatures while attacking, it became an awesome spell, the great thing about it is it will fit in so many different situations, if you're attacking, defending or just someone is trying to burst lightning something, you can just throw it in there and just !@#% everything up!
And as for my goblin,
Goblin Terrorist
1RR
Haste
When goblin terrorist deals combat damage to a player, sacrifice it and do an extra 2 damage to that player and 1 damage to all creatures that player controls.
2/2
One thing I saw last night at our FNM that I thought was REALLY an *censored* move on the players part was the kid had some big creature in play, I think it was like a 3/7 that mills the opponent for 10, so the guy hit the 3/7 for 5 with a burn spell and then attacked and he tried to convince the kid that if he blocked with the 3/7 it wouldn't die, thankfully the kid knew enough about the game to just take the damage, but I honestly was on the verge of either calling a judge (I don't know what a judge can do in that situation but it's worth a shot) or just walking up and punching the guy in the face if the kid blocked haha. As far as I'm concerned anything where you make a boldfaced lie to get your opponent to screw up is the worst thing you can do, but if you just play smart and only give away information when you need to to keep the opponent guessing, that's totally fine.
Played a pure worldwake draft last night with some friends (store was out of zendikar), if you don't raredraft and just go for good commons/uncommons, G/W can completely destroy people with its speed. Obviously the loam lions and beastial menaces are just plain awesome in draft, but there were also a few other bombshells that on their own pretty much won games (we played 3 rounds and I went 2-0 in each round so it wasn't close by any means).
Refraction trap was mentioned in the article, but I don't know if it was given the credit it was due even still. It's great for defending against burn or attackers, but actually I loved it even more when I was attacking, people would try to trade down blockers for my lions or apex hawks (which are pretty awesome also, 2/2 fliers that scale with your mana just rock early or lategame) and then I could refraction trap the damage to them and have their creature still die from mine. Worked great on the defense also and then if you're really gutsy, in games two or three (or late 1) you could try and trick your opponent into thinking you had one.
Battle hurda actually worked wonders too if we did get to the middlegame, 3/3 first strike doesn't look too impressive on paper, but I didn't really see anything that people played that he would be really worried about and then with the traps, anything that did scare him would get blown up anyway.
Lastly, if you ask me apex hawk is better than gnarlid pack (although I ran that in my deck too), in the early game gnarlid pack probably is better, but then once you start putting one or two multi-kickers onto them, 4/4 with flying suddenly becomes a lot scarier than a 4/4 without flying because of the lack of beefy fliers.
So...yeah, just wanted to share my thoughts, the deck for me was probably the easiest draft deck I've ever had to build, just threw all my loam lions, explores, apex hawks, grappler spiders and refraction traps into one deck and it ate people for dessert.
Great article, personally I totally believe that using any psychological warfare is perfectly ethical, it's a competition of wits and if you can find a way within the parameters of the game to get your opponent to make a mistake then hey, great job. My favourite thing I like to do is I move really really fast compared to other players (I know this because I almost always will be done all 3 games of a match while other players are still finishing game 1 or starting game 2). The obvious reason is that it can make the opponent miss some triggers, one guy got really mad at me in a draft because I played three creatures in a row while he had blood seeker in play, but I made him confirm that each creature went into play before I played the next one so when he tried to say I lose 3 life, I only lost one. The other reason playing fast works really well is I find it makes the opponent subconsciously move fast too, if you're used to playing quickly without making mistakes and your opponent isn't, in a 'blitz' game everything else equal you're going to win.
the soonest you really can get the thing going would be turn three: Turn 1 vampire lacerator, Turn 2 ooze garden, turn 3 pump, attack and then ooze. vs a cheap vampire deck, turn one would see a disfigure or at the very least turn 2 urge to feed or something else of the sort. Once the vampire deck would get rolling with gatekeepers of malakir and hideous ends and vampire nighthawks you're done. Looking at my decks (I don't have the money for anything good either), everything except for maybe my ally deck I made just for fun would easily beat the combo here.
As far as I can tell from my casual experience, if you want to run a combo deck you either need to play control; so like U/W or something like that, have a lot of different combos built into the deck so that if you took away one card you would still be able to realistically win, or make the deck able to run to some degree without the combo so that you aren't shafted when it falls through.
I guess this would depend on the kinds of decks your friends are running (only for casual). If you just want a fun combo deck for hilarity's sake, I'm sure it'll fit the bill. But I don't like the look of relying entirely on just the one card, there are just too many ways to easily deal with it from any colors standpoint, killing a few of your creatures off be they tokens or the original version really handicaps you because of how few you have, bouncing the tokens does the same thing and then if you cant get or keep one of your ooze gardens in play then you're just done for.
I'd put bloodchief ascension in over the basilisk collar, it can really be a game-breaker if the opponent doesn't have removal for it and if the opponent does, then the basilisk collar is going to be dead anyway so doesn't really matter which one you pick. I'd also say the gatekeepers should be in the main deck, 3 mana for a 2/2 AND a kill spell is too fun if you ask me.
I'm trying a blue urzatron deck too, here's what it looks like for me (bear in mind I just started playing again so I'm limited to mostly newer cards but you get the idea anyway) some of the cards like covenant of minds I should get rid of too, that was from an earlier version of the deck.
