Do you think Wizards will ever again print dual lands that are better than shocks?

[Clark Kant]

The whole point of this endeavor is to make large sanctioned paper legacy a possibility again, with stores getting wotc rewards for hosting legacy tournaments. That will never happen as long as a) wotc refuses to acknowledge legacy events with legal proxies and b) duals (which practically every legacy deck requires) cost $500+ per land and rising every year and c) the duals remain substantially superior to all alternatives, so much so that players playing shocks instead of duals lose 10% of the games they play purely due to not being able to afford duals.

You can tackle any of those 3 issues, a) asking wotc to sanction and reward stores for holding legacy tournaments even if they allow proxies, b) asking for the reserve list to be done away with, or c) asking for new duals that are much closer in powerlevel to the original duals (they make your opponent gain a life or peek at a random card in your hand when they enter the battlefield untapped) or as Mr. Safety proposed below, asking that the fastlands be errataed to be made fetchable.

I would prefer a and b but wotc has not budged on either issue for the past two decades. They strenghtened the reserve list in 2010 so it's not going anywhere. This thread is about c, either asking wotc print new duals that are much closer in powerlevel to the abur duals and make them uncommons so that people can readily access them, or errata existing duals to make them fetchable.

Would anyone here mind if Wizards printed the following cards into a legacy and commander only set such as Commander Legends 2?

Selesnya Garden
Forest Plains
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gain a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Boros Garden
Mountain Plains
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gain a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Golgari Garden
Swamp Forest
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gain a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Izzet Garden
Island Mountain
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gain a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Dimir Garden
Swamp Island
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gain a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

And a cycle of these same lands for the other 5 guilds as well.

Does anyone think doing so would violate the reserve list in any way? If not, then why aren't we asking Wizards to do just that?

With duals that close to the originals in power level, I wouldn't even bother taking my duals out of their binder. Why play with $1000 cards and risk getting them damaged or stolen when alternatives exist that are 99.9% as good. I am sure lots of other players will find these duals close enough to the originals that they wouldn't feel like they are handicapping themselves by playing them instead of the $500-1000 duals, where as Shocklands costing you 10% of your life total each time was an actual drawback that costs people games fairly often.

Another approach is...


To put them even closer to ABUR duals in powerlevel while not exceeding them, they could add a negative "Once upon a time" style clause. - If it's your first landdrop of the game, opponent gains live, may scry1, you reveal the top card of your library, exile the top card of your library face down.. yadayada.. thousand possibilities with little to no drawback while 1) not violating reserve and 2) not outright costing you games like shocks and 3) technically still being worse then real duals

Thats a great idea. A minor drawback that only occurs the first time you cast a land of that type, or better yet, a minor drawback that only occurs if that land is your first landdrop of the game.

This would be a great way to ensure the prestige format of magic, legacy can continue to exist as a paper format with sanctioned events and a healthy player base with annual growth, rather than a stagnant player base that will eventually cause the format to die out entirely the way that vintage has, all while also making wotc some money (legacy players buy cards and secret lairs as well).

Yet another...

...option would be to errata all of the different dual lands to their corresponding land types, ie Woodland Cemetery is now a Forest Swamp. Honestly, it would make a lot of sense to do this, it's a logical move. It wouldn't be perfect, but a land like Blooming Marsh would be practically identical to Bayou because legacy runs on such a low land count.

Fetchable fastlands will never be quite as good as duals, but a list with a 1 of fetchable fastland along with 4 on color fetches, 4 prismatic vista and 5 basics will perform just as well as an identical list with reserve list duals instead of fastlands 99% of the time. And that will be good enough for people on a budget.

Do you think Wizards should errata some of the older lands to make them fetchable, and would that make legacy friendlier to cheaper non reserve list manabases?

I actually really love the idea to errata some of the other dual lands to have the land types added to them.

Changing all the infect creatures and Inkmoth Nexus to make them Phyrexians is a functional errata. It makes them all die to Engineer.

If that is okay, then erratating Blooming Marsh to be a forest swamp is no different.

If they’re willing to errata all the infect creatures for flavor reasons, even if it hurts infect players, they could easily errata these lands to make them more playable and useful in the eternal formats.

The main reason not to would be because they wont make as much money as they would selling players new duals and secret lair shocks every few years. But if the players demand them to, they *might* just to make the players happy.

It wont violate the reserve list and will have zero impact on the price of duals but it will make everyones non dual lands more useful.

That will make...

1. A lot of wotc customers happy.
2. Bridge the gap between the powerlevel of budget legacy/modern decks and nonbudget decks.
3. Make a lot of the nonreserve list duals lands from core sets that stores are sitting on more valuable and increase their sellable inventory.
4. Lead to some modern and pioneer players trying their hand at legacy and potentially rejuvenate an eternal format.

I dont know why people keep claiming wizards doesnt care about legacy. Yes they wont violate the reserve list due to fear of a lawsuit, but thats not evidence that they dont care about legacy.

Legacy players are among Magics longest and most loyal customers.

Legacy, Vintage and commander are the only eternal formats. God knows Vintage is never going to be a paper format again but Legacy very well could. The majority of legacy decks do not require any reserve list cards to build, except for the dual lands.

Eternal formats show the history of the game and people are more willing to spend money in older games and in older formats that they grew up with. MtG being a 30 yr old game is precisely why people are willing to spend more money on it than they would be into a 5 yr old tcg. So a errata like this that could make legacy far more accessible to more players without violating the reserve list would be a wonderful thing for both the format’s accessibility and also for hasbro in the long run.

Making loyal long term customers happy is a good thing for a company like hasbro to do every once in a while.

Old Discussion:

Do you think Wizards will ever again print dual lands that are significantly more powerful than the shock lands or triomes?

Legacy is dying, in a large part because dual lands cost $500+ and the only other fetchable lands that come close (shock lands), make you sacrifice 10% of your starting life total every time you play one untapped. Commander decks also cost massive amounts due in large part to requiring $500 duals. No, the issue isn't simply the reserve list. More than half of all legacy viable decks do not require any reserve list cards except for the duals. If Wizards ever releases duals that are not as devastating to your life total as shocklands are, they would lower the barrier of entry for legacy quite significantly. Players on a budget won't mind playing slightly inferior dual lands as long as the deck doesn't end up losing a large percentage of games due to the budget card. Where as losing 2 life every time you play a land is going to decrease your win percentage substantially. Having your opponent gain 1 life (or take a peek at a random card in your hand) every time you play a land is not going to cost you anywhere near as many games.

Yes Wizards promised to never reprint dual lands. But that doesn't mean that they can't print duals that are a lot more powerful than the shocklands in some product that is only legal in legacy and commander, such as one of the universe beyond sets.

How about a legacy and commander only fetchable shockland that only shocks you for 1 life to play untapped? Or better yet, one that makes your opponent gain a life? Or makes your opponent scry a card, or reveals the top card of your library to your opponent in order to play it untapped? Or perhaps fetchable triome lands that can be played untapped by having your opponent gain 3 life? The options are literally limitless. And all of these would be significant upgrades to the shocklands and closer to dual lands in power level. They would also be extremely affordable since the whales and investors would prefer the superior duals even if they cost 20x as much as these lands. So these lands would strictly be sought after by players looking to enter legacy or commander on a tight budget.

Is there anything stopping Wizards from releasing such lands in a Universes beyond (legacy and commander only) set? If not, I think it's just a matter of when, rather than if. Do you agree?

What fetch able lands would you like to see?

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

What fetch able lands would you like to see?

None fetches are a bad design decision

[Clark Kant]

Universes beyond cards only being legal in legacy and commander seems like a huge sign than Wotc actively cares about these formats, atleast enough to design an annual set of cards just for them. Printing reasonable dual alternatives would be an even bigger sign that they want to see legacy as a format be affordable once again.


None fetches are a bad design decision

I think you misunderstood the question. I am not asking what fetchlands would you like to see. I am asking what duals would you like to see that are much closer in powerlevel to the reserve list duals while not being identical (in order to provide an entry point to legacy for newer players).

Edit:

I think you misunderstood the answer. I do not want more lands that can be fetched and make fetchlands more powerful.

This reasoning doesn't make sense. None of the current legacy decks play all 4 copies of any dual land. So whether 4 fetchable duals exist or 8, fetches would not be any more powerful and there is absolutely no reason to think that the number of duals and fetches in decks would increase.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

I think you misunderstood the question. I am not asking what fetchlands would you like to see. I am asking what duals would you like to see that are much closer in powerlevel to the reserve list duals while not being identical (in order to provide an entry point to legacy for newer players).
I think you misunderstood the answer. I do not want more lands that can be fetched and make fetchlands more powerful.

[kombatkiwi]

I think you misunderstood the question. I am not asking what fetchlands would you like to see. I am asking what duals would you like to see that are much closer in powerlevel to the reserve list duals while not being identical (in order to provide an entry point to legacy for newer players).

You already got the answer to this from user "Purple Blood" in the MH2 preview thread, why do you need to make another thread about it


I don't see how that is a solution. When it comes to competitive play, its obviously not a solution because no matter what its a competitive disadvantage. When it comes to non-competitive play, proxies are already commonplace so this changes nothing as anyone would rather just proxy a dual than play with suboptimal cards.

[Goaswerfraiejen]

Yes, they will--when sales start to flag.

But really, there's no reason why they couldn't make better duals--e.g. ETB gain 1 life, ETB mill you or your opponent, ETB scry 1, or a 1/1 dual creature with haste (well, that may not be better, but it's interesting and close to Dryad Arbor's model).

[Zoid]

There is no reason for WotC to cater to the non-modern eternal community because it's small and they don't make much money from them since they buy singles only.
You can see it pretty clearly that they just port everything in legacy they like to modern in MH2.
Just like vintage, legacy will die/become a proxy/big boys only format.
For commander it's not so much of an issue since there are already a shit load of other lands available and it's a singleton format.
If it ever comes to it, I'd rather think they just ban the reserved list since there are a few cards on that which are stupidly priced.

[Erdvermampfa]

It is absolutely clear they won't dismiss the vast amount of money they could make by reprinting RL cards some day. Hasbro has explicitly set them the goal to significantly increase the game's profits and the direction the game has taken for the last 2 years shows it. I'm pretty sure they are considering an abolishment or at least a redefinition of the RL. Just sell it as a move to make the game "more accessible" or some other PR-bullshit and no one would ever be upset.

[phonics]

WOTC are already doing better every year, year over year, selling regular stuff, in spite of how messed up formats were for that stretch from war of the spark onwards for a few years. Nobody cares about paper legacy or vintage outside of boomers who don't buy sealed product anyways, and everyone else interested will completely shift onto mtgo if they haven't already. They have already printed a ton of alright alternatives that satisfy 90% of the edh player base, which leaves the tiny demographic of sweaty cedh players who actually care about getting duals, but they are putting things like tabernacle, bazzar, workshop or twister into their decks, or are just straight up proxying already so duals aren't that big of a deal.

They don't really have a reason to stir that pot and print duals/ reserve list like cards unless it is as a saving grace for when they go on a streak of screwing up for 5+ solid years of printing terrible sets/ products that destroy format metas among countless other terrible decisions that threaten to completely ruin the game. But that would basically require them to basically do a blunder on the scale of making a Secret Lair: Misogynistic Racist White Supremacists product containing a Hitler/ Trump meld card with art by Noah Bradley in it.

[Mr. Safety]

The other option is to print different fetches. Tap, pay 1 life, search your library for a land that can produce Black and Green...rather than a Swamp or Forest. Then cards like Blooming Marsh, Woodland Cemetary, and even cards like Hissing Quagmire are available.

My opinion is that WOTC is actively trying to make the RL go away for competitive play's sake, but to do it in a way that doesn't affect collectors as much. How they do it is beyond me, but i genuinely think they will.

[Barook]

Universes beyond cards only being legal in legacy and commander seems like a huge sign than Wotc actively cares about these formats, atleast enough to design an annual set of cards just for them.
You got that wrong. Commander is the most popular format by far and thus they're catering to their cash cow. High-powered Commander products also being Eternal-legal is just a side effect, not a sign that they actively care about Eternal.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

The other option is to print different fetches. Tap, pay 1 life, search your library for a land that can produce Black and Green...rather than a Swamp or Forest. Then cards like Blooming Marsh, Woodland Cemetary, and even cards like Hissing Quagmire are available.

My opinion is that WOTC is actively trying to make the RL go away for competitive play's sake, but to do it in a way that doesn't affect collectors as much. How they do it is beyond me, but i genuinely think they will.

This runs into the same problem as printing better shocks, as it doesn't replace duals.
But it does give the added bonus of being completely broken and allowing you to run 20 copies of any land do y long as it produces a colored mana

[Wrath of Pie]

The other option is to print different fetches. Tap, pay 1 life, search your library for a land that can produce Black and Green...rather than a Swamp or Forest. Then cards like Blooming Marsh, Woodland Cemetary, and even cards like Hissing Quagmire are available.

My opinion is that WOTC is actively trying to make the RL go away for competitive play's sake, but to do it in a way that doesn't affect collectors as much. How they do it is beyond me, but i genuinely think they will.

Dropping Vintage and Legacy as sanctioned paper formats would do the trick. (Let's be honest, if they make new fetches/duals they will be with Commander in mind and make them nearly useless for 60-card Magic, because that is where the money is.)

[Reeplcheep]

Dropping Vintage and Legacy as sanctioned paper formats would do the trick. (Let's be honest, if they make new fetches/duals they will be with Commander in mind and make them nearly useless for 60-card Magic, because that is where the money is.)

Didn't they already do this?

[Wrath of Pie]

Didn't they already do this?
Not officially, they're still keeping up the pretense of relevance.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I agree that Wizards will do whatever makes them money and also that the only format with duals they care about is Commander. And they've already printed functional duals for commander, the Luxury Suite, Morphic Pool cycle.

I would expect more like that, maybe ones with the actual land types. Especially if they just bite the bullet and ban fetchlands in every format like they should.

But I think in terms of duals they'll break the reserved list before obsoleting the original duals, because the only function Legacy and Vintage have is as prestige formats to flash big dollars at. So they might just go back to what the reserve list was before the Negator kerfluffle and only print a super limited amount of promo duals and other RL cards.

[Mr. Safety]

This runs into the same problem as printing better shocks, as it doesn't replace duals.
But it does give the added bonus of being completely broken and allowing you to run 20 copies of any land...

The point would be to open up almost the entire history of different dual lands to be fetched, which makes having dual lands not as important. If players don't need duals then the duals should drastically drop in price. This would make a bunch of lands functionally identical to dual lands, which is what needs to happen for competitive play if the RL stays in place. That is just my opinion, just something to banter about. I think it would shake up the entire paradigm of the game because it would go from having the most optimal mana fixing with fetch/dual mana-bases, which still isn't perfect, to everyone has perfect mana for whataver you want to do. I think Hearthstone gives us a small glimpse of what that would look like.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

The point would be to open up almost the entire history of different dual lands to be fetched, which makes having dual lands not as important. If players don't need duals then the duals should drastically drop in price. This would make a bunch of lands functionally identical to dual lands, which is what needs to happen for competitive play if the RL stays in place. That is just my opinion, just something to banter about. I think it would shake up the entire paradigm of the game because it would go from having the most optimal mana fixing with fetch/dual mana-bases, which still isn't perfect, to everyone has perfect mana for whataver you want to do. I think Hearthstone gives us a small glimpse of what that would look like.
Except those lands aren't better than duals, so unless you're already maxed out on duals you still won't be picking any of them up.
Instead you've made Cradle, sanctum, and coffers fetchable

[Mr. Safety]

That's a fair point.

Another option would be to errata all of the different dual lands to their corresponding land types, ie Woodland Cemetery is now a Forest Swamp. Honestly, it would make a lot of sense to do this, it's a logical move. It wouldn't be perfect, but a land like Blooming Marsh would be practically identical to Bayou because legacy runs on such a low land count.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

That's a fair point.

Another option would be to errata all of the different dual lands to their corresponding land types, ie Woodland Cemetery is now a Forest Swamp. Honestly, it would make a lot of sense to do this, it's a logical move. It wouldn't be perfect, but a land like Blooming Marsh would be practically identical to Bayou because legacy runs on such a low land count.

Again, even if Blooming Marsh was a budget Bayou, I would lose a non-zero number of games where I draw the Marsh and it enters tapped. So even if all the checks/fast lands were fetchable, you won't be picking them up. The only way to make people not play duals is to either print some super strong dual hate (A special price of progress that deals 3+ damage for each land with multiple land types maybe, or a mini Helldozer) or ban them.

[KobeBryan]

Fetchable horizon canopies.

Thats how you get everyone to change.

[Mr. Safety]

Fetchable horizon canopies.

Thats how you get everyone to change.

Sounds dope to me.

369

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Given that they went out of their way to ban them in Historic, and will probably soon add Prismatic Vista to that list and maybe even Guided Passage, I think it's safe to say that Wizards recognizes that fetchlands are just bad game design, and responsible for almost all of the cards that have been banned in Legacy for instance in the past decade or so- Astrolabe, delve cards, Deathrite, Top, W&6 etc. would all still be legal if fetchlands were banned instead. Hell even Survival would be pretty fair.

It seems silly then to imagine them printing more of the fucking things

[Clark Kant]

That's a fair point.

Another option would be to errata all of the different dual lands to their corresponding land types, ie Woodland Cemetery is now a Forest Swamp. Honestly, it would make a lot of sense to do this, it's a logical move. It wouldn't be perfect, but a land like Blooming Marsh would be practically identical to Bayou because legacy runs on such a low land count.

I actually really love the idea to errata some of the other dual lands to have the land types added to them.

If they’re willing to errata all the infect creatures for flavor reasons, even if it hurts infect players, they could easily errata these lands to make them more playable and useful in the eternal formats.

The main reason not to would be because they wont make as much money as they would selling players new duals and secret lair shocks every few years. But if the players demand them to, they *might* just to make the players happy.

It wont violate the reserve list and will have zero impact on the price of duals but it will make everyones non dual lands more useful.

That will make...

1. A lot of wotc customers happy.
2. Bridge the gap between the powerlevel of budget legacy/modern decks and nonbudget decks.
3. Make a lot of the duals lands that stores are sitting on more valuable and increase their sellable inventory.
4. Lead to some modern and pioneer players trying their hand at legacy and potentially rejuvenate an eternal format.

I dont know why people keep claiming wizards doesnt care about legacy. Yes they wont violate the reserve list due to fear of a lawsuit, but thats not evidence that they dont care about legacy.

Legacy players are among Magics longest and most loyal customers.

Legacy, Vintage and commander are the only eternal formats. God knows Vintage is never going to be a paper format again but Legacy very well could. Eternal formats show the history of the game and older games gain more respect. MtG being a 30 yr old game is precisely why people are willing to spend more money on it than they would be into a 5 yr old game. So a errata like this that could make legacy far more accessible to more players without violating the reserve list would be a wonderful thing for both the format and for hasbro in the long run.

Making loyal long term customers happy is a good thing for a company like hasbro to do every once in a while.

[Clark Kant]

That's a fair point.

Another option would be to errata all of the different dual lands to their corresponding land types, ie Woodland Cemetery is now a Forest Swamp. Honestly, it would make a lot of sense to do this, it's a logical move. It wouldn't be perfect, but a land like Blooming Marsh would be practically identical to Bayou because legacy runs on such a low land count.

Mr. Safety, is there any possibility that you could update the thread title to...

Do you think Wizards should errata some of the older lands to make them fetchable, and would that make legacy friendlier to cheaper non reserve list manabases?

[Zoid]

Mr. Safety, is there any possibility that you could update the thread title to...

Do you think Wizards should errata some of the older lands to make them fetchable, and would that make legacy friendlier to cheaper non reserve list manabases?

It's absolutely naive to expect something like that.

Creature type erratas are one thing, fully functional erratas something else.
They only rarely do functional errata, mostly when they screwed up the wording on a new card (Hi, Hostage Taker) or a new card/mechanic is introduced that plays badly with something they don't really care about because it was printed in Visions or some other ancient set.
Sometimes they get the bright idea to "restore a card to it's intended functionality".
That is either completely irrelevant or busted like Flash or Time Vault.

Adding basic types to random duals also has much more implications and many more interactions then being fetchable.

As previously stated, fetches themselves are terrible and created more and more issues as the years go on.
At least they started to realize that and banned them in Pioneer.
Pioneer itself shows their current "long term plan" for eternal formats.
Every few years introduce a new "eternal" format with an arbitrary cutoff date and push that.
Then they ramp down the support for older "eternal" formats and let them die/let people be priced out.
As result people switch to the newer format and have to buy more cards.
It's much easier and profitable for them to just let Legacy die then support it longer.
Considering some recent printings I wouldn't be surprised if they are actively trying to kill it.

[Goaswerfraiejen]

Just for funsies, consider:


Mangrove Forest
Land - Forest
Uncommon

T: Add G or U or B


Somewhat less fetchable, way better than a dual (it's a triple!), doesn't violate the reserved list, and at uncommon it's not going to break the bank.



Not unlike Murmuring Bosk, really, so there's some precedent along those lines, even if this is strictly better than that.

[the Thin White Duke]

Making loyal long term customers happy is a good thing for a company like hasbro to do every once in a while.

I assume "long term customers" means Vintage and Legacy players? Hasbro will "once in a while" release a Modern Horizons-type set to distract those customers with shiny new toys. This of course lasts for 5 minutes, then threads like this one pop up.
Hasbro only needs to put out a Horizons set to get some cash from Eternal players because most already have cards and rely solely on the secondary market for new singles. The money comes from new players who buy packs for Standard. I'm 100% sure that such net-new players' spending dwarfs the average Eternal (minus EDH) players' spending on sealed product.
TLDR, It's been said so many times before,Hasbro doesn't care about Vintage and Legacy because they can't monetize this market.

[Clark Kant]

It's absolutely naive to expect something like that.

Creature type erratas are one thing, fully functional erratas something else.

Changing all the infect creatures and Inkmoth Nexus to make them Phyrexians is a functional errata. It makes them all die to Engineer.

If that is okay, then erratating Blooming Marsh to be a forest swamp is no different.

Errata only the duals like Blooming Marsh where it makes sense to do so and keeps the duals inferior to the reserve list cards. Hell package the errataed lands together into a secret lair and lots of legacy players would buy them as cheap alternatives to $1000 dual lands ($4000 for a playset).

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

At least they started to realize that and banned them in Pioneer.
Pioneer itself shows their current "long term plan" for eternal formats.
Every few years introduce a new "eternal" format with an arbitrary cutoff date and push that.
Then they ramp down the support for older "eternal" formats and let them die/let people be priced out.
As result people switch to the newer format and have to buy more cards.
It's much easier and profitable for them to just let Legacy die then support it longer.
Considering some recent printings I wouldn't be surprised if they are actively trying to kill it.

