No, the reserved list can't and won't be reversed. Not tomorrow or in any relevant time frame.Originally Posted by SMR0079
Wizards flew a panel of knowledgeable people out to Renton last year to discuss the reserved list. That panel overwhelmingly recommended getting rid of the reserved list. Wizards R&D was publicly overwhlemingly supportive of getting rid of the reserved list.
Despite the above, Wizards hardened their reserved list policy - not only not eliminated it, made it worse. There was (quite likely accurate) speculation that Wizards faced external pressure that forced their hand.
The reserved list is not changing.
“It's possible. But it involves... {checks archives} Nature's Revolt, Opalescence, two Unstable Shapeshifters (one of which started as a Doppelganger), a Tide, an animated land, a creature with Fading, a Silver Wyvern, some way to get a creature into play in response to stuff, some way to get a land into play in response to stuff (a different land from the animated land), and one heck of a Rube Goldberg timing diagram.”
-David DeLaney
That doesn't stop similar cards from seeing print in the future; even a format where Candelabra of Tawnos et. al. was banned, and some quasi-candelabra variant is printed instead.
Level 2 Judge
Owner, Tales of Adventure Comics and Games, Coopersburg, PA
I'm familiair with what occured, but you are absoloutly incorrect to say that the reserved list "can't" be reversed. While it's not likley that it will be reversed in the near future, a change of opinion or leadership is all that is needed for policy to change.
I actually agree that the everything pre-revised should stay on the list, but Duals and the rest shoudl be fair game.
Calls for banning are almost always the scrubs way out. Real men view a challenge as something to overcome, a puzzle to solve, an opportunity to be had, and the source of evolution.
They did that, with Magus of the XXXX. They all suck because they are open to spot removal that almost every deck in Legacy has packed in mainboard, baring a few.
WoTC has promised that they will not take any cards off the reserved list. They still do however, retain the right to abolish it entirely.
Bottom line, they are a business, and businesses have a right to change their policies or ideas.
Now, if WoTC would ever realize that Legacy is booming and would like to get in on the profit without causing a legal ruckus, there are also ways of reprinting a majority of the reserved cards be getting around the reserved list. For instance,
-Snow Covered Dual lands
-Moat that costs 1or 3
-A candelabra that says "X,tap; Tap OR UNTAP X lands you control"
-A Tabernacle that makes you pay during your draw step
-TriLands that are shocks, EX MountainPlainsSwamp that comes into play tapped unless you pay 2 life (most likely, 3 4 and 5 color decks would run these along with duals, thus lowering the demand for them)
-Also, if WoTC were a wise business, they could release something similar to the DeckBuilders Toolkit, except for Legacy, featuring all the cards that are getting expensive but aren't on the reserved list. Maybe perhaps $20 for a booster consisting for 5 random cards from a set that consists only of Tops, Counterbalances, Standstills, FoWs, Fetches, Wastes, Vials, Lackeys, Mutavaults, Vindicates and similar cards
I'd also like to see FtV Counterspells this or next year. FoW, Drain, Counterspell, Daze, Spell Snare, Force Spike, Remand, Pact of Negation, Condescend, Mana Leak, Circular Logic, Spell Pierce, Red Elemental Blast, Blue Elemental Blast, and Stifle.
Granted, Drain does seem a little unrealistic, but Berserk wasn't worth much less, and they still decided to reprint it in FtV Exiled...
TIME POLICE
Things I would absolutely cream myself over. Rishadan Port, tap your land... oh, you don't have mana? That sucks. (But yeah, I get your point)
Level 2 Judge
Owner, Tales of Adventure Comics and Games, Coopersburg, PA
Wow... 3 posts by Ben. Clearly, those trolls are antagonising SCG excessively and probably gathering support on the side.
I wonder if they will ever learn that the consumer determines the price: the mtg market is not like a cartel (not with the big auction site going around and how easy it is to transport cards throughout the world)! The LGS here is buying FOW at 30 and selling at 60, guess how many they are getting?
Could someone explain to me how Legacy would die out? There is huge player base in the USA and there is enough cards to continue to fill tournaments... I can see how the extremely few vintage cards become diluted throughout the world, but I don't see something similar happen in Legacy..?
some nearly as good reprint of dauls would help a ton. Like say one that was like the ravnica one but you got a poison counter instead of lose 2 life when they come into play.
Because cards get lost/destroyed/disappear every year? That's how legacy dies out. Or when the only people who play the format own all the staples, the rest are owned by collectors, and none of the playerbase wants to trade/sell their staples. Really, there are about 225,000 playsets of each dual land total. Legacy has a player cap because of that. Same case with wasteland and FoW. And you would need to reprint ALL the staples en masse, reprinting just force and wasteland wouldn't matter one bit if duals weren't reprinted because the price of duals would go up in relation to how popular the format would be to people who just got a set of fow's or wasteland and them thinking "I should play legacy. I need duals. Oh wait there aren't that many...I'm not blowing $400+ on a set of underground sea's!!!" So yeah.
