Cards printed rarities

[ryO!]

Is there a way to know how many cards were printed by edition and by language?

"any edition"
French : xx xxx xxx
German : xx xxx xxx
italian : xx xxx xxx
SChinese : xx xxx xxx
TChinese : xx xxx xxx
Jap : xx xxx xxx
korean : xx xxx xxx
Portuguese : xx xxx xxx
Russian : xx xxx xxx
English : xx xxx xxx

this from alpha to zendikar?

thanks for your help. (i ve actually tried to find something like this, but never had relevant answers...)

[Finn]

To my knowledge, no. Wizards has kept this information secret since Tempest Block.

[ryO!]

To my knowledge, no. Wizards has kept this information secret since Tempest Block.

thanks ... that s a shame though.
any ideas where i could find it from alpha to tempest?

[MMogg]

To my knowledge, no. Wizards has kept this information secret since Tempest Block.

Which makes no sense to me at all. For a supposed "collectable", knowing how many are out there should be a fundamental knowable to determining value. I really don't understand the logic behind making print run numbers esoteric.

[Malchar]

Are they still printing cards in traditional Chinese? I haven't really seen them for any of the new sets.

[Ectoplasm]

Apparently they quit printing in traditional Chinese a few years ago. The specifics are in the 'pimp legacy decks' thread somewhere, but I read they're only printing simplified Chinese nowadays.

[MMogg]

Are they still printing cards in traditional Chinese? I haven't really seen them for any of the new sets.

No, I believe Mirrodin was the last set to have Tradition Chinese. Since pretty much only Hong Kong and Taiwan (maybe Singapore's Chinese population too) use them (and most of them can also read Simplified characters), it's not really worth it for Wizards to print them.

Personally I dislike Traditional characters. They're far too blocky and complex. For example 個 = 个.

[ParkerLewis]

Which makes no sense to me at all. For a supposed "collectable", knowing how many are out there should be a fundamental knowable to determining value. I really don't understand the logic behind making print run numbers esoteric.

I'm on the exact opposite side. I don't understand the logic of making it known. How would that benefit them in any way ?

Plus, I'm not even sure it would in fact benefit players that much. So what if you learn there are 100 000 Baneslayer Angels in this world ? Or twice as much instead ? It's not going to change people's deckbuilding choices. Maybe a few people would change their opinion / value of a card based on that, but in the end, we're all into this game because we want to. Not because we're speculating on the card prices and trying to make money off it.

The only exceptions would be special items like the FtV series, that are actually more geared towards collectors and the buying of which is more motivated by the collectable aspect But even then it gets really complex to determine wheteher it's beneficial and to whom. For example, knowing that FtVE had low print runs surely made the demand and price skyrocket (which was the effect intended, obv)... should it be considered a benefit for the customers for this information to have been known then ? If anything, customers would have been better off if this information hadn't been revealed to everyone. Of course, there are answers here, but this was just an example to show that the problem is not that simple.

The only people I could see this benefit to would be the single card retailers. And they probably have a good guesstimate of these numbers already (assuming that at their position they have information to have good guesstimates of how much product was printed, even if it's only relatively to one another, which seems a reasonable assumption to make seeing how they are in direct contact with distributors).

[MMogg]

@ ParkerLewis: The logic behind making it known is that they are marketing a "collectible" while saying "we're not telling you how rare what you're buying is."

You're right, it doesn't really benefit players, but it would collectors. Why is Italian Legends worth less than English? Who cares if it's a different language, just price them the same, or heck, it's foreign, so the Italian should be worth more, no? No. The whole Legends debacle shows us that print runs do alter the value of cards. Originally the thread was about print run numbers of various languages, which I think is more than valuable to know for those interested in collecting and trading different language cards. Using "what it's worth to you" as a base is a little crazy when they are sitting on the quantifiable data to let us determine the value respective of the English counterparts, just as we can generally devalue Italian Legends to about 80% of the English.

[dahcmai]

Try writing them. It doesn't hurt to try.