You had me until here. Pioneer isn't indicative of any eternal plans and they've basically dropped off a cliff.
Also between premodern, old school, middle school and whatever else the community is making more non-rotating formats then anyone else

[Zoid]

You had me until here. Pioneer isn't indicative of any eternal plans and they've basically dropped off a cliff.
Also between premodern, old school, middle school and whatever else the community is making more non-rotating formats then anyone else

Well, I would agree that Pioneer is a special case.
They were basically forced to create it to take the steam of Frontier.
However, they also cannot sanction too many formats a time to not fragmentize the player base too much.
At this point it think I would have made more sense to bring back Extended.
That is reasonably "eternal" while also offering the possibility to get rid of degenerate cards by rotation.
Small community formats will always be a thing but most of them don't get enough attention or die due to the community being shit at managing anything.
RIP Highlander, screw Commander.

[kombatkiwi]

Changing all the infect creatures and Inkmoth Nexus to make them Phyrexians is a functional errata. It makes them all die to Engineer.

If that is okay, then erratating Blooming Marsh to be a forest swamp is no different.

Errata only the duals like Blooming Marsh where it makes sense to do so and keeps the duals inferior to the reserve list cards. Hell package the errataed lands together into a secret lair and lots of legacy players would buy them as cheap alternatives to $1000 dual lands ($4000 for a playset).


Errata only the duals like Blooming Marsh where it makes sense to do so and keeps the duals inferior to the reserve list cards.


inferior to the reserve list cards.








You already got the answer to this from user "Purple Blood" in the MH2 preview thread, why do you need to make another thread about it

I don't see how that is a solution. When it comes to competitive play, its obviously not a solution because no matter what its a competitive disadvantage. When it comes to non-competitive play, proxies are already commonplace so this changes nothing as anyone would rather just proxy a dual than play with suboptimal cards.

Please just stop posting lol

[Clark Kant]

The whole point of this endeavor is to make large sanctioned paper legacy a possibility again, with stores getting wotc rewards for hosting legacy tournaments. That will never happen as long as wotc refuses to acknowledge legacy events with legal proxies and duals and cities and cradles cost $500 and rising every year and the duals remain substantially superior to all alternatives. You can tackle any of those issues, asking wotc to sanction and reward stores for holding tournaments even if they allow proxies, asking for the reserve list to be done away with, asking for new duals that are much closer in powerlevel to the original duals (they make your opponent gain a life or peek at a random card in your hand when they enter the battlefield untapped) or asking that the fastlands be errataed to be made fetchable.

Fetchable fastlands will never be quite as good as duals, but a list with a 1 of fetchable fastland along with 4 on color fetches, 4 prismatic vista and 5 basics will perform just as well as an identical list with reserve list duals instead of fastlands 99% of the time. And that will be good enough for people on a budget.



At this point it think I would have made more sense to bring back Extended.
That is reasonably "eternal" while also offering the possibility to get rid of degenerate cards by rotation.

God no. Very happy they went with a nonrotating format instead of reintroducing extended.

They consistently print as many degenerate cards every year as rotate out so that reason doesnt make sense.

The whole appeal of nonrotating formats like legacy, modern, pioneer, commander and historic is that your decks and cards continue to be legal no matter how much time has passed since you first started playing magic. This is why Brawl will never be as appealing as Commander, and its also why magic players that rotate out of standard stuck around to keep playing modern and legacy decades later, because their favorite cards and decks from when they first started playing magic are only legal in those formats. Pioneer is still new. Modern took some time to accumulate players as well. Give pioneer another decade to accumulate a critical mass of magic players whose favorite cards and decks that they are most nostalgic towards are all from pioneer legal sets, and it could become the next modern.

Wizards unfortunately did sabotage Pioneer by adding nonpioneer legal cards to Historic instead of just expanding Historic by releasing older sets until all Pioneer legal sets make their way onto arena.

But I expect this will be fixed in the next few years quite easily. They will eventually print a Pioneer Horizons set, might even give it a name like Historic Pioneer. The paper version of the set will include all cards that were added to Historic on Arena, while the Arena release of Pioneer Horizons will include all Pioneer cards that havent been printed into Arena yet. Then, they can simply rename Pioneer into Historic or vice versa and this new format will thrive. Hell it will probably even displace modern as the most popular nonrotating 1vs1 format if Arena continues to grow.

[kombatkiwi]

The whole point of this endeavor is to make large sanctioned paper legacy a possibility again, with stores getting wotc rewards for hosting legacy tournaments. That will never happen as long as wotc refuses to acknowledge legacy events with legal proxies and duals and cities and cradles cost $500 and rising every year and the duals remain substantially superior to all alternatives.

Ok


You can tackle any of those issues, asking wotc to sanction and reward stores for holding tournaments even if they allow proxies
Doesn't seem likely because then what's the incentive for wotc


asking for the reserve list to be done away with
Has already been tried ad nauseam


asking for new duals that are much closer in powerlevel to the original duals (they make your opponent gain a life or peek at a random card in your hand when they enter the battlefield untapped) or asking that the fastlands be errataed to be made fetchable.
This isn't a useful suggestion, as people keep trying to explain to you while you just outright ignore them over and over


Fetchable fastlands will never be quite as good as duals, but a list with a 1 of fetchable fastland along with 4 on color fetches, 4 prismatic vista and 5 basics will perform just as well as an identical list with reserve list duals instead of fastlands 99% of the time. And that will be good enough for people on a budget.

"Fetchable shocklands will never be quite as good as duals, but a list with a 1 of fetchable shockland along with 4 on color fetches, 4 prismatic vista and 5 basics will perform just as well as an identical list with reserve list duals instead of shocklands 99% of the time. And that will be good enough for people on a budget"


The whole appeal of nonrotating formats like legacy, modern, pioneer, commander and historic is that your decks and cards continue to be legal no matter how much time has passed since you first started playing magic. This is why Brawl will never be as appealing as Commander, and its also why magic players that rotate out of standard stuck around to keep playing modern and legacy decades later, because their favorite cards and decks from when they first started playing magic are only legal in those formats. Pioneer is still new. Modern took some time to accumulate players as well. Give pioneer another decade to accumulate a critical mass of magic players whose favorite cards and decks that they are most nostalgic towards are all from pioneer legal sets, and it could become the next modern.
The idea that people like eternal formats because it lets people continue to play the same archetype they loved from a separate different format is kind of a myth I think. Most of the viable decks in legacy/pioneer/modern bear no resemblance to any archetype from old standards/extendeds (barring a few particular exceptions like maybe Goblins and Enchantress). As the formats grow bigger (more powerful / bigger card pool) it becomes less and less likely that any given standard deck will be able to "cross over" into a given eternal format and it even becomes less likely that individual cards from standard are even good enough to compete.

People like eternal formats because
1. They want to be able to buy into a format and have their deck be relevant for an extended period of time (not necessarily using cards they already happen to own or have used in the past)
2. They want some kind of tournament support for it so they can actually play

When modern was introduced it was 32 sets which is (almost?) exactly the same size as Pioneer when Pioneer was introduced so in terms of the cardpool being stable (and early format bans etc) they aren't too different.

The big difference is
- Pioneer now is competing with modern to some extent which has had players committing to it for many years prior, so even if their introductory offerings are comparable Pioneer would still have a lot of "catching up" to do in terms of appeal
- Modern mostly had tournament support due to quite significant initial commitment from WOTC and this hasn't been possible for pioneer because of COVID


Wizards unfortunately did sabotage Pioneer by adding nonpioneer legal cards to Historic instead of just expanding Historic by releasing older sets until all Pioneer legal sets make their way onto arena.
If you're just saying "pioneer would be more popular if it was on Arena instead of Historic" then sure


But I expect this will be fixed in the next few years quite easily. They will eventually print a Pioneer Horizons set, might even give it a name like Historic Pioneer. The paper version of the set will include all cards that were added to Historic on Arena, while the Arena release of Pioneer Horizons will include all Pioneer cards that havent been printed into Arena yet. Then, they can simply rename Pioneer into Historic or vice versa and this new format will thrive. Hell it will probably even displace modern as the most popular nonrotating 1vs1 format if Arena continues to grow.
I think the chances of this happening are close to zero
EDIT: upon further reflection I have revised my initial knee-jerk reaction to the somewhat more moderate "very unlikely"

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

- Pioneer now is competing with modern to some extent
"some"

[TsumiBand]

So, the Reverberate fiasco taught us nothing

They don't print cards that mimic "Good Cards(tm)" from the RP, they tried it with Fork-but-not and their social media messaging was all "so, we got in trouble for Reverberate" and they spent a lot of time talking about how they aren't gonna do that anymore. I promise you if they took enough shit for Reverberate being too close to Fork to generate public apologies then they'll never do anything that edges too close to duals.

Even if that weren't true, 4DogHorse is right about not wanting to make fetchlands more better

[Purple Blood]

The best idea in this thread was the fetchable duals with only one basic land type. But if I had to bet, WOTC would say that would violate their RL policy.

If that's true then the only way they could make it work is through extremely inelegant means. For example, printing fetchable dual/tri-lands that had a requirement to enter into play untapped that were specific but trivial for certain decks to achieve. A ridiculous, specific example would be something like "enters untapped if [you are playing legacy format / you have X card in your deck / other stupid condition]"

I don't like any of these options to be honest. In the end I couldn't really care less considering the only time I'm playing Legacy in paper is at my LGS that allows proxies. I would assume most people are in that boat or exclusively play online.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

The best idea in this thread was the fetchable duals with only one basic land type. But if I had to bet, WOTC would say that would violate their RL policy.

If that's true then the only way they could make it work is through extremely inelegant means. For example, printing fetchable dual/tri-lands that had a requirement to enter into play untapped that were specific but trivial for certain decks to achieve. A ridiculous, specific example would be something like "enters untapped if [you are playing legacy format / you have X card in your deck / other stupid condition]"

I don't like any of these options to be honest. In the end I couldn't really care less considering the only time I'm playing Legacy in paper is at my LGS that allows proxies. I would assume most people are in that boat or exclusively play online.

Bosk already exists and the RL list is just a wink wink fiction.

[Purple Blood]

Bosk already exists and the RL list is just a wink wink fiction.

Yeah but it makes you take damage. It would have to be Bosk without the damage but with the other clause.

[Grizzlenasty]

Of course they will print better duals than shocks one day. They will straight up reprint ABUR duals and sell it to you via Scamalot Lair...
it's not like they've never removed cards from the Reserve List before. 23 if I'm correct.

[Zoid]

Of course they will print better duals than shocks one day. They will straight up reprint ABUR duals and sell it to you via Scamalot Lair...
it's not like they've never removed cards from the Reserve List before. 23 if I'm correct.

Didn't they get a lot of shit for that?
Also that was ages ago even for for wizards who change things every other year.

Even though almost everyone who would complain about the fall of the RL would probably deserve it, I think wizards are for once too afraid to meddle with the "natural order".

[Grizzlenasty]

Didn't they get a lot of shit for that?

Not really.. it's a very loud minority that's against abolishing the RL. And it was back then. They've even reprinted one of the RL cards into a regular set by accident once.. Nobody sued them. And what would Wizards actually be sued for? One doesn't lose money if the prices of, for example, duals would plummet. One would at most loose a possible profit. IF duals plummet in price due to reprints. And that is something every sane person should doubt. Alpha bolt is what? -700 even though there are 45+ reprints. It's still the desireable original. M11 Bolt has next to none collectable value.

My guess is, if there was a lawsuit, they'd simply win it. They'd lose some of there reputation for not holding a promise(wouldn't be the first time) and yes it might cost them some money, but... they'd also gain a shit ton of reputation for finally owning up to a really stupid mistake, making the game more accessible for a lot of people that would drown them in ten times the money they might have lost in a courtcase, and could finally get rid of the bad reputaion of being the greediest company right after BP, Pfizer and Activision. (Edit: While in reality they could get even greedier with the Lairs - win win)

Talking about a possible lawsuit - wouldn't those Big Boy Investors lose money if Wizards decided to ban all reserve list cards in every single format including Vintage? I'm pretty sure this would be the number one way to make ABUR duals prices drop by a significant enough amount to make anyone cry.

But I'm getting offtopic here.. this has been discussed before and no soulution was ever found..

I just strongly believe they will sooner or later reprint the real deal, scam us 150 per piece and call it day. Deep in your heart you know it's true.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

They're not even that loud. I don't think I've met a single person in twenty years of playing this game that is pro reserved list.

[Goaswerfraiejen]

Bosk already exists and the RL list is just a wink wink fiction.

Funny, in the other thread you seemed to think it was a legally-binding document.




They're not even that loud. I don't think I've met a single person in twenty years of playing this game that is pro reserved list.

I think I encountered a few online 10-15 years ago or more, but I also think they were seriously underestimating the collector's market and the state of eternal formats. Regardless, I actually agree with you on this: the RL serves basically nobody at this point, and it's not clear it ever did, really.

[kombatkiwi]

Not really.. it's a very loud minority that's against abolishing the RL. And it was back then. They've even reprinted one of the RL cards into a regular set by accident once.. Nobody sued them. And what would Wizards actually be sued for?

Around 2010 WotC invited Ben Bleiweiss (who was like the inventory manager for SCG at the time or at least someone who had a very publicly-known vested interest in the value of MTG cards) and Stephen Menendian (who was similarly a very well-known player of eternal formats at the time) to WOTC HQ to discuss the topic of whether the reserved list should continued to exist or not.

https://articles.starcitygames.com/articles/so-many-insane-plays-visiting-wizards-reprints-and-the-reserved-list/

Both of them put forward the position that the reserved list should not exist.

However in that SCG article linked above you see mention of the upcoming (at the time) FTV relics which was known to contain Masticore (a RL card) and later had Mox Diamond (another RL card) in it. Also the Phyrexia Duel deck with Phyrexian Negator, another RL card.

WotC did experience legal pressure in the wake of these specific reprints which is why they apparently ignored the advice of Menendian/Bleiweiss and later strengthened the reserved list rather than removing it. This was confirmed to me by Gavin Verhey. It's the only justification that makes sense for why they wouldn't roll back the reserved list



One doesn't lose money if the prices of, for example, duals would plummet. One would at most loose a possible profit.
This statement is idiotic


IF duals plummet in price due to reprints. And that is something every sane person should doubt. Alpha bolt is what? -700 even though there are 45+ reprints. It's still the desireable original. M11 Bolt has next to none collectable value.
This is also an entirely unconvincing argument because you're just cherrypicking an example that favours the point you are trying to make.


My guess is, if there was a lawsuit, they'd simply win it. They'd lose some of there reputation for not holding a promise(wouldn't be the first time) and yes it might cost them some money, but... they'd also gain a shit ton of reputation for finally owning up to a really stupid mistake, making the game more accessible for a lot of people that would drown them in ten times the money they might have lost in a courtcase, and could finally get rid of the bad reputaion of being the greediest company right after BP, Pfizer and Activision. (Edit: While in reality they could get even greedier with the Lairs - win win)
This idea is also how I feel about it but the "they would simply win it" part is dependent on professional legal knowledge and most armchair donks don't have any real idea and are just speculating on whether it's actually true or not.
There's really no point discussing this topic of the RL at all outside of people with the legal credibility/qualifications to make a meaningful/accurate assessment of it (which isn't me either)

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Funny, in the other thread you seemed to think it was a legally-binding document.


Gonna need the quote on that....

[Grizzlenasty]

This statement is idiotic

So you're saying I have a good chance at sueing Wizards for my loss of money over Oko for example... I could've cashed out for much more than it's worth now. Sure no promises were made here but it's basically the same.



This is also an entirely unconvincing argument because you're just cherrypicking an example that favours the point you are trying to make.


Nah, I'm giving an example. Could've named numerous other cards like Stp oder simply Alpha basics. But that gets tedious quick and won't help with people like you that are cherrypicking satements to prove that their authors are supposedly cherrypicking.



This idea is also how I feel about it but the "they would simply win it" part is dependent on professional legal knowledge and most armchair donks don't have any real idea and are just speculating on whether it's actually true or not.

Speculating.. that is exactly what I did. Thought I made that obvious enough by using words like "guess, believe, would"..
Well, obviously not obvious for everyone.

But let's end this here. My english isn't good enough to really clarify my point as deep as I would like to and I'm not here for getting called names.
You wont convince me, I wont convince you.

I believe they print better duals than shocks and these duals will be the ABUR ones.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

This idea is also how I feel about it but the "they would simply win it" part is dependent on professional legal knowledge and most armchair donks don't have any real idea and are just speculating on whether it's actually true or not.
There's really no point discussing this topic of the RL at all outside of people with the legal credibility/qualifications to make a meaningful/accurate assessment of it (which isn't me either)

https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/large/front/a/0/a084d0fb-8db2-4873-a2f9-e6e5fecdd38c.jpg
https://c1.scryfall.com/file/scryfall-cards/large/front/6/9/699a6663-cc48-4c1d-aaa2-a423169b7783.jpg

[Clark Kant]

Lands like this would be perfect addition for the next set release catered at Commander.

[kombatkiwi]

So you're saying I have a good chance at sueing Wizards for my loss of money over Oko for example... I could've cashed out for much more than it's worth now. Sure no promises were made here but it's basically the same.
The important difference is exactly that no promise was made. "basically the same" except for the one crucial factor might as well be not the same at all


Nah, I'm giving an example. Could've named numerous other cards like Stp oder simply Alpha basics. But that gets tedious quick and won't help with people like you that are cherrypicking satements to prove that their authors are supposedly cherrypicking.
Would the price of e.g. revised duals and unl power drop by a noticeable amount? Yes. So it doesn't matter how many counterexamples you can find of cards that wouldn't be affected (much) because collectors can easily make a case that the RL is affecting the value of their investment


Speculating.. that is exactly what I did. Thought I made that obvious enough by using words like "guess, believe, would"..
Well, obviously not obvious for everyone.
Sure this isn't some terrible sin or anything and it's good that you admit you don't know much more than a guess but I just get tired of people confidently asserting things like this, and the conversations on this topic just repeating the same points


Sinkhole and Dreadnought
If you're trying to make the point that wotc printed both of these cards and didn't receive any backlash (I can't infer any other meaning from that post)
A) Sinkhole isn't on the reserved list
B) Phyrexian Dreadnought judge foil was printed in 2010, same year as FTV relic

[Grizzlenasty]

Would the price of e.g. revised duals and unl power drop by a noticeable amount? Yes. So it doesn't matter how many counterexamples you can find of cards that wouldn't be affected (much) because collectors can easily make a case that the RL is affecting the value of their investment

What was the word again?.. ah wait.. ah speculation! You simply cannot proof that. As much as I cannot proof the opposite.



Sure this isn't some terrible sin or anything and it's good that you admit you don't know much more than a guess but I just get tired of people confidently asserting things like this, and the conversations on this topic just repeating the same points

Obviously not tired enough to leave us clueless peasents alone. Admitting to something that a person with reading comprehension can undoubtedly see? Giggles. I don't understand why you have to be like that.
The question was if Wizards will ever print better duals than shocks. A lot of people believe they'll do it in the form of legandary duals, scry duals, drawback duals, reveal random card or whatever duals.
And I happen to strongly believe (google it up, it's something different than "to know sth.") that they'll abolish, revise, change or do whatever to the RL so that they can reprint the ABUR ones.
I could've just written:"Yes, I do" but I thought it it would be better to clarify in what sort of duals I believed. Big mistake on my side as I see.



A) Sinkhole isn't on the reserved list
But it once was.


B) Phyrexian Dreadnought judge foil was printed in 2010, same year as FTV relic
Proof that they've already found a way around their policy at least once.
It's their rule, I think (a difference from knowing here again) they can change it in whatever way they see fit.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

If you're trying to make the point that wotc printed both of these cards and didn't receive any backlash (I can't infer any other meaning from that post)
A) Sinkhole isn't on the reserved list
B) Phyrexian Dreadnought judge foil was printed in 2010, same year as FTV relic
I showed you two cards that were on the reserved list and have since been reprinted. If WOTC was sued over it I'm sure you can find it.

[Grizzlenasty]

They've removed Sinkhole in 2002, and after the FTV debacle they changed the wording of the RL to incorporate the following..

"In consideration of past commitments, however, no cards will be removed from this list."

Before that they gave themself a loophole for special editions like Judge Promo yadayada...

My point is, they've changed it.

Why not change it to "In consideration of weighing in past commitments vs popular demand..."

But we can't convince kiwi anyways.
You've seen his overly provocative and hostile behaviour.
He's just in here to argue for the sake of arguing, ripping statements out of context to make a point and overall accusing us of speculation in a thread speculative by nature.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

They've removed Sinkhole in 2002, and after the FTV debacle they changed the wording of the RL to incorporate the following..

"In consideration of past commitments, however, no cards will be removed from this list."

Before that they gave themself a loophole for special editions like Judge Promo yadayada...

My point is, they've changed it.

Why not change it to "In consideration of weighing in past commitments vs popular demand..."

But we can't convince kiwi anyways.
You've seen his overly provocative and hostile behaviour.
He's just in here to argue for the sake of arguing, ripping statements out of context to make a point and overall accusing us of speculation in a thread speculative by nature.

Unlike this post which is made in the goodest of faith...

[Grizzlenasty]

I'm a saint :tongue:

[kombatkiwi]

Ultimately the point is that you don't need to convince ME. I WANT the reserved list to go away.


And I happen to strongly believe (google it up, it's something different than "to know sth.") that they'll abolish, revise, change or do whatever to the RL so that they can reprint the ABUR ones.

It's their rule, I think (a difference from knowing here again) they can change it in whatever way they see fit.

Why not change it to "In consideration of weighing in past commitments vs popular demand..."
If it's so simple why haven't they already done it? It would be free money for WotC/Hasbro. The only possible explanation is that they legally believe it is not an option available to them. If you legally believe that it is an option then that's cool but again you don't need to convince ME (or the majority of the playerbase which already thinks removing the reserved list is a good idea)

Therefore

If you think you have a good argument for why the reserved list can be removed then you should write a letter to Hasbro offering your services as a consultant to their legal department because that is the only way you are ever going to change anything.
Writing forum posts about it is just a complete waste of time.

[Grizzlenasty]

If it's so simple why haven't they already done it? It would be free money for WotC/Hasbro. The only possible explanation is that they legally believe it is not an option available to them. If you legally believe that it is an option then that's cool but again you don't need to convince ME (or the majority of the playerbase which already thinks removing the reserved list is a good idea)

Probably because they don't want to... yet. There are loads of possible explanations.



If you think you have a good argument for why the reserved list can be removed then you should write a letter to Hasbro offering your services as a consultant to their legal department because that is the only way you are ever going to change anything.
Writing forum posts about it is just a complete waste of time.

Why would I want to do that? Writing a letter to a multibilion dollar company about them changing something I don't even really care about and asking for a job I'm neither qualified for, nor interested in, is the ultimate form of wasting time.
Typing my nonsense into a forum on the other hand, is quite enjoyable and makes me forget my day to day sorrows. And quite honestly you seem to have found the same enjoyment in our little exchange. Do you already have a pen pal?

Still the question was, will they print better duals than shocks. And I think, yes they will. And I think it will be the ABUR ones sooner or later. No proof, no hint, no nothing. I just believe it will happen. I didn't even want to argue about RL stuff.

[Goaswerfraiejen]

The reserved list is not a legal document. It's a company policy, nothing more. Let's not let our armchair lawyering go too far, here.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

If it's so simple why haven't they already done it? It would be free money for WotC/Hasbro

Because they're a publicly traded company and need to have constant growth forever or be gutted and sold for parts. So they have this emergency revenue stream that they can break open exactly once and now is not the time because of whatever their consultants say.
Or they just have their own crazy Musk telling them about the future sand the future isn't dual lands or whatever.
Or there's a holdout from the original artists and they don't want to release them with only 8 of the original arts.
Maybe they dislike you personally and aren't printing them because it makes you wrong and they giggle every time you post this.

