you all make it sound like SCG was the mother ship. The problem is they obviously don't know how to run a business. I mean we just had Eternal Weekend and Card Titan had a ton of people playing Vintage AND Legacy.
Just because SCG can't hold it together, doesn't mean legacy is gone.
This is a little painful, but relatively speaking it's not worse news than SCG cutting the Sunday open altogether. That was the real gut punch, and Legacy has done pretty well since then. We have a growing community here in Utah, and people here tell me that there was zilch even a year ago. That's all since the SCG open changes and general pessimism around the format.
I'll believe this is starting when Star City Games reduces the prices on its 100 volcanic islands from $233 at the lowest. Until then, no reason to panic.Originally Posted by Zooligan
Honestly, people freaking out about card prices is a little silly. I'm willing to take a 50%+ haircut on my legacy collection. I've gotten more than enough enjoyment out of it. How much money have I spent on bullshit in my life with no hope of even partial reimbursement? If I absolutely have no use for my Useas, which cost me $650 for a set, and EDH players give me $250, whatever. I'll live. Buying a collectible hoping for/expecting a payday has never been a sound investment strategy -- see Franklin Mint, comic books, Beanie Babies, etc.
On another topic: I am surprised to hear how much trouble the Tour itself was (apparently) in. It seems a little strange to me that it's so hard to make money off constructed MTG when card prices get out of control so quickly. When you hear about local stores cutting corners, thats one thing -- small-scale businesses have variance in how well they are run and are subject to market pressures -- but SCG is a well-oiled machine with the highest prices in the industry. If they can't figure out a way to generate sustainable revenue from singles sales, entry fees, other products... it makes you wonder how the economies of MTG work at all.
Also: Wizards, its distribution network of LGSes, and SCG have a symbiotic relationship right now when it comes to constructed. SCG is doing a lot of the legwork to run high-level tournaments for Standard. (Didn't Wizards cut the number of GPs recently?) If they were to suddenly stop, I think the impact on Standard card prices would make what might happen to RL staples look like child's play. Without high-level tournaments to play, and artificial scarcity due to changing printing practices, why should a card like Smuggler's Copter ever be a $15 bill for local game stores? LGSes would not be able to afford opening cases and buylisting cards and constructed overall would take a nosedive. That would kill the collectibility of the game forever and take away a lot of the incentive to be a longtime player (which is something Wizards likes to point out). I wonder if that's why Wizards is hyping the collectible lottery with Expeditions and Inventions. But the shine will come off of those if there's no viable format to play them in.
Sorry to rant but every bit of news like this tickles my "Wizards wants this game to be about drafting" conspiracy bone.
Highest prices in the industry when you're selling a commodity isn't a great place to be. Why should anyone buy from SCG? I'm only going to do it if I'm at their event, out of pure convenience.
It does say at the top that the year will consist of 3 seasons, so one would hope there will be 3 Opens + 3 Team Constructed, each with a Legacy classic the following Sunday. Still not great, but can't really say I blame them. It's disappointing to see the Sunday Classics go, but looking at the coverage archive the last few have all pulled <100 players while Modern is pulling at least 50 more. It would be nice if they just offered both, but I'm guessing at some point it's just not worth the overhead of judges, event staff, and table space.
I think the biggest thing is the deep seeded emotional understanding that the right play is the right play regardless of outcomes. The ability to make a decision 5 straight times, lose 5 times because of it, and still make it the 6th time if it's the right play. - Jon Finkel
"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings."
SCG is a card store, it might dominate the standard and limited scene on the east coast, it's not the center of Legacy universe, not even close.
Legacy is a grass-root, community-drive format. It'll be alive as long as Wizard supports it, however tiny support it gets. When Wizard drops support like it did to Extended, Legacy would then die out. I don't see why we care so much about SCG Tour.