I agree with Ben Bleiweiss. Really, stoneforge mystic compared to force in relation to supply? SFM was just printed and has probably tens of millions of copies in circulation. FoW has a few million copies if that. Same with wasteland. I believe Ben when he says he can't keep the card in stock; the card is a VERY high demand right now. If it isn't reprinted en masse this year I believe Ben will be right in predicting that FoW's price point will rival that of mana drain's/over $100 apiece. So many decks play 4 it's unbelievable.
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It's pretty obvious that the Reserved List doesn't even matter at this point. Force, Waste & Goyf are not on the Reserved List, but Wizards has shown no interest in reprinting them, or doing anything else to help Legacy grow as a format. It's quite simple.
Wizards does not want Legacy to grow as a paper format.
And the reasons should be obvious as well. Wizards wants people playing Standard, not Legacy. Standard & Draft are huge cash cows and they will do everything they can to protect them. If more people can play Legacy for a reasonable price, and Legacy grows, there is a good chance players will move away from Standard, in the same way they have mostly abandoned Extended.
Standard requires you to keep throwing money at cardboard every year and lose the value of those cards with rotation. On top of that the format is usually pretty narrow and while plenty of people find it fun there are others who would prefer the great diversity of Legacy if they could afford it. Wizards might be able to make some big short-term money off Legacy players, and it might be able to make a little long-term money as well. But none of that will be worth it if their biggest money machine is weakened.
The eternal formats were never supposed to be popular, and no one could have seen Legacy's surge in popularity coming. Vintage was by far the premier eternal format and Legacy was often viewed as the bastard format even 2-3 years after it got its own Banned list. Despite having a great deal of prestige Vintage was tiny compared to Extended and could never grow much because less than 30,000 people could ever own a piece of power. Meanwhile Legacy grew much more popular purely via grassroots efforts from people who enjoyed the format, there was no organized support at the local level (at least in America) and hardly any tournaments.
Starting 2011, none of the cards in the reserved list will see a functional reprint. Magus of the Candelabra is the closest you can get to the original and it sucks balls.
I would also add Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Your clue will be if they don't reprint Ajani Vengeant in any promotional set.
EDIT:
I forgot Dark Confidant. He's still under the radar and if WotC will reprint him, they would have done it a long time ago.
The absence of a card from the Reserved List is not a guarantee that it will be reprinted. Most cards are not reprinted, and when they are, it usually takes a while. Complaints about the Reserved List did not get especially vocal until about two years ago, and it's unreasonable to expect Wizards to reprint all the staples that aren't on the Reserved List within two years. (Incidentally, Wasteland has been reprinted twice--as a Judge Gift and as a Player's Reward.)
Cards need to be reprinted in a way that doesn't break Standard, and they can't just make every staple an FtV or Rewards card. I think Force of Will can potentially be safe for Standard some day, but it needs to be in the right format. It seems unlikely they'd ever reprint Wasteland again since land destruction is "unfun". I think Goyf might be okay in some formats, but it's something that Wizards sounds very reluctant to print.
tl;dr Wizards needs to wait for the right Standard format before reprinting Legacy cards in a Standard-legal set, and it would be against the spirit of a "collectible card game" if every staple were reprinted in other manners (Rewards programs, From the Vault, Duel Decks, etc.). There's a balance involved.
Consequences of the new buy list.
Only a couple that I can see, FOW, Wasteland, Tarmogoyf, and duals going up up up. From here on out I will refer to these as super staples. Whenever someone comes to me about entering the format, I almost always suggest acquiring these first as they are the backbone to the format. Sure, there are many many decks that require few or none of the above, but they are more niche than staple decks. My suggestions don't add up to a hill of beans but I'm sure that the other people that suggest similar strategies to enter the format cause a significantly higher demand for these cards than for deck specific cards.
When cards that are not super staples go up in price, like they tend to do these days, an interesting situation occurs, the super staples lose value in trade. We often see crazy price flashes when cards are unbanned or find a home in a tournament winning list. Because the super staples are already expensive, they cannot go up by much, instead things like candelabra, show and tell, time spiral, entomb, ect go up in price. However, there is inevitably the question that goes something like this. Is entomb, for example, worth almost the same as a force of will? The answer is no and so one of two things must occur. Force of Will must increase in price or entomb must decrease in price to achieve the one price that is true market value. Because stores are more than willing to increase prices and are not as willing to decrease them, the value of force increases. This process takes quite a lot of time.
Over the past year, many cards have seen major increases in value. In order to justify all of these increases, eventually the super staples will increase in price to suit the new values of the other cards. This has been a long time coming, and I would be surprised to see FOW under 80 at year end. The other super staples will follow suit.