[Purple Blood]

The reserved list is not a legal document. It's a company policy, nothing more. Let's not let our armchair lawyering go too far, here.

When the RL discussion turns into a debate over legal ramifications I always laugh. The best theory a prospective plaintiff could come up with is promissory estoppel and even then, that is incredibly tenuous. It safe to say that potential legal blow-back cannot possibly be the reason for any of their RL policies.

The can always weasel their way around the RL - e.g. Maro: "today we're clarifying our long-held internal policy that the RL means we will not be printing those cards in a Standard legal set."

[Purple Blood]

If it's so simple why haven't they already done it?

Short answer? They've decided that whatever they're doing instead is more profitable on whatever timescale they've deemed most important.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Yeah two things to bear in mind are

1) It is pretty clear that Wizards is not currently hurting for strategies to get people to buy Magic cards

2) It is pretty clear that they want to move primarily online and away from cardboard

3) It is also pretty clear that EDH, limited, and Standard are the money makers and they don't really care that much about eternal formats outside of Commander.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

To the extent Legacy has a function it's to be a prestige format and for that, a ludicrously high budget requirement is a feature and not a bug.

[Grizzlenasty]

Having to drive 400+ kilometres to play with my power or having to drive about 100 kilometres to play Legacy with someone else than my close pals is a feature? Mkay, I haven't looked at it that way yet. At least I get to see some of my country :cool:

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Having to drive 400+ kilometres to play with my power or having to drive about 100 kilometres to play Legacy with someone else than my close pals is a feature? Mkay, I haven't looked at it that way yet. At least I get to see some of my country :cool:

I mean yeah. It’s conspicuous consumption. That’s what prestige branding is about. It’s not supposed to be accessible.

[PirateKing]

Having to drive 400+ kilometres to play with my power or having to drive about 100 kilometres to play Legacy with someone else than my close pals is a feature? Mkay, I haven't looked at it that way yet. At least I get to see some of my country :cool:

Yeah some of this sounds close to "I bought a 750 bhp hypercar and the interstate speed limit is only 70mph, that's only 25% of my top speed! Are you telling me I have to drive all the way to a dedicated automotive facility to enjoy even half of my car's performance? Ridiculous!"

Like I'm sorry your toy outperforms the Toyota Camry's and Ford F150's, but isn't that kind of the point?

[Grizzlenasty]

Yeah some of this sounds close to "I bought a 750 bhp hypercar and the interstate speed limit is only 70mph, that's only 25% of my top speed! Are you telling me I have to drive all the way to a dedicated automotive facility to enjoy even half of my car's performance? Ridiculous!"


Oh wow, there are speedlimits in other countries? I wouldn't even bother buying any car then.


I mean yeah. It’s conspicuous consumption. That’s what prestige branding is about. It’s not supposed to be accessible.

I don't think that is what Magic is about. But maybe that is just me. I'd like to have everyone enjoy every single card there is. And I want to play against other peoples skill and knowledge rather than their wallets. Maybe I'm an idealist.

[Ronald Deuce]

To the extent Legacy has a function it's to be a prestige format and for that, a ludicrously high budget requirement is a feature and not a bug.

Nowhere close to profound, but certainly de profundis. This is so dumb I'm half-tempted to sig it.


I mean yeah. It’s conspicuous consumption. That’s what prestige branding is about. It’s not supposed to be accessible.

The next time Wizzerds sells a Legacy-targeted product, uses Legacy as a selling point for anything at all, and/or demonstrates that they have anything resembling a hold on how the format develops or stagnates, this just might come close to demonstrating a grasp of a tiny sliver of reality.


Like I'm sorry your toy outperforms the Toyota Camry's and Ford F150's, but isn't that kind of the point?

Yeah. And unlike Reserved List cards, better cars than F-150s continue to be manufactured so that people can use them to do things F-150s can't, like "not get stolen because they don't have plastic door handles."

This shit is so low-effort it's almost negligent.

[kombatkiwi]

Probably because they don't want to... yet. There are loads of possible explanations.
Great, let's hear them then.
You could make some argument for a kind of "they are waiting until the price climbs even higher before reprint" but then why do they print fetchlands in modern when they are only worth $50-100 and RL cards are already $500-1000+. It seems like having the extra revenue stream outweighs the potential future gains. Maybe there is some kind of model you could come up with that makes sense for them to delay further, but considering how Wotc/Hasbro have seemed comfortable with short-term cashgrab as a strategy (bonkers powerlevel in standard, secretlair every month including walking dead, etc) it seems like the burden of proof is on you to propose such a thing.


Still the question was, will they print better duals than shocks. And I think, yes they will. And I think it will be the ABUR ones sooner or later... I didn't even want to argue about RL stuff.
Well they can't reprint the abur ones "sooner or later" unless they do something about the RL, funny how that works


The reserved list is not a legal document. It's a company policy, nothing more. Let's not let our armchair lawyering go too far, here.
By making this comment you are participating in armchair lawyering. Please do any/all of the following:
- State your legal qualifications / credentials to convince me that I should take your opinion that the RL is not a legal document seriously
- Write a letter to Hasbro legal department / offer your consulting services to convince them that the RL is not legally relevant
- Provide any other reasonable justification to explain why WotC / Hasbro maintains this "company policy" when it basically entails them throwing free money down the drain


Because they're a publicly traded company and need to have constant growth forever or be gutted and sold for parts. So they have this emergency revenue stream that they can break open exactly once and now is not the time because of whatever their consultants say.
Again I admit this explanation does make some sense but it's just not at all consistent with the actions of their company over the last 1-2 years (willingness to execute short-term cash-grabs that largely disappoint the playerbase).
The assertion that it is something they can "break open exactly once" is also obviously false, see fetchlands being reprinted in MM3 and then a few years later in MH2 and they're still a motivator for people to buy packs


Or they just have their own crazy Musk telling them about the future sand the future isn't dual lands or whatever.
lmao ok


Or there's a holdout from the original artists and they don't want to release them with only 8 of the original arts.
They can just print them with the MTGO art or commission new art, it's not that hard


Maybe they dislike you personally and aren't printing them because it makes you wrong and they giggle every time you post this.
could be !


When the RL discussion turns into a debate over legal ramifications I always laugh. The best theory a prospective plaintiff could come up with is promissory estoppel and even then, that is incredibly tenuous. It safe to say that potential legal blow-back cannot possibly be the reason for any of their RL policies.

The can always weasel their way around the RL - e.g. Maro: "today we're clarifying our long-held internal policy that the RL means we will not be printing those cards in a Standard legal set."
By making this comment you are participating in armchair lawyering. Please do any/all of the following:
- State your legal qualifications / credentials to convince me that I should take your opinion that the RL is not a legal document seriously
- Write a letter to Hasbro legal department / offer your consulting services to convince them that the RL is not legally relevant
- Provide any other reasonable justification to explain why WotC / Hasbro maintains this "company policy" when it basically entails them throwing free money down the drain

Again I don't pretend to understand the relevant legal systems to actively make the argument that WotC/Hasbro getting sued over this is likely. But big megacorp Hasbro presumably does have decent lawyers and at this point there is no other reasonable explanation as for why they wouldn't get rid of the RL.


Short answer? They've decided that whatever they're doing instead is more profitable on whatever timescale they've deemed most important.
Again this is like a semi-reasonable idea on the surface but it's not at all consistent with their previous/recent actions or strategies:
- Reprinting chase modern cards every now and then when the prices are high
- Reprinting chase cards as alternate premium versions in secretlairs
- Taking advantage of short term cashgrabs that alienate/disappoint various sections of the playerbase


1) It is pretty clear that Wizards is not currently hurting for strategies to get people to buy Magic cards

2) It is pretty clear that they want to move primarily online and away from cardboard

3) It is also pretty clear that EDH, limited, and Standard are the money makers and they don't really care that much about eternal formats outside of Commander.

1) "Yeah we are making enough money right now, I don't think we need any good ideas to make more, let's all go home for today" does this sound like expected behaviour of any company, let alone Hasbro with all their recent decisions pushing secret lairs every month and so many supplemental sets that we are basically in a year-long continuous spoiler season.
2) Paper is a huge moneymaker for them, the idea that they want to also make money off arena doesn't mean they are throwing away what is still probably their main source of revenue
3) Do you think commander players are not interested in RL cards? Why do they sell secret lairs or modern horizons, which are (mostly) not playable in limited or standard?


To the extent Legacy has a function it's to be a prestige format and for that, a ludicrously high budget requirement is a feature and not a bug.
Other people have already made good arguments for why this idea is dumb

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I don't think that is what Magic is about. But maybe that is just me. I'd like to have everyone enjoy every single card there is. And I want to play against other peoples skill and knowledge rather than their wallets. Maybe I'm an idealist.

I mean

1) I was talking about Legacy and not Magic generally but also

2) That's not what Magic is about either. Magic is a product being sold under capitalism. The purpose of Magic as a game is to increase the profits of Hasbro shareholders. Anything else it does is secondary to that end- complementary, ideally, but still secondary.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

1) "Yeah we are making enough money right now, I don't think we need any good ideas to make more, let's all go home for today" does this sound like expected behaviour of any company, let alone Hasbro with all their recent decisions pushing secret lairs every month and so many supplemental sets that we are basically in a year-long continuous spoiler season.

I mean you're accidentally making the point here. They're already doing quite a lot of things to get players to buy cards.

You seem to be laboring under the belief that if Wizards simply prints more things that Magic players want, then they'll make more money, but this just isn't true. There is a ceiling to how much money the existing player base will spend on Magic cards. There's some flexibility here in that obviously you can convince a player to pony up a bit of extra cash for some goodies they really want, but again, this is what the Secret Lairs and stuff are for- offering limited print and special promo versions of popular cards.

Nothing about their current marketing strategy suggests that breaking the reserve list is a good money making strategy for them at the moment, when what they're doing is already working. The only thing they really want to do besides pump as much as they can every quarter from the existing player base is expand that player base, but that's what Arena's for. Where the Reserve List isn't even applicable. Do you have some reason to think that printing duals is going to entice new players into the game?


2) Paper is a huge moneymaker for them, the idea that they want to also make money off arena doesn't mean they are throwing away what is still probably their main source of revenue

Right but I mean. They're not throwing it away. They're doing quite well on that end, in fact.

Breaking the reserve list is not really a huge risk but it is still a change to their status quo business model and there's really not a compelling business reason for them to do it. Especially when it's better off as an ace to keep in their backpocket until such a time as they do need a significant sales bump, instead of the current time when they've been experiencing massive year-on-year growth for the past decade.


3) Do you think commander players are not interested in RL cards? Why do they sell secret lairs or modern horizons, which are (mostly) not playable in limited or standard?

I mean they are but they're also casual players and like. EDH is the format where they have done the most to let you get by without duals. Like Command Tower and the Luxury Suite cycle are just straight up duals (or more) except that they can't be fetched, and honestly I think there's very strong gameplay reasons to discourage the fetch/dual interdependency as much as possible beyond just power level, and certainly beyond power level in terms of mana fixing.



Other people have already made good arguments for why this idea is dumb

No they haven't, they've just angrily insisted that it's dumb because they find the idea that market forces might produce an outcome they dislike and that they find anti-social in implication unpleasant to wrangle with.

[Grizzlenasty]

1) With Magic I meant Legacy or Vintage... every other format is Napalm-Aids. Makes you sick and burns in your....

2) I was talking from a players perspective not the companies or shareholders one.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I mean okay, but Magic is in reality owned by Hasbro, which has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders, so the conversation about what the game should look like without regard to profits is pretty tertiary, unless you're looking into either creating a new similar game (and hopefully avoiding being sued) or buying the existing one from Hasbro somehow.

[kombatkiwi]

You seem to be laboring under the belief that if Wizards simply prints more things that Magic players want, then they'll make more money, but this just isn't true. There is a ceiling to how much money the existing player base will spend on Magic cards. There's some flexibility here in that obviously you can convince a player to pony up a bit of extra cash for some goodies they really want, but again, this is what the Secret Lairs and stuff are for- offering limited print and special promo versions of popular cards.
Yes, you obviously can convince a player to pony up a bit of extra cash for some goodies they really want
Yes this is what the secret lairs are for
If these goodies are currently selling for $500+ on the secondary market then it seems like Hasbro might want to get in on that, perhaps by the vehicle of secret lairs which they have already established for such a purpose. Perhaps offering limited print and special promo versions of popular cards on the reserved list could be a thing they are interested in doing, seeing as by the current market price of those cards they could successfully charge a lot more than current secret lairs. So I have no idea what point you're trying to make here


Nothing about their current marketing strategy suggests that breaking the reserve list is a good money making strategy for them at the moment, when what they're doing is already working. The only thing they really want to do besides pump as much as they can every quarter from the existing player base is expand that player base, but that's what Arena's for. Where the Reserve List isn't even applicable. Do you have some reason to think that printing duals is going to entice new players into the game?
Maybe printing duals won't entice new players into the game. But why is that necessarily relevant. If it only got existing players to spend a lot (reminder: the secondary market prices of these cards are very high) to buy in to secret lair duals or secret lair power for either:
- Nostalgia value for collectors ("I get to own power? Cool")
- New collectibles for collectors
- People wanting to play sanctioned legacy/vintage
- People wanting to play non-proxy commander / cube
Wouldn't that be worth it for wotc just by itself? What is it about their current marketing strategy that says "Selling people alternate art foil Uro directly is a good business decision" while also simultaneously saying "selling people alternate art foil ancestral recall would be a bad business decision?" I don't think this has ever been adequately explained by people trying to make this argument.


Breaking the reserve list is not really a huge risk but it is still a change to their status quo business model and there's really not a compelling business reason for them to do it.
Printing promo versions or reprint sets of high-demand cards is exactly their current business model though. The "WotC only wants people to play standard" claim doesn't work because otherwise they wouldn't be printing Secret Lairs or Modern Horizons at all


Especially when it's better off as an ace to keep in their backpocket until such a time as they do need a significant sales bump, instead of the current time when they've been experiencing massive year-on-year growth for the past decade.
I can't directly refute this particular idea but the entire concept of "we have this really good and reliable idea for making money but we will save it until we really need it" doesn't seem congruent with my understanding of Hasbro or business in general.


I mean they are but they're also casual players and like. EDH is the format where they have done the most to let you get by without duals. Like Command Tower and the Luxury Suite cycle are just straight up duals (or more) except that they can't be fetched, and honestly I think there's very strong gameplay reasons to discourage the fetch/dual interdependency as much as possible beyond just power level, and certainly beyond power level in terms of mana fixing.
- Casual players or not, they still buy a lot of cards, which is all that matters from WotC pov
- Just like in legacy if you don't have duals you can still possibly win games with Watery Grave or Darkslick Shores or the UB Pathway or whatever other substitute dual lands but the optimal version of your deck still includes the real duals and people obviously care about that enough (otherwise the secondary market prices wouldn't be so high). It doesn't matter how many of things like the battlebond lands get printed or if R&D doesn't want fetchlands to be good. The only thing that is relevant to this discussion is that dual lands exist and they are legal (and good, and better than the alternatives) in formats that people play


No they haven't, they've just angrily insisted that it's dumb because they find the idea that market forces might produce an outcome they dislike and that they find anti-social in implication unpleasant to wrangle with.
Your argument is something like "Ludicrously high cost of legacy is a feature not a bug, because capitalism", which only makes sense if the high cost / exclusivity serves to make money for WotC. It doesn't, because the reserved list exists and therefore they can't actually profit from sales of the expensive thing. If the only argument against the RL was just "boo hoo I can't afford this" then sure you can tell people to just suck it up, but instead:
1. WotC opens new profit channel / revenue stream / whatever the appropriate jargon is
2. Game becomes more affordable for the people who play it

It's a win-win. The only people that lose out are the people who have huge amounts of money tied up in RL collections which brings us back to the "the only reason they are not doing it is the threat of litigation" problem

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

It absolutely helps Wizards sell Magic cards that when outside media writes the game they often latch onto and gush about the exorbitant price of certain RL Magic cards, even when they are not making any money directly anymore from sales of Beta Black Lotuses etc.. Like, do you think Louis Vuitton is following Econ 101 supply/demand curves when they price an airplane shaped purse at $40k? Do you think $10k a bottle is just what Dom Perignon costs to make?

I need to fucking sleep and don’t have time to go into more detail right now but this is what conspicuous consumption is. The whole point is to be expensive. Again, exclusion of the poors is a feature, not a bug. Rich people go to clubs that charge you a thousand bucks a head just to get in because they charge you a thousand bucks a head to get in. That means they don’t have to bump elbows with poor people.

Legacy has no use to Wizards as a main driver of sales for new packs because Standard and limited already do that. They don’t need any help figuring out how to bilk EDH players, they’re doing just fine on that end and there’s no reason to believe that duals are a breaking point there. Making Legacy more accessible would just muddy the distinctions and serve no function that they care about on a financial level. What purpose does Legacy, and Vintage for that matter, serve to Wizards? The only meaningful answer is that having these prestige formats elevates the brand overall and provides a sense of mystique and age to the game. It creates an allure for assholes like the pharmabro guy to flex about picking up Power.

Breaking the Reserve List honestly probably wouldn’t affect this too much, depending on how it was handled exactly, but what’s the incentive? Wizards doesn’t make money promoting Legacy, not really. You can say it’s win/win but it’s only a win for people that want Legacy to be more accessible. This is like arguing that Louis Vuitton could make more money selling that fucking purse for $120. Maybe in the short term yeah, because there’s enough demand for the brand, but you’re cannibalizing what created the allure in the first place. If they just start making and selling accessories at a normal rate and normal price then it becomes just another brand that has to compete in the market of functional, maybe marginally upscale fashion, throwing away the market niche that was pretty fucking difficult to build in the first place.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Like Wizards might break the reserved list at some point, because lol is the idea of legal repercussions for that a joke, but if they do so they will be extremely careful to make it clear that accessibility is not going to be greatly improved. They don’t want cheap duals, get that idea out of your head forever.

[kombatkiwi]

It absolutely helps Wizards sell Magic cards that when outside media writes the game they often latch onto and gush about the exorbitant price of certain RL Magic cards, even when they are not making any money directly anymore from sales of Beta Black Lotuses etc.. Like, do you think Louis Vuitton is following Econ 101 supply/demand curves when they price an airplane shaped purse at $40k? Do you think $10k a bottle is just what Dom Perignon costs to make?

I don't think MTG cards are a Veblen good, no.

This analogy also falls apart because Louis Vuitton doesn't have a policy in place that prevents them from producing expensive designer bags in 2021

A better analogy would be like:
- We (LV) have this extremely popular classic vintage bag which sells for 1000s on secondary market.
- If we made official replica copies of it (even if they weren't intended to be 100% indistinguishable but e.g. they still had some small copyright 2021 marking on it somewhere or some slight variation in the design) they would be a popular item and people would buy them at a pretty high price, we would make a lot of money off it.
- But we won't do that, instead we will just produce some generic bags which have more boring designs and cost the same amount for us to make but people don't want to pay as much money for them.

Wouldn't that be really dumb?

I'm not suggesting that WotC should sell Black Lotus reprints direct from their amazon storefront for 99c each (even though I would personally appreciate that it obviously wouldn't be a good business decision)


I need to fucking sleep and don’t have time to go into more detail right now but this is what conspicuous consumption is. The whole point is to be expensive. Again, exclusion of the poors is a feature, not a bug. Rich people go to clubs that charge you a thousand bucks a head just to get in because they charge you a thousand bucks a head to get in. That means they don’t have to bump elbows with poor people.
The idea that a childrens card game is offering this kind of luxury experience is just insane. You go to a legacy GP and it's still the same class of sweaty neckbeards at a standard or limited one. I have seen some people offer the idea that "legacy is better because I don't have to play with children" but I think a) people that really care about that are a tiny minority b) there aren't many small children playing other formats anyway c) Grow up lol it's says age 13+ on the packs


Legacy has no use to Wizards as a main driver of sales for new packs because Standard and limited already do that. They don’t need any help figuring out how to bilk EDH players, they’re doing just fine on that end and there’s no reason to believe that duals are a breaking point there.
What happened to 'maximise profits, fiduciary duty to shareholders'


Making Legacy more accessible would just muddy the distinctions and serve no function that they care about on a financial level. What purpose does Legacy, and Vintage for that matter, serve to Wizards? The only meaningful answer is that having these prestige formats elevates the brand overall and provides a sense of mystique and age to the game. It creates an allure for assholes like the pharmabro guy to flex about picking up Power.
Martin Shkreli isn't buying Modern Horizons / Strixhaven boxes (well I think he's still in jail but you get what I mean). If the existence of the reserved list only serves a secondary market of investors/speculators then why do we care about it? It's not helping WotC directly, it's not helping grow the game in terms of playerbase/tournaments. Even if you want to make the argument that a headline of "alpha lotus sells for 100k" actually motivates people's interest to play the game then you can still have that in a world where the RL doesn't exist anyway.


Breaking the Reserve List honestly probably wouldn’t affect this too much, depending on how it was handled exactly, but what’s the incentive? Wizards doesn’t make money promoting Legacy, not really. You can say it’s win/win but it’s only a win for people that want Legacy to be more accessible. This is like arguing that Louis Vuitton could make more money selling that fucking purse for $120. Maybe in the short term yeah, because there’s enough demand for the brand, but you’re cannibalizing what created the allure in the first place. If they just start making and selling accessories at a normal rate and normal price then it becomes just another brand that has to compete in the market of functional, maybe marginally upscale fashion, throwing away the market niche that was pretty fucking difficult to build in the first place.

Again the analogy falls apart because:
1) The idea that people treat legacy/vintage as this kind of aspirational luxury experience seems dubious, even for enfranchised standard/limited/modern players. For the majority of outsiders I would argue the reaction is simply "that game costs how much to play? nope"
2) More importantly, the reserved list situation is not "we have produced this luxury item, how much should we decide to sell it for", as is the case for the modern fashion offerings, it's instead "we have made the decision that we cannot produce this luxury item". Even if the high prices do influence people to think "wow that is cool and I want it", as it could for a bag or a watch, there is no official channel for them to buy it from so it makes no money for the company anyway. You have to make the argument that the high prices somehow generate an allure for the overall game, such that a $1000 underground sea makes people want to play standard, which seems like nonsense to me

Edit:

Like Wizards might break the reserved list at some point, because lol is the idea of legal repercussions for that a joke, but if they do so they will be extremely careful to make it clear that accessibility is not going to be greatly improved. They don’t want cheap duals, get that idea out of your head forever.
I am okay with WotC printing them at a rate that maximises their profitability. I'm not insisting that individual cards have to have a price cap of $10 or $50 or $100. Yes, wotc maximising profit will involve them "throttling" the supply of cards in some manner, just like how they only print the ZEN fetchlands in more-expensive reprint sets and not in precons/guildkits/FNM promo packs etc. But wotc makes money from this approach and it also helps make the game more affordable so I'm okay with that even though I would prefer if I could buy any card for $1 or whatever

[Grizzlenasty]

Like Wizards might break the reserved list at some point, because lol is the idea of legal repercussions for that a joke, but if they do so they will be extremely careful to make it clear that accessibility is not going to be greatly improved. They don’t want cheap duals, get that idea out of your head forever.