SCG is a store which by definition has to sell packs or anyway give sense to their buy, therefore it makes perfectly sense they support very much the new formats
Right. And every time I went to an SCG event, I usually spent about $100 on cards. That's because I knew the trip was coming up, I'd save up, bring trade stuff, decide to pull the trigger on something for my deck, etc. etc. I think the idea that they didn't make any money on Legacy players is bunk, or they wouldn't still be selling Legacy cards for premium prices (they would be trying to liquidate).
The question is how much money do they need to make. From their one post, the indication is that not enough was coming in. That begs the question: What does a company have to do in order to run high-level constructed tournaments? Is it even possible to make this kind of thing work?
There's plenty of information we don't have about this, of course. But all Magic players should be wary of these kinds of pronouncements. They weren't close to shutting down the whole thing because of the ~30 player difference between a Modern classic and a Legacy classic. There are other things going on.
Edit: I was wrong in my last paragraph. I just ran the numbers. Modern Classics did consistently outdraw Legacy by a significant amount.
However, when there was a Modern open and Standard/Legacy classics, the margins were much closer. Legacy actually outdrew Standard in the last three Classics where those were the two options, and two of the last four before that. The widest gulfs in attendance for Legacy and Standard classics in Standard's favor were early in the year.
What happened after that? Well, there were more cards in rotation with the Eldrazi deck, EMA, and CN2. I bet that helped a lot.
To me this data indicates that people want to play non-rotating formats. The highest-attended classic was nearly 400 people for the Modern classic after the Worcester Legacy open (Non-rotating formats!!!) The second-highest was the 266-player Legacy Classic in New Jersey in August. I don't understand how they look at this data and decide that the world needs MORE Standard classics.
Standard cards are far more liquid than Legacy cards. Even though Legacy was outdrawing Standard, people need to buy more cards more often for Standard than Legacy. Would not be surprised if Standard Classics saw an increase of players (if all things remained the same) because rotation happens once a year now instead of twice a year.
What happened after that? Well, there were more cards in rotation with the Eldrazi deck, EMA, and CN2. I bet that helped a lot.
To me this data indicates that people [U
Classics also are kinda just terrible tournaments, which limits their appeal across formats. I don't think SCG wants to accept that. Losing them is annoying mostly because they were a source of weekly paper legacy results, not because they were fantastic tournaments. The root source of this problem seems to be the 2-day opens.
I was willing to go to a Legacy Classic if it were close to NYC just because it was a (moderately) competitive +4 round legacy tournament. But I'm probably never going to go to a Modern one despite playing a decent amount of Modern, because there are just more options for competitive Modern tournaments (PPTQs, etc.) that don't involve much travel. And I think the same is true (and then some) for Standard players.
Even were they to completely get rid of legacy, which may be the future regardless, I think a Saturday Standard Open and a Sunday Modern Open would be much better than having these ugly stepchild Sunday tournaments.
That is what they were doing several years before the whole classic change; there would usually be a Legacy open on Sundays and Standard on Saturdays. That is why there was a huge uproar when they announced the classic change, guess we have finally come full circle.
Honestly, based on attendance numbers, the best move is to make the entire year Modern open, Modern + Legacy Classics. There were five Modern opens with higher attendance than the Standard open with the highest attendance. Modern averaged 769 players over 10 tournaments; Standard was at 592 over 11. (!)
And the data is trending toward Legacy being the secondary format of choice for open attendees. As I said in my last post, Legacy classics have outdrawn Standard each of the last three times they have been head to head, and five of the past seven. In addition, both Legacy opens outdrew every Standard open. (Obviously there are geographical factors at play, but the upshot is people will make time for Legacy.)
I don't believe that the difference in attendance between Standard and Modern can be explained by "people didn't have an outlet for their deck on day 2." If anything, I bet that complaint is more common from Legacy players who get fewer high-level tournaments. They must be making a lot of money off card sales on Standard days to make up for the yawning gulf in attendee revenue. And of course, people buy singles for Modern and Legacy too.
I don't really get what their strategy is. Their willingness to come out and say that they were struggling is indicative of problems beyond "people don't play Legacy."
Yeah, you might be right.
