Right. People rooting for Wizards and SCG to fail mystify me. If counterfeits flood the market the game is changed radically. I don't know the consequences. But I expect it to be disastrous for Vintage, Legacy and Modern when there is zero buyer confidence and zero ability for businesses to make money off of eternal formats.Originally Posted by dontbiteitholmes
Put another way. I would rather have prohibitively expensive Force of Wills and Dual Lands and a thriving and tournament scene, rather than ubiquitous Force of Wills and Duals Lands and dying tournament scene. Why not have both? Because without the money made from trade and inventory of Legacy and Vintage its doubtful to me that there is a healthy LGS business and tournament scene to continue playing the game we love.
Wizards knew there was a large and growing demand for legacy cards and chose not to do a thing about it. Now its time to pay the devil its due.
The problem extends beyond Legacy, because current Standard, Modern and EDH-type cards are just as susceptible to counterfeiting as Legacy cards, and often easier to move. For what it's worth, I doubt that they will outright disallow sanctioning Legacy tournaments, or any format that's currently sanctioned, but I expect that both players and dealers will become reluctant to buy cards, and that overall the very existence of high-quality counterfeits will have a chilling effect on the older formats, so to speak. Fewer tournaments and fewer players.
Speaking for myself, the entire situation with the high-quality counterfeits, WotC, SCG, Hasbro, the so-called consumer confidence, and the emerging competition (Warcraft Hearthstone) will be interesting to watch, albeit from a safe distance. I can't wait to find out what WotC will do and what they'll call it. But in the end, it's ourselves (the Magic players) that have the most to lose. Many of us will have invested a lot of money into our collections, I personally spent quite a bit of time hunting down some exquisitely beautiful cards bearing the artists' autographs, and it's scary to think some crooks from Hong Kong might trigger a process that will render all of that largely irrelevant.
If this is still a super hot topic while GP Sacramento is going on, I'll go around and try to interview a few dealers on the subject.
What it takes to be a pimp:
1. Knowing the right people.
2. Have the money
Not one or the other, but both.
The fastest way to become a millionare is to start with a billion dollars, then start collecting magic cards, eh? - dry cereal
Go run along now the grown folks are trying to have a conversation.
I wasn't saying they were going to disallow sanctioning Legacy I was just saying stores will stop doing it ala Vintage which is basically the end if it happens because of counterfeits. I'm not even so much worried about my cards' value as the end of Legacy mattering, but I think in this case it's both one and the same. I think the time is coming where Legacy cards will be near impossible to move for fear of fakes and there will be no tournament scene so I see no reason to hang on to my cards much longer. I'm probably going to start sorting them out this weekend to sell if I don't make other plans. I pretty much have lost all long term confidence in the game after hearing about 1000 shitty comments similar to the one above from bitter have-nots. I never knew so many people had a deep seated hatred of people like me just for owning some cards, but if the MTG scene is this toxic I don't see holograms solving the problem.
big links in sigs are obnoxious -PR
Don't disrespect my dojo dude...
Sweep the leg!
Well this much I can say, word is out. I have not seen so many >10 post count people in a thread outside of a primer. We have people talking, we have people watching.
Brb, grabbing my surfboard, waves incoming.
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?
100% truth. Gaming community as a whole is rubbish; in Magic specifically, I've essentially stopped doing tournaments. Got tired of meeting tryhards who were more interested in Jedi mind tricks and snide comments than actually playing a game. (Don't get me wrong, there's some good types left, but the whole community is just so much more venomous than I remember it being in the '90s.)
The proper plural must be "hall of fames." You wouldn't say Halls & Oate, now, would you?
I dont know about your interpretation of this thread, but I read it as most people that already have decks in legacy welcome it because it reduces the cost of prohibitively expensive pieces of cardboard which makes the format more accessible to a larger pool of players which would make it more popular. The #1 complaint I hear about people not getting into legacy is that it is too expensive to jump in, and even then it takes a shit load of money to get enough staples to play a variety of decks. I thought that vintage died because it became too hard to get cards like power which meant people had to use proxies which meant that they couldn't be sanctioned events, which wouldn't happen in this case because these are just counterfeits not proxies. Even if these counterfeits become widespread wizards wont be able to do anything outside of alienating every format outside of standard by banning non holographic stamped cards. It will kill the secondary market, but I feel like this would effect collectors much more than players, since at that point the secondary market wont matter to players who would just buy counterfeits since for all intents and purposes they are the same (outside of collecting).
This isn't the fault of the counterfeiters, they are simply acting on incentives. Notice that up until a couple years ago this was not even an issue outside of special cases like power because we didnt have things like 150$ staples. This was a problem that Wizards needed to address, which they didnt.
Man sad to say but you are spot on with that. This thread is not as bad as the MTGS thread, no shock there. Still so many cheap skate haters.
I like that there is an entry barrier to the format the player base tends to be a little older and more mature. I love legacy but the day my local Legacy tournaments are overrun by FNM kids with $25 dollar proxy decks is the day I would consider selling my cards assuming of course that they are still worth anything
Where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.