I thought about putting in four of each urza, but then it would be way too hard to get the two blue needed for almost every spell (never mind 3 for roil), with expedition map and all the draw it's still pretty easy anyway to get all three of them together. For me it's always hilarious when I rite of replication my darksteel colossus or roil elemental (or any other uber awesome creature the opponent might have snuck into play under my control). Also works out pretty well as stoppage if I need to buy extra time to get the mana.
Thoughts anyone?
P.S. Yeah, uber happy today, second booster of the pre-release got Jace Wouldn't buy/trade for it just to put in the deck but since I have it I just gotta use it.
You could go the opposite direction and have the creatures with come into play effects and then after sacrificing them to death pit ressurect them again...balthor is the main one im thinking of right now but there are other good ressurection cards, or you could just use zuberas twice or something like that
Well its not the best deck ever but for casual i've got a fun black/green snake thingy...I just put lots of snakes like sakiko, springcallers etc so i get tons of mana all the time, lotsa life gain and creature kill (all arcane) so with my nourishing shoals and vital surges I get plenty of life AND can cast kuro easily using sakura tribe elders getting swamps and a few of those snakes that convert mana...I would write up my deck build but right now it really does suck.
The idea that wizards creating a shortage for their own product is beneficial for themselves is totally bogus for this reason. They DON'T change the price that they sell their boxes to retailers for. If wizards sells lets say 10(X) number of boxes to a retailer this month, he'll make 10(X*Y) revenue and then that translates into profit down the road. If we tone it down to 5(X) boxes to a retailer, they're still ONLY making 5(X*Y) revenue, Y does NOT change because of a shortage!
As for making the set sell longer in the market, that doesn't stick at all either. If we had lets say 100(A) demand for worldwake at the beginning of the set, the demand for more boosters is going to drop more and more as the set gets older no matter what they try to do, the reason being the cards that people are looking for are already out there. The reason that sales are up so high right at the release is because if you want to get that card you want, your only hope is to pretty much buy a booster box and hope that one or two of the rares in there are the bomb rares that you are looking for in your deck. A few weeks later, there are so many boxes opened already, if you wanted to you could easily just trade for your rares and you don't even need to open another booster to get all the cards you want.
Long story short, the longer they wait the worse for them. End of story. You really need a better understanding of business/economics if you want to participate in the discussion here in any meaningful way.
And as for my goblin,
Goblin Terrorist
1RR
Haste
When goblin terrorist deals combat damage to a player, sacrifice it and do an extra 2 damage to that player and 1 damage to all creatures that player controls.
2/2
Refraction trap was mentioned in the article, but I don't know if it was given the credit it was due even still. It's great for defending against burn or attackers, but actually I loved it even more when I was attacking, people would try to trade down blockers for my lions or apex hawks (which are pretty awesome also, 2/2 fliers that scale with your mana just rock early or lategame) and then I could refraction trap the damage to them and have their creature still die from mine. Worked great on the defense also and then if you're really gutsy, in games two or three (or late 1) you could try and trick your opponent into thinking you had one.
Battle hurda actually worked wonders too if we did get to the middlegame, 3/3 first strike doesn't look too impressive on paper, but I didn't really see anything that people played that he would be really worried about and then with the traps, anything that did scare him would get blown up anyway.
Lastly, if you ask me apex hawk is better than gnarlid pack (although I ran that in my deck too), in the early game gnarlid pack probably is better, but then once you start putting one or two multi-kickers onto them, 4/4 with flying suddenly becomes a lot scarier than a 4/4 without flying because of the lack of beefy fliers.
So...yeah, just wanted to share my thoughts, the deck for me was probably the easiest draft deck I've ever had to build, just threw all my loam lions, explores, apex hawks, grappler spiders and refraction traps into one deck and it ate people for dessert.
As far as I can tell from my casual experience, if you want to run a combo deck you either need to play control; so like U/W or something like that, have a lot of different combos built into the deck so that if you took away one card you would still be able to realistically win, or make the deck able to run to some degree without the combo so that you aren't shafted when it falls through.
3 Sphinx of Lost Truths
2 Covenant of Minds
1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
1 Gifts Ungiven
2 Treasure Hunt
2 Ior Ruin Expedition
URZA HELPERS 4
4 Expedition Map
4 Counterspell
2 Into the Roil
2 Condescend
4 Scattering Stroke
1 Dispel
1 Spell Pierce
WIN CARDS
1 Darksteel Colossus
1 Lorthos, the Tidemaker
1 Goliath Sphinx
2 Kederekt Leviathan
2 Roil Elemental
3 Rite of Replication
12 Island
3 Urza's Mine
3 Urza's Tower
3 Urza's Power Plant
I thought about putting in four of each urza, but then it would be way too hard to get the two blue needed for almost every spell (never mind 3 for roil), with expedition map and all the draw it's still pretty easy anyway to get all three of them together. For me it's always hilarious when I rite of replication my darksteel colossus or roil elemental (or any other uber awesome creature the opponent might have snuck into play under my control). Also works out pretty well as stoppage if I need to buy extra time to get the mana.
Thoughts anyone?
P.S. Yeah, uber happy today, second booster of the pre-release got Jace Wouldn't buy/trade for it just to put in the deck but since I have it I just gotta use it.
Hope this helps