Positively, and suspect my opinion is the majority.
Negatively, and suspect my opinion is the majority.
Positively, and suspect my opinion is the minority.
Negatively, and suspect my opinion is the minority.
Indifferent, and suspect my opinion is the majority.
Indifferent, and suspect my opinion is the minority.
Well, of course the dealers would jack up the price.Originally Posted by Darkenslight
Hill Giant means business.
Not if they're printed in quantities such that every Walmart and such carry them. That would work well. Commander decks with one dual land and one fetch land for $59.95 or whatever the price of the next Call of Duty is. It would be expensive for Magic, but if you think about it, it's not that expensive really.
If you think about it there isn't really much reason for any of this to not be possible. Which more and more leads me to believe that there must be something else at work here.
So two things on the economics of reprinting duals;
1) Private dealers don't have the power to just set market prices. Even Starcity or whatever. So they can't just "jack up" the prices unilaterally or even acting in concert (at least not with ease.)
2) Hasbro doesn't make money if people really really want to buy some new product and do so by deferring other expenses; they only make money if they raise the net number of buyers or the average monthly expenditures of their regular customers.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
I think the issue becomes that Legacy players don't buy packs. After all this time being conditioned to rely on the stupidly easy source of single cards, there is no market to Hasboro.
Even if they reprinted dual lands in some capacity, the majority of Legacy players would probably just buy them from SCG anyway.
So there has to be something else there for Hasboro to see any reason to change their policies.
Either forming their own single market for select Reserve List cards (massively unlikely) or putting a dual land in every pack such that the single price would be no different than the pack price, then there would be no point in buying singles (pretty much the same thing as before, never going to happen) or something else I can't think of (more likely) or it will never be profitable to modify the Reserved List and we're stuck here (most likely).
How does it follow that legacy players do not contribute to Wizards' profits? Just because a singles purchase doesn't immediately go into the company's bank account doesn't mean that they're not making money off of it. The only place where Wizards directly takes in money is from their distributors. However, all of the singles purchases drive demand for product, which in turn is bought and opened. Granted, they've stopped making money off of the original dual lands, but they will definitely profit off of any product they make with legacy playable cards.
Because the money to be made would not be by Hasboro. Just look at any of the FTV sets. MSRP is $40 and the cheapest you can get them from any distributor is $100.
The cost to produce one pack is pretty universal across the spectrum. A popular set like Ravnica or Innistrad get bought up in huge numbers by Standard players and some open up foil shock lands, but other open up Volatile Rig. But despite the fact that there are more bad cards then good, they continue to buy packs. Hasboro makes money.
If they produce packs containing dual lands, distributors will buy them, open them, and sell the lands for $50 each. Any packs being sold will be for $35 each or something like that.
Meanwhile, the MSRP would have been the same, so Hasboro makes an equal profit, while SCG reaps huge gains.
So why bother changing anything? If you can make money with Dragon's Maze level shit, why bother printing anything else?
So yes Wizards would make money, but no more than they are going to make from M14 or whatever this greek thing is coming next.
There's a solution, which I think gets around the Reserved list.
Don't reprint stuff. Just release an additional print run of, say, Revised. Old frame/new frame, whatever. A great opportunity to introduce modern wordings, new artwork, fix production errors (or you can do it as close to original as possible, I don't care). Not a reprint in a letter of it, not a reprint in a spirit, just an additional print run. I guess it would even sell well.
You can say it in any way you want but that's still reprinting and that will still have the effects of a reprint. Wizards would still break their promise by doing that.
Wizards apparently stated themselves they gegret it but it's a promise, they can't just break that without losing the trust of many players.
I don't like MTG, i just like legacy control decks.Esper stoneblade
What about a Player's Edition? White Bordered, updated card face, updated text. Non-collectible. No rarities. Simply print in such a way that a full box of boosters would yield one card each from the set. Buy 4 boxes and you have playsets of everything from the set. This would be for the players, not the collectors. High print runs, so there is no scarcity. If you really wanted to protect the secondary market, you could make them all text only, but tournament legal. Sort of official proxies.
Chronicles says "hi". That's exactly the bullshit that brought us the reserved list!
The only Way to negate the reserved lists effect is printing "better" cards to outclass the reserved ones. WotC just can't figure out how to do that with the original Duals without "cheating" on their own promise like they did with Reveberance/Fork which caused a shitstorm while testing waters.
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Chronicles didn't go far enough. Also, how much are Chronicles cards worth these days? Are they affecting the value of the BB version you have? Doubt it.
