Again I'll say this, fuck that. I don't want to play or play against fugly duals. Print them normal and it will be fine. The Unlimited and Revised duals should drop in price which is what most people want to happen. I think the goal should be to get the Revised and Unlimited duals down to $20. I think this is where most people bought them at or at least the non-blue ones. Hopefully people who did invest in them won't lose a ton of money since the duals will still hold most of its value, but it is also much cheaper for new players to enter the format.Originally Posted by MMogg
But don't print ugly duals. We don't want Legacy decks looking like shit (ie new border AND white border duals).
I don't want to sit across from some fat ass who smells of butt sweat but thems the breaks.
I don't see why WotC should shit all over those who have duals already.
Edit: BTW, I'm well aware that I am probably a lone voice on this point and I'm also well aware that if and when they reprint them they will probably be foiled out or at least BB, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with the underlying philosophy behind it. I don't agree with punishing players who have them and I also think that foil variants (like promos) are bringing in new stock at the top of the hierarchy of desire instead of at the bottom where it's needed. The argument that players will get rid of their old RV and UL for BB thus freeing up those RV and UL for newer players is horrible, imho, as it's predicated on forcing players who have already bought into Legacy to buy in again or just keep their RV and be happy with them, thereby NOT freeing up extra copies.
Who says the Internet isn't full of <3?
It's hard to make something uglier than RV duals, so I doubt Wizards would force that. The RV duals will still have value, so people who want to get prettier new duals can do so and it frees up cheaper duals for other players.
The bottom line is, by buying Magic singles you need to accept the consequence that the market can change over time. If people hate the loss of card value over time so much they should not be playing Magic.
Not trying to rationalize the fugly, but I like white bordered duals. Makes land easier to find after I pop a fetchland. With usually 7-8 fetches in my decks, that's a lot of searching.
/ totally agree. There are exceptions, but I'll bet about 95% of people that care about their collections (as opposed to people who have shoe boxes of cards rotting in the attic) have their cards to play; not speculate and try to make a profit. Magic is primarily a game and secondarily a collectible to the majority of people who own cards.The bottom line is, by buying Magic singles you need to accept the consequence that the market can change over time. If people hate the loss of card value over time so much they should not be playing Magic
Yeah, but here Wizards has a choice :)I don't want to sit across from some fat ass who smells of butt sweat but thems the breaks.
But it really isn't. Sure the duals will go down but it also makes completing your set much cheaper. The people that already have their set hopefully have had their duals for a while and bought them for what the reprints will hopefully return them to. I am really just assuming here. I think some might get hit a little harder if they just recently bought a bunch of duals, but thems the breaks if we want to keep the format alive.I don't see why WotC should shit all over those who have duals already.
I don't mind them either. I really don't mind white bordered old cards. What I do hate is stuff like 8th edition Kird Apes and the like. I can't stand new bordered and white bordered together.
Can I put something forward?
I'm not going to say that players should be put ahead of the collectors, (even though I agree with it) because it's been said before. But how exactly does a collector base, and how quickly, does it multiply? It would happen at a very slow rate, and I don't believe people actually collect cards if you haven't started quite a bit ago. So this base is most likely not only not growing, but dwindling. Whereas players multiply. I was brought in by other players, I brought in my brother, his friends, and a few friends of mine. They brought in friends. And we have more players. So, not only are we ALREADY the larger base, but we're expanding. WotC, while it shouldn't ignore them (collectors) by tanking the value of Duals or whatnot, should have a more vested interest in the player base, and their decisions should reflect that.
Well, not necessarily. The goal is to have the cheapest version of a dual at $20. Probably that means that the reprinted dual is $20, while the RV and unlimited duals will still be higher.
I would be much happier if the cheap versions cost $20. That would also be more than enough to keep those "runny-nosed" children others are complaining about from destroying your precious peace of mind.
I think white-border in the new frame with no availability to foil is about as bad as it gets for ugliness.
And the Duals will probably stay the same pricewise, 4th Edition Bolts really didn't go down too far in price with M10, right?
Ah yes, little bit of market speculation here, but stock up on Wu Spies while you can. Some guy on Salvation is going full retard promoting his new "Wu Dragon" deck.
EDIT: Also, the guy with the "solutions" article really offers no point as to why the cards' prices would drop. I could've written that with a fifth of whiskey running through my veins, albeit with a few spelling errors. Also, according to him, Undiscovered Paradise sees more play than Humility, which makes me lol, and Badlands sees so much play it isn't funny, right?
tl;dr who plays Badlands?
