My suggestion is that they should print cards that reward you for having only 1 or less basic land type among lands you control.
Not only would that be a great thing flavour-wise, but also avoids that cards don't need to cost 3 black and 5 green to ensure that they don't get "abused".
Another upside would be that they aren't tempted to (re)create yet another lame 1.1 version of each manafixing land in existence.
In response...Hypothek!
It seems like the only time I comment is during these "is legacy dying" discussions...
I'll play Legacy even if it stops being a popular format. It's strength has already dropped considerably since this time last year (at least by my perception). Before Mental Misstep it seemed like the sky was the limit, and everyone wanted in. Naturally, the prices went up. Luckily for me, I got the bulk of my cards before Legacy was popular, and I'll still play the format even if its just on kitchen tables.
The topic of prices/availability killing Legacy is a thorny issue. I can sympathize with people who don't want to drop X hours of work on a few pieces of cardboard. I can see that budgets are a constraint, but I will always advise people to try and take the long view.
If Legacy is really what you want, then take time to gather staples/decks. It's not like Standard; you don't need the cards before they rotate. They're not going anywhere. Take your time. Maybe start with forces and wastes, and play some merfolk. It may not be the best deck right now, but it will get your foot into the door as you piece together duals and get access to the 2-3 color tempo decks. This is just one path into Legacy (the one I'd recommend). Before you know it, you'll be dropping tropicals for goyfs. It just takes time to gather the pieces, but you don't need to rush it.
I don't think the constant cries for reprints, especially reserved list reprints, is going to get a big following from Wizards. Their official, corporate stance is that they do not make printing decision based on the secondary market, at least to reduce the price of expensive cards. It appears to me that they definitely do, and they manage this smartly.
Here's my observation. A retail store level product (set release, duel deck, premium, commander) can reprint a card that is worth up to 20 dollars. We have Graveborn (Entomb), Elspeth vs. Tezzeret (Elspeth). These were about 20-25 dollars during printing. Neither has grown or tanked significantly after the printing. The limited print run (FTVs) can go up to about 40-50 on a card. This has also been fairly predictable. (Please let me know if I missed something.) Finally, we have very small runs (Judge rewards) that can go above a 50 dollar reprint.
What does this mean? It just gives us a rough estimation of what we can expect from each release in terms of reprinted cards. We'll never see Jace or Goyf as anything but a rare promo. We might get wasteland in the new Realms. We'll probably see shocklands at some point either in a new set or something like commander.
I believe the reason these trends exist is because Wizards is actually very keen on the secondary market, but not for the reason players may think. Most players you talk to would prefer as many expensive reprints as possible to reduce the price of the game overall. They often cite the assertion that Wizards would also make a ton of money as a result.
Wizards is certainly a for profit company, and this logic is seductive. So why not put Black Lotus in M13 as a common? Wizards' wants as many people to play magic as possible in order make as much money possible. They also have an audience of game stores, and they can't be abandoned. More so than any individuals, these stores carry a ton of stock in Magic singles. They stand to lose the most if the secondary market crashes. When they lose, us players don't have a place to get the exact singles we crave for tournament decks. More importantly, we don't have the venues for even playing in these tournaments. Wizards needs the vendors, large and small, for its business model to work. Without your local game store, there are no tournaments, no places to buy singles, and no community. Wizards, wisely, does not want to sacrifice them to the altar of format accessibility for Legacy (or any other format).
If you're craving high priced reprints, its probably not going to happen. It might be a tough pill to swallow, but Wizards must be doing something right if the game is on an all time high. Enjoy it, and if you want to play the best format (Legacy) just understand that there is going to be some barrier to entry, but it is one worth breaking down.
Backseat Critic
I'm glad we can have this conversation without too much whining about the topic.
I am in the camp that thinks they can make more money in the long term by abolishing. I think the vendors will also make more in the long term.
I'm sure many of you know vendors who have had power or otherwise sitting in the case for a long time because they're hard to move.
With reprints, more people will buy the reprinted cards and more people will play the game/format in general.
More players = more money.
They don't need to make it standard legal or some bullshit like FTV. Just sell eternal packs where the cards are only legal in their respective formats.
Seems most stores would sell many many many more copies of the reprinted lotus to make up for the one beta copy they sold. People would still bust packs but consider how many people would buy the reprinted lotus as a single. The value would almost certainly blow away all of the money made selling Abu lotuses during the same time period. Make that money wizards, you morons.
If they can find the budget to print goddamned unhinged/unglued they can make an "Archives" series of sets.
The increased number of players to the game/eternal formats would make more money than the losses from the disgruntled player base and collectors IMO.
