SCG increases the price of FoW

[GoblinSettler]

Still, I wouldn't be surprised to see FoW reprinted in the next FTV.

Or maybe they just found out that it is not reprinted.

[Erdvermampfa]

Or maybe they just found out that it is not reprinted.

I've quite shaken off the feeling that SCG has a lot more access to information regarding upcoming prints and reprints of cards. I wouldn't be surprised at all if someone revealed some kind of direct bondage between wizards and scg...

[SpikeyMikey]

Or maybe they just found out that it is not reprinted.

This was my first thought upon seeing this thread.

I've thought about the forgery thing before. The problem is, I don't have the know how to do it and I wouldn't really be interested in trying to make a business out of it; at least, not to the point where it would be worth buying a printing press and spending a couple months educating myself and perfecting the process.

You'd have to diversify your distribution methods, some random no name suddenly selling off thousands of dual lands would trip warning bells. And slowly leaking them out seems like way too much work. Not that the money wouldn't be good, but I prefer the ease of my current job, even if I could make more peddling old Legacy cards. I know there are counterfeit cards out there, I remember reading an article on it a few years back, it even talked about counterfeit sealed product from Asia. Link: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazin...om/feature/209

But yeah, I hope the forgers out there kick up the pace a bit. I don't really care if my dual lands are real, as long as I can use them to play with and they look better than sharpie on the back of a junk common.

[(nameless one)]

I've quite shaken off the feeling that SCG has a lot more access to information regarding upcoming prints and reprints of cards. I wouldn't be surprised at all if someone revealed some kind of direct bondage between wizards and scg...

Of course they're connected in some way. It's like the unseen bond. WotC makes money off of SCG and SCG does the same with WotC.

I wouldn't be surprised if SCG was behind the whole "closing the loophole on Reserved list" movement. This enables SCG to monopolize eternal cards while WotC still gets SCG's business.

[Asthereal]

They up the price because people buy the cards for that higher price.
If people don't, they will lower the price again.
It's not that complicated.

Let's say you have a diner, where many people come for a cup of coffee.
You sell your coffee at $2 per cup. Lots of people drink it.
Wouldn't you ever wonder if you'd sell the same amount of coffee if you asked $2,50?
If people'd buy the coffee anyway, you'd make more money if you asked for $0,50 more.

SCG does what any normal shop would do: figure out how to make money.
If they'd stop doing that, they'd go bankrupt at some stage.

[Tylert]

They up the price because people buy the cards for that higher price.
If people don't, they will lower the price again.
It's not that complicated.

Lert's say you have a diner, where many people come for a cup of coffee.
You sell your coffee at $2 per cup. Lots of people drink it.
Wouldn't you ever wonder if you'd sell the same amount of coffee if you asked $2,50?
If people'd buy the coffee anyway, you'd make more money if you asked for $0,50 more.

SCG does what any normal shop would do: figure out how to make money.
If they'd stop doing that, they'd go bankrupt at some stage.

It's not exactly that. To sell cards, SCG needs to have some supply. no cards = No money.
If a card sells to fast for them to keep some in the inventory, they have to raise the buy price so people sell to them. If they keep the same selling price, then they will lower their margin, so they rise the selling price...

[clavio]

This is fucking ridiculous. It's really hard to get my non-legacy friends to take the plunge when the buy in is so high.

I've quite shaken off the feeling that SCG has a lot more access to information regarding upcoming prints and reprints of cards. I wouldn't be surprised at all if someone revealed some kind of direct bondage between wizards and scg...

They significantly raised their buy prices right before the Zen "priceless treasures". They know what's up.

I'd be surprised if no one who hasn't already done it.

That sentence is a fucking puzzle.

[Asthereal]

It's not exactly that. To sell cards, SCG needs to have some supply. no cards = No money.
If a card sells to fast for them to keep some in the inventory, they have to raise the buy price so people sell to them. If they keep the same selling price, then they will lower their margin, so they rise the selling price...

In short, they try to make money.
Of course your explanation is more precise, but it all boils down to commercial thinking.
If they do this wrong, they go out of business. So they do this right.