This and your comment before are exactly on point. Sooner or later they will reprint the real deal and scam us 150+ per shiny walking dead edition ABUR dual. I've never said they'd reprint these cards in a way that they would be priced like shocks. I'm just really sure they'll reprint them sometime. I mean there have to be physical copies outside of hardcases with fancy grading stickers on it, to actually have said prestigious format in a playable state to keep that aforementionerd appeal, or am I missing something?
I mean, would rich people still pay a high amount of money to look at a club that theoretically has enough space to not bump into poor people?

[Clark Kant]

Would anyone here mind if Wizards printed the following cards into a legacy and commander only set such as Commander Legends 2?

Selesnya Garden
Forest Plains
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Boros Garden
Mountain Plains
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Golgari Garden
Swamp Forest
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Izzet Garden
Island Mountain
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Dimir Garden
Swamp Island
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

And a cycle of these same lands for the other 5 guilds as well.

With duals that close to the originals in power level, I wouldn't even bother taking my duals out of their binder. Why play with $1000 cards and risk getting them damaged or stolen when $2 alternatives exist that are 99.9% as good.

Does anyone think doing so would violate the reserve list in any way? If not, then why aren't we asking Wizards to do just that?

[kombatkiwi]

Just wondering but would anyone here mind if Wizards printed the following cards into a legacy and commander only set such as Commander Legends 2?
Would anyone here "mind?" unlikely


Does anyone think doing so would violate the reserve list in any way?
Probably not


If not, then why aren't we asking Wizards to do just that?

Because (as people have already explained to you, multiple times) it wouldn't solve anything

The real dual lands are still strictly better so anyone who wants to compete in legacy would still want to have the real dual lands

Maybe there are a few people who go "oh I can play a budget version of miracles with these" but is that number of people going to be a notable fraction of the group who currently refuse to consider playing with Hallowed Fountain / Prairie Stream etc? No

[H]

I'm just going to make the following blanket statement: keep your posts/replies on topic, focus on making arguments, providing evidence and/or reasoning and drop the pseudo-insults. If the topic can't continue without it descending to outright, or thinly veiled, insults it will be locked. Thanks.

[Mr. Safety]

Just wondering but would anyone here mind if Wizards printed the following cards into a legacy and commander only set such as Commander Legends 2?

Selesnya Garden
Forest Plains
When ~ etb, either each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Boros Garden
Mountain Plains
When ~ etb, either each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Golgari Garden
Swamp Forest
When ~ etb, either each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Izzet Garden
Island Mountain
When ~ etb, either each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Dimir Garden
Swamp Island
When ~ etb, either each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

And a cycle of these same lands for the other 5 guilds as well.

Does anyone think doing so would violate the reserve list in any way?

If not, then why aren't we asking Wizards to do just that?

If they entered tapped unless you did those things, it should be fine. That's essentially what the shocklands are, but instead of revealing a card or giving opponent's life you instead pay 2 life. If the shocklands didn't cause havoc with the RL then those wouldn't either.

[Clark Kant]

If they entered tapped unless you did those things, it should be fine. That's essentially what the shocklands are, but instead of revealing a card or giving opponent's life you instead pay 2 life. If the shocklands didn't cause havoc with the RL then those wouldn't either.

Yes I meant to include that clause as well. Just edited it in.

Yes that's my reasoning as well. These would not cause any issues with reserve list. They are technically more different from the original duals than the shocklands were.

However, they are a significant upgrade over the shocklands though and a ton of modern players with interest in trying legacy would buy them up. It's like Lightning Bolt vs Healing Salve. Technically mirror images of each other, but gaining life is much less powerful than your opponents losing life.

Game 1 when your opponent doesn't know what you're playing, you have them gain a life if you need mana that turn. Once your opponent knows what you're playing, or after a Thoughtseize, or if you're playing an aggro deck and don't want them to gain 1 life, it's fine to have them take a look at a card in your hand.

These lands are much much much closer in powerlevel to the original duals, and will not a make a difference in 99.9% of games unlike the shocklands which will cost you close to 5% games.

[Clark Kant]

I'm just going to make the following blanket statement: keep your posts/replies on topic, focus on making arguments, providing evidence and/or reasoning and drop the pseudo-insults. If the topic can't continue without it descending to outright, or thinly veiled, insults it will be locked. Thanks.

Thank you for trying to keep the topic civil.

I appreciate that trolls exist that love to drop pseudo insults (I just don't bother replying to them) but I don't think locking the thread is the solution. Why not just warn them instead of locking the whole thread, which is precisely what the trolls want.

[H]

Thank you for trying to keep the topic civil.

I appreciate that trolls exist that love to drop pseudo insults (I just don't bother replying to them) but I don't think locking the thread is the solution. Why not just warn them instead of locking the whole thread, which is precisely what the trolls want.

Honestly, because time is limited. But yes, if it is clear enough who is engaging in seeming bad faith, they will be warned/banned/whatever other actions are deemed necessary.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I don't think MTG cards are a Veblen good, no.

This analogy also falls apart because Louis Vuitton doesn't have a policy in place that prevents them from producing expensive designer bags in 2021

A better analogy would be like:
- We (LV) have this extremely popular classic vintage bag which sells for 1000s on secondary market.
- If we made official replica copies of it (even if they weren't intended to be 100% indistinguishable but e.g. they still had some small copyright 2021 marking on it somewhere or some slight variation in the design) they would be a popular item and people would buy them at a pretty high price, we would make a lot of money off it.
- But we won't do that, instead we will just produce some generic bags which have more boring designs and cost the same amount for us to make but people don't want to pay as much money for them.

Wouldn't that be really dumb?

I'm not suggesting that WotC should sell Black Lotus reprints direct from their amazon storefront for 99c each (even though I would personally appreciate that it obviously wouldn't be a good business decision)


The idea that a childrens card game is offering this kind of luxury experience is just insane. You go to a legacy GP and it's still the same class of sweaty neckbeards at a standard or limited one. I have seen some people offer the idea that "legacy is better because I don't have to play with children" but I think a) people that really care about that are a tiny minority b) there aren't many small children playing other formats anyway c) Grow up lol it's says age 13+ on the packs


What happened to 'maximise profits, fiduciary duty to shareholders'


Martin Shkreli isn't buying Modern Horizons / Strixhaven boxes (well I think he's still in jail but you get what I mean). If the existence of the reserved list only serves a secondary market of investors/speculators then why do we care about it? It's not helping WotC directly, it's not helping grow the game in terms of playerbase/tournaments. Even if you want to make the argument that a headline of "alpha lotus sells for 100k" actually motivates people's interest to play the game then you can still have that in a world where the RL doesn't exist anyway.



Again the analogy falls apart because:
1) The idea that people treat legacy/vintage as this kind of aspirational luxury experience seems dubious, even for enfranchised standard/limited/modern players. For the majority of outsiders I would argue the reaction is simply "that game costs how much to play? nope"
2) More importantly, the reserved list situation is not "we have produced this luxury item, how much should we decide to sell it for", as is the case for the modern fashion offerings, it's instead "we have made the decision that we cannot produce this luxury item". Even if the high prices do influence people to think "wow that is cool and I want it", as it could for a bag or a watch, there is no official channel for them to buy it from so it makes no money for the company anyway. You have to make the argument that the high prices somehow generate an allure for the overall game, such that a $1000 underground sea makes people want to play standard, which seems like nonsense to me

Edit:

I am okay with WotC printing them at a rate that maximises their profitability. I'm not insisting that individual cards have to have a price cap of $10 or $50 or $100. Yes, wotc maximising profit will involve them "throttling" the supply of cards in some manner, just like how they only print the ZEN fetchlands in more-expensive reprint sets and not in precons/guildkits/FNM promo packs etc. But wotc makes money from this approach and it also helps make the game more affordable so I'm okay with that even though I would prefer if I could buy any card for $1 or whatever

But your first example fails because that's exactly what Louis Vuitton's business model is. They produce ridiculously expensive luxury items one year, and the next year they make new ones. They don't continue remaking the same thing over and over to drive its price down because its rarity is artificial to start with.

Fundamentally you seem incapable of seeing the forest for the trees and understanding that Wizards' question and its fiduciary duty is not, "What makes us the most money off of duals" or even "what makes us the most money off of the reserved list," but, "what model overall makes us the most money in both the short and long term".

And don't get me wrong the incentives push a lot more heavily towards short term profits, but the long term is a consideration so there has to be some really compelling short term motivations to take any action that might significantly harm long-term profits.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Would anyone here "mind?" unlikely


Probably not



Because (as people have already explained to you, multiple times) it wouldn't solve anything

The real dual lands are still strictly better so anyone who wants to compete in legacy would still want to have the real dual lands

Maybe there are a few people who go "oh I can play a budget version of miracles with these" but is that number of people going to be a notable fraction of the group who currently refuse to consider playing with Hallowed Fountain / Prairie Stream etc? No

idk you might seriously consider those in a Punishing Fire deck.

[kombatkiwi]

Fundamentally you seem incapable of seeing the forest for the trees and understanding that Wizards' question and its fiduciary duty is not, "What makes us the most money off of duals" or even "what makes us the most money off of the reserved list," but, "what model overall makes us the most money in both the short and long term".
No, I understand this 100%


And don't get me wrong the incentives push a lot more heavily towards short term profits, but the long term is a consideration so there has to be some really compelling short term motivations to take any action that might significantly harm long-term profits.
If you never get rid of the RL those long term profits are never realized because WotC can't take advantage of the equity in the RL cards, do you agree? So your argument must be "there will be some better time in the future where getting rid of the RL would maximise profits more compared to getting rid of it now" which is possible but idk what kind of crystal ball you are using


But your first example fails because that's exactly what Louis Vuitton's business model is. They produce ridiculously expensive luxury items one year, and the next year they make new ones. They don't continue remaking the same thing over and over to drive its price down because its rarity is artificial to start with.

The point is that wotc doesn't currently have this choice to keep making and selling new luxury items because their luxury items are on the reserved list and they aren't allowed to make new ones. LV doesn't have this limitation and can design new luxury items as it sees fit. LV doesn't cripple itself by saying "well we made those expensive luxury bags last year, we can't do anything like that anymore, from now on let's just stamp our logo on paper bags and sell them for $2"

Here's another analogy then:
Imagine you own a bag-making factory
It can make both cheap utilitarian bags and luxury designer bags
You have infinite capacity to make however many bags of each type and they both cost you the same amount to make
You can sell designer bags for $1000 and utilitarian bags for $10-50
Is there a reason why you would just decide to stop making the designer bags?
Is that not effectively the situation wotc has put itself in?

Wotc could try to print new (ie mechanically unique/original) "luxury" cards that are A) So scarce and B) in such high demand that they cost on the secondary market the same price as dual lands / power, but the backlash from the playerbase would be enormous. (e.g. imagine if the secretlair walking dead cards were actually highly playable and/or the price of the secretlair was comparable to RL cards)

- They could try to print non-unique exclusive collectible cards like "secret lair shivan dragon" or whatever and sell it for as high price as they want ($1000?) but how many people would buy it? Very few probably, certainly not as many as would buy secret lair black lotus for $1000. Similar logic if put in packs as a kind of ultra-rare "masterpiece" slot to sell boxes.

Realistically the only way WotC can take advantage of having in-print cards worth $1000+ is if they reprint the reserved list stuff so by not doing that they are effectively leaving money on the table (it's an obvious way to make a large amount of profit they couldn't access through other means)

You can make the argument that they are either
A) Biding their time and waiting for prices to increase even further
B) Holding it as a trump card to unleash when the company is in dire straits

But both of these explanations feel more "mental-gymnasticy" to me than the alternative


because lol is the idea of legal repercussions for that a joke
Again please feel free to state whatever legal qualifications / credentials you have

[Zoid]

While this discussion seems to go in circles, here's something else:

Isn't there a thing that they basically can't legally acknowledge the secondary market?
If they would do so they would be subject to strict checks since the cards could then be considered a currency or something.
This is why they always talk about trading or collecting cards when they reprint stuff.

In that sense they might have passed to point where they could do this without arousing suspicion if they would price the reprints too close to the current market value.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

No, I understand this 100%


If you never get rid of the RL those long term profits are never realized because WotC can't take advantage of the equity in the RL cards, do you agree? So your argument must be "there will be some better time in the future where getting rid of the RL would maximise profits more compared to getting rid of it now" which is possible but idk what kind of crystal ball you are using

What no I don't agree at all. In fact my point is fundamentally how that's just not true, is demonstrably untrue, and is bad economics, so I don't think you understand this even 20%. Not what I'm saying at least.

Let's step all the way back. What are the basic material conditions we are analyzing? There is a game, called Magic: The Gathering. There is a company that owns the rights to sell and distribute and license usage of the game and its components, in other words to which the Magic game is a commodity to be sold, called Wizards of the Coast, which is in turn a subsidiary of a company called Hasbro; here we may use these two interchangeably, but let's just say Wizards. There are lastly, two types of people in the world as far as Wizards is concerned; those that buy the products they are making, the Magic playerbase, and those who don't, which is everyone else.

What we have to understand here is that the Magic playerbase is a discrete pool of consumers who have a discrete budgetary limitation. Neither of those things are fixed, but they aren't untrammeled. They are in fact severely trammeled by the reality of how much people are willing to spend on a game. Keep in mind that many of these people play many other games, board games, video games, tabletop, war games etc. as hobbies as well. Every dollar they spend on Magic is a dollar they are choosing not to spend elsewhere, and vice versa. And y'know, they also have to pay bills, rent, eat food etc..

Now the key thing here is that Wizards absolutely does not give a single solitary flying shit what products the players are buying as long as it's the product they're making and they thing they can maintain these sales long term. If tomorrow Richard Garfield shoved an old woman in line at the grocery store, and she turned out to be an evil witch who, in retaliation, cursed him and erased forever the concept and memory of the Reserved List and every card on it, and in fact of Alpha/Beta entirely; what would that change? I mean obviously that would alter the metagame a lot and make things confusing for us, but from Wizards' perspective the only thing that matters is how that would affect sales. And their sales, right now, are completely unaffected by the existence of the cards on the reserved list because. Y'know. They're not printing them.

Wizards' concern can be expressed in a pretty simple formula: (Number of players buying product) x (Average amount of money spent by players on product)

Would the duals no longer existing, even in memory, alter either of those numbers?

Well yes, that was in fact my argument earlier; the prestige/allure/mystique of really expensive old cards and the conspicuous consumption entailed helps elevate the brand overall.

But that's the only way in which the dual lands' retconned nonexistence would affect the above formula.

So no, it's ridiculous to think of Wizards as having "unrealized equity" in the Reserved List, because instead of a product containing dual lands it could just release any other product and it doesn't care about the content of the product, it only cares that people are buying it. It's all fungible to Wizards. If the people wanted white-bordered Ouphe theme decks they could print those and be just as happy.

To make an argument that reprinting duals would increase Wizards' profits you have to have a situation where one half of the formula outlined above is slumping in a way that more duals would plausibly help.

As mentioned the prestige/conspicuous consumption aspect of old expensive cards works pretty much one way. Like theoretically maybe there's a price point where lowering entry costs somewhat would attract more players, but you're almost certainly not going to be able to accurately identify where that is. Generally speaking the point of conspicuous consumption is that you want it to be expensive, and yeah players will gripe that they want to play old expensive cards they can't afford, but that's kind of the point. You could frustrate your players by making it wildly inaccessible or creating enormous power gaps between a budget list and a budget-doesn't-matter, but that's not what they've been doing. They've been printing lots of pretty good duals in recent years, they're just not as good as the originals. But were pretty far removed from "painlands are too good for Standard" days. So those wildly expensive cards are just aspirational, something to daydream about and maybe start working at collecting a piece at a time. That's not bad for Wizards to have.

Meanwhile non-players just don't give a shit at all because they don't know what dual lands are and while the price of the game generally might be keeping them out, it's not the price of RL cards because there's lots of formats they can play without those. In fact all the most popular ones except again EDH which you can do just fine in without- in fact playing an expensive tricked out deck can be a bad idea in a format where politics matter.

So the only half of the equation that reprinting duals might help is the spending by existing players. But there's no indication that's necessary; again, Wizards is doing really, really well at selling new products, and they've long since figured out how to get even eternal players and older players/collectors on board with special promo shit and lots and lots of annual products that just circumvent Standard entirely.

Now, again, if sales start slumping at some point they have the option of breaking the Reserve List, but they want to do that very carefully and the most careful way to do it is... just don't do it. A short term modest sales bump isn't worth the damage it would entail because again, funds are fungible and most of the money existing players would be spending on a product with duals is just money they would otherwise be printing on From the Vault: Ouphes or whatever.


The point is that wotc doesn't currently have this choice to keep making and selling new luxury items because their luxury items are on the reserved list and they aren't allowed to make new ones.

This is nonsense, shit like Modern Horizons 2 IS them printing new luxury goods.

https://shop.tcgplayer.com/price-guide/magic/modern-horizons-2


LV doesn't have this limitation and can design new luxury items as it sees fit. LV doesn't cripple itself by saying "well we made those expensive luxury bags last year, we can't do anything like that anymore, from now on let's just stamp our logo on paper bags and sell them for $2"

Uh no it has a lot of limitations. Like, they can only make a small number of these things because the artificial scarcity is the point and what drives the brand. They have to be very careful in managing that, in fact. Their equity is in their brand and their brand is all about the public perception of them as being scarce, luxury, conspicuous. And public perception is fickle.


Here's another analogy then:
Imagine you own a bag-making factory
It can make both cheap utilitarian bags and luxury designer bags
You have infinite capacity to make however many bags of each type and they both cost you the same amount to make
You can sell designer bags for $1000 and utilitarian bags for $10-50
Is there a reason why you would just decide to stop making the designer bags?
Is that not effectively the situation wotc has put itself in?

Do you

Do you not wonder why people make cheap bags when anyone could theoretically just make a bag and charge $50k for it? Hell you could custom order a purse tomorrow and then put it up on ebay for $1million if you wanted, no one could or would stop you. Do you think this is a good money making scheme?

Luxury markets are incredibly competitive. Magic cards are cheap fucking cardboard and ink, that cost like pennies to hundreds to make. It requires constant brand management to get people to pay through the nose for the latest product and honestly if anything Wizards is probably oversaturating the market lately with infinite Lair, Commander, Horizon, Market, Duel, FTV etc. etc. products.

But for right now it seems to be working, Magic sales grew 30 fucking percent last year. What incentive does that give Wizards to fuck around with its winning formula?

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

While this discussion seems to go in circles, here's something else:

Isn't there a thing that they basically can't legally acknowledge the secondary market?
If they would do so they would be subject to strict checks since the cards could then be considered a currency or something.
This is why they always talk about trading or collecting cards when they reprint stuff.

In that sense they might have passed to point where they could do this without arousing suspicion if they would price the reprints too close to the current market value.

I mean collectible markets are not illegal

[Grizzlenasty]

Game 1 when your opponent doesn't know what you're playing, you have them gain a life if you need mana that turn. Once your opponent knows what you're playing, or after a Thoughtseize, or if you're playing an aggro deck and don't want them to gain 1 life, it's fine to have them take a look at a card in your hand.

These lands are much much much closer in powerlevel to the original duals, and will not a make a difference in 99.9% of games unlike the shocklands which will cost you close to 5% games.

I'd absolutely give them a try if I was on budget or just buying in. Sure, not every deck could get away with these - I feel like Delver or Storm decks might have problems including these, but most midrange and control decks couldn't cares less about the drawback.
Just my initial thought on these. I find them pretty well designed to be honest.

[Ronald Deuce]

But your first example fails because that's exactly what Louis Vuitton's business model is. They produce ridiculously expensive luxury items one year, and the next year they make new ones. They don't continue remaking the same thing over and over to drive its price down because its rarity is artificial to start with.

Yeah. And you can use a Louis Vuitton bag to do what other Louis Vuitton bags do. It's a fucking bag. Jesus.


Fundamentally you seem incapable of seeing the forest for the trees

You are not in a position to say that, especially when you're flexxxing your luxury hobby amid other fully-invested enthusiasts of said hobby in a world that has YACHTS that the other enthusiasts seem to have noticed and conspicuously haven't flexxxxxxxxed over because that'd be stupid.


And don't get me wrong the incentives push a lot more heavily towards short term profits, but the long term is a consideration so there has to be some really compelling short term motivations to take any action that might significantly harm long-term profits.

They're not making money off the reserved list. They are making factually zero dollars off of the list. They have made factually zero dollars off the list for the entire history of the list. I genuinely don't know what to say that hasn't been said hundreds or thousands or millions of times that will make this sink in for people who seem to have failed a middle-school intro-to-economics course "because the teacher doesn't know econ."

And to anyone who takes umbrage, I'm trying really, really hard to be civil right now, but this nonsense is insulting to read.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Yeah. And you can use a Louis Vuitton bag to do what other Louis Vuitton bags do. It's a fucking bag. Jesus.



You are not in a position to say that, especially when you're flexxxing your luxury hobby amid other fully-invested enthusiasts of said hobby in a world that has YACHTS that the other enthusiasts seem to have noticed and conspicuously haven't flexxxxxxxxed over because that'd be stupid.



They're not making money off the reserved list. They are making factually zero dollars off of the list. They have made factually zero dollars off the list for the entire history of the list. I genuinely don't know what to say that hasn't been said hundreds or thousands or millions of times that will make this sink in for people who seem to have failed a middle-school intro-to-economics course "because the teacher doesn't know econ."

And to anyone who takes umbrage, I'm trying really, really hard to be civil right now, but this nonsense is insulting to read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

[Wrath of Pie]

Would anyone here mind if Wizards printed the following cards into a legacy and commander only set such as Commander Legends 2?

Selesnya Garden
Forest Plains
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Boros Garden
Mountain Plains
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Golgari Garden
Swamp Forest
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Izzet Garden
Island Mountain
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Dimir Garden
Swamp Island
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gains a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

And a cycle of these same lands for the other 5 guilds as well.

With duals that close to the originals in power level, I wouldn't even bother taking my duals out of their binder. Why play with $1000 cards and risk getting them damaged or stolen when $2 alternatives exist that are 99.9% as good.

Does anyone think doing so would violate the reserve list in any way? If not, then why aren't we asking Wizards to do just that?

What's the incentive to specifically use such a minor drawback when they can just restrict the untapped status to having 40 or more life?

[Ronald Deuce]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Demonstrate that you weren't simply supplying your credentials by citing that.

EDIT: "Rolexes are hard to find, so that's how Wizzerds makes money" makes no sense. Do better.

[Ronald Deuce]

Wizards is probably oversaturating the market lately with infinite Lair, Commander, Horizon, Market, Duel, FTV etc. etc. products.

But for right now it seems to be working, Magic sales grew 30 fucking percent last year. What incentive does that give Wizards to fuck around with its winning formula?