All of this brings up the carrying capacity for the format. If prices get too high there are a couple release valves. Firstly, if cards increase in price by too much, businesses will fail to move the product. This is a real threat to the ever increasing prices trend. The second is the swath of people willing to cash in if prices get too high. This will release a lot of pressure from the system if they sell via auction but this will not do anything if they just sell to Starcitygames or similar store. If people sell to major online retailers then they add power to Starcitygames position of increasing prices to increase profits.
All and all, I think that the superstaples, allong side the wierd 100+ cards, like Grim Tutor, Tabernacle, Candelabra, and recruiters will go up so long as Starcitygames can afford to buy out a fair percent of the market.
Why kept on bashing on FOWs there are tons of cards out there became super expensive recently. FOW is not the only one.
Anyhow as long as people are willing to pay the big bucks the stores would jack them up.
Business is all about earning, they would grab as much money as they can off people now if they have the chance. If to the point that Legacy dies they can simply focus more on standard/extended (Extended Open lol?). It is not like Magic would die out as a game without legacy anyway, money can be made one way or another. Just right now playing around with legacy's card vaule is a major way to earn at the moment. That said I seriousely doubt as a business SCG really cares about if the formate dies or not since there are still other formates out there... as long as they "make it popular" again then it is all good.
til then kept on sucking Legacy's life force til it dries up
Last edited by Ben; 03-20-2011 at 01:39 PM.
Your numbers are a bit off. There is about 290k of every revised rare in english, about 20k of each Unlimited rare.....the FBB and WB print runs of revised in french, german, and italian were about the size of Unlimited each from what we understand.....that being said, there is another 60k or so duals....
Thats about 360-390k or so, as definite numbers do not exsist on the foregien stuff, but just english alone is much more than 225k...
Now, sure sets have been lost I am sure or are just rotting away.......but there is a LOT of duals out there to be had.
Your numbers on FOW and Wasteland are off too.......there was way less alliances printed than Ice Age, and there is only around 600k of each Ice Age Uncommon......Tempest had a smaller print run than Ice Age too....so wasteland and FOW are probably less than 500k each......
Later EddieO
He said "playset" meaning 4x of each card. Given your math, he is over estimating the amount of cards available.
Could this card be printed: (yes)
The Tabernacle of Ginger Ale
Legendary Land
All creatures have "At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice this creature unless you pay 1."
Level 2 Judge
Owner, Tales of Adventure Comics and Games, Coopersburg, PA
ehm, not?
This would be as good as the original - in fact it would be better - no way this will happen
I'd so get a foil of that just for the name alone.
Hello all,
I think there's a good discussion going on here, and I'd like to add some thoughts. The crux of the matter here is not so much the prices of the cards, but the future survival of magic's best format. Obviously, higher prices leads to some deterrence for new players, but it can also have some upside.
Over the past week, a friend of mine traded his entire standard deck to a store for 4x Force of Will, 4x Aether Vial, and various other legacy cards. What prompted his to do this was seeing my Merfolk deck in action, and wanting a piece of the fun. Legacy decks have that mystique to them when you see the format in action.
The same day I was listening to a podcast on legacy, and one of the hosts was saying that the high price of staples forces people to commit to the format, which I view as a good thing. In addition, once this initial commitment has been taken, the price of continuing to play is far less than standard.
We have been seeking converts to legacy for the past week, and it looks like the local area which had virtually no interest is now abuzz with legacy talk.
One telling example I used was breaking out the standard deck I used at FNM (UWB Caw-Blade), and my mono-U merfolk deck that I have been playing with slight variations for a few years. The standard deck costs more, and will see more of its money cards rotate out this fall. (Admittedly, Jace skews this calculation.)
This really opens people's eyes, especially after showing them that caw-blade is basically a worse version of the 'fish' archetype.
Some people will always bitch about prices. It's the nature of the beast. I say, let the standard kids complain about Jace. Legacy is for the people who 'invested' in the game and format. I'd rather have a smaller cadre of legacy adherents who understand the cost of playing the best format than a bunch of fair-weathers who just like to play the blame game every time the price of a good card goes up.
Some people will learn that legacy is the most diverse, most fun, most dynamic, (and least expensive) format around, and they will be rewarded.
Respectfully,
The Backseat Critic
To Ben - Looking over you're buy/sell lists at starcity, one thing jumps out at me. Your margins for legacy staples is low, and, I assume, the volume you move is much less than standard as well. This strikes me as the opposite of some crass money grab. It looks like a genuine labor of love. If anything, we all owe the people at starcity some measure of gratitude for popularizing legacy, and basically being a distributor of its staples to what amounts to, in the grand scheme, peanuts. Thanks.
A quick tip - If the prices of legacy cards seem daunting, I sympathize. Just be aware of the free resources available. Before purchasing, read the articles and check out the winning decks. Also, build and test your ideas on workstation or similar software. When you feel good about your creation, invest in the cards. Then, you are likely to have a deck that you can compete with for years to come.
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