If you want to have a conversation over an issue you have to at some point discuss it's causes.Originally Posted by MaximumC
It is better to ask and look stupid then keep your mouth shut and remain so.
I hope your afterlife is filled with eternal torment.
Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
Like so many things, market value is a matter of perception. Sold my entire collection (well, I kept my D+T deck) just a few hours ago...$43,000. We think of the cash as having stable value, but even that is simply based upon a market. So honestly we traded cardboard for paper greenbacks.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
"Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason."
"Governing is too important to be left to people as silly as politicians."
"Politicians were mostly people who'd had too little morals and ethics to stay lawyers."
We never should have ditched the gold standard.
Actually we never did, it just that that gold isn't the obvious choice these days: real estate, dollars, yen, and MtG-cards (so it seems) are the new golden standard
But, good God! $ 43,000... That's a lot...
"Be it ever so crumbled, there's no place like home."
RGCL (GQ)
Youtube-playlist dedicated to RGCL
Well as long as we're going totally abstract and reducing it down to "traded item for item", if what you're saying is true then you just sold a mess of toys aimed at teenagers for more money than I make in a year and a half. Good on ya, but it still begs the question for a lot of people as to whether or not the initial investment makes sense at *this point* in the game. Some people having been buying in since Alpha, but someone just learning the game today is going to listen to a podcast like Tolarian Community College's talk about the harm that the lack meaningful reprints are doing to the game and ask themselves if it's worth their preferred "unit of perceived value". Increasingly, that answer will demand a higher and higher price point.
On a half-related note -- do you think these counterfeiters would accept custom orders for cards that were clearly never printed, but still passable? I don't mean like shitty card creation thread cards, I mean like... Future Sight bordered Progenitus or new-border reprints of ante cards, dumb stuff like that. You know, for lulz.
Yea, but that is also the point. Someone who bought into type 1.5 in the tail end of 03 will have seen their collection do better than the stock market. Think about that.
Where the hell do you find someone with 4K to spend on cards though?
It is better to ask and look stupid then keep your mouth shut and remain so.
I hope your afterlife is filled with eternal torment.
Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
SourceThe gold standard is a monetary system where a country's currency or paper money has a value directly linked to gold. With the gold standard, countries agreed to convert paper money into a fixed amount of gold. A country that uses the gold standard sets a fixed price for gold and buys and sells gold at that price.
The interwebz says Switzerland was the last country to abandon the gold standard (which it did in 1999).
Except it can't just be that. If someone decided that it was just "insane" to pay $150.00 for a Tarmagoyf, they'd chuckle and move on with life. Instead, people are motivated to complain about the fact that this is the price. That is, they make a value judgment that something is "wrong" with a system where people are willing to pay that much for a Magic card. So, yeah, there is some "good" and "bad" judgments going on.
My point was just that the mechanism causing the current prices is well-understood: high demand due to a larger player base and a supply side economy that is ruthlessly efficient and smoking out the highest possible price point the market will bear. Whether you think this is a good thing ("The free market is always right. Someone will pay this price, so the price is right!") or a bad thing ("If I want to play Modern, I have to pay as much as I would for a used car. That's not fair!") depends entirely on your personal preferences.
That would be true if it was only the Reserve List that was causing cards to grow in value beyond what you might expect for a Card Game For Babies. But, it's not. Standard regularly sees $20.00 - $50.00 staples. Modern sees staples from $100 - $200. The Reserve List has nothing to do with those prices. I get that the Reserve List is a contributor to a lot of recent spikes in light of Eternal Masters, but it's hardly the ROOT OF ALL PRICE EVILS.
Comparing Magic to the stock market is misleading.
I mean, if you were investing in the collectibles market in the 90s, most of what you might choose to invest in would have tanked and tanked hard. Sports cards, Beanie Babies... they just flopped. Heck, even other card games -- good ones, like Five Rings or Vampire -- evaporated. Somehow, Magic hung on and grew. That was something that I don't think you could have predicted legitimately at the time. Paying 4k for Magic Cards would have been an extremely high-risk proposition.
And that's the better point here. While it's true that the "stock market" in general did not gain as much as Magic Cards did in the same time period, that's because you're comparing apples to oranges. Don't look at large, safe portfolios that rise and fall with the market at large. That's not what Magic was. Look at small, new companies with high-risk, high-reward propositions. Stocks that no one would realistically invest their retirement in. Like, the flood of tech company startups around the same time. Some flopped, some hit HARD. THAT'S the comparison.
