The Realest Look at Legacy Deck Costs

[Artowis]

I laugh when people complain about the cost of legacy, and how it's too expensive to play, yet the ones complaining play Standard, the most expensive format there is. Sure, you can build a standard deck cheaper than Legacy, but within 2 years the cards you purchased are no longer playable, and chances are, you will need an entire new deck. You're buying cards when they're at their highest price, holding onto them to play in tournaments, and then selling them when they've rotated out and dropped in price. The people complaining just aren't thinking long-term. Most of the people playing Eternal have been playing magic for many years. Very few of us got into the format by buying an entire deck and then going to our first tournament. We played terrible decks while slowly accumulating cards. I've played Burn, Sligh, White Weenie, etc. I got my butt kicked, but I met amazing people and ended up having a lot of fun. Legacy has the most variety of any format. If you can't find something to play, then you obviously don't want to. just grab a handful of cards and enjoy yourself.

Unfortunately, many people these days don't want to save up and work towards a goal. It's easier to complain about what they want now, even though they've put forth zero effort to achieve it.

Do people ever get tired of repeating this same line of rationalization?

Oh and the latter is the reason Vintage is dead. Good call there.

[Valarne]

+1 @Madpeep.

This game is obviously one that involves money being spent. Its not like the booster packs most of bought when we were kids, in the hope of cracking that Colossus of Sardia, was paying themselves back.

If it was "just" a game/hobby like Chess, Petanque, whatever, then it would have a completely different feel. Sure its tough when the price goes up and up, but it has always been a part of the game. I don't play Standard because I think its too expensive. I probably spent 3000 dollars on Legacy cards the last 4 years, but it has been spent in gradual minor steps, and the great thing about it is that I can still play most of the decks that I have had available in this period. Going from Mono-red to now just about everything. Plus we legacy-players don't have to put up with the hassle of trying to get rid of cards all the time (before they rotate).

And yeah, deck designers that have been playing standard for the last 3 years could easily build decks that win tournaments with the smallest of purchase. Basic lands are very often better than duals, and the latter are "never" needed as playsets anyway. All the power creep is extended legal, more or less. The other day I was playing against a BW goodstuff brew piloted by a standard player, in his first Legacy tournament. He had 2 Hymns and no Swords (no removal at all (!)), simply because he didn't have the cards, but if he did, he probably would have won. He was using filter-lands, maybe other stuff, I'm not sure. I was playing UBr Dreadnought just for the record.

And Force of Will is not completely necessary main for any blue deck, especially post-Mental Misstep. FoW was that safety valve in turn 0, that Misstep for most cases will be able to substitute (and doing it better). Starting from turn 1 there are plenty of solutions for blue and non-blue (read Chalice-Moon, Mana Tithe etc) disruption.

[Valarne]

Do people ever get tired of repeating this same line of rationalization?

Oh and the latter is the reason Vintage is dead. Good call there.

The big difference is that you can't really win much in Vintage by playing fair (actually the hatebear approach works sometimes), but you can in Legacy.

[SpikeyMikey]

So what I keep seeing from the "high prices are OK" side (need better labels for the sides of this argument. Maybe douchebag patrol...) is that people that are new to the format should have to play bad decks and that you're afraid to play in a format where people who have less money than you might be able to beat you. Why even play the game? Why not save that $5000 you spent on cards and just offer every opponent cash to concede. Innovation doesn't happen when cards aren't available. People can't experiment when experimentation comes with a price tag of $500+. I was playing down in Platteville last night with Too Close's crew (nice group of guys). Belcher took first and in talking to To Close to the Sun, he said the deck was an excellent choice there because so few people had the cards to play blue. That's a problem. If you care about the game as a game, you can see why bastardized metagames based on card availability disinigrate the integrity of the format. That's why this elitist bullshit of "it should be expensive and unavailable" pisses me off. You're basically saying "I don't care if my greed destroys the health of the format." Well fuck you too buddy. Believe me, if poker was as intricate and mentally taxing as Magic, I would be playing it instead. If I could print my own Magic cards and play with those proxies in competitive tournaments, I would. I don't play high level Magic because I want to compensate with the cost of my cards. I'm comfortable with the size of my cock. I just want the intense competition. It's not about making money. Go ahead and raise your hand if you've ever won a 200+ man tourney. Nobody on this forum is making a living at this game, so don't give me this "high payoff/high entry" bullshit. Magic pay is shit. A 500 man poker tournament is going to have a bigger top prize than $2k and the cost of entry is about $1475 less.