Competitive standard players travel to GPs and grind PPTQs, not the SCG circuit. If SCG wants to build a niche, they should focus on the eternal format of choice, whether that's modern or legacy. They're always going to be the B-league when it comes to standard.
Honestly, so many of my earlier legacy cards have increased in value enough for me to take a 50% haircut and still probably come out ahead. But that's besides the point; my favorite legacy tournaments are still the weekly ones with the same 10-12 people group that fires off every week. Sure, the lack of these scg classics will probably stifle the speed deck innovation, but the format itself changes at a glacial rate anyways. Overall, I do hope that more events like eternal weekend and eternal extravaganza get more people as legacy prices (hopefully) return to a more reasonable range.
As for the reserved list, the primary culprits are still the dual lands. Since wizards does work quite closely with card stores and doesn't want to disrupt their investments too much, I could potentially see a compromise to essentially give these large box stores copies of newly printed dual lands to offset their losses. This would obviously be detrimental to smaller stores and collectors without direct connections to wizards, but Hasbro stands to profit from tapping into a new market with product that will probably have very wide appeal (especially if it is released as an eternal masters set once or twice a year rather than every two years).
As for litigation such a reprinting would cause, Hasbro certainly has a group of high priced lawyers on retainer. I'm sure they will be able to either block any smaller suits before going to court or come to card (rather than cash) settlements. Larger box stores will already have been appeased with essentially free cash (valuable cards they can sell). Sure, it leaves the door open for some sort of class action suit with long term collectors and smaller stores; however if such a case were to really come about, I personally feel that Hasbro has a pretty good shot to win, especially when they are basically creating a whole new line of product that will require minimal R&D and some new art (which most artists would be scrambling to do).
If you're selling them at the highest price and not just listing them at the highest price, that's a great place to be!
I really enjoyed this because it meant that each Sunday, when I finished whatever I was doing today, I sat down and watched the last handful of rounds of coverage. Having fallen out of regularly watching coverage, I find myself forgetting to watch it when it does finally come back around. I haven't watched a full round of MTG on stream since... GP Seattle?
The aspect I can't figure out is why they're capping Sundays at 2 big events. Running the Open format again seems fine, but if they're going to have a semi-arbitrary number for how many to run, the number of major formats seems like a good one to pick.
The potential downside, of course, is that attendance disperses among the 3 events and Classic attendance falls even further. It looks like they've been average paying around 120% in tix->credit. Collecting $5K to do $6K in sales, at margin, is probably borderline worth it but something of a loss-leader - the Classics do add value to the Open/weekend/card-acquisitioning/sales, so they probably accept that (and occasionally they have a bigger turnout and make more). If the Classics numbers diminished further (like if they added a 3rd one each week), it would become a more serious hit.
Obvious solution: scale prize support to attendance. Put 160 tix/player in the pool and pay out in predictable percentages, with invites extended at certain cutoffs. This means less of a guaranteed payout, which might be off-putting to some, but no one is that excited about Classic payout anyway. They'll likely draw more people who want to play Legacy than they'll lose for not guaranteeing more fun bucks in the side event.
Yes. So I can post this again.
It's worth remembering that when Wizards held some closed-door discussions about the Reserved List years ago, Ben Bleiweiss was one of the people they invited.
So SCG has had a seat at the table about these things, and as far as we know, they were (and presumably still are) anti-Reserved List. Putting more stock into the market lets them make up in volume what they lose on any given sale.
Star City Games knows exactly how to run a business. I think they're run far more intelligently than Wizards of the Coast is. This decision sucks for Legacy players, but I don't think it's bad from a business perspective by any means. Wizards of the Coast is the one that makes perpetually dumb business decisions and stays in business only because the game can run on its own fumes at this point.
There have been several articles on StarCityGames.com, including The first result on Google for "starcitygames reserved list" in which an SCG writer, in this case, Ben Bleiweiss himself, argues against the reserved list.
If you dig a bit further, Ben has also written about his trip to Washington, as well.
I am, and we as a company, would still love to see the Reserve List abolished. Our position on this has not changed.
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