God have mercy on us all.
It's all fine and dandy to have an expensive hobby until there's no one to play with due to price barrier. RIP vintage.
"I made a Redguard that looks like Kimbo Slice. He wrecks peoples' shit. And dragons." - Bignasty197
Originally Posted by Philipp802
See, i agree with this. But if they abolish the reserve list, it's not like distributors would lose from it, quite the opposite. Injecting a small quantity of cards in the market make for massive demands, and who gain from those demands are mostly the retailers. We've seen already from FTV and whatsnot that the price of cards don't go down, at least i've not seen a single card vary in price too much. The only exception to this rule i've observed is SFM that was printed in a precon, and as such in very large numbers and its price has remained low whereas now would be much higher.
But that was a precon. As long as WotC inject small quantity of cards in the market, they can at least keep the cost constant while increasing the number of players. And everyone would gain more. New players would enter, retailers would gain from more packs sold, and collector wouldn't lose anything.
Maybe they wouldn't GAIN in the long term as much as before (the collectors), but considering the fact the player base would surely grow, i'm not even sure that would be the case at all.
The alternative (printing situationally better duals) would be far worse for collectors. Duals would tank in price extremely fast. If i were a collector, i'd prefer limited reprints than a possible destructive new print. That, or Legacy will inevitably lose players in the long run and possibly go the way of Vintage, duals are a bit too scarce to support a large playerbase already. And sadly i think this is the way Wizard choose, with the creation of Modern.
Guys, Modern was the death knell of Legacy. It's only a matter of time. See Vintage for reference. In five years, Legacy and Vintage will be similar.
Modern is an eternal format without any cards on the reserved list, so I don't see how you can argue that it's "modern and not the reserved list" that's the issue.
This is silly. Saying that you can play a strictly worse card than the best available card does not mean that playing a strictly worse card is in any way, shape or form acceptable. As Magic players, we do crazy things to eke out fractions of a percentage vs. our opponents. You can win even if you tap your mana wrong or play your threats in the wrong order, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't make an effort to hit the ideal lines of play.
I'm sure one of the Hatfields could D2 a Legacy GP with one of the newer precons like Graveborn, but that wouldn't make it a good idea for them to run it. Optimal is just that, optimal.
It's not really the reserved list that crushes the format. That's *a* root cause of the problem, but not the only one. The real problem is two-fold; price and power-creep.
I play Magic when I can borrow cards from Jaco. That means once in a while for major events, when I've got the money to shell out for hotel rooms and 6 hour car rides. I'm not going to show up to a little local tournament because I have no intention whatsoever of spending $1600 to buy a deck. I had one, last year. I sold it because $1400 in pocket was a hell of a lot more enticing than some little bits of cardboard. I'm not going to pigeon-hole myself into some shitty budget deck like Dredge or Affinity because it's cheap. I play this game for enjoyment. If I wanted to play cards to make money, I'd play poker. I can walk into a casino almost any night of the week and spend 2 hours at a $1/$2 no limit table and walk out $200-$300 up. Sometimes I'll lose, it happens, but on the whole, it's so far ahead of Magic in EV, there's not even a question. I just spent 8 hours playing in a PTQ today. I came in 13th, walked out with 9 packs of DKA. If I flip those at $2.50/ea. then I've lost $2.50 on 8 hours of my time. The only people making money on this game are the speculators and maybe the top 30-40 players worldwide.
Two, the power creep is a problem. Once games get swingy enough, people will quit. I've got a friend that wants me to get him into Magic; he quit Yu-gi-Oh! because he said it got stupid how ridiculous some cards were to beat. It's not even a matter of balance. A format can be balanced and still be too swingy, depending on the power disparity between various cards and the amount of time you have to find an answer before those cards kill you. Belcher is a great example. You have 0 turns to find an answer to Belcher before they beat you. You either have it in your opeining hand or it's irrelevant. Imagine if the whole format was like Belcher, but each one required a different strategy to beat. Did you correctly guess what your opponent is playing and mull for the right answers or did you guess wrong and lose? All the decks are around 50%, but it's no fun for anyone. becaise balanced is not the same as healthy. If they keep printing better mousetraps, eventually, Legacy will die because it will be such a coinflip format even after you spend half a dozen car payments on a deck that no one in their right mind will play it (I'm looking at you, Vintage enthusiasts).