Jaco:
I think that you're missing out on a major point at your look at the economic impact of reprints. And I know that the lines have been seriously blurred here, but we have to remember there's a difference between junking the reserve list and reprinting cards. But even if we're talking abour reprints, if you look at card values through reprints, you can see that cards with a heavy play value will retain their monetary value through any number of reprints. The examples of BoP and WoG were given by Ben Bleiwess. Those were the best examples because they were valuable cards that have been reprinted umpteen million times, but even with lower value cards or cards that have only been reprinted once, you can see this. If a card is ubiquitous to a format or to a color, it will retain value. When a card has gained value through rarity alone or through rarity and slight play value, then yes, the card will take a big hit in value. While Reflecting Pool was in Standard, prices went up, then fell when it rotated out. But it has no play value in older formats, and hasn't since the printing of the Odyssey fetch lands. It's price was bouyed entirely by scarcity and age. That is not the case with dual lands. You're right about cards like Tabernacle, which see limited play, or even Imperial Recruiters, because the playability factor of these cards is low. They're niche cards and as such, their primary value is in scarcity, not in play value.
Dual lands are ubiquitous to Legacy and Vintage. I speculate (and at this point, this whole discussion is speculation) that if reprinted in any fashion short of a full reprint in a Standard legal set (which seems about as likely as a mass printing of Splendid Genesis), the price on duals would not drop dramatically. You would see the initial surge of demand like you do with any other reprint (Serra, Pool, etc.) but that demand would not die off because it would be bouyed by *players*, not collectors. The pool of Magic players far outstrips the pool of collectors. Additionally, reprints only affect price if the quantity of reprints is roughly equal to or larger than the original run. Small prints of foil promo versions of cards have no effect one way or the other on the price of the base card. When Pernicious Deed was offered as a foil, regular Deeds did not move one way or the other because the demand for foil Deeds is almost entirely based on a small population of collectors and players like yourself that want to have the absolute best and rarest of everything. The FTV sets did not affect the prices of the original editions of any of the cards in that set. If you were to release duals at a reasonable rate, say through Player Rewards or as a GP promo, etc. then you would see no change in the price of A/B/U/R duals. If you were to release these duals at a much higher rate, you would temporarily see small drops in price, as cheaper reprints allowed poorer players to buy into the format. It's my opinion that it would take a very significant reprint quantity to affect the price of duals, however, because there are a lot of players that don't play Legacy because of the cost barrier. Every time card values went down on staples, people would buy them until the card values rose to their previous position and priced people out again or until there were simply no more people interested in playing Legacy to absorb the extra supply.
Like you said in your article, if you can buy a Beta Mox Emerald for $350, maybe you do, but if it's $550, maybe you don't. You stick with what you can afford at that point, which is the $280 Unlimited Mox Emerald. The demand is there for the Beta, but not at the price. Because that's what's wrong with the basic "supply and demand" model. There's feedback. Supply and demand is far more complex than just supply and demand. Demand goes up, price rises, demand goes down, because it's no longer a good value (in this case, value being from a player standpoint, not a collector standpoint, although decreased demand removes value from it as a collectible as well). We keep talking about the amazing turn out of 2,220 players at Madrid. Some people point to it as a sign that prices can and probably will rise too high for the format to grow, some people see it as a sign that the format is healthy and needs no fixing. But that number only tells us one thing. It tells us that 2,220 people went to GP: Madrid. It does not tell us how many people would've went if duals were $10-$15 each. It does not tell us how many people would've went if duals were $60-$80 each. You can't extrapolate anything from that number. To borrow from Geometry, you can't, from a single point, extrapolate a line. Two points or more points can make a line, but a point is just a point. If you can extrapolate anything from the attendance at GP: Madrid, it's that Legacy is an incredibly popular format. Perhaps it's as popular as it will ever get. Perhaps we're already at max absorption and any further flooding of the market with Legacy staples will devastate prices. But I don't think it will. And honestly, I don't think that you think it will either.
All I can provide for evidence in favor of my opinion is anecdotal evidence. I can tell you that Chris sold his collection over Christmas. Prices on cards had gone too high for him not to. I can tell you that the 4c Landstill deck that I played at GP: Chicago was not what I wanted to play. You and I talked about decks that I was looking at for Chicago, but in the end, I played with what I already had built, even though it was 2 or 3 years old and no longer a tier 1 deck. I played it because I couldn't shell out a couple hundred bucks to put ANT together and even that wasn't my first choice, it was just the cheapest of the competitive choices. I think at the time I was more interested in playing R/W Chalice Aggro or my Ice Blue Zoo, but I just couldn't shell out the money for the Chalice shell or for Goyfs/Confidants/etc. for IBZ. I know that in San Diego, even though there was a thriving Legacy community before I left (for those of you not familiar with the area, around the time of the split from T1 and shortly thereafter, we had 40-50 man events weekly) there were plenty of players who played subpar decks because they couldn't afford better cards. This is why I think that increasing supply will not have any serious adverse effect on value. The cyclical nature of demand with price allow WotC to reprint without destroying collectors. It will certainly increase profits for stores and online retailers.