Magic was not the stock market. It was a high-risk, high-reward investment in a specific start up company. Most of the time, that kind of investment falls on its face. However, every now and then, you strike gold.
I was not talking about playing the game like a stock market, I was talking about just buying into the game. If you just bought into the game and played it and at the same time made other investments, your random cardstock that you bought to play a game have done better than any stock you bought that was not Apple. That's mindblowing.
Also, sure, you can play magic as a stock market, but in 03 no one I know was doing that unlike today....
It is better to ask and look stupid then keep your mouth shut and remain so.
I hope your afterlife is filled with eternal torment.
Fuck. Which one of my quotes do I drop for this?
True dat. The finance community is absolutely mind-blowing in its scope nowadays. And the change has been FAST. Not even a year ago you could buy cards that saw play in the top 8 of a Grand Prix that weekend if you wanted, and the price would creep up over the next week. Now, suddenly, if you try to buy cards WHILE THEY ARE ON CAMERA the price is spiking and your order is being cancelled.
Inevitable? Maybe. But, it's certainly different.
I, for one, welcome our counterfeiting overlords at this time. They are not unequivocally bad for the game. They are potentially bad for the game from certain perspectives and under certain conditions. I will elaborate.
We're talking about flows of cardboard, flows of currency, and libidinal investment in a card-playing experience. As a player, my interest is in maximizing the pleasure of playing the game, which requires me to achieve a certain flow of cardboard into my collection. The flow of currency out of my bank account is to be minimized.
The game's producers have different goals. Their interest is rather in maximizing the flow of currency out of my bank account, and all other factors for them are trade-offs. They don't have to care about the volume of cardboard going in except insofar as this influences future purchases. They don't have any direct access to my experience of playing the game, but they do make considerable effort to keep the metagame healthy (both by bannings and new printings).
What a counterfeiter does is increase the volume of cardboard available to me without influencing game play in most circumstances. Only when they challenge the stability of Wizards as a whole could this become an issue for me, but by then I'll probably have all the cards anyway, and the local Legacy community will probably keep on playing just as they've always done.
Compare counterfeiters to speculators. Which one does me, the playing consumer, a service and which a disservice? The speculator does everything he can to lower the supply of cards, buying them out, selling to me at a higher price. The counterfeiter does everything he can to increase the supply of cards, sneaking them into the market, and probably not giving me any trouble about the price. I get the same thing for less money.
If Wizards doesn't like it, there's plenty they can do to stop it.
Last edited by Lormador; 06-02-2016 at 05:24 AM.
Amen!
For all the elaboration, your post boils down to: "Meh, counterfeiting won't be big enough to impact the game, so who cares."
Allow me to present the contrary view. For full disclosure, this is coming from someone who is firmly a player, not a speculator in the slightest, but someone who does own most (not quite all) of the playable cards in Legacy and Vintage, but who also likes to have a cube, a bunch of EDH and casual decks, and other stuff on tap.
Counterfeits are bad and you should feel bad.
There's only two places where you would play counterfeits - in sanctioned events, and not in sanctioned events. With me so far? If you're bringing counterfeits to sanctioned events, you're lying to people. You are representing to your opponents, the TO, and Wizards that you have legitimate copies of the cards you are playing when in fact you do not own them. Oh, I know, people quibble with this, saying that "I'm not actually hurting anyone" and so on. That dodges the issue: you're lying to people. I think a person's honesty and integrity counts for something.
Okay, so what about non-sanctioned events or casual play? This is where people use counterfeits but disclose them as such, so there's no dishonesty involved. That's fine. But, once you remove the veil of dishonesty, there is no more need for you to use counterfeit cards at all. You can sharpie a basic land, but if that's not your style -- and I can't blame you -- then just make, print, or order a cheap play test card from Etsy or something that LOOKS good but doesn't look exactly like the genuine article. If you're not trying to pass it off as real, who cares? Frankly, I think it's way cooler if someone has a well-done playtest card in a cube than the original.
Which all brings us back to your point, Lormador. Assuming we're not sneaking counterfeits into tournaments, why should one prefer a good play test card to a good counterfeit? What's the harm?