[death]

Magic pay is shit. A 500 man poker tournament is going to have a bigger top prize than $2k and the cost of entry is about $1475 less.

But once you lose, you lose your money. With $1475 in Magic cards however, you can continue to enjoy the game as long as you live or liquidate them anytime you want to.

[SpikeyMikey]

I can continue to enjoy poker as long as I live for free the same way I could with Magic. Once you lose your entry fee at an SCG Open, that fee is gone. The only difference between the two is that poker pays better and Magic has what you could consider a security deposit. Fine, you can liquidate that $1475 in cards, but you spent the money on them in the first place. So you're still taking a sucker bet from a money point of view.

[Cabal_chan]

The people complaining just aren't thinking long-term.

Soooo...wanting your cards to retain their $$$ value (essentially greed, when you look at it) is thinking long term, but not wanting the format to suffocate under high card prices that prevent it from growing (some form of growth is needed for long term sustainability) isn't thinking long term?

Ok.

[Humphrey]

well own a lot of legacy staples but the prices are pissing me off. legacy is dead in my local area and thats mainly because of the prices. A lot of players dont have dont have or dont want to spend 2000$ on cards just to play 1 deck. that sucks. whats the point of having/buying cards at 5000$+ value if ure unable to play with somebody.

but i see the problem in the people who are paying these high prices for papercards

[thefreakaccident]

I'm kind of on the fence in this debate, because I still have a lot of really expensive staples, but I do agree that the prices are keeping the format from growing.

Maybe I should just sell all the cards and prey they don't just increase in price.

[SpikeyMikey]

I'm kind of on the fence in this debate, because I still have a lot of really expensive staples, but I do agree that the prices are keeping the format from growing.

Maybe I should just sell all the cards and prey they don't just increase in price.

The saddest part about that statement is that when I left San Diego in 2005, the last weekly legacy tournament that I went to had 54 players. That was our weekly LGS tournament; anywhere from 45-55 people at Game Empire every week. 6 years and several hundred percent cost increase later...

[TooCloseToTheSun]

So what I keep seeing from the "high prices are OK" side (need better labels for the sides of this argument. Maybe douchebag patrol...) is that people that are new to the format should have to play bad decks and that you're afraid to play in a format where people who have less money than you might be able to beat you. Why even play the game? Why not save that $5000 you spent on cards and just offer every opponent cash to concede. Innovation doesn't happen when cards aren't available. People can't experiment when experimentation comes with a price tag of $500+. I was playing down in Platteville last night with Too Close's crew (nice group of guys). Belcher took first and in talking to To Close to the Sun, he said the deck was an excellent choice there because so few people had the cards to play blue. That's a problem. If you care about the game as a game, you can see why bastardized metagames based on card availability disinigrate the integrity of the format. That's why this elitist bullshit of "it should be expensive and unavailable" pisses me off. You're basically saying "I don't care if my greed destroys the health of the format." Well fuck you too buddy. Believe me, if poker was as intricate and mentally taxing as Magic, I would be playing it instead. If I could print my own Magic cards and play with those proxies in competitive tournaments, I would. I don't play high level Magic because I want to compensate with the cost of my cards. I'm comfortable with the size of my cock. I just want the intense competition. It's not about making money. Go ahead and raise your hand if you've ever won a 200+ man tourney. Nobody on this forum is making a living at this game, so don't give me this "high payoff/high entry" bullshit. Magic pay is shit. A 500 man poker tournament is going to have a bigger top prize than $2k and the cost of entry is about $1475 less.