Ending the reserved list isn't "fucking around with [Wizards's] winning formula." That's a literal direct application of the formula you claim they've bashed their heads through concrete walls to find. You just demonstrated exactly how Wizards can make more than 30% increased sales, but you don't feel like understanding your own argument because "muh cardboard Ferrari."

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Demonstrate that you weren't simply supplying your credentials by citing that.

EDIT: "Rolexes are hard to find, so that's how Wizzerds makes money" makes no sense. Do better.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l17WAyNAHfQ

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Ending the reserved list isn't "fucking around with [Wizards's] winning formula." That's a literal direct application of the formula you claim they've bashed their heads through concrete walls to find. You just demonstrated exactly how Wizards can make more than 30% increased sales, but you don't feel like understanding your own argument because "muh cardboard Ferrari."

You seem to have a very hard time tracking things so I'll make things slightly easier for you and clarify that I don't own any duals, or indeed, any reserved list cards at all.

I'm not entirely sure I actually own Magic cards at this point outside of whatever's still on my MTGO account. Like, maybe? But after two moves in the past year I'd be hard pressed to say where they are.

And no I just demonstrated the opposite, you just weren't paying attention and/or have a very hard time reading. I was demonstrated that Wizards can't just wave a wand and grow more than 30% annually no matter what they print and that recklessly trying to do so is a really bad idea from a business perspective.

Like. You do understand that 30% annual growth is a fucking lot for an established company, right? Like that's an absurd level of growth.

Like I laid out a pretty simple formula of how Wizards can increase its profits, and you could address this if you wanted to make an argument, but it doesn't seem like you want to make an argument, it seemed like you want to start shit and demonstrate that you're bad at reading and don't know what the words you use mean.

[Grizzlenasty]

What's the incentive to specifically use such a minor drawback when they can just restrict the untapped status to having 40 or more life?

Time to open up the thread: "Will Wizards ever print zero drawback Triple lands?"

Either they make them slightly worse or right away.. I don't wanna say it.. argh.. REPRINT THE OG DUALS. Untapped status of 40 life would be kind of functionally the same for literally any format in nearly every situation. Ratchet bomb is still kind of worse but also better than Powder Keg. Thin Line I'd say.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Watery Grave is $13; Drowned Catacomb is $8. Fetid Pools & Choked Estuary are $5, Darkslick Shores is $16, Creeping Tar Pit is $4. Sunken Ruins is $18, Underground River, despite innumerable printings, is $8. Polluted Delta is $42 of course. Morphic Pool is $27.

All of these are worse than Underground Sea, which is $800.

But it is also obvious that all of them are good enough that people want to play them, or more accurately, are willing to play them.

What players want is indestructible five color artifact snow lands that also shuffle your library, draw you a card when they enter play, and modal double faced with a Brainstorm/Force of Will split card. Or rather that's what they think they want, because players want to be able to do everything all the time with no restrictions and don't understand that that would make the game unfun.

And like I don't mean to interrupt people talking about what they think the game should look like from a purity of play standpoint, but this thread seems to be specifically framed as "what will Wizards do" and then people keep saying stuff that sure sounds like they don't understand that Wizards only interest in the game is as a means to make money.

It's not enough then to just say you think Wizards should make lands that are equal to or better than the duals for mana fixing, you have to have an actual case for why they would do that.

[kombatkiwi]

Now the key thing here is that Wizards absolutely does not give a single solitary flying shit what products the players are buying as long as it's the product they're making and they thing they can maintain these sales long term. If tomorrow Richard Garfield shoved an old woman in line at the grocery store, and she turned out to be an evil witch who, in retaliation, cursed him and erased forever the concept and memory of the Reserved List and every card on it, and in fact of Alpha/Beta entirely; what would that change? I mean obviously that would alter the metagame a lot and make things confusing for us, but from Wizards' perspective the only thing that matters is how that would affect sales. And their sales, right now, are completely unaffected by the existence of the cards on the reserved list because. Y'know. They're not printing them.
Let's make things really simple:
Right now, some number of people are willing to spend hundreds / thousands of dollars on duals/power/workshops/bazaar etc.
WotC doesn't currently get 1 cent of this, because the reserved list means they aren't currently selling those items.
If the secondary market price of an underground sea is $1000 (for the sake of argument), the announcement of removing the reserved list would drop the price (especially of revised edition copies), but the amount of money wotc makes from printing underground sea increases infinite, because the amount of money they are currently making from selling underground sea is zero


Wizards' concern can be expressed in a pretty simple formula: (Number of players buying product) x (Average amount of money spent by players on product)
Correct, assuming that players are buying product in a way that helps WotC bottom line, but players are instead spending a lot of money buying old cards on the secondary market rather than getting money to WotC because WotC has this rule that they aren't allowed to print them anymore.


So no, it's ridiculous to think of Wizards as having "unrealized equity" in the Reserved List, because instead of a product containing dual lands it could just release any other product and it doesn't care about the content of the product, it only cares that people are buying it. It's all fungible to Wizards. If the people wanted white-bordered Ouphe theme decks they could print those and be just as happy.
It's not all fungible to WotC, this is the point I made in my previous post; there's no other reasonable way for WotC to cards that have pricetags of hundreds of dollars. If they priced an Ouphe theme deck at $500 nobody would buy it but people are paying that much on the secondary market right now (and more) for 1 card


To make an argument that reprinting duals would increase Wizards' profits you have to have a situation where one half of the formula outlined above is slumping in a way that more duals would plausibly help.
Why does anything have to be slumping? Wouldn't they want to increase "average amount of money spent by players on product" (in a way that makes money for WotC) at any time?


As mentioned the prestige/conspicuous consumption aspect of old expensive cards works pretty much one way.
I don't think this idea of RL cards giving MTG "prestige" has any merit
- If people do like the idea of owning a lotus a la they like the idea of owning a rolex it doesn't help WotC at all because WotC can't currently produce and sell them
- Therefore you have to make the argument that the existence of the reserved list creates an allure/credibility for other formats, and no, I don't believe that the high price of the power9 makes people look in and go "wow cool I want to start playing the cheaper / mass market version of this". "It elevates the brand" is such a hand-wavey argument


Like theoretically maybe there's a price point where lowering entry costs somewhat would attract more players, but you're almost certainly not going to be able to accurately identify where that is.
Lowering entry costs to attract players works on a continuous scale. You reduce the price a bit and a few people will join. You reduce the price a bit more and a few more people will join. So reducing the barrier to entry by any amount helps. There's not some magical cutoff point that needs to be hit.

As a reminder, my argument isn't that "more people will join ergo WotC will make more money" (even though that could possibly happen) or that "we need Lotus for the proletariat" or something like that, my argument is that WotC is currently making 0 dollars from the sale of RL cards when they could be making some (high) nonzero amount.


You could frustrate your players by making it wildly inaccessible or creating enormous power gaps between a budget list and a budget-doesn't-matter, but that's not what they've been doing.
This is basically true for legacy / vintage
Even if you just want to play a fun EDH deck that draws cards and don't care about powerlevel you still want to have duals and twister.

But ultimately the argument about whether a player merely "wants" vs "needs" it is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that the secondary market price of the cards indicates what people are willing to pay. It's a lot. How much money does WotC currently make from that high price? Zero


They've been printing lots of pretty good duals in recent years, they're just not as good as the originals. But were pretty far removed from "painlands are too good for Standard" days. So those wildly expensive cards are just aspirational, something to daydream about and maybe start working at collecting a piece at a time. That's not bad for Wizards to have.
It is bad for WotC to have because WotC doesn't see a cent of that. If a someone says "Im a highly enfranchised MtG player, I spent $1000 on it last week" and rather than buying boxes of Eternal Masters 2 they bought 2 duals off Ebay you don't think that's bad for WotC? You could argue that like it doesn't have any direct "negative impact" and the player is still part of the community/ecosystem and playing in tournaments etc but the opportunity cost for WotC (compared to the player spending money in a way that makes money for WotC) is high.


Meanwhile non-players just don't give a shit at all because they don't know what dual lands are and while the price of the game generally might be keeping them out, it's not the price of RL cards because there's lots of formats they can play without those. In fact all the most popular ones except again EDH which you can do just fine in without- in fact playing an expensive tricked out deck can be a bad idea in a format where politics matter.
"Actually the reserved list doesn't matter because you can just play standard"
"Actually the reserved list doesn't matter because if you play a Taiga in commander people will gang up on you anyway"
You are seriously grasping at straws now and this "non players" point also assumes that the only thing WotC cares about is pulling new people into the game to spend money on whatever their current offerings are. If wotc can also make money by selling $500 cards to enfranchised players then why wouldn't they want to do that.

Oh good, it seems you agree:


So the only half of the equation that reprinting duals might help is the spending by existing players. But there's no indication that's necessary; again, Wizards is doing really, really well at selling new products, and they've long since figured out how to get even eternal players and older players/collectors on board with special promo shit and lots and lots of annual products that just circumvent Standard entirely.

Define "necessary". WotC is a company and they like to make money ("FiDuCiArY dUtY"). If they have this obvious way that they could make more money, then.... ?


Now, again, if sales start slumping at some point they have the option of breaking the Reserve List, but they want to do that very carefully and the most careful way to do it is... just don't do it. A short term modest sales bump isn't worth the damage it would entail because again, funds are fungible and most of the money existing players would be spending on a product with duals is just money they would otherwise be printing on From the Vault: Ouphes or whatever.
In my opinion you haven't made a good case that "brand damage" is a realistic thing to be concerned about here and the idea that people just throw money at WotC for any card printing regardless of what the cards actually do/are is just nonsense. The idea that "We only need to make more money if we find ourselves in a slump otherwise we can just cruise" also stupid


This is nonsense, shit like Modern Horizons 2 IS them printing new luxury goods.
Foil old border retro force of negation is $200 on cardkingdom, urza $170, Scalding tarn $80. Whats the price of a revised scrubland? let alone P9, Bazaar etc


Uh no it has a lot of limitations. Like, they can only make a small number of these things because the artificial scarcity is the point and what drives the brand. They have to be very careful in managing that, in fact. Their equity is in their brand and their brand is all about the public perception of them as being scarce, luxury, conspicuous. And public perception is fickle.

Yes LV is careful about managing the perception of the brand but you totally misread the point I was making.

LV has proven that they can sell bags for a high price. Once they have proven that this is a good way they can make money, why would they simply write-off or ignore that and only sell new things for a low price? (It seems like you agree with me that this would not be a good business decision). This isn't a case of "selling things for a low price hurts the brand" it's "selling things for a low price directly cuts revenue".

The secondary market for MTG has proven that those cards can sell for a high price. If wotc can see that it could make money by selling cards at this price, why would they simply write-off or ignore that and only sell things for a lower price? It seems like this would not be a good business decision but by maintaining the reserved list it is effectively what they are doing.


Do you not wonder why people make cheap bags when anyone could theoretically just make a bag and charge $50k for it? Hell you could custom order a purse tomorrow and then put it up on ebay for $1million if you wanted, no one could or would stop you. Do you think this is a good money making scheme?
I don't think they would buy my custom purse for 1 million just like I don't think (many) people would buy secret lair shivan dragon for $1000 just like I posted previously


Luxury markets are incredibly competitive. Magic cards are cheap fucking cardboard and ink, that cost like pennies to hundreds to make. It requires constant brand management to get people to pay through the nose for the latest product and honestly if anything Wizards is probably oversaturating the market lately with infinite Lair, Commander, Horizon, Market, Duel, FTV etc. etc. products.

They have done the "brand management" because commander and legacy etc are super popular and people are willing to pay hundreds for the cards on the secondary market. But they aren't "cashing in" on the brand management because they don't make any money from the sales of these

Again it's like my LV example. You do the necessary brand management to get people to pay $1000 for your bag design. Wow! What an achievement. Then, after demonstrating that you can make a lot of money this way, you arbitrarily decide to only make generic luggage. Again this is not "create a spinoff/sister company to make generic luggage" but simply "the designer bags make a lot of money but we are just deciding not to do that". Why? It doesn't make any sense


But for right now it seems to be working, Magic sales grew 30 fucking percent last year. What incentive does that give Wizards to fuck around with its winning formula?
Ronald Deuce reply to this is exactly correct

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Okay let's simplify something

The total amount of dual lands in existence is about 2.5 million, or 250k of each, according to some guy on the internet (https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/22meqg/random_question_how_many_original_dual_lands_were/).

TCG listed market price of a revised dual for each type is:

Tundra 530
Underground Sea 880
Badlands 440
Taiga 390
Savannah 340
Scrubland 310
Bayou 550
Tropical Island 720
Volcanic Island 750
Plateau 320

Single set of each: 5,230

Let's assume that every dual land ever printed still exists and in a condition worth paying said market price for; that creates a market value for the entire set of {dual lands} of about $1.3 billion.

Let's assume that every year about 10% of those cards are sold on the secondary market. That puts the annual revenue of the market for dual lands at $130 million.

Let's assume that Wizards is able to functionally, through whatever packaging/product product is uses, sell its reprint duals at 1/4 the current market price; that means we're talking about $32.5 million in annual revenue, which we are also assuming is a pure increase since it will only displace spending in the secondary market, and we're also assuming there are no negative knock-down effects from destabilizing the secondary market in this way that affect Wizards' overall Magic sales otherwise.

So we're talking about a more or less one time gimmick to wrest maybe $32 million from the secondary market, and to be clear, based entirely on a set of insanely generous assumptions, with the real annual value of the secondary market for duals being almost certainly drastically less than aforementioned, even if we throw in the much higher priced but also dramatically rarer alpha/betas (unlimited also being dramatically rarer than revised but also way less expensive/prestige than a/b).

Note that this does not mean, "Wizards will only sell $32 million worth of product containing duals," it just means that's the amount of said sales that are displaced from the existing dual secondary market, and not from the market of just, "other Magic the Gathering products."

Now I mean $32 million isn't something I would sneeze at personally but Hasbro's games division, of which Magic is the primary driver, made $243 million in just the first quarter of 2019. (https://www.anbmedia.com/news/toys/2019/04/hasbro-q1-2019-earnings-up-2-percent-magic-the-gathering/)

So we again divide that 32 by a quarter and like, maybe quarterly sales experience a short-term boost of $8 million.

So like, just as a starting premise can we look at the math involved (which again we're making a lot of really generous assumptions about) and discount the idea that there's any reality in which reprinting dual lands is some eureka genius idea that's just so obviously going to bolster their profits that they'd be fools not to? Because that's not the reality in which we live. This shit is at the very best case a pretty marginal and diminishing boost compared to like, say, the shit they're doing to boost Arena or brand recognition or improve their storylines, shit that actually has the potential to boost their profits and the value of the company long-term.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

You are like just literally doing the goose that laid the golden egg thing, or trying to get Wizards to do it. The Secondary Market isn't something standing in the way of Wizards' profits. It helps them. Its entire revenue is drastically below what Wizards itself makes but it bolsters confidence that these pieces of cardboard people are spending big bucks on are worth something. And the reserve list is a small but helpful bolster to that illusion. You know what cards aren't on the reserved list btw? Any of them printed this fucking century. Like I am going to my goddaughter's high school graduation this week and she wasn't fucking born when the last card went on the reserved list. So no, Wizards "handicaps" itself by not printing 10,000 Underground Seas that would go for $200 each and instead only sells a million copies of Ragavan that will go for $80 each.

Because they're not a bunch of dumb monkeys.

[kombatkiwi]

You are like just literally doing the goose that laid the golden egg thing, or trying to get Wizards to do it. The Secondary Market isn't something standing in the way of Wizards' profits. It helps them. Its entire revenue is drastically below what Wizards itself makes but it bolsters confidence that these pieces of cardboard people are spending big bucks on are worth something. And the reserve list is a small but helpful bolster to that illusion.
The reserved list only helps bolster the illusion for cards that wotc can't make any money off of, is the problem.
The fact that the RL exists doesn't give me some magical confidence that the value of my scalding tarns is going to go up forever.


You know what cards aren't on the reserved list btw? Any of them printed this fucking century. Like I am going to my goddaughter's high school graduation this week and she wasn't fucking born when the last card went on the reserved list.
What does this have to do with anything


So no, Wizards "handicaps" itself by not printing 10,000 Underground Seas that would go for $200 each and instead only sells a million copies of Ragavan that will go for $80 each.

This shit is at the very best case a pretty marginal and diminishing boost compared to like, say, the shit they're doing to boost Arena or brand recognition or improve their storylines, shit that actually has the potential to boost their profits and the value of the company long-term.
It's a false dilemma, even assuming your back-of-the-envelope calculation is correct there's still nothing stopping them from printing both duals and ragavans

The "It's a 1-time emergency button and after they do it once it's all gone" idea also doesn't convince me because why do the prices for e.g. the fetchlands keep going up over time even with occasional reprints. It's not like "oh we reprinted this once in MM3 now nobody will want to buy it ever again"

The entire approach to that calculation is also stupid:
Like look at one of the secret lair that has just come out, they sell for about $30 right
Lets say they sold idk, 100,000 of that? I have no idea what the actual numbers look like but surely it can't be that high
Oh that's only $3M? A tiny fraction of Hasbro games division overall revenue? Why did they bother then


So we again divide that 32 by a quarter and like, maybe quarterly sales experience a short-term boost of $8 million.
Even if this is true I don't think you have made any good argument that there's any significant downside
The only thing you have is the idea about "loss of prestige" right. Is there anything else?

[Clark Kant]

The discussion around them getting rid of the reserve list or makes duals that are superior to the OG duals is a waste of time. Neither is going to happen.
I'd absolutely give them a try if I was on budget or just buying in. Sure, not every deck could get away with these - I feel like Delver or Storm decks might have problems including these, but most midrange and control decks couldn't cares less about the drawback.
Just my initial thought on these. I find them pretty well designed to be honest.

Thank you. That was precisely the goal, to design duals that do not violate the reserve list but whose drawback is so insignificant that players wouldn't mind using them in place of the OG duals. I think those cards walk that line well but there are other ways to do this as well.

So does anyone have any other ideas for duals with very slight drawbacks that will neither violate the reserve list nor cost people games... Basically duals like these?


Would anyone here mind if Wizards printed the following cards into a legacy and commander only set such as Commander Legends 2?

Selesnya Garden
Forest Plains
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gain a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Boros Garden
Mountain Plains
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gain a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Golgari Garden
Swamp Forest
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gain a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Izzet Garden
Island Mountain
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gain a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

Dimir Garden
Swamp Island
When ~ etb, it enters tapped unless you either have each opponent gain a life or reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone

And a cycle of these same lands for the other 5 guilds as well.

With duals that close to the originals in power level, I wouldn't even bother taking my duals out of their binder. Why play with $1000 cards and risk getting them damaged or stolen when $2 alternatives exist that are 99.9% as good.

Does anyone think doing so would violate the reserve list in any way? If not, then why aren't we asking Wizards to do just that?

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I mean as I made clear, I'm not making the time to explain why it's a risky (I don't say clearly bad) idea for Wizards, from a purely financial perspective; I've already done that and that wasn't the point of that post.

The point of that post was that the only money Wizards is theoretically "losing" to the secondary market on duals is a pretty small fraction of what they are currently making selling Magic cards.

I am specifically leaving open as a separate question whether or not it would be pure unbridled profit to break the reserve list or entail risk, because that's a separate question. The point I was making that you don't seem to really have an argument against is that while it sounds impressive to say, oh, an individual dual land can sell for up to a thousand dollars, more in the cases of A/B, that's with a pretty miniscule volume. Again, every assumption I made was pretty heavily weighted in your favor and the annual revenue of the secondary dual market is still pretty small potatoes in the best case scenario.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

In other words if we're having a pros vs cons conversation I think it's fair and true to say that the cons are a lot smaller than a lot of people want to suggest, at least in most iterations, but like, the pros are pretty fucking small too and I haven't seen any really compelling argument otherwise, not from a Wizards' fiduciary perspective.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Also I don't have numbers one this but intuitively it feels to me like recent (meaning like at least the past decade+) Magic design philosophy has not included a lot more mana fixing land cycles that are equal to or above the painlands but worse than the OG duals, it's also just emphasized a lot more splash mana costing. It just feels like you see a lot less double, triple same color costs overall than you used to.

[kombatkiwi]

I mean as I made clear, I'm not making the time to explain why it's a risky (I don't say clearly bad) idea for Wizards, from a purely financial perspective; I've already done that and that wasn't the point of that post.

The point of that post was that the only money Wizards is theoretically "losing" to the secondary market on duals is a pretty small fraction of what they are currently making selling Magic cards.

I am specifically leaving open as a separate question whether or not it would be pure unbridled profit to break the reserve list or entail risk, because that's a separate question. The point I was making that you don't seem to really have an argument against is that while it sounds impressive to say, oh, an individual dual land can sell for up to a thousand dollars, more in the cases of A/B, that's with a pretty miniscule volume. Again, every assumption I made was pretty heavily weighted in your favor and the annual revenue of the secondary dual market is still pretty small potatoes in the best case scenario.

Sure I don't disagree that if the reprint supply is so scarce that the price stays the same/similar that the total revenue from duals is likely to be small compared to other wotc products, whether that's from direct 'secretlair style' sales or some kind of rare booster insert / masterpiece (like when they put actual old copies of power in very few packs of Zendikar 1)

I just don't believe it entails risk (except for the legal issue), AND there is potentially a point of lower price / higher supply where they can move a lot more of them and overall make more than your estimation


In other words if we're having a pros vs cons conversation I think it's fair and true to say that the cons are a lot smaller than a lot of people want to suggest, at least in most iterations, but like, the pros are pretty fucking small too and I haven't seen any really compelling argument otherwise, not from a Wizards' fiduciary perspective.

Yeah this is fair
I just think that the cons are close to 0 where the upside is much clearer

[BirdsOfParadise]

I think that
(a) Wizards has figured out that Legacy and Vintage and other old-time formats are good for Wizards, as long as Wizards doesn’t need to do anything to support them, since they enhance the brand and help keep players in the fold, so to speak; and
(b) they don’t need to do anything to support Legacy and Vintage; and
(c) they can sell packs containing Urza’s Saga / Ragavan / Endurance to Legacy and Vintage players without rocking the boat; and
(d) they could sell packs containing Underground Sea to Legacy and Vintage players, but that would rock the boat; and
(e) they could take some other creative steps like the ones outlined in this thread to reduce the barrier to entry for Legacy and Vintage, but that would involve doing something, and see item (b).

Why should Wizards care that Legacy has a high cost of entry?

I don’t mean to be a cynic. I have the same instinct to try to fix Legacy and I have loads of ideas. But it won’t come from Wizards. All you’ll get from Wizards is more Ragavans. If you want a better Eternal format you’ll just need to make up your own rules and convince your friends to get on board.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Well the risk of harm to the prestige/allure of expensive old Magic cards is... nebulous to say the least. I would certainly say that part of the reason that any legal issue is a non-threat is that it's pretty well established that collectible value is just dependent upon an iteration, and this is true across numerous collectible fields- you're not going to get anywhere suing DC for printing collections or new editions of Action Comics #1, you can't sue whoever makes baseball cards for printing a new Mickey Mantle, not successfully. Ty can and does make new versions of Radar etc.. So you'd have to make the case that the Reserve List itself represents some kind of binding legal contract, and that's a pretty wildly novel and I'd say frivolous argument.