The harm is that you're contributing to a long-term problem. A time bomb. When you buy a counterfeit, you're fueling demand for people to make them. And, demand matters. Look at what has happened to Magic prices recently. The speculator community has certainly contributed to the pace of increases, but the prices are only sticky because people (somewhere) are willing to pay. Demand matters, and demand fuels the decisions of counterfeiters. The larger and better the counterfeit industry gets, the more and more erosion you will see in buyer confidence. At some critical threshold -- I can't tell you when -- I think you'll see price skyrocket as stores charge a premium for "certified" genuine cards.
Apart from that, when you take counterfeits into your collection, you are setting someone up in the future for bad times. Someday your collection will be sold or traded, and those cards may drift around into someone else's hands. That person, in turn, may either get disqualified or worse if they pass it off as real.
Your point was that you think your individual contribution to both problems are small, so who cares. Well, that's true with any large-scale problem. It's like voting for Donald Trump. Your vote might not individually count for much, but a reality TV star can't actually be President unless people individually make the choice to propel him to that office.
And, besides that, since the only non-dishonest demand for counterfeits (casual play) can be satisfied with play-test cards that do not even begin to create these kind of problems -- why on Earth would you opt for the counterfeit?
Like what? Reprint cards into the dirt? Allow people to order singles for a set price maximum to prevent cards from inflating? Sell Collector's Editions containing all the copies of every card anyone ever needs?
Look, I completely agree that card prices are out of control, but the mentality of "RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE" represented by these concepts is just juvenile. Having SOME cards at a high price has benefits for the game. Black Lotus has a mystique that it would not have if you could order one for $20.00 from Wizards whenever you want. Enforcing set card prices would dramatically change the secondary market's desire to crack packs to pre-sell or otherwise re-sell cards, which would in turn cut Wizard's sales to some degree. Lower card prices means stores make less money selling singles, and this means less money available to fund events. Enforcing a cap on prices would probably bankrupt stores with large stocks of expensive cards by crushing the value of their inventory over night.
Wizards knows card prices are problematic. They're doing what they feel like they can to help. People complaint about the print run of Modern Masters and such, but for Pete's sake, they're practically FARTING quality reprints nowadays. Between Commander, MM, MM2, Conspiracy, Conspiracy 2, and EM, they've been throwing reprints of high-quality older cards out the door at an insane clip. They're being careful not to reprint them into the dirt, but they're still reprinting them and the pace seems to be increasing. Remember, this season we get a Commander set, EM, and Conspiracy 2 all in the same summer!
So... let's just settle down and get off the whole "Hah, I'm totally justified in lying to people and funding criminals in China because Wizards won't do what I want!" high horse.
good. very good.
not quite true. frankly, the game functions equally on card artwork as on card text. especially given the diversity of legacy strategies and available sets, having the correct artwork is key to quick grokking of the game state. related to this and your later points, can you point the forum to examples of nice Etsy playtest cards?
this last part is essentially already true—a store pays buylist prices for cards, assumes the risk, and you (consumers) pay retail.
This assumes you don't mark them. I've got a whole bunch of these things and the backs are sharpied to indicate. They're also not double-sleeved. I also use them only in our weekly proxy legacy nights and boozed-up commander get-togethers.
don't forget the 'Murica part.
There are a few weasel words here. "Farting" is a particularly egregious one as there is mathematically sound reasoning (the case of Bob, Goyf) that the reprints Wizards are making are of insufficient quantity to change the price (ergo, supply is insufficient). Reprints as part of boosters with this ludicrous "Mythic" rarity also contribute to the EV/MSRP dance. Wizards are essentially just-barely-not-reprinting cards, and major retailers "preselling" aren't helping. At SCG, the mythics in EMA have seen only modest reductions in their sell price (Karakas excepted and lets not talk about Mana Vault in the legacy context) and only a couple of the rares have seen proper reductions in their price relative to availability (Gamble, Sinkhole, Entomb).
I think the larger point that we all need to keep in mind here is about exactly what we're paying for when we buy Magic cards.
We're paying for information. A set of rules and a set of valid pieces. You're taking a shortcut from seeing the information on mythic spoiler and writing out the card values on index cards, with some nice art and some development time to make sure the cards play nice together. In a world where there are no constructed formats, this is a perfect way to design the distribution and packaging of the game.
Then the cash grab of constructed comes in. Bomb mythics sold at 1/8 packs replacing rares in packs with randomized content? This is the part contributing to elevated prices, prerelease speculation, and buyouts.