I'm talking about Chronicles II: The Uncollectable. What if they printed Alpha and Beta, text only, no artwork, no flavor text. 100 times the amount of printed cards they would print for a base set. All commons.
There is a way to print cards without affecting prices of existing stock.
I guess you could argue that they are functional reprints, so the R/L comes into play, but I would argue that they are not reprints, as they would no longer be collectible.
That was a pretty dull shitstorm, I missed it entirely.
Although going back to white borders/nopictures is a silly idea, they should just man up and nuke the reserve list policy.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
I'm really happy the reserve list exists. I wish people would stop the incessant moaning and get over the ruling made by WotC. This is a hobby it is expensive as are most hobbies. Involvement in the Magic the Gathering community is completely separate from an individuals overall quality of life. I have no interest in a care bear welfare community and neither should you.
The ultimate problem with "nuking the reserved list" is that what's sacred after Wizards breaks that? People have pissed and moaned over 6th rules, 8th borders, M10 rules, mythic (which I still bitch about), but we console ourselves with the fact that there remains a foundation. What happens when the reserved list goes down? Will people invest or feel safe with their collection? I know quite a few people, a fairly good portion of the players I know, who would probably sell and run if the reserved list were nuked.
Eventually I do think something needs to be done. There was an interesting article about Candelabra a while back and an estimate of the remaining copies. However, right now is not that time, nor do I think it should ever be a "nuke".
If Wizards came out in a statement that essentially read, "we care more about the health of our formats than dumb promises we made before we knew what we were doing, and as such, we are going to print the following cards in an upcoming non-standard legal set" I'm fairly sure nobody would seriously freak out. Special Edition style, there would be fireworks and people pulling down Palpatine statues.
But that's the standard. You have to make it a responsible, white collar business decision and present it as such. Type 2 you can get away with these Daily MTG articles written all colorfully and for children, but for Legacy where we are all comfortable with 2 grand for a deck, Wizards should write to us as such.
This is short-sighted as well as incorrect. The MTG community exists within society and is fully influenced by society so it certainly does not exist "completely separate from an individuals overall quality of life", especially not since certain formats are very expensive to be involved with. The more people there are who can afford to buy an okay card pool for a format the healthier that format will be. Someone who cares about legacy as a format will want it to be widely played because otherwise it collapses.
They could have reprinted Force of Will or Wasteland at any point, yet they haven't. They're reprinting another money card they could have reprinted at any point, Tarmogoyf, but putting it at the highest rarity in a special set with far more limited supply than ordinary sets. These things should indicate that nobody is going to flood the market with dual lands and Moats or whatever.
Why does anything have to be sacred?
Frankly if you buy Magic cards thinking they hold some sacred immutable value, then you're an idiot that deserves whatever's coming to you.
Wizards should be more concerned about the health of the game than the delusions of some participants therein.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
+1 ... nuff said
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A common Magic staple, and one that's cited often in this thread with good reason, are the Dual Lands. A playset of each can run you 3700-4000 for just Revised. Are you among the people who have sets of these? How would you feel seeing your collection drop from the value of a decent car to a fraction of the value? Hell, I'm just getting back in and already I'd be pretty upset if I saw my meager staples tank. Magic has been going extremely strong for twenty years and the price of staples continues to rise at a constant pace. More than a few people do consider this an investment, and they aren't half-wrong if you remove the "greedy geek" equation.
Seeing the end of the reserved list in any slight capacity would remove all bars from all cards and ultimately betray trust. Eventually the reserved list will have to come down. But it will have to be done tactfully and it will have to be for the legitimate reason of debilitating numbers of cards left in circulation rather than the current conundrum of people unwilling to pay money for a game that costs money.
What is more important to you, the quantity of players, the quality of decks, and the overall health of the format, or the monetary value of your investment?
I try my best not to be a doomsayer, but the two are growing mutually exclusive. Vintage has offered a glimpse of days to come, and most of us here do not care for that fate.
I can understand the sentiment that you "invested" in this game, and now as a pseudo-shareholder, you feel compelled to guard your stock. But I worry that as that case may be, Magic is not the investment you seek. For the most of us, Magic is a game, and while the pieces do indeed cost money and are traded in very commodity like ways, do not be fooled, for it is a game, meant to be played first, foremost and if I had may way, exclusively.
The Reserve List is a stopgap measure, and for both the health and economy of the format, it will become the eventual ruin of it. Having your collection lose half its value but having a high volume making it easy to cash out is a whole lot better than having your collection double in value, only to have zero buyers.
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