But again, the biggest downside is that you're just wasting a rainy day fund when the sun is shining. Magic is making plenty of money, right now you'd just be priming a pump that's already gushing. Save something like reprinting duals until you're actually dealing with declining sales/interests.

I mean again that's from Wizards' fiduciary perspective, I would like them to make the game overall way more accessible, including Legacy, but I don't think that's really profitable for them.

[Grizzlenasty]

That was precisely the goal, to design duals that do not violate the reserve list but whose drawback is so insignificant that players wouldn't mind using them in place of the OG duals. I think those cards walk that line well but there are other ways to do this as well.

So does anyone have any other ideas for duals with very slight drawbacks that will neither violate the reserve list nor cost people games...

To put them even closer to ABUR duals in powerlevel while not exceeding them, they could add a negative "Once upon a time" style clause. - If it's your first landdrop of the game, opponent gains live, may scry1, you reveal the top card of your library, exile the top card of your library face down.. yadayada.. thousand possibilities with little to no drawback while 1) not violating reserve and 2) not outright costing you games like shocks and 3) technically still being worse then real duals

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I mean if they want to they could do “drawbacks” like “when this etb, mill three” or “when this etb, each player gains 2 life” or “etb tapped unless you discard a card” that would just be better than duals in certain decks

But again if we’re asking what Wizard will do the question is why would Wizards want to do that?

Like consider formats like Historic, Modern, and Pioneer without duals. People have multi hundred dollar mana bases for their decks based around fast lands, shocks, pain lands, filters, checks, etc.. What does it do to those formats if they just print lands that obsolete those manabases? That’s not a rhetorical question really. Does that help Wizards? But if so, how?

Again it kind of feels like people are working backwards from the assumption that Wizards wants dual lands running around all over, and the reserved list is some big bad meanie to be overcome or tricked to get to that end.

But it’s not. Wizards has the power here. The reserved list is just an excuse because they don’t want to do the thing (right now at least)

[Clark Kant]

To put them even closer to ABUR duals in powerlevel while not exceeding them, they could add a negative "Once upon a time" style clause. - If it's your first landdrop of the game, opponent gains live, may scry1, you reveal the top card of your library, exile the top card of your library face down.. yadayada.. thousand possibilities with little to no drawback while 1) not violating reserve and 2) not outright costing you games like shocks and 3) technically still being worse then real duals

Yes. Thats a great idea. A minor drawback that only occurs the first time you cast a land of that type, or a minor drawback that only occurs if you do not have any other lands in play.

This would be a great way to ensure the prestige format of magic, legacy can continue to exist as a paper format with sanctioned events and a healthy player base with annual growth, rather than a stagnant player base that will eventually cause the format to die out entirely the way that vintage has, all while also making wotc some money (legacy players buy cards and secret lairs as well).

[Grizzlenasty]

I mean if they want to they could do “drawbacks” like “when this etb, mill three” or “when this etb, each player gains 2 life” or “etb tapped unless you discard a card” that would just be better than duals in certain decks

But again if we’re asking what Wizard will do the question is why would Wizards want to do that?

Like consider formats like Historic, Modern, and Pioneer without duals. People have multi hundred dollar mana bases for their decks based around fast lands, shocks, pain lands, filters, checks, etc.. What does it do to those formats if they just print lands that obsolete those manabases? That’s not a rhetorical question really. Does that help Wizards? But if so, how?

Again it kind of feels like people are working backwards from the assumption that Wizards wants dual lands running around all over, and the reserved list is some big bad meanie to be overcome or tricked to get to that end.

But it’s not. Wizards has the power here. The reserved list is just an excuse because they don’t want to do the thing (right now at least)

Lands like that would probably be either straight up better versions of duals, like the mill land - which would impede with the prestigious appeal from real duals, or would be as bad as shocks playpatternwise - the lifegain one. Abur duals are not only rare but also the best option available. It would need to stay that way if RL is supposed to stay. We no care for modern historic pioneer... Wizard could simply print them into a Commander set in a weak year.. 5 to 10 years from now maybe.



Yes. Thats a great idea. A minor drawback that only occurs the first time you cast a land of that type, or a minor drawback that only occurs if you do not have any other lands in play.

I'm pretty high on the "OUAT" style clause. If your first land is a fetch, the drawback doesn't matter, if you later pick it up via daze or Scryb/Quirion Ranger and replay it as your only land in play from hand or via Crucible/Ramunap effect, it doesn't matter. If your opponent plays a bazillion wastelands and forces you to play your land as your only one again and again the reoccurring drawback isn't screwing you over even more than your opp is already doing.
This ensures these duals are an estimated 99% as playable as the ABUR ones, as the build in drawback only occurs every so and so many games just once. Most Legacy play patterns should basically be unaffected by this. And Commander players wouldn't be sad about such lands either. It's a very fine line between making them viable while not printing the next broken thing. I.e. Enters tapped unless you get half a bazaar :D

Now we just have to negotiate which drawback it should be and open up the thread:"Will Wizards ever employ us and give us enough trust and power to change everything"

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Lands like that would probably be either straight up better versions of duals, like the mill land - which would impede with the prestigious appeal from real duals, or would be as bad as shocks playpatternwise - the lifegain one. Abur duals are not only rare but also the best option available. It would need to stay that way if RL is supposed to stay. We no care for modern historic pioneer... Wizard could simply print them into a Commander set in a weak year.. 5 to 10 years from now maybe.

I am really fucking confused as to what you want at this point, much less what you think Wizards would plausibly do

If they want to get around the reserved list without breaking the reserved list- and I don't see any reason for them to actually want this- they would do what I said. But the point is that there's no reason for them to do this.

If they want to do away with the reserved list they'd just do that. If they want to keep the reserved list and keep making duals that are worse than the original duals but still playable in other formats they'd... do that because that's what they've been doing. See again the Luxury Suite cycle which perfectly demonstrates how easy it is to just insert duals into commander products.

You seem to want... duals that are worse than the original duals, but just like. Barely. Well okay, what about this card:

Badder Lands
Land- Swamp Mountain
When ~ etb, flip ten coins. If you lose all ten flips, lose 1 life.

There it's strictly worse than Badlands in everything except a Chance Encounter deck. But... is there a reason to print this card? No. Like. Why would there be?


Now we just have to negotiate which drawback it should be and open up the thread:"Will Wizards ever employ us and give us enough trust and power to change everything"

Well no because you don't seem to understand that card design and development has to cater to specifications of what Wizards is actually trying to do with its products, so you'd be a bad employee from their perspective.

[kombatkiwi]

Again it kind of feels like people are working backwards from the assumption that Wizards wants dual lands running around all over, and the reserved list is some big bad meanie to be overcome or tricked to get to that end.

What we are doing is asking "assuming the reserved list did not exist, would it benefit wotc to be able to print reserved list cards" and coming up with ideas like
- It seems like it would allow them to make some money easily
- It would be consistent with their overall strategy of reprinting chase cards every now and then with premium versions like in Secret Lairs or Modern Horizons
- It would be an overwhelmingly popular thing for them to do (in terms of absolute number of people for / against)

Reasons for them not doing it seem to be things like
- It could hurt the prestige / value of the MTG brand?

and on balance of these things it would seem like printing RL cards would be a good idea
Then we have to ask if that is the case, why have they not done it? And the most straightforward answer is that they can't, because the RL exists

You are doing the same kind of "working backwards" that you claim
You see that WotC isn't printing RL cards, and work backwards from the assumption that it must be because they have identified it's a correct business decision for them not to.
Once you start from that position then any argument in favour of removing the RL can be disregarded, because if it were true then WotC would already be printing RL cards.
So you end up arguing in favour of any nonsense you can come up with that justifies the RLs continued existence like "Legacy/Vintage is a prestige/luxury experience that makes wotc money by giving whales an environment where they can exclude the poors" or "they are too busy making money from modern horizons cards to have any room in their schedule for anything else"


But it’s not. Wizards has the power here. The reserved list is just an excuse because they don’t want to do the thing (right now at least)
This is a far, far bigger assumption than anything I have said which is why I keep insisting that if people want to make this argument they provide their legal qualifications/experience


Like consider formats like Historic, Modern, and Pioneer without duals. People have multi hundred dollar mana bases for their decks based around fast lands, shocks, pain lands, filters, checks, etc.. What does it do to those formats if they just print lands that obsolete those manabases? That’s not a rhetorical question really. Does that help Wizards? But if so, how?
As someone else has already pointed out, the "they could just print them in a supplementary set that's only legal in legacy/vintage/commander" is such an obvious solution that it feels like you are concern trolling

[Clark Kant]

As someone else has already pointed out, the "they could just print them in a supplementary set that's only legal in legacy/vintage/commander" is such an obvious solution that it feels like you are concern trolling

Yes it seems pretty clear to me that he is concern trolling at this point. Why else keep reasking the same questions that people already answered multiple times, including in the OP where it's suggested these lands be introduced in Commander Legends 2 or a similar legacy and commander only set.

And why without any legal education, make claims that Wizards would face zero legal risks or consequences if they straight up abandoned the reserve list promise they made earlier and strengthened again just a decade ago, despite not being a legal expert qualified to make such a claim.


I'm pretty high on the "OUAT" style clause. If your first land is a fetch, the drawback doesn't matter, if you later pick it up via daze or Scryb/Quirion Ranger and replay it as your only land in play from hand or via Crucible/Ramunap effect, it doesn't matter. If your opponent plays a bazillion wastelands and forces you to play your land as your only one again and again the reoccurring drawback isn't screwing you over even more than your opp is already doing.
This ensures these duals are an estimated 99% as playable as the ABUR ones, as the build in drawback only occurs every so and so many games just once. Most Legacy play patterns should basically be unaffected by this. And Commander players wouldn't be sad about such lands either. It's a very fine line between making them viable while not printing the next broken thing. I.e. Enters tapped unless you get half a bazaar :D

Now we just have to negotiate which drawback it should be and open up the thread:"Will Wizards ever employ us and give us enough trust and power to change everything"

Yes, the more I think about it, the more the OUAT clause makes sense. It's could have a substantial drawback to normal duals, but just have the drawback only apply if it's the first land you played that game. Even the same exact drawback as the shocklands (lose 10% of your life) wouldn't be a big deal if you could avoid the drawback by playing a fetchland as your first land of the game and then use it to fetch this new weaker dual land out.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l17WAyNAHfQ

Don't sign your posts

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Oh my god I posted that without knowing you people filled up another page with this stupid slap fight.

E: And it was a page because I just page sniped myself onto a new one. Now I have to make some content uh...
Reserved List sucks and if you think they can't drop it you're wrong. Source: The times they dropped cards off it
Yes Magic cards are a luxury good, a status symbol, like LV purses or Ugly ass OFF-White Dunks. Source: Hundred + dollar APAC lands.

[Grizzlenasty]

Yes, the more I think about it, the more the OUAT clause makes sense. It's could have a substantial drawback to normal duals, but just have the drawback only apply if it's the first land you played that game. Even the same exact drawback as the shocklands (lose 10% of your life) wouldn't be a big deal if you could avoid the drawback by playing a fetchland as your first land of the game and then use it to fetch this new weaker dual land out.

Sure one could argue that there isn't even a drawback really and balancing wise these might be horrible if held next to other duals wizards made, but the goal for me was to get as closely to the real deal while elegantly shipping around reserve and still keeping it recognisable as a real Magiccard regarding rules and flavour. Flip 10 coins duals and alike belong into Un... sets from my point of view.

That's the best I could come up with :eyebrow:


Oh my god I posted that without knowing you people filled up another page with this stupid slap fight..

If it wasn't for the mods, we could easily fill up 20 more pages of that jibberish :laugh:

[Wrath of Pie]

So does anyone have any other ideas for duals with very slight drawbacks that will neither violate the reserve list nor cost people games... Basically duals like these?

Drawbacks are way too minor for them to be printed, unfortunately. (Plus where would they be printed?)

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Yes it seems pretty clear to me that he is concern trolling at this point. Why else keep reasking the same questions that people already answered multiple times, including in the OP where it's suggested these lands be introduced in Commander Legends 2 or a similar legacy and commander only set.

Yeah I never asked that question a first time and I’ve spent honestly way too much time explaining in painful detail why Wizards has no incentive to do the thing you’re imagining. It’s obvious to me that you just don’t want to hear it, you want to hear people gushing about bad amateur card design.


And why without any legal education, make claims that Wizards would face zero legal risks or consequences if they straight up abandoned the reserve list promise they made earlier and strengthened again just a decade ago, despite not being a legal expert qualified to make such a claim.

I mean ignoring that I spent almost a decade doing paralegal work, the burden is on you to show what plausible legal repercussions Wizards would face. Who would sue them and on what grounds, in what court? What precedent can you point to for a successful lawsuit on the grounds that a game company or producer of collectibles said they wouldn’t do a thing and then changed their mind? Can you point to anyone that successfully sued Wizards over Ragavan after they said they’d never print Lazy Goblin? Who won or settled against DC for bringing Superman back from the dead? Over The Rolling Stones not actually retiring after farewell tour #n?

It’s honestly embarrassing to watch you confidently declare that a multi billion dollar international corporation is obligated to never do something because some dude pinky promised, especially when said corporation literally has a well established track record of changing its mind about what it will and won’t do.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Like just rename the thread “Design duals that skirt but don’t break the reserve list” if that’s the only thing you’re interested in. Because instead you asked a question you seem to really not want the answer to.

[Zilla]

I know you're new here, but please stop double posting. Thanks.

[Purple Blood]

I mean again that's from Wizards' fiduciary perspective, I would like them to make the game overall way more accessible, including Legacy, but I don't think that's really profitable for them.

Its pretty simple: they want formats that involve you buying cards as often as possible to be the most accessible. Draft is on one end of the spectrum and Legacy/Vintage is on the opposite end. There's no money in it for them if I'm playing the same deck (and maybe changing a handful of cards per year) for the next decade. There's a lot of money if I literally have to open multiple packs every time I want to play a new round.

[Clark Kant]

I look at how many commander legends and modern horizons and even strixhaven cards show up in legacy decks, and how much the legacy metagame evolves around these cards each year and I am left dumbfounded how anyone can believe the ridiculous notion that legacy players don't buy new cards.

Most people play commander casually, and stick to their favorite decks wirh minimal changes for years. Legacy however is a more competitive format and the format and it's players incorporate powerful new cards into their decks much faster.


Drawbacks are way too minor for them to be printed, unfortunately. (Plus where would they be printed?)

Just take a look at how well the Uro secret lair despite only seeing play in legacy, or how it's maintained its price. The wasteland secret lair will sell a boatload as well.


They literally printed a commander only slightly weaker black lotus in Commander Legends 1. There is no reason they can't print commander/legacy/vintage only slightly weaker dual lands in Commander Legends 2, particularly when doing so would both sell a ton of product and help save a dying prestige format that so many people love. A very fun and diverse format at that that is unlike any other format out there

The original duals by being slightly better and being so old, will remain just as valuable. But these new duals will make the format far more accessible than the current best alternative that has people lose 2-8 life each game for the sake of a consistent manabase.

And those with original duals would have a healthy sanctioned legacy paper format they can use them in.

This is the definition of a win win move. Sell product, keep a format alive, keep magic's oldest and most loyal playerbase happy.

Given that, the better question is, why wouldn't Wizards do it?

But the more interesting question is the one that many here are discussing, how best to design a land that is close enough to duals that the drawback will not cause people to lose games the way shocklands do, without being considered a reserve list violation the way that snowduals would be according to Maro.

[dte]

Given that, the better question is, why wouldn't Wizards do it?

To not double down on a clear design mistake?
From a gameplay perspective, ABUR duals are bad/boring. Modern databases are much more interesting both to play and to build, when you have to balance your greed over colors versus life (fetch/shocklands), need for basics (both in play and in the library), and EtB tap effects (mostly fastlands, but also manlands). The only lands that are used that are worse than duals from my (yes, it is subjective) gameplay perspective are fetchlands, with these endless search and shuffle. And they regularly reprint those, so my argument might be completely invalid.

On access to legacy issues, the biggest trouble I see is to keep repeating that duals or other expensive cards are essential. To my opinion, this is a fallacy, and quality of builds/play matters much more than duals. Some decks cannot be played without, but legacy is diverse enough that there are plenty of budget decks that can win tournaments if well build/played, from humans and D&T to death shadow and co. A funny point is that actually modern attracts much more player with suboptimal/cheap builds. I do think that it is mostly because it is not as badly perceived to do so, not because it is intrinsically a lower power gap between Tiers 1 decks and budget ones.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Its pretty simple: they want formats that involve you buying cards as often as possible to be the most accessible. Draft is on one end of the spectrum and Legacy/Vintage is on the opposite end. There's no money in it for them if I'm playing the same deck (and maybe changing a handful of cards per year) for the next decade. There's a lot of money if I literally have to open multiple packs every time I want to play a new round.

See this guy knows what's up


I look at how many commander legends and modern horizons and even strixhaven cards show up in legacy decks, and how much the legacy metagame evolves around these cards each year and I am left dumbfounded how anyone can believe the ridiculous notion that legacy players don't buy new cards.

You seem to be incapable of not strawmanning people, or at least incapable of understanding how numbers work. Legacy players don't buy new cards in the same numbers as limited and Standard players, this is just factual. The Eternal players who do buy lots of new product are EDH players, which is why Wizards prints shit for EDH.

And like if I am trying to borrow cards from people for a Legacy deck it is routinely the new cards I have trouble finding, even when it's a new card that's actually seeing Legacy play.


They literally printed a commander only slightly weaker black lotus in Commander Legends 1.

Okay

1) No they didn't.

2) cEDH isn't a real thing so they don't really care what dumb stuff they print for commander because it's a casual and mostly self-regulating format.


There is no reason they can't print commander/legacy/vintage only slightly weaker dual lands in Commander Legends 2

No, there's no reason they can't but there's lots of reasons they won't.


particularly when doing so would both sell a ton of product

I literally just dismantled this argument with factual numbers.


and help save a dying prestige format that so many people love.

lmao citation needed


A very fun and diverse format at that that is unlike any other format out there

Ehhhhh...?


The original duals by being slightly better and being so old, will remain just as valuable.

lmao this is just a contradiction. If you're trying to make it easier to play without duals you're going to lower the value of duals because that's the thing you just said.


But these new duals will make the format far more accessible than the current best alternative that has people lose 2-8 life each game for the sake of a consistent manabase.

So again

1) Why do you think Wizards wants to make Legacy more accessible?

2) If they want to make the format more accessible, why wouldn't they just reprint duals?


And those with original duals would have a healthy sanctioned legacy paper format they can use them in.

But they already have that. In fact they have two, including Vintage.


This is the definition of a win win move. Sell product, keep a format alive, keep magic's oldest and most loyal playerbase happy.

They're already selling product, Legacy seems fine and about as alive as they want it, and uh lol ignoring the presumption of the last point, Wizards doesn't care about happiness except as it relates to selling products, which is why they are more focused on selling products aimed at the people who buy more products.

This doesn't seem like a win win, it just seems like you fantasizing about something you want and then working backwards to rationalize it.


Given that, the better question is, why wouldn't Wizards do it?

Why wouldn't you set your dick on fire, if it feels really good and won't harm you at all? I guess the answer is that there's no reason not to given those priors, but your priors are bad.

[Clark Kant]

To not double down on a clear design mistake?

Duals work well in legacy and commander, and function well in a format with Wasteland alongside other nonbasic hate. If you disagree, you should instead be arguing for the original duals to be banned in legacy.

For the third time, the fact that these duals would be too powerful for modern is irrelevant. No one is arguing for these cards to be printed in Modern Horizons 3. We are talking about them being printed into Commander Legends 2.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

To not double down on a clear design mistake?
From a gameplay perspective, ABUR duals are bad/boring. Modern databases are much more interesting both to play and to build, when you have to balance your greed over colors versus life (fetch/shocklands), need for basics (both in play and in the library), and EtB tap effects (mostly fastlands, but also manlands). The only lands that are used that are worse than duals from my (yes, it is subjective) gameplay perspective are fetchlands, with these endless search and shuffle. And they regularly reprint those, so my argument might be completely invalid.

On access to legacy issues, the biggest trouble I see is to keep repeating that duals or other expensive cards are essential. To my opinion, this is a fallacy, and quality of builds/play matters much more than duals. Some decks cannot be played without, but legacy is diverse enough that there are plenty of budget decks that can win tournaments if well build/played, from humans and D&T to death shadow and co. A funny point is that actually modern attracts much more player with suboptimal/cheap builds. I do think that it is mostly because it is not as badly perceived to do so, not because it is intrinsically a lower power gap between Tiers 1 decks and budget ones.

+this

Including fetchlands just being absolutely terrible for the game. I find them being banned in Historic a promising sign but yeah then they went ahead and reprinted them in MH2 so, not 100% clear on what their position is on the fucking things.

[Wrath of Pie]

They literally printed a commander only slightly weaker black lotus in Commander Legends 1. There is no reason they can't print commander/legacy/vintage only slightly weaker dual lands in Commander Legends 2, particularly when doing so would both sell a ton of product and help save a dying prestige format that so many people love. A very fun and diverse format at that that is unlike any other format out there

Commander makes them massively more money than Legacy could dream of, and Black Lotus is banned in Commander, so it makes sense for them to make a Commander-compatible Lotus that isn't LED. (Also, slightly weaker is not a fair description.)

That's why I suggested a Commander-compatible drawback, because that's who they design dual land cycles for in those products, not Legacy players.

[Clark Kant]

Including fetchlands just being absolutely terrible for the game. I find them being banned in Historic a promising sign but yeah then they went ahead and reprinted them in MH2 so, not 100% clear on what their position is on the fucking things.

It's pretty clear what their position is. They want multiple formats that coexist at multiple different power levels, even the mana bases.

It's a great sign that there are people that enjoy so many differnt formats, including Pioneer and Historic that do not have fetchlands. If you find historic more fun, play that. But if you also enjoy playing legacy, you have to accept that it has a significantly more powerful manabase than Modern and should be supportive of efforts to make the format more accessible to more players.

It's almost like some legacy players have a death wish for paper legacy and actively want people to remain priced out even if it means that paper legacy goes the way that paper vintage did.


Why wouldn't you set your dick on fire, if it feels really good and won't harm you at all? I guess the answer is that there's no reason not to given those priors, but your priors are bad.

Lol. How am I even supposed to ridiculous analogies like this? In what universe is setting your dick on fire causes no harm at all. Is it the same universe where printing these lands into a legacy/commander only product somehow harmful to health of legacy?

How is making legacy more accessible for more people equivalent to burning a body part off?

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

It's pretty clear what their position is. They want multiple formats that coexist at multiple different power levels, even the mana bases.

It's a great sign that there are people that enjoy so many differnt formats, including ones that Pioneer and Historic that do not have fetchlands. If you find historic more fun, play that. But if you want play legacy, you have accept that it has a significantly more powerful manabase than Modern and should be supportive of efforts to make the format more accessible to more players.

Historic is Arena's "eternal" format. Fetchlands aren't banned for power reasons, at least not power reasons as it relates to mana fixing. The problems fetchlands introduce to the game are unintended effects as far as shuffling, graveyard filling etc.., and mitigation of nonbasic hate. They're basically just really badly designed lands that made the game worse, and this is all discounting the effects on paper which are worse because it wastes a lot of time with shuffling and creates opportunities for both cheating and theft.