I think the major issue that Wizards faces when it comes to reprints is how to deliver the cards to the players. Let's say that Wizards releases an "Eternal" set (because they actually give a shit about what players want, and they understand that more cards = more players = more money) with a traditional booster approach. They put 15 cards representing a pool of staples and slap an MSRP of $3.99 because they want to get cards into players hands. The big issue is whether or not it is going to be possible for players to purchase packs for MSRP. (hint, it's not) Shop owners would likely hoard the packs/ open them and sell singles. Sure it will "flood" the market, but the immediate reaction is not going to lower prices. In fact, if the formats are really that popular then supply will catch up to demand quickly, but probably will not make an appreciable dent in prices. So in essence, Wizards wins, shop owners win, but do players really get what they want? It depends on what players want; to play the game or or to play with cheaper cards.
I've been playing for a while and when revised came out, I thought it was actually kind of cool that certain cards were not getting reprinted. I thought it would enhance the "flavor" of the game because if the game survived years down the road, there would only be a certain number of powerful cards representing these really powerful items or spells. What a dipshit I was. The secondary Magic market has become an investment opportunity instead of a game, and propped up by Wizard's ill-management of their intellectual property, i.e. the Reserve List. Every time some mouth piece from Wizards says "we don't care about the secondary market" it makes me laugh. If they're afraid of pissing off some speculators who have "struck it rich" in this market that they (Wizards) have let spiral out of control, at the expense of people who actually want to PLAY the game, then they're ignoring the fact the bubble has to burst someday. When people finally get sick of paying thousands of dollars for cardboard, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.
LOL at a secondary market "crash" if WotC reprints expensive cards.
If Wizards reprints duals, these stores will make money. Sure, their white-border dual lands lose some percentage of their value (the supply of revised duals is ABUNDANT and the market is a bubble, revised had an enormous print run), but if the format becomes more accessible then more people will start playing and thus more eternal product gets moved through the store (on the whole) and the value of non-reprinted staples goes up.
Reprinting expensive cards--as long as the pacing is careful--is good for the eternal market. Reprinting dual lands mainly hurts speculators sitting on a ton them, but I don't care about them and neither should Wizards.
I can see where you're coming from with this. It uses the sound logic that a larger player base equals more customers equals more sale equals more profit. What I think this model is missing is that creating a larger Legacy player base may not dramatically increase the size of the aggregate player base, and each player has finite money to spend on this hobby (hence the reason for this discussion). So just because Legacy is easier to get into, it doesn't mean that each individual player will spend more money in total.
I would conclude that it is in Wizard's best interest to look out for the stores in regards to their long and short term profitability. I don't know any rich game store owners, so I can't imagine their profit margins are that large. Also, I would be willing to bet that a good portion of their sales come from people selling them cards and other people buying them. The secondary market has to be a viable way to stay in business, and even a short term shake up could mean some stores will lose too much money to be viable.
Wizards gets the enviable position of being on top of a quasi pyramid scheme. They push this product out to retailers, but they rely on these stores to facilitate the game itself. If the stores don't feel they can't make money by offering Magic, they'll stop, which will in turn hurt Wizards.
Wizards has become great at keeping this machine working with the cards they decide to print and reprint. Drastic shifts in this system will likely produce negative consequences. Right now, everyone has a story about "the friend who would play Legacy, if only the costs were lower." Flooding the already delicate secondary card market with plentiful reprints may lead to the issue of "now I don't have a store nearby to buy cards and play."
Not being able to play a format due to availability and cost is not fun, but it is a situation that can be fixed at the individual level. If you want to play, pay the costs. If you don't want to pay, no one is forcing you. Trying to fix it with reprint policy changes would likely be the worse of two worlds.
Backseat Critic
Those 'speculators' are the big stores that run the big tournaments. Ask yourself what if starcity stopped running its open series? What if they stopped paying people to write columns? The belt tightening could produce some much more negative effects.
They are sitting on a ton of cards. It's like the stock market, which is also driven on speculation. They have a large number of 'dual land shares.' Tanking that 'stock' is going to hurt, even if it can be somewhat mitigated by the selling of reprints. They will make some margin on the reprints, but they invested thousands in the original duals that are now worth less than what they paid for them.
Imagine a hefty part of your own stock portfolio were to lose a significant amount of value. LOL, right?
Backseat Critic
Dude, there is no way that the profitability of SCG's Open Series hinges on the price of the most expensive cards. If magic cards are like stocks then SCG has a very diverse "portfolio." And it is simply untrue that dual lands are a "hefty" volume of their stock. The price of white-border duals falling to even $0 would not break them--and, as I said earlier, could stimulate prices for other staples (assuming that it caused more people to enter the format, which I predict would be the case).
After all, just look at the SCG open series itself, adding more players makes all values rise.