I mean, I like being able to pay drafters to open packs for me at a lowered rate to acquire the constructed-level cards i want. And I like stores doing the legwork to find cards and hold stock for me. I like that Wizards makes nice artwork and good tempting and decent story/lore to make it more than mathematics. I'm willing to pay a premium for that. But what i care about more than anything is having Legacy opponents—opponents who aren't on burn or maneless dredge half the time. (with apologies to Patrick Sullivan and burn players on his level). And unless the supply of powerful cards from the past increases at a rate sufficient enough to drastically reduce prices, we're in a river heading only one direction—too expensive to justify playing.
So, I agree that the economics of the game is a supply-side problem (and not just in eternal formats). Its why I've picked up a whole load of obvious and subsequently-marked-as-such Chinese versions of cards so as not to contribute to demand in the "real" marketplace and as not to reduce the supply. Its because I play the game to play, and not to collect or make money from cardboard. And if Wizards would print a new CE for eternal formats only, I'd buy it so fast it'd make your head spin.
one final thought: the friend of mine who has been handling placing orders for these chinese versions has been doing so in order to leave entire Legacy decks in his safe rather than take them out weekly…because the value of the decks is too high to risk. When you think about it that way—something has to give.
coda: anyone taking bets on how long its gonna take MTGO to become subscription-based with full card availability?
@warfordium on twitter.
Sure. Here's a few stores expressly selling Playtest cards. (They call them "proxy," but that's not the right terminology anymore.)
https://www.etsy.com/shop/AllNightTh...hopheader-name
https://www.etsy.com/shop/MTGKUN?ref=l2-shopheader-name
In addition, there's a surfeit of people on Etsy peddling counterfeits (I'm not sure why they have not been shut down, and they're spreading over time!) but even these folks are willing to print whatever you want on the card. You can get some good images of clearly-not-legit MTG cards out there and ask them to create them for you, and they're usually cooperative. Anything to increase the market for playtest cards and reduce the market for counterfeits, in my book.
I don't buy the "grokkin" argument because typically someone is not going to playtest out the entire deck, just the expensive part. It's easy to see that card such-and-such is a full art Plateau, for example, particularly if it's sitting in a pile of lands. I suppose you could run into trouble if you have an EDH table where everyone has full grips of playtest cards but, come on, everyone starts with SOME amount of legit cards.
Well... maybe. I'm not sure a simple sharpie mark is enough to move something from the counterfeit category into the playtest category. I've got one Bayou, for example, that has a pen mark on the back. Gotta play it in a sleeve. But, it's legitimate. Plus, if you got a sharpie and wrote "IMA FAKE" on the back, no one is going to see it during regular play, and you've already helped fund the Chinese Mafia or whatever. I mean, I appreciate that it's a good way to avoid being dishonest, so that's good, but if you're going to mark it anyway, why not just use a grokkable custom image on the front?
Right, sorry.
Yeah, well, I don't know the units of conversion between one Fart (frt) and a playset of Tarmagoyfs, that is true.
But, I do know that reprint sets are coming out more frequently than before. They dumped the core set, so we no longer get our yearly reprint of Giant Spider and instead we get frequent reprints of powerhouse cards. They started slow. That seems fair. But, now, the pace is increasing. Maybe the set print run isn't up, but the number of sets is, so... it seems like they deserve a little credit.
Eh... you're paying for a few things.
1. The Intrinsic Value of Cardboard and Fresh Ink Smell (TM)
2. The capitalistic dopamine release of buying something / collecting something you want.
3. The right to participate in sanctioned events using this card.
4. The ability to use the card to play casually at home and avoid the cost of making a card yourself.
5. The belief that you can re-sell the card later on to recoup some or all of your cost, or to make a profit.
6. The desire to support Wizards or your local store.
Now, I think the only things on this list that have a major impact on the price are 2, 3, 4, and 5; I think the others are vanishingly small.
I don't think there is a realistic way for them to do this given Magic's model. Perhaps a subscription based service allowing you to play the current Top 8 decks in a format, or something like that. Kind of like they used to sell the World Champion decks with different backs. Otherwise, I don't think this idea is compatible with MTG.
I have no problem with exceptional quality fakes, at least someone is helping eternal stay alive.
Unless you know for a fact 100% its fake without tearing it apart(because you can be destroying real stuff and now you feel stupid).
Then that's on you and you alone to keep your mouth shut about it.
If you don't know and can't tell the difference then just say it's real and move on with life.