Also like, I've played this format since before it was this format so I'm really not interested in your lectures about what I should or shouldn't support, especially when they're based in bad logic and poor reading comprehension.

If you need a recap/summary, and it's very obvious that you do

1) I do not own duals

2) I support breaking the reserved list and reprinting duals

3) I recognize that Wizards has no actual reason to do so at this time

4) I recognize that the RL is an excuse and if they want to "functionally" reprint duals they'll just do that and not do this Rumplestiltskin routine of just skirting the edges or w/e

5) On a side note I think fetchlands should be banned for multiple power and gameplay reasons because they're just badly designed cards that make the game worse.

[dte]

Duals work well in legacy and commander, and function well in a format with Wasteland alongside other nonbasic hate. If you disagree, you should instead be arguing for the original duals to be banned in legacy.

I really doubt that would make legacy players happy. But it is a bit puzzling to me to argue on one hand that duals are absolutely needed, and on the other that they "function well"? They do the job for sure, but so would black lotus, sol ring and a few moxes if they were authorized - at least they seem to do so in the format they are legal in.
So I would think that "working well" in a given format would mean "balanced", and that they are not.
I think it is fair to say that duals are overpowered and a bad design from the first editions, but that there are players who enjoy playing them, and that there is a dedicated sanctioned format that allow them to do so.
I would like to add that it is possible to play this format without duals and do well.

Edit:

The problems fetchlands introduce to the game are unintended effects as far as shuffling, graveyard filling etc.., and mitigation of nonbasic hate. They're basically just really badly designed lands that made the game worse, and this is all discounting the effects on paper which are worse because it wastes a lot of time with shuffling

Completely agreeing with this.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Like just rename the thread “Design duals that skirt but don’t break the reserve list” if that’s the only thing you’re interested in. Because instead you asked a question you seem to really not want the answer to.

We already have a shitty card creation thread

[Clark Kant]

But it is a bit puzzling to me to argue on one hand that duals are absolutely needed, and on the other that they "function well"?

If force of will was a reserve list card, thus selling for $3000 for a playset, I would be making this same arguement for Force. That Force is absolutely needed for a paper legacy format not dominated by combo, functions well, and would be arguing for FoW (or something that serves that same function just as well but not reserve list such as a Force of Negation that can counter Thassa and can be used during either players turn) to be printed as well.



That's why I suggested a Commander-compatible drawback, because that's who they design dual land cycles for in those products, not Legacy players.

That's irrelevant to the thread. This isn't a discussion about how to make cEDH cheaper and more accessible. It's about how to make legacy more accessible and able to support sanctioned paper events again.

More duals that are only usable in Commander does nothing to make paper legacy more accessible.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

That's irrelevant to the thread. This isn't a discussion about how to make cEDH cheaper and more accessible. It's about about to make legacy more accessible and able to support sanctioned paper events again.

More duals that are only usable in Commander does nothing to make paper legacy more accessible.

I thought it was a discussion about whether we think Wizards will ever again print dual lands that are better than shocks

And like, again, and I know you'll just keep ignoring this question, but why do you think Wizards wants Legacy to be more accessible?

[dte]

If force of will was a reserve list card, thus selling for $3000 for a playset,

FoW was not reprinted until very recently, without a big effect on its cost. You might have confused "reserve list" and "rare"?


I would be making this same arguement for Force. That Force is absolutely needed for a paper legacy format not dominated by combo, functions well, and would be arguing for FoW (or something that serves that same function just as well but not reserve list such as a Force of Negation that can counter Thassa and can be used during either players turn) to be printed as well.

Those are two different arguments. In your first, you had that duals were needed to play legacy.
You could argue that FoW is absolutely needed for the format health (and here Wizard did a great thing by printing a fixed version in FoN that complements FoW in legacy, and is pulling weight elsewhere), but not that you need FoW to play legacy.
Half of the legacy decks do not play FoW.

Last, FoW have no real alternatives, and has a great effect but at a large cost. Duals do have many alternatives, only slightly less powerful, and are basically great because they do not have much deckbuilding cost, especially since fetchlands pair well with them and allow you to play basics around waste/moon.

[Clark Kant]

And like, again, and I know you'll just keep ignoring this question, but why do you think Wizards wants Legacy to be more accessible?

What evidence do you have that they don't? They created legacy as a format, and they routinely ban cards to keep legacy diverse and healthy. Hell they even banned cards just because they felt those cards made the format less fun to play, so why despite this do you think that they would be fine with a beloved paper format either failing completely or be taken over by unsanctioned legal proxy events.

An assertion that Wizards is no longer interested in legacy as a format requires supporting evidence. The only "evidence" you gave so far is that they won't break the reserve list and thus they must not want legacy to be accessible, but several other posters have pointed out to you, that this doesn't prove your assertion and there are other reasons why they may be not inclined to break the reserve list.

Also do you have any numbers to support your assertion that legacy players do not spend much money buying newer cards? And even if this unproven assertion holds true, what makes you think that that even a few million dollars in sales for printing some card board wouldn't be worth it for them? A secret lair featuring these duals (lands that would be legal only in vintage/legacy/commander) would still almost certainly outsell every other secret lair released to date. And it would take them no more effort to do than any other secret lair.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

What evidence do you have that they don't? An assertion like that requires supporting evidence. The only reason you gave so far is that they won't break the reserve list and thus they must not want legacy to be accessible, but several other posters have pointed out to you, that this doesn't prove your assertion and there are other reasons why they may be not inclined to break the reserve list.

I'm getting a little tired of you saying I said things I didn't say, but I'm going to chalk it up to poor reading comprehension rather than malice.

The evidence I have that they don't care very much about supporting Legacy as a format is that they... don't do much to support Legacy as a format. "An assertion like that requires supporting evidence" well no, it doesn't, it's literally a null position. You are making a positive claim that a party wants to do X thing which, noticeably, it is not currently doing.

You are the one that should be making a positive case for why Wizards wants to support Legacy or should want to do so, more than it currently does, because that is literally the foundation you have built your argument on.


Also do you have any numbers to support your assertion that legacy players do not spend much money buying newer cards? And even if this unproven assertion holds true, what makes you think that that even a few million dollars in sales for printing some card board wouldn't be worth it for them? A secret lair featuring these lands would almost certainly vastly outsell every other secret lair released to date. And it would take them no more effort to do than any other secret lair.

You know you sure love tossing out baseless assertions for someone complaining that everyone else has to defend stuff that's obvious.

I am going to simply assert that Legacy players buy less product than other players because it's really obviously true and you have given me no reason to waste time digging up numbers for you when you're incapable of reading posts or making good faith, logically coherent arguments. And love to make baseless assertions about how much people would love and want to own your shitty fantasy card designs.

[Clark Kant]

No the null position is the default position. Wizards created legacy, monitor it, ban unfun cards from it, and make an effort to keep it a diverse format with many viable archetypes and strategies.

If you are going to claim that they do not care about legacy, then you should be able to provide evidence to that end.

If you are going to claim that these lands wouldnt make Wizards money and wouldn't be worth their time to print and sell, then you should have some evidence that legacy players don't spend money on magic.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

No the null position is the default position. Wizards created legacy, monitor it, ban unfun cards from it, and make an effort to keep it a diverse format with many viable archetypes and strategies.

If you feel that they do not care about legacy, then you should be able to provide evidence to that end.

What do you imagine that evidence would look like?


If you feel that these lands wouldnt make Wizards money and wouldn't be worth their time to print and sell, then you should have some evidence that legacy players don't spend money on magic.

Uh what

Do you realize how many unspoken assumptions you've packed into this or nah

Besides which this is also like, again, what would that look like to you? Besides the sales numbers which idk maybe that's available somewhere, you can go look it up yourself tho.

[Clark Kant]

That's precisely my point. You earlier said that Wizards won't print these lands because cards aimed at legacy players wouldn't make them money, and they don't have any interest in seeing legacy be accessible enough to allow sanctioned paper legacy to survive. I asked you for evidence for either of this and you don't have any.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

That's precisely my point. You earlier said that Wizards won't print these lands because cards aimed at legacy players wouldn't make them money, and they don't have any interest in seeing legacy be accessible enough to allow sanctioned paper legacy to survive. I asked you for evidence for either of this and you don't have any.

It's funny because what actually happened was that I outlined in painstaking detail, including actual data, why reprinting the duals wouldn't actually make Wizards that much money.

I guess I "have no evidence" that the shittier duals you just made up wouldn't make a billion dollars but again it's pretty laughable for you to pretend the default position is that they would. I can't prove a negative because that's not how reality works my dude. You can keep saying people would be clamoring for your shitty card designs all day but the burden is on you to actually make a convincing case and supply evidence for it.

But you don't want to do that because you're lazy I guess which is also why I presume you don't bother reading my posts before making up some position to argue with.

[Clark Kant]

...wouldn't make a billion dollars but again it's pretty laughable for you to pretend the default position is that they would.

A billion dollars? Seriously? Good straw man.

You argued that these cards wouldnt sell well enough to be worth being made. By saying that it wouldn't be worth it for Wizards to make these lands, you weren't saying these won't sell a billion, you were saying they wouldn't sell as much as other secret lairs or commander decks or the bevy of other products they make.

This is just going in circles. I'm out.

[Grizzlenasty]

I thought it was a discussion about whether we think Wizards will ever again print dual lands that are better than shocks

And like, again, and I know you'll just keep ignoring this question, but why do you think Wizards wants Legacy to be more accessible?

The latter is not even important to answer the initial question. You are behaving like Kanye simply not wanting to understand, why he is called a gayfish. "Come on, just get it man"

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

The latter is not even important to answer the initial question. You are behaving like Kanye simply not wanting to understand, why he is called a gayfish. "Come on, just get it man"

What the fuck are you talking about? How is whether Wizards wants Legacy to be more accessible not important to the question of whether they'll print near-duals in general, much less ones specifically aimed at eternal formats only through a Commander product or whatever? Like literally Clark's basic argument is that.

So just like. Again. What the actual fuck are you talking about?

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

A billion dollars? Seriously? Good straw man.

Throw out a number then.


You argued that these cards wouldnt sell well enough to be worth being made.

No I didn't but we've established that you can't read so this claim isn't surprising.


You weren't saying these won't sell a billion, you were saying they wouldn't sell as much as other secret lairs or commander decks or the bevy of other products they make.

No I didn't but we've established that you can't read so this claim isn't surprising.

If you want to know what I said I recommend reading my posts as a good starting point, just a heads up

[Ronald Deuce]

Leaving a number of tangents aside regarding whether Wizards wants to fuck, marry, or kill Legacy and how likely it is that a person will buy one box over another (for which we don't have any data afaik), I guess I've learned over the past several pages that it's contentious to assert that selling things to customers can make you money.

I'm just finished; I got nothing.

[Wrath of Pie]

That's irrelevant to the thread. This isn't a discussion about how to make cEDH cheaper and more accessible. It's about how to make legacy more accessible and able to support sanctioned paper events again.

More duals that are only usable in Commander does nothing to make paper legacy more accessible.

That may come as a surprise to you, but the main demand for duals is Commander. If you want Wizards to reprint duals, go convince Commander players.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Leaving a number of tangents aside regarding whether Wizards wants to fuck, marry, or kill Legacy and how likely it is that a person will buy one box over another (for which we don't have any data afaik), I guess I've learned over the past several pages that it's contentious to assert that selling things to customers can make you money.

I'm just finished; I got nothing.

Some of y’all just refuse to understand basic economics.

“If one Modern Horizons set makes Wizards money, then they should release ten Modern Horizons sets every year! They’ll make ten times as much money!”

Like I don’t know how to explain to y’all that demand isn’t a limitless resource and customers don’t have bottomless pockets

[Grizzlenasty]

What the fuck are you talking about? How is whether Wizards wants Legacy to be more accessible not important to the question of whether they'll print near-duals in general, much less ones specifically aimed at eternal formats only through a Commander product or whatever? Like literally Clark's basic argument is that.

We can only theorycraft why they would be inclined to do that. Nothing we could come up with will satisfy you as you are obviously just here to say "Nope, not gonna happen". Sooner or later they have to print near duals or real duals, IF they want to keep certain formats alive and accessible. IF they don't, that's fine. Nothing I can do about. I've already gotten my power and at least a dozen of each individual dual when they were more reasonably priced. Like my most expensive dual was a volc priced at 23 EUR. I'd be sad for not finding anybody to play the game with unless I lend them my decks or incentivize them to to simply proxy some up, but that's about it. I can accept that.

So much effort to purposefully understand us wrong. Commander is one way they could do it. Eternal Masters CXVIII, Scamalot Lair or handing them out as FNM prices another. These are just already known possible contenders for a place where it might happen if it happens at all. I'm pretty sure Wizards could come up with more. They are creative when it comes to sellable product.



That may come as a surprise to you, but the main demand for duals is Commander. If you want Wizards to reprint duals, go convince Commander players.

Not sure if this would be enough. Commander players could get along with duals way worse than what hyperefficient Legacy needs. They are not triple dazing until turn 4 for example. Heck I've seen some of these filthy casuals play multiple ETB tapped lands into Back to basics *shudders*

[Zoid]

Since this is a quality thread:

https://i.imgflip.com/5e6j2f.jpg

[Grizzlenasty]

Since this is a quality thread
Like at least we can say, when the mods finally lock up the thread, the comments accumulate more value over time and incentivize forum members into posting more. A prestigious thread so to speak. Let's call it the "Reserve Thread"

[Wrath of Pie]

Not sure if this would be enough. Commander players could get along with duals way worse than what hyperefficient Legacy needs. They are not triple dazing until turn 4 for example. Heck I've seen some of these filthy casuals play multiple ETB tapped lands into Back to basics *shudders*

Well, then that's your answer.

[Ronald Deuce]

Like at least we can say, when the mods finally lock up the thread, the comments accumulate more value over time and incentivize forum members into posting more. A prestigious thread so to speak. Let's call it the "Reserve Thread"

This is a quality post. It's like the limited-edition Louis Vuitton of posts.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

We can only theorycraft why they would be inclined to do that. Nothing we could come up with will satisfy you as you are obviously just here to say "Nope, not gonna happen". Sooner or later they have to print near duals or real duals, IF they want to keep certain formats alive and accessible. IF they don't, that's fine. Nothing I can do about. I've already gotten my power and at least a dozen of each individual dual when they were more reasonably priced. Like my most expensive dual was a volc priced at 23 EUR. I'd be sad for not finding anybody to play the game with unless I lend them my decks or incentivize them to to simply proxy some up, but that's about it. I can accept that.

So then. Whether they want to keep Legacy accessible is, by your own description, directly relevant to whether they want to reprint duals, or near-duals or whatever.

So the opposite of what yous aid.


So much effort to purposefully understand us wrong. Commander is one way they could do it. Eternal Masters CXVIII, Scamalot Lair or handing them out as FNM prices another. These are just already known possible contenders for a place where it might happen if it happens at all. I'm pretty sure Wizards could come up with more. They are creative when it comes to sellable product.

Yeah I don't think anyone's arguing that they couldn't print functional duals if they wanted to. In fact people seem to have even stopped arguing that they couldn't just break the reserve list if they wanted, which is good because that argument was dumb.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Like at least we can say, when the mods finally lock up the thread, the comments accumulate more value over time and incentivize forum members into posting more. A prestigious thread so to speak. Let's call it the "Reserve Thread"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l17WAyNAHfQ

[Grizzlenasty]

This is a quality post. It's like the limited-edition Louis Vuitton of posts.

Grizzlenasty's reserve post policy

The complete list of reserved posts appears at the end of this document. Reserved posts will never be posted again in a functionally identical form. A post is considered functionally identical to another post if it has the same words, wittyness, intention, or content. No posts will be added to the reserved list in the future. No posts from the "Do you think Wizards will ever again print dual lands that are better than shocks?" thread and later threads will be reserved. In consideration of past commitments, however, no posts will be removed from this list. The exclusion of any particular post from the reserved list doesn't indicate that there are any plans to repost said post.

List of reserved posts:

Like at least we can say, when the mods finally lock up the thread, the comments accumulate more value over time and incentivize forum members into posting more. A prestigious thread so to speak. Let's call it the "Reserve Thread"


I'm outta here!

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

So I mean if you don't understand luxury marketing/economics, okay, that's not surprising really it's a weird and confusing niche of an already dumb and dismal science. You don't understand why studios finance weird artsy dramas to win awards instead of more big dumb CGI schlock that makes bank on the international market, okay. But like I should emphasize that the idea that Legacy has value to Wizards as a prestige format is the optimistic scenario. Because it certainly doesn't have value to them in terms of actually moving their product. If you don't think Wizards cares about Legacy as a prestige product, then you have to ask if it has any reason to care about the format at all. And no, "rewarding their most loyal fans" is not a thing capitalists give a shit about when their "loyal fans" are happy to sit on the products they bought twenty years ago and not buy anything new.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l17WAyNAHfQ

Don't Sign Your Posts!

[Ronald Deuce]

Grizzlenasty's reserve post policy

The complete list of reserved posts appears at the end of this document. Reserved posts will never be posted again in a functionally identical form. A post is considered functionally identical to another post if it has the same words, wittyness, intention, or content. No posts will be added to the reserved list in the future. No posts from the "Do you think Wizards will ever again print dual lands that are better than shocks?" thread and later threads will be reserved. In consideration of past commitments, however, no posts will be removed from this list. The exclusion of any particular post from the reserved list doesn't indicate that there are any plans to repost said post.

This is gonna make us SO much money!

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

You dips know that luxury goods do exist and are driven by careful brand management and artificial scarcity, right? Like that's just. The material reality of the world. People really do pay $50k or whatever for a dumb airplane purse or a watch.

Or a Black Lotus for that matter.

[Ronald Deuce]

You dips know that luxury goods do exist and are driven by careful brand management and artificial scarcity, right?

Yes. And you've demonstrated neither the understanding that that has nothing to do with the RL, nor the comprehension that unlike RL cards, luxury goods do what other, cheaper goods (that still get sold to people) do only maybe just as well (unlike "retread" cards that don't break the "spirit of the Reserved List"), nor that because of that fact luxury items/brands are sold for reasons independent of their functions (unlike "retread" cards, etc.), nor that refusing to sell items doesn't make anyone any money, nor that Wizards isn't making money off Legacy or Vintage anyway AND SELLING CARDS TO PLAYERS OF THOSE FORMATS WILL MAKE MONEY INSTEAD, just as selling products targeted to demographics interested in other things has made Wizards money. 130% as much money as they'd made before.

Then you brought up Dunning-Kruger before Dunning-Krugering yourself over about five different additional topics.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Yes. And you've demonstrated neither the understanding that that has nothing to do with the RL

This is just begging the question since the entire point is that it does have something to do with the reserved list. You just want to be able to assert that it doesn't as a prior, probably because you have a poor understanding of the subject and poor argumentation in general.


nor the comprehension that unlike RL cards, luxury goods do what other, cheaper goods (that still get sold to people) do only maybe just as well (unlike "retread" cards that don't break the "spirit of the Reserved List")

?

Dimir Guildgate does what Underground Sea does.

If you're trying to say anything else, it's incomprehensible to me.


nor that because of that fact luxury items/brands are sold for reasons independent of their functions (unlike "retread" cards, etc.)

Yeah the shitty card designs itt are not the equivalent to the Gucci belt or w/e in this example, other fancy collectible cards are, e.g. all those Lair cards they just released. But the existence of the Reserved List and the fact that players can point to cards that are worth thousands, tens of thousands of dollars helps stabilize the collectible/bling card market/demand; at the very least the allure and high price of old cards does and the Reserved List is a prop to that end.


nor that refusing to sell items doesn't make anyone any money

That. That's literally what artificial scarcity is.

Do you think limited releases "don't make any money"?


nor that Wizards isn't making money off Legacy or Vintage anyway

You're going to have to argue with Grizzle about that


AND SELLING CARDS TO PLAYERS OF THOSE FORMATS WILL MAKE MONEY INSTEAD, just as selling products targeted to demographics interested in other things has made Wizards money. 130% as much money as they'd made before.

Yeah I already went over the math on this and even with really optimistic assumptions the dual market is just not a significant amount of money relative to Wizards' annual revenue, even if they could completely displace it and even if that had no repercussions.


Then you brought up Dunning-Kruger before Dunning-Krugering yourself over about five different additional topics.

I guess it doesn't stop from continuing to be ironic

Did you get a chance to google what de profundis means btw

[Ronald Deuce]

This is just begging the question since the entire point is that it does have something to do with the reserved list. You just want to be able to assert that it doesn't as a prior, probably because you have a poor understanding of the subject and poor argumentation in general.

No. You have yet to demonstrate that RL cards are luxury goods, that they were manufactured as luxury goods, and/or that they have become luxury goods when they were not and the company that manufactured them treats them that way. Most of them haven't been of much value at all until pretty recently. Your assumption that RL cards are luxury goods and that hyping their scarcity increases the revenues of a company that doesn't even talk about them and would rather manufacture other things because it doesn't know how to handle its terrible business decisions has fully polluted your argument to the degree that you aren't in touch with what cards in a card game do.


Dimir Guildgate does what Underground Sea does.

QED.



But the existence of the Reserved List and the fact that players can point to cards that are worth thousands, tens of thousands of dollars helps stabilize the collectible/bling card market/demand; at the very least the allure and high price of old cards does and the Reserved List is a prop to that end.

You have not provided a single piece of valid or topical evidence for this assertion, and almost everyone else in this thread has given you a surfeit of evidence that this is baseless.


Did you get a chance to google what de profundis means btw

Yeah; it's an ancient Sinhala admonishment that means, "You're arguing with a former Latin teacher about what a Latin phrase means."

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Like it's probably worth talking about the archetypical example, which is the diamond market. You can go read an article on it (https://blog.krosengart.com/de-beers-diamonds-controversy) but the basic thing is that diamonds aren't, in the modern era and ever since we've had the capacity to dig deeper into the Earth than our forebears, particularly rare. And obviously they're not actually that useful, at least as jewelry. So how is it that people will pay months' salary for a little shiny rock? Because of successful marketing and deeply, deeply artificial, carefully managed scarcity. And nowadays convincing people that functionally indistinguishable synthetic diamonds are "fake" in some way.

But the point is that it's a careful tightrope. De Beers aren't idiots or philanthropists. They don't flood the market with tons of gigantic artificial diamonds not through incompetence or altruism, but because their brand and their business model depends on public confidence that the goods have value based on public confidence, and it turns out that that's a very fickle thing and very hard to get back once you lose it.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

No. You have yet to demonstrate that RL cards are luxury goods

You need it demonstrated to you that a $500,000 piece of cardboard (https://www.pcgamer.com/with-a-black-lotus-sold-at-dollar500k-magic-the-gathering-hits-a-new-level/) is a luxury good

Okay buddy pal


that they were manufactured as luxury goods

Irrelevant


and/or that they have become luxury goods when they were not and the company that manufactured them treats them that way.

It honestly would help this conversation a lot if you had the slightest understanding of what you were talking about.


Most of them haven't been of much value at all until pretty recently.