My understanding is that SCG created the open series to add value to their stock of eternal cards and that they made a ton of money as the series continued to increase Legacy's popularity. So it's not as if they started out by purchasing dual lands and other expensive staples at 2012 prices, these things used to be worth a lot less money just a few years ago.
But, seriously, forget that, because the real money to be made for SCG was and is in the sub $20 cards, which move a lot faster on the whole. And SCG has dealt with cards dropping in price before, what's a few more?
Sorry, but the Legacy market as a whole simply does not rely on the most expensive cards holding their value. They are small fish in an ocean of cards.
This is patently false. The big stores stand to gain if something major like the duals were reprinted. The speculators are individuals. Now, some of them happen to be pretty nice people (I'm thinking of Morbid- and Jaco), but with a few notable exceptions, I couldn't possibly give a fuck less about them.
Here's how the scenario works. You're a major company. You have to keep inventory of the product you sell because your customers don't want to keep inventory. That means that they're not going to put up with long lead times. Either you have the part in stock, or they buy somewhere else. But inventory, ANY inventory, is a waste of your money. That's money you could have invested in something useful. Instead, you've got it invested in something that's not accruing interest and in fact actually costs you money for the warehouse space and man-power necessary to manage that inventory. So the faster you move that inventory, the more liquid your position. And while not having the inventory means not making a sale, the closer to "just enough" that you can get - the less of your capital you have tied up in useless inventory - the happier you are, because you're maximizing your gains.
You don't want to sit on cards for long periods of times. You want something to come in and move right out the door again. Ideally, the moment anything touched your dock, you'd turn around and ship it out again. This concept is known as "turns". The company I work for, we shoot for 12 turns a year. That means, ideally, every month, we've turned our entire inventory. The stuff that came in at the end of January needs to be gone by the end of February. Some things turn faster, some slower, but that's our goal. And we're a stocking supplier. If you look at JiT (Just-in-Time) companies like Dell, they try and push their turns to the sub-day level.
I can't tell you what kind of turns Ben Bleweiss averages. But I can say with a fair degree of certainty that he measures his average turns in days. I'd be shocked if his average turn ever extended out past 2 weeks. Now there are going to be some items, mostly older things with limited play value, that are going to end up sitting for 3 months, but there are also going to be cards they're turning daily.
Why does this matter? Say the price of duals drops a dollar a day for 40 days. The speculator, who's holding on to the cards, just lost $40/ea. on those duals. The store, who has no illusions about stockpiling (because remember, inventory is a necessary evil) the shit out of some duals, is buying and selling every day. Yes, they lose a little bit off the profit of each dual, but since they're constantly selling out of their position and buying back in at a lower price, make up the difference in profit in volume. Rather than making 20 transactions at $15, they're making 22 at $14. Voila, profit!
Perhaps you weren't here for the original discussion, but SCG pushed hard for the repeal of the Reserved List. They stood to make a lot of money off it because Ben and Pete are intelligent businessmen.
I'm so happy you're back to chime in; always so correct regarding the subject of reprints. Level headed instead of utter nonsense whining that comes out of most people's mouths because they have to actually spend money on a hobby.
This is the most intelligent post in the entire thread.
Agreed. When most of the playing population hates the reserve list and the largest store argues against the reserve list, I can't help but wonder who the people are arguing for the reserve list and what their motivation is.
Tom? Is that you? I thought you were going to go work on DnD?
I know right, because people with opposite views than your whiner cry facing about paying money for a hobby clearly equals...
Caught me! Sitting on my inventory of 600 blue dual lands.
Or maybe some would rather not see this CCG go the way of others like Yugioh and Pokemon where nothing holds value.
As strongly as you feel about Legacy costing as little as possible for all parties involved I feel just as strongly that people should have to put in the same amount of effort as I did to get where I am. You cannot go through life expecting everything to be handed to you, you have to work for it. Do people really find this concept that unreasonable? Especially in regards to something as inconsequential for quality of life as a card game. Unfortunately Legacy is going to be out of the price range for some people just like everything else in life, this is the socioeconomic system we live in.
Edit: For the record I own literally zero dual lands. If I want to play Legacy I either borrow them or proxy them for smaller events at my LGS.
You mean like Tarmogoyf? Or Dark Confidant? Or Jace? Or Wasteland? Or Force of Will?
If your argument is that nothing will hold value unless it is on the reserve list, you should realize how wrong you are and that plenty of things hold (and increase) in value despite the fact that none of these cards are on the reserve list.
Tom? Is that you? I thought you were going to go work on DnD?
All of those have been reprinted right? Oh wait no they haven't excluding Wasteland which were both Foil and both small run player/judge rewards.
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