Finally, I posted in another thread on this subject about the rise in cost of Magic cards, but it has far outstripped almost any other commodity. The explosion in the price of duals over the last 10 years compared to the rate of inflation is ludicrous. In 2002, I bought my first Mox. It was an Unlimited Mox Emerald. I paid $60. I also picked up duals at that time for around $3-$7 from Don, depending on condition and which dual. I paid $120 for an Alpha Ancestral Recall. Only the mox has failed to reach 1000% appreciation over the last 8 years. If collectors take a hit on the value of their collections, most of them (like yourself) will still be making an excellent interest rate on their investment if they decide to sell.
Edit: I should've proofread this before I posted, but I'm tired and late for a date, so I rushed it. I know I made a few intellectual leaps without really documenting what was taking me from point to point, so I'm editing quickly to try and fill those holes.
Last edited by SpikeyMikey; 03-03-2010 at 08:09 PM. Reason: Te Sueno
Some NLS versions play 1.
On the topic, I really don't get it while people think their investment should be safe and the value of their cards should increase (or, to be more accurate regarding the past: skyrocket) or why it would be good for the format if WotC wouldn't do something about the rising card prices.
Anyone read any arguments about this?
Also, I don't know whether it would be time to merge this thread with the other one about cardprices. They both steer into the same direction.
I would buy dual reprints like crazy. I have ~70 casual decks built atm with a shitload of Invasion tap lands and Tempest Pain Lands serving as proxies of duals.
With reprints of duals, I'd want to have at least three or four sets of duals. I'm sure other people think like this. This would keep prices in check, but lower them from today's obscenity.
If prices dropped to $20, I'd immediately buy a set of the Duals I needed right then.
If prices dropped to $10, I'd immediately buy a set of the Duals I might need.
If prices dropped to $5, I'd immediately buy a playset of all of them.
I don't know if that means anything in a real sense, but I think a good majority of players who don't have Duals would do the same. Does that mean anything, with regards to the market for Duals? Just wondering.
This is pretty much what I, and my friends who play Legacy but have shit jobs, are doing. It just takes a lot longer at our respective wages. We'd all love to have FBB duals, but at the moment we're just trying to get shit to play with. I even am wiling to buy duals listed as 'heavy play' from vendors to save money; I just want them to play with, their resale value is a bonus in case something retarded happens and I need the cash. It's kind of sad to be playing in a tournament and realize that the deck I'm playing would cost more to build from scratch than I paid for my current car.
Here's to "FTV: You can play Legacy now!"
They are typically 15 card boxes, so here goes...
10 Dual Lands
1 Force of Will
1 Lion's Eye Diamond
1 Entomb
1 The Tabernacle at Pendrelvale
1 Natural Order
DON'T foil them. Give them black new borders.
Suggest whatever for MSRP. Let people buy them at whatever. Give them out at sactioned tournaments. Everyone (myself included) who owns old stuff, just let it go and be happy that we can have new players to play with.
Replace Tabernacle with Tarmogoyf and give it a huge print run and it seems good. Tabernacle is played in one deck, which is not very good, and should not be as high as it is.
If it was only unique cards with rising prices (unique meaning played in only a few specific decks), I wouldn't really care. I'm fine* with having a few $100+ cards in the format, even if they're played as 4-ofs (Imperial Recruiter). What's would not be fine is if every top deck had to have a few of these ultra-rares (think of a Lands vs. Imperial Painter vs. Grim Tendrils meta, blech) and it is also not fine if every top deck costs as much as those bank-busters, but spread over more cards (decks with $400 manabases, plus maybe Goyfs and FoW and other valuables).
Basically there should be plenty of competitive options at $300, at $500, at $700. Less than thee hundred dollars should not limit you to "dredge, burn, or nothing". Even if dredge is good, you can't call yourself a true competitor if you can't metagame by changing decks! This is why the "but dredge is cheap" claim is so hollow.
*Not my ideal, but I would find this situation acceptable.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Reply With Quote