~ Mohandas Gandhi
Without collectors, dealers, and players Magic doesn't exist as we know it. Counterfeiters hurt 2 of those pillars and the likely end result is less tournament support which then hurts players.
People keep making the analogy that this is like mp3's and the music industry but I don't think that makes any sense. I think a more relevant analogy would be if people were printing fake tickets good enough to get into shows. You can justify it by saying concerts are too expensive but in the end if enough people are buying fake tickets, especially on purpose, and getting into live shows with them, soon enough there aren't any more live shows.
Stores run events to make money. I agree WotC could have done more to mitigate this situation but let's be honest, a lot of people are just using that to justify doing something they would otherwise feel bad about. I've never seen a community so gleeful about cutting it's own nose off but I guess for some people they'd rather ruin something for everybody if they can't be included.
Anyone who thinks massive counterfeits are good for Legacy in the long run has to be suffering from a serious brain injury. This will exponentially hasten the demise of the format.
big links in sigs are obnoxious -PR
Don't disrespect my dojo dude...
Sweep the leg!
Actually, they do address the problem, but they do it in a way of maximum price-gauging without actually solving the problem. Tarmogoyfs came out even higher than before after MM.
Let's say the new Modern precon for 75$ Wizards revealved today would contain a Tarmogoyf - chances are most LGS would charge 200+$ and those who didn't would be sold out immediately by guys you then sell it on Ebay for 200+$. See: JMS and FtV:20.
The entire system right now is just very customer-unfriendly and exploitable, thus I can see the demand of cheaper solutions for prices getting more and more ridiculous.
Right or wrong, there is a clear demand here. I don't think any of us here are either upset or surprised by this. Right or wrong, the supply will come. It always has and always will. Of those openly accepting counterfeit cards, I don't suspect it is out of malice towards Hasboro. Had they themselves done this, just as many people would line up to purchase their cards over imported copies. They just haven't, and this is the result. Complain and debate all you want, just don't be surprised. This was a long thing coming, and is a natural result of economics.
I'm really hoping that they print these to demand, thus setting a ceiling for certain staples. (I'd also accept reprinting the same key staples -- I'm thinking chiefly of fetches -- in different event decks, thus approaching a "print-to-demand" scenario.) It's such an unusual product choice that I'm having trouble figuring out what the intention is; $75 to break into the tournament scene seems ... disingenuous.
The proper plural must be "hall of fames." You wouldn't say Halls & Oate, now, would you?
This just seems appropriate.
Article from Quiet Speculation, could be useful.
http://www.quietspeculation.com/2014...potting-fakes/
Lol @ this.
Yeah, I bet the idea of spending thousands on cardboard to play an extremely high-variance game, with little payout, no social prestige, and a playerbase notorious for poor manners is something that will select for well-adjusted, sociable types versus lower costs to entry.
This sort of posting is probably why there are so many "cheap skate haters" exist.
Perhaps if you had simply read the quoted post in my message, you would be enlightened as to why I mentioned it?
I get what you are saying and I partially agree.
I think rarity is key to Wizards business model. With print on demand, players essentially just buy the cards they want and ignore the collect ability and random aspect of the game. People get around this through the singles market; but do so at a price. This is where the SCGs of the world make their bank. But Wizards just printing what tournament players want radically changes their business, and I'm guessing though I don't know, for the worse. When Wizards can sell box after box of RtR for shops and players wanting shock lands, wouldn't that make more money than just selling known shocklands in a pre-con decks?
This is why this story is so interesting, impactful and potentially damaging. Wizards business model, the collectible card game with chase rares, is precisely what moves products for them and gives rise to absurd singles prices for the SCGs of the world. Ironically, it also makes the collectible cards ripe targets for piracy, which could undermine their whole business. I don't think they make as much selling products with known contents like Modern Masters Precons. But it maybe a move they have to make to preserve the game and curb outrageous pricing.
One thing is for sure, I think the landscape of the physical magic singles market is in for sea change in 2014.
I'm going to play my legacy cards and decks while I can, because I'm genuinely uncertain if things will continue as they have in the past.
I hope you are not trying to discourage people from playing Legacy based on their financial status or age.
But the big problem with that analogy is that the producers still sell tickets for shows to people who want to buy them. For this analogy to work, what would have to happen is that the producers (or whoever are the ones selling tickets) could be making tickets to sell, but they refuse to even though there's still plenty of room (i.e. they're not sold out). So if you want to buy a ticket to a show, you have to find someone who already has a ticket and try to get it from them.
The most relevant analogy I can think of is a company that owns the copyright to a TV series but, after the show went off the air, have refused to provide any actual way to still watch it (e.g. no DVD release, no iTunes download, nothing on Hulu, etc.) despite there being strong demand for it (i.e. we're not talking about some obscure show from 20 years ago or a series that bombed horribly and was canceled after 2 episodes; we're talking about a series that is actually really popular and would sell well if released somehow).
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