Of course I'd rather pay $2,00 for my coffee, but I prefer to have the chance to pay $2,50 for my coffee than to not be able to buy coffee at all.

And seriously, there's MCM, eBay, local traders and I know not what to get your cards from. If SCG prices itself out of the market, we wil just get cards elsewhere. If it turns out that everyone follows the price increase from SCG, AND we all keep buying, this just means they are right to increase the price, and we should stop wining.

[ReAnimator]

Ok for the people suggesting that you could easily counterfeit cards, you are sadly misinformed. There used to be a lot of counterfeiting in the 90's but the cards never looked good, or felt remotely close.

You can't duplicate what cards look like on a laser or injet printer, the types of large offset printers that cards are printed on are worth millions of dollars and are larger than your average house. Also the cardstock will never be right either, you can't just buy that stuff at staples, you ever rip a card in half? there is a layer of blue paper in the middle of every card, it's not just normal printer cardstock.

If someone was to print realistic passable counterfeits you'd need access to a real printing warehouse, order the correct stock, have all the die cutting set up etc. It would have to be done by a group of people who are all in on it who already run this sort of operation, where would the incentive be to commit a major crime and conspiracy with many people as opposed to just running a large scale print shop and doing normal jobs? and at the volumes it would take to actually do this profitably you think no one would notice that there are now hundreds and thousands of extra cards on the market? cause otherwise it's not really worth doing.
The only way you could possibly do this is if you did it in china and bribed the right people, while having a bunch of connections. There have been a lot of counterfeit Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh cards done that way, but they were never passable other than to 8 year olds.

[ReAnimator]

Of course they're connected in some way. It's like the unseen bond. WotC makes money off of SCG and SCG does the same with WotC.

I wouldn't be surprised if SCG was behind the whole "closing the loophole on Reserved list" movement. This enables SCG to monopolize eternal cards while WotC still gets SCG's business.

Ben B at SCG has publicly stated he was flow to Wotc headquarters with a lot of the other big retailers like T&T and advised Wotc to abolish the reserve list, he is totally against it. JFC calm down with these conspiracy theories they are nonsense and totally dismissed by you know actual facts and things that happened.

[Oiolosse]

...If SCG prices itself out of the market, we wil just get cards elsewhere. If it turns out that everyone follows the price increase from SCG, AND we all keep buying, this just means they are right to increase the price, and we should stop wining.

I know what you are saying here but let me just add that responding to market demand in a natural manner by increasing price is done in more of a continuous fashion. It can't be truly continuous of course but the discrete moments in which they raise their prices would be more often and not so considerable. After all, we need to ask ourselves, what made them increase their prices on FoW so dramatically and why right now? Why not before the GP?

Haha, maybe they know that FTV WILL have FoW. They raise prices, people think think that FTW will NOT have FoW so they gobble them up in case there is a further price hike...then BAM, FoW is printed in FTV but we won't really care because we are happy that it's printed and the price will come down a bit (maybe) and we'll be thankful...yadda yadda, man fuck SCG and their price hikes. They raise their prices and everybody follows.

Also! This is a game in which the quantity of cards printed is ultimately dictated by one entity. Hasbro. It's not like SCG is selling tacos for 5.00 and so everybody ups their prices...Pedro down the way is still gonna cook them up at 2.00, because he creates them and his margin is unchanged. His ingredients still cost him the same amount. When the selling price of cards goes up, the buying price goes up. Collectibles have this problem.

[bruizar]

How many years did we have to acquire 4 Force of Wills again before the price hike? stop complaining. SCG is a store and they can price the cards however they want.

[Ayotte]

Ok for the people suggesting that you could easily counterfeit cards, you are sadly misinformed. There used to be a lot of counterfeiting in the 90's but the cards never looked good, or felt remotely close.

You can't duplicate what cards look like on a laser or injet printer, the types of large offset printers that cards are printed on are worth millions of dollars and are larger than your average house. Also the cardstock will never be right either, you can't just buy that stuff at staples, you ever rip a card in half? there is a layer of blue paper in the middle of every card, it's not just normal printer cardstock.