Also a bunch of our heavy hitters who always play blue weren't there, Easter break, I didn't have to play either guy running chalice. I really do wish the would reprint the stuff that the format uses that isn't on the reserve list, but abolishing it and mass reprinting duals seems like it could do more harm than good. Oh, and I ain't your buddy, guy.

[SpikeyMikey]

Well it's not like Belcher completely folds to blue anyway. You stomped a mudhole in me two games running. Granted, I'm not particularly experienced at playing against Belcher, but it's not like you just waltzed through without me having any counters. But the idea that

The thing with reprints (and I know this subject has been done to death) is that it's a broad term that can encompass a lot of different things. Everything from Judge foils to throwing one in each Commander deck or sold to reprinting in in M12 in the common slot.

And honestly, the reserve list doesn't serve a purpose. It's stated purpose is to instill confidence in the value of the cards on the list, but people have just as much confidence in the value of Force or Wasteland as they do in the value of Trop or Sea and probably more than they do in the value of bubble cards like Badlands or Phyrexian Dreadnaught. I mean, even if Force is reprinted in a base set next year, you'd probably still rather have a pile of Forces than a pile of Spirit of the Nights. Depending on the rarity it's printed at, the price could actually go up with a reprint. It'd certainly be every bit as ubiquitous as Jace and Alliances versions would command a huge premium. A mythic reprint of Force of will would do more to increase the value of existing Forces than no reprint at all.

I'm not advocating that Wizards try to control the secondary market by releasing cards in quantities to fix prices in a given spot. But I do think that there need to be reprints. There may have been 70-75k of any of the revised duals originally, but there's no way there are that many now. Too many have been destroyed, lost or found their way into boxes or binders and will never see tournament play again. And there's a lot of demand out there.

I like Magic as a game. The part that I enjoy most about it is building new decks and playing around with card interactions. If the cards were worth nothing and there were no prizes for the tournaments, I'd still drive 1 1/2 to 2 hours one way to play. I just want the competition. High prices keep me from getting that competition because my opponents are playing with decks that they can afford to play, decks that they have cards for, not the best deck they can design. And in fairness, I'm hampered by the same cost issue. Not as much as some people; I work 2 jobs and make $55k a year, but dropping $1500 on a deck is still a pretty major expenditure. It's not like I have that kind of cash laying around that I can do it on a whim.

Maybe it's just that this ruins my nostalgia. I remember when they first split the B/R list off from T1 and we built a Legacy scene in San Diego. We had more people for the weekly Legacy than they did for Standard FNM because it's such a fun format. But try getting someone to try out a format that costs $500 minimum to get into and 3-4 times that if you want something highly competitive.

[troopatroop]

-rant-... ... It's not about making money. Go ahead and raise your hand if you've ever won a 200+ man tourney. Nobody on this forum is making a living at this game, so don't give me this "high payoff/high entry" bullshit. Magic pay is shit. A 500 man poker tournament is going to have a bigger top prize than $2k and the cost of entry is about $1475 less.

Well I can say I've won a 35+ player inhouse poker tournament, and won more money in poker games than magic games, but I've definitely made more money getting in and out of magic than playing poker in the long run. There were some early career cashouts that I'm not proud of, namely to those slimey Albany characters (braves+Afro), and I probably lost value along the way, but Dual Lands are a safe investment. I've got a much better chance of going 5-0 at local tournament with the best 75 cards I can concieve. Magic Tournaments are somewhat forgiving in a way that poker is not. There ARE a lot o' Donkeys at big tournaments (scrubs), and people can be outplayed. This is Legacy! Goblin Charbelcher is an "all in" deck, and the guy won, old news. That deck is cheap to build!, as is Goblins, Merfolk, Sligh, and Storm.