There's a lot of moralizing going on here, particularly regarding the choice to purchase counterfeits, or the conditions under which counterfeits may be acceptably used. I'd like to take a look at this from a purely economic perspective for a moment instead. After all, if moral judgments are consequences of the same material foundation that produces the economic relations under discussion, they won't necessarily have the kind of transcendent basis for judgment that they really need to function "according to their label."
Economic theory begins with identifying the actors involved, and the empirical branch of the science is then used to see how well models predict their behavior. We've got players, Wizards, the LGS, speculators, and counterfeiters. Each has their own interest and strategies for achieving their goals. We ask ourselves under what conditions these actors are going to exist.
Players: want a fun game, cheap cardboard, a strong LGS, many other players, and big tournaments (especially Legacy tournaments)
Wizards: wants people to buy packs
The LGS: wants people to buy whatever's on their shelves, has an investment in the cardboard they've already acquired
Speculator: wants big tournaments, metagame fluctuations, controlled supply, high and sticky card prices
Counterfeiter: same as speculator without control of the supply
It's clear that both speculator and counterfeiter depend directly on high secondary market card prices to exist: that is the single most important condition that will give rise to both.
There are two claims offered in this thread, one that counterfeiters are good for the players and one that they are bad. It's easy to see now that both of these are true to some extent. While counterfeiters depend on a high price for the cardboard, their own activity erodes that value, resulting in cheap cardboard for the players. There's also no damage to the game play itself because counterfeiters are only copying existing cards: and most desirable ones at that. The first two interests I've listed for the players are well served by counterfeiters.
However, it's also clear that there's a relation here between high card prices and the LGS. Most local game stores that provide singles, if they provide Legacy singles, have a significant investment in those cards. I've never operated a store, but I think it's safe to say that some of them might even have to close their doors if that investment suddenly vanished. I doubt that many of them have hedged against this risk, and although a credit swap is theoretically possible, I know of no financial instruments offering this service for Magic cards. A strong LGS is a very high priority for players, adding a lot of charm to the game and enabling the baseline experience of a majority of competitive players.
Yet I think the interactions here are very complicated and unclear, with the LGS also selling numerous other products, serving to inspect cardboard coming in with a fair amount of rigor, potentially profiting hugely by distributing counterfeits, etc. Still, the claim that Wizards does what it does, which seems to us players as so annoying, in order to protect the LGSs on which the game depends appears to have force.
As for Wizards, they could undercut every counterfeiter and speculator with ease if they chose to. There are numerous enforcement options they could attempt, if they thought these were worthwhile. They don't need to care about the secondary market except insofar as it impacts the LGSs.
Your points on the economic issues at play are well-taken, and I don't disagree. Isn't there something missing if one tries to drain all the morality out of the equation, though?
I don't think it's unfair to suggest that dishonesty, certainly when coupled with dishonesty leading to economic advantage is considered "bad" and "immoral." I'm hard pressed to think of a moral or ethical system that endorses lying or misrepresentation. And, as I mentioned in my last few posts, representing counterfeit cards as the real deal (by selling them, trading them, or playing with counterfeits in sanctioned tournaments) is a misrepresentation.
Of course, players have contrary desires. Legacy players want large tournaments and so some might be willing to turn a blind eye to counterfeits to get attendance up. Players have a desire to play with the most powerful decks but don't want to spend thousands of dollars. These, and other desires, certainly may lead some to feel like the dishonesty is "worth it." I understand that perspective.
But, that does not suggest we should stop calling a duck a duck. If you are sneaking counterfeits into a Legacy Open, you're lying to your opponents and the tournament organizer. If you think that's a fine thing to do due to other desires, then that's a decision for you to make. Hand-waving away this moral decision is just a way to feel more comfortable about what you're doing without really facing reality.
Every couple of days I'm reminded why Reddit is cancer. The amount of misinformation in that sub/thread is staggering, as if people are actively letting themselves get duped by fakes so that they can claim that they are indistinguishable from the real thing. There are currently at least 3 "tests" that fakes will never pass, 2 of which don't even require the card be present. And they don't require a loupe.
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
I don't think the thread is going overboard about the quality of the fakes; just pointing out that they are indeed being used in tournaments AND being shipped to dealers on the secondary market. They're being caught, but they're good enough to get past some players and cause trouble.
This is my favorite quote from that Reddit thread:
"But this sub told me that fakes were so people could play Legacy on a budget, not so people can try and pass them off as real on the secondary market!"
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