If someone was to print realistic passable counterfeits you'd need access to a real printing warehouse, order the correct stock, have all the die cutting set up etc. It would have to be done by a group of people who are all in on it who already run this sort of operation, where would the incentive be to commit a major crime and conspiracy with many people as opposed to just running a large scale print shop and doing normal jobs? and at the volumes it would take to actually do this profitably you think no one would notice that there are now hundreds and thousands of extra cards on the market? cause otherwise it's not really worth doing.
The only way you could possibly do this is if you did it in china and bribed the right people, while having a bunch of connections. There have been a lot of counterfeit Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh cards done that way, but they were never passable other than to 8 year olds.

What about something like this?

I saw that the other day and I wondered how easy it would be to use collector's edition cards that are altered to be borderless at a tournament. It's not like anyone will pull the card out of your sleeve to see the back.

Regarding SCG's price jumps, I heard that last week, people were buying Jace's for $100 on ebay and selling them to SCG for $120, lol. When they raise their buy price by so much, they're effectively able to corner the market by buying every version of a card that is currently for sale.

I still don't understand why people buy cards from SCG when they can just go to tcgplayer and get them for so much cheaper, not to mention ebay.

[Kuma]

I think Ben Bleiweiss got tired of being wrong in his prediction a couple of years ago that Force of Will would be a $100 card so he made it come true.

In all seriousness though, they're still like $55-$60 on ebay. Just buy them there.

[ReAnimator]

They significantly raised their buy prices right before the Zen "priceless treasures". They know what's up.

Uh cause Wotc actually purchased cards from them and Troll and Toad, and ebay etc. It was impossible for Wotc to do what they did without any of the sellers noticing.

This is all public record and mentioned in articles etc.

This thread is so full of stupid it's alarming.

[Nidd]

How many years did we have to acquire 4 Force of Wills again before the price hike? stop complaining. SCG is a store and they can price the cards however they want.

I have owned about 6 different playsets of Force of Will over the last 3 years, each and every copy was bought with the intention of playing it and then the price rose by such an amount that I couldn't defend owning them instead of, you know, selling them and paying my rent for 2-3 months with the money.

But this is not about a single person. This is about the apparent main supplier increasing the god damn price of format staples by a whopping 50%.
Ask yourselves when you've heard of such a large price increase the last time. From an economic standpoint alone, I find this to be bonkers and I can't help it but call anyone who's buying his cards at SCG insane.

[bruizar]

Well, something has to fuel the tournaments they run, and there is no shame in wanting to get rich for running a business.

If the format starts hurting (i.e.: shrinking), demand will drop, prices will normalise and SCG will have to sell their stock for less than they intended. if the format is healthy than no problem. Even the newcomers can STILL make money by collecting money rares from drafts or buying into a card that spikes up (bonfire, goyf, jace, etc etc). That money can be spent on legacy if they want, or on rent, which ever comes first.

[lyracian]

How many years did we have to acquire 4 Force of Wills again before the price hike? stop complaining. SCG is a store and they can price the cards however they want.

For the folk that just started playing; hardly any time at all. Unless you have a lot of cash or buy a collection it is difficult for new players to get started in Legacy.

Sure the format may be "healthy" in some areas but it just gets harder and harder to get new players in to Legacy. This will just see more people moving to Modern.

[(nameless one)]

Ben B at SCG has publicly stated he was flow to Wotc headquarters with a lot of the other big retailers like T&T and advised Wotc to abolish the reserve list, he is totally against it. JFC calm down with these conspiracy theories they are nonsense and totally dismissed by you know actual facts and things that happened.

Bill Clinton also publicly stated he did not have sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

[Tammit67]

How many years did we have to acquire 4 Force of Wills again before the price hike? stop complaining. SCG is a store and they can price the cards however they want.

My real issue with SCG setting prices however they want is they basically dictate how every other store buy/sells cards for. SCG prices are the guideline every other trader/store/site uses in their own dealings.

I just don't want new players priced out of this format