This isn't true but it would also be irrelevant if it was true.


Your assumption that RL cards are luxury goods and that hyping their scarcity increases the revenues of a company that doesn't even talk about them and would rather manufacture other things because it doesn't know how to handle its terrible business decisions has fully polluted your argument to the degree that you aren't in touch with what cards in a card game do.

People talk about duals and power 9 all the time. Wizards literally maintains the Reserved List to hype them. This company that "makes terrible business decisions it doesn't know how to handle" has experience a decade of double digit year-on-year growth. What exactly makes you think you know how to run De Beers' better than the people successfully squeezing a monopoly on common shiny rocks?


QED.

So you just like not knowing what Latin words mean, or


You have not provided a single piece of valid or topical evidence for this assertion, and almost everyone else in this thread has given you a surfeit of evidence that this is baseless.

You haven't provided a single shred of evidence so I guess you just like knowing what words mean in general.


Yeah; it's an ancient Sinhala admonishment that means, "You're arguing with a former Latin teacher about what a Latin phrase means."

I've known a lot of teachers that don't know what words mean. I'd be more impressed if you actually demonstrated knowledge on a topic instead of just asserting that you're right because you were once a teacher.

I am however delighted to know that you're no longer influencing students so I guess today isn't all bad news.

[kombatkiwi]

You need it demonstrated to you that a $500,000 piece of cardboard (https://www.pcgamer.com/with-a-black-lotus-sold-at-dollar500k-magic-the-gathering-hits-a-new-level/) is a luxury good

People talk about duals and power 9 all the time. Wizards literally maintains the Reserved List to hype them. This company that "makes terrible business decisions it doesn't know how to handle" has experience a decade of double digit year-on-year growth. What exactly makes you think you know how to run De Beers' better than the people successfully squeezing a monopoly on common shiny rocks?


De Beers hypes/markets diamonds to sell those exact diamonds, LV hypes/markets bags to sell those exact bags

What you are arguing is that wotc 'hypes' (by virtue of not reprinting them even though they supposedly have the option to) Underground Sea in order to sell Dimir Guildgates. The analogy doesn't track

Ronald Deuce gave a similar, more acerbic response: "Your assumption that RL cards are luxury goods and that hyping their scarcity increases the revenues of a company that doesn't even talk about them and would rather manufacture other things because it doesn't know how to handle its terrible business decisions has fully polluted your argument to the degree that you aren't in touch with what cards in a card game do."

I would 100% agree that wotc treats e.g. Scalding Tarn or Mana Crypt like De Beers treats diamonds. WotC could print millions of them and drop the price to nothing but they don't do that because it's not what makes them the most money in the long run, so they print limited runs of them in special, expensive sets. I have no objection to this practice. All I want WotC to do is apply a similar scheme to the RL cards. Again, this seems like such an obvious move for wotc to do and the arguments against it are so weak ("WotC doesn't want to support legacy", "The reserved list brings an allure and prestige to the game") that I believe the reason that WotC is not doing it is because the reserved list prevents them from doing so, or at least they believe that it does under threat of lawsuits.

On this same point:

But the existence of the Reserved List and the fact that players can point to cards that are worth thousands, tens of thousands of dollars helps stabilize the collectible/bling card market/demand; at the very least the allure and high price of old cards does and the Reserved List is a prop to that end.
This is true, BUT:
1) It only applies to cards that are actually ON the reserved list (the fact that the reserved list exists does not give me any confidence in the stability of the price of my watery grave)
2) WotC DOESNT MAKE MONEY (i.e. they don't benefit) from cards that are actually ON the reserved list BECAUSE THEY CANT (don't, won't) SELL THEM

Therefore, again, you must be making the argument that the existence of the reserved list helps to stabilize/raise the value of cards in the latest standard / horizons set, which is just nonsense, OR that it somehow is a player acquisition mechanism via some kind of Post-Malone-Pathway (which is obviously not reliable as a deliberate strategy and the net effect of which seems fairly negligible)


“If one Modern Horizons set makes Wizards money, then they should release ten Modern Horizons sets every year! They’ll make ten times as much money!”
Or perhaps the next Modern Horizons could be an eternal masters set with RL cards, on a similar release schedule? It's a strawman to argue against the idea that WotC should churn out a new supplementary set each week


Its pretty simple: they want formats that involve you buying cards as often as possible to be the most accessible. Draft is on one end of the spectrum and Legacy/Vintage is on the opposite end. There's no money in it for them if I'm playing the same deck (and maybe changing a handful of cards per year) for the next decade. There's a lot of money if I literally have to open multiple packs every time I want to play a new round.
Why not: "It's pretty simple: they want [blank] you buying cards as often as possible".
If they only wanted people playing standard/draft then they wouldn't keep printing cards aimed at modern and commander.
Even if wotc has no intention of 'supporting' legacy, if they printed a set with duals / power in it, would it sell? Yes. Why does wotc care beyond that? They can just go back to printing normal standard/draft sets afterwards. (And clearly they already do exactly this, all the time, with commander legends, eternal masters, modern horizons, etc)

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Hey, if an Underground Sea isn't a luxury good, what do you people think luxury goods even are?

[kombatkiwi]

Hey, if an Underground Sea isn't a luxury good, what do you people think luxury goods even are?

If any item can be considered a "luxury good" only based on its value then any rare antique/collectible can be considered a luxury good (e.g. a faberge egg or the mona lisa or whatever other museum-style pieces)

But from a business perspective (and for the purposes of the present discussion) these kinds of items are fundamentally different from the luxury goods that can be (and are) readily manufactured in current year (e.g. a Ferrari, or a designer bag, or diamond jewellery etc) so describing them with the same label is misleading

By implying that reserved list cards are not a "luxury good" I am not suggesting that they don't meet some arbitrary standard of (un)affordability, but that from a business/economics perspective it makes no sense to talk about them as though they are part of the above latter category as long as WotC continues to refuse to produce them.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

If any item can be considered a "luxury good" only based on its value then any rare antique/collectible can be considered a luxury good (e.g. a faberge egg or the mona lisa or whatever other museum-style pieces)

Yes. Because that is exactly what they are. A luxury good is any item whose price out scales its value. An Underground Sea is not one hundred times better than a Watery Grave, lol.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Like even if you think an Underground Sea isn't a luxury good, which is wrong, surely you have to recognize that Beta and even Unlimited ones are, right? There's no extra utility over an HP Revised one so why you paying somewhere between twice and ten times as much?

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

De Beers hypes/markets diamonds to sell those exact diamonds, LV hypes/markets bags to sell those exact bags

No it doesn't. De Beers is hyping diamonds so it can sell diamonds generically, the types of diamonds it displays in commercials are actually usually way bigger than the diamonds it actually sells for instance. Hyping products it's no longer even selling is still part of LV's brand management.

Wizards hypes cards so it can sell cards. The fact that it can point to the luxury old card market and showcase cards going for hundreds or thousands (or in a few cases hundreds of thousands) dollars helps it manage its brand and helps it hype up "Magic cards," even without it currently selling those exact same Magic cards. Because as far as Wizards is concerned it's all fungible.

Except that if it does a Lair set of full art original Moxen it runs a risk of impacting that secondary market and lowering its value which lowers its brand.

So there's no incentive to do that if they can just make money selling new Magic cards instead, or shinier versions of other high value but not top end existing cards.


What you are arguing is that wotc 'hypes' (by virtue of not reprinting them even though they supposedly have the option to) Underground Sea in order to sell Dimir Guildgates. The analogy doesn't track

I mean guildgates were an extreme example. Morphic Pool and Watery Grave and Polluted Delta don't go for hundreds of dollars but they are worth way more than scraps of cardboard cost to make. And it's not even about manabases in particular. Why are people willing to pay $70 for Ragavan or Sword of Hearth & Home? It's partially a desire to play with the cards but a large part is the belief that these cards will hold value.


I would 100% agree that wotc treats e.g. Scalding Tarn or Mana Crypt like De Beers treats diamonds. WotC could print millions of them and drop the price to nothing but they don't do that because it's not what makes them the most money in the long run, so they print limited runs of them in special, expensive sets. I have no objection to this practice. All I want WotC to do is apply a similar scheme to the RL cards. Again, this seems like such an obvious move for wotc to do and the arguments against it are so weak ("WotC doesn't want to support legacy", "The reserved list brings an allure and prestige to the game") that I believe the reason that WotC is not doing it is because the reserved list prevents them from doing so, or at least they believe that it does under threat of lawsuits.

Let's go back to De Beers. Why do you think they work so hard to discredit lab-created diamonds? Why aren't they interested in increasing the supply of much bigger diamonds- which they could, pretty easily?


On this same point:

This is true, BUT:
1) It only applies to cards that are actually ON the reserved list (the fact that the reserved list exists does not give me any confidence in the stability of the price of my watery grave)
2) WotC DOESNT MAKE MONEY (i.e. they don't benefit) from cards that are actually ON the reserved list BECAUSE THEY CANT (don't, won't) SELL THEM

Therefore, again, you must be making the argument that the existence of the reserved list helps to stabilize/raise the value of cards in the latest standard / horizons set, which is just nonsense, OR that it somehow is a player acquisition mechanism via some kind of Post-Malone-Pathway (which is obviously not reliable as a deliberate strategy and the net effect of which seems fairly negligible)

I mean it doesn't have to make sense, the point is to boost public confidence not to actually create a safeguard for the public. In fact if you can do the former without doing the latter that's preferable.

Yes Wizards can just print more Ragavans any time it wants and drop their price to nil. Ignoring that they have strong incentives to not do this, or at least not do it cavalierly, what incentive does the public paying $300 a playset have to believe that they won't do this? Only the perception that Wizards doesn't do that kind of thing.

Yes it's just an illusion and sleight of hand to act like the Reserve List is any guarantor of the value of new cards, but it does still affect perception of Wizards and their philosophy towards reprinting valuable cards.


Or perhaps the next Modern Horizons could be an eternal masters set with RL cards, on a similar release schedule? It's a strawman to argue against the idea that WotC should churn out a new supplementary set each week

That's not a strawman, that's reductio ad absurdum, which is not a logical fallacy. It's a legitimate question you need to address. Why shouldn't we take this principle to its extreme?


Why not: "It's pretty simple: they want [blank] you buying cards as often as possible".
If they only wanted people playing standard/draft then they wouldn't keep printing cards aimed at modern and commander.
Even if wotc has no intention of 'supporting' legacy, if they printed a set with duals / power in it, would it sell? Yes. Why does wotc care beyond that? They can just go back to printing normal standard/draft sets afterwards. (And clearly they already do exactly this, all the time, with commander legends, eternal masters, modern horizons, etc)

Why does Wizards care? Because of how it affects the perceived value of peoples' big boxes of cardboard that are fundamentally close to worthless but go on the market for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which in turn affects how willing people are to continue paying big money for Magic product.

Now personally I don't think abolishing the RL would do that much damage if reprinting of duals etc. was carefully managed, but you also have to go over the other end; how much more money would that actually bring in than what Wizards is already making from those players?

And I went over the math there and I think it's just doubtful that it's actually that much. So provide the other half of the equation. Yes dual products would sell, but their current products are selling. Why should they take the risk?

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

I think it again needs to be emphasized that Magic the Gathering makes over a billion dollars in revenue annually. Yes the individual prices of old RL cards on the secondary market can be staggering, but

1) Wizards doesn't simply have the ability to capture this market regardless of anything they do, regardless of its consequences, and

2) Even if they did, the volume is anemic so the overall value of that market is pretty small potatoes compared to overall revenue

People keep ignoring this question of volume, of the actual value of the market that exists for duals specifically (as opposed to people that would just be buying whatever shiny new Magic cards whether they're duals or pirate monkeys or whatever.)

But that question is really fucking important to Wizards. It needs addressing. Unless there's some compelling reason to believe that breaking the RL, either directly or in spirit, would swell the playerbase, there's not really a compelling argument that printing duals substantially increases even short term profits, and this neglects questions of how that affects long term profits and the perceived stability of Magic collection values.

[Maximus]

This entire game is a "luxury good", it's just that RL shit is ridiculous.

My take:
1. WOTC doesn't care about us or our format
2. Their design philosophy and company decisions actively hurt our format sometimes
3. WOTC isn't putting up tournaments for our format
4. This website is effectively centralizing the format community anyway

So why do we care what they do? We should just encourage/allow reasonable proxies at our grassroots events, at least until it becomes the standard like in Vintage. At least for RL cards. And possibly have our own ban list so we aren't waiting for 3 years for Top to get banned (or TCruise / W6 / Oko / whatever). Other larger game communities do this all the time with no problems. Collectors and traders get to keep full value cards, players get to actually play, everyone wins.

All IMO

[Ronald Deuce]

This entire game is a "luxury good", it's just that RL shit is ridiculous.

Yeah, there's that. I was arguing from more of a microcosmic perspective given that everyone here likely plays/has played/wants to play Magic in some form.


Hey, if an Underground Sea isn't a luxury good, what do you people think luxury goods even are?

I can acknowledge that there are luxury items that are RL cards. That doesn't mean anyone's demonstrated that the RL makes the cards on it luxury goods purely because they're on the RL (cf. Seas with Rysorian Badgers), nor that non-RL cards are NOT luxury items because they're not on the RL (e.g. Imperial Seal), nor that this "line" of luxury goods is being sold (it isn't), nor that there's a comparable product or line that's being sold through the advertisement/hype-building/whatever of RL cards (there isn't, except maybe specific old-bordered Secret Lair Signet type stuff, though I doubt that's particularly relevant for a number of reasons), nor (most crucially) that RL cards are being used to advertise or build demand for anything at all.

The only ads I've seen for Magic that have been made since the '90s are for Standard-legal sets, Modern- and/or Commander-targeted sets, or for Arena, especially Arena. There are no RL cards on the Arena platform (afaik; if I'm just out of the loop, feel free to drub me), so the RL isn't selling Arena to anyone and Wizards isn't using Arena to sell RL cards (which, again, they're not selling to anyone in any format anyway). There are no RL cards in Standard or Modern, either, so the only format for which Wizards is advertising products that includes RL cards is Commander. "Third-party" content creators, one could argue, are advertising for Wizards while using RL cards in their content, but that's only a fraction of the experience, so it's an enormous stretch to say that Wizards (N.B.: NOT the content creator) is using those cards to build hype to get people to buy packs. The thing is that even if Wizards is using those cards (specifically RL cards given the parameters of this discussion) as a form of latent passive advertising, or whatever you'd call it, manufacturing those cards again isn't going to change anything. They'll still be rare. They'll still be powerful. They'll still "WOW!" people, unless they just do new-bordered terribad digi-art versions, in which case they'll sell anyway.

And again, Wizards isn't selling RL cards. It would make more sense to argue that Wizards is allowing the allure of RL cards to drive RL sales for its clients (game stores, etc.), but that's still a stretch, and it's also a tangential discussion that I don't think will bear much fruit.


De Beers hypes/markets diamonds to sell those exact diamonds, LV hypes/markets bags to sell those exact bags

I'm not going to keep wasting time on the other guy, because he's all over the map (most recently claiming a known fallacy isn't a fallacy, etc.), but there's an important point to be made here: Even if these companies (esp. gemstone purveyors) are suppressing supply to increase the prices of their goods and marketing them based on scarcity, they could be doing so for other reasons than purely to drive sales or sale prices up, e.g. to maintain the value of their own holdings in those products. It's possible (and this is pure speculation) that enough people at Wizards have enough RL cards that they would want to maintain the value of their holdings by not producing more.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Is an Undergroudn Sea 100 times better than a Watery Grave?
Y/N

[KobeBryan]

Is an Undergroudn Sea 100 times better than a Watery Grave?
Y/N

When there's a 1000$ prize at the end of the tunnel, you will want that sea 99.99% of the time, unless you want to play death shadow, which by the end of the tunnel, they have a 0.01% of getting that far into a big tournament.

[Cire]

People have the odd idea that the people making business decisions at the top are all subject to the peter principle and are therefore making the de facto wrong decisions. On average this is far from the truth. You have a successful outlet of a successful company that is making intelligent business decisions. Take whatever razor you want to the question of why haven't they obsoleted or got rid of the RL. For whatever reason, either legal, effort, marketing, production it is safe to assume they held a hundred meetings with their C-Level suite, their lawyers and whatever and decided that it would cost more to obsolete or get rid of the RL than they could make reprinting those cards or making just as good or better. If its such a low-hanging money making fruit that we are discussing it, better believe they had that discussion as well and after such discussion they decided not to do it.

[Reeplcheep]

When there's a 1000$ prize at the end of the tunnel, you will want that sea 99.99% of the time, unless you want to play death shadow, which by the end of the tunnel, they have a 0.01% of getting that far into a big tournament.

That’s actually wrong. Assuming that the EV of the event is as generous as a mtgo 100 man challenge (unlikely since wizards can print chests for free), you can estimate how big the prize pool has to be for it to make sense.

Goatboats has the prize pool for those at 3300$ for a 30$ entry. Your expected prizes go up from 60$ to 63$ when you win rate goes from 60% to 61%. A sea costs 2500$ more than a watery grave. Assuming each sea raises your win rate by at least 1% (very unlikely), it takes 236 events to break even on 4 of them. Ie over the life of your deck compete for 780 000$ in prizes at 60% or better win rate.

If you are playing in a 1k, paying 10000$ to win on average 3.7$ more isn’t very rational.

Edit:math

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

When there's a 1000$ prize at the end of the tunnel, you will want that sea 99.99% of the time, unless you want to play death shadow, which by the end of the tunnel, they have a 0.01% of getting that far into a big tournament.

Correct, I want it more but is it 100 times better? To justify the price tag I need to be earning $998 more than had I run Watery Grave instead.

[KobeBryan]

That’s actually wrong. Assuming that the EV of the event is as generous as a mtgo 100 man challenge (unlikely since wizards can print chests for free), you can estimate how big the prize pool has to be for it to make sense.

Goatboats has the prize pool for those at 3300$ for a 30$ entry. Your expected prizes go up from 60$ to 63$ when you win rate goes from 60% to 61%. A sea costs 2500$ more than a watery grave. Assuming each sea raises your win rate by at least 1% (very unlikely), it takes 236 events to break even on 4 of them. Ie over the life of your deck compete for 780 000$ in prizes at 60% or better win rate.

If you are playing in a 1k, paying 10000$ to win on average 3.7$ more isn’t very rational.

Edit:math

I don't think its possible to put a quantitative data on something where in a match with some thing going down the wire, where 1 life matters, you can justify not using underground sea over watery grave.

When you need the win you have to make that sacrifice. Its more than just calculating whether you would get a Rate of return on the card. And if you win a top GP of the year with YOUR custom decklist, you are able to be a top quality streamer making content. There's more intangibles than meets the eye.

[Cire]

Just calculate the costs of each deck prior to tournament and have a weighted handicap system :tongue:

[Wrath of Pie]

Just calculate the costs of each deck prior to tournament and have a weighted handicap system :tongue:
Finally, I can go mono-Island and get somewhere!

[Zoid]

Finally, I can go mono-Island and get somewhere!

4 Countryside Crusher + 56 Mountains.

[kombatkiwi]

Like even if you think an Underground Sea isn't a luxury good, which is wrong, surely you have to recognize that Beta and even Unlimited ones are, right? There's no extra utility over an HP Revised one so why you paying somewhere between twice and ten times as much?
Sure, the point is that Dom P company puts new bottles of Dom P on the shelves every day (even if it's not very many) and so does Gucci etc etc. Can (does) WotC do this with dual lands? No. So obviously the same principles don't apply. That's all Im saying. I'm not trying to suggest a beta lotus is a sensible, practical purchase for a struggling family of 4 or something


No it doesn't. De Beers is hyping diamonds so it can sell diamonds generically, the types of diamonds it displays in commercials are actually usually way bigger than the diamonds it actually sells for instance. Hyping products it's no longer even selling is still part of LV's brand management. In this sense I used "hyping" as a synonym for 'keeping the price high through artificial scarcity' rather than 'advertising' but I see how that would have been confusing. Regardless:


Wizards hypes cards so it can sell cards. The fact that it can point to the luxury old card market and showcase cards going for hundreds or thousands (or in a few cases hundreds of thousands) dollars helps it manage its brand and helps it hype up "Magic cards," even without it currently selling those exact same Magic cards. Because as far as Wizards is concerned it's all fungible.
If you think you are making a good point here you are just not living in reality. WotC doesn't official acknowledge the existence of RL cards basically at all. They certainly don't tweet about ebay prices or things like that. They don't put black lotus or other RL in their ads (the "big diamond" analogue) or even talk about them at all really. The closest thing you can get to is examples from Magic Online like vintage cube and eternal weekend events. And even if you were to make the argument that these are examples of a genuine effort by WotC to 'hype' the existence of the RL cards, to what effect does it have? On MTGO where they can print as many copies as they want? Does that kind of thing generate interest in standard sets (the thing that you insist is the only thing that they care about)?

Again Ronald Deuce already also said it (and the rest of their post is also correct):

I can acknowledge that there are luxury items that are RL cards. That doesn't mean anyone's demonstrated that the RL makes the cards on it luxury goods purely because they're on the RL (cf. Seas with Rysorian Badgers), nor that non-RL cards are NOT luxury items because they're not on the RL (e.g. Imperial Seal), nor that this "line" of luxury goods is being sold (it isn't), nor that there's a comparable product or line that's being sold through the advertisement/hype-building/whatever of RL cards (there isn't, except maybe specific old-bordered Secret Lair Signet type stuff, though I doubt that's particularly relevant for a number of reasons), nor (most crucially) that RL cards are being used to advertise or build demand for anything at all.

Therefore ideas like the following statement just don't make any sense:

Except that if it does a Lair set of full art original Moxen it runs a risk of impacting that secondary market and lowering its value which lowers its brand.


I mean guildgates were an extreme example. Morphic Pool and Watery Grave and Polluted Delta don't go for hundreds of dollars but they are worth way more than scraps of cardboard cost to make. And it's not even about manabases in particular. Why are people willing to pay $70 for Ragavan or Sword of Hearth & Home? It's partially a desire to play with the cards but a large part is the belief that these cards will hold value.
True, but why does the belief that Ragavan will hold value have anything to do with the reserved list? The card is not on the reserved list. People understand that even for cards not on the reserved list WotC doesn't print them into oblivion because it's not in WotC interest to do so. It doesn't have anything to do with the existence of the reserved list. This is not a good argument


Let's go back to De Beers. Why do you think they work so hard to discredit lab-created diamonds? Why aren't they interested in increasing the supply of much bigger diamonds- which they could, pretty easily?
The WotC equivalent of discrediting lab-created diamonds is them discrediting counterfeit cards (substitutes of their product which they don't have essentially monopolistic control of the supply) and wotc does do this.

I assume the argument you are making about 'big diamonds' is that De Beers doesn't produce more big diamonds because either:
1) Having big diamonds be really cool/scarce makes the demand for the small diamonds higher: we have already established that this point makes no sense because wotc doesn't actually use its "big diamonds" in any form of marketing / advertising. (We could have a discussion about whether that would be an effective strategy but the fact stands that it's currently not happening).
2) Having big diamonds be really cool/scarce makes the demand/price for the big diamonds higher: this also makes no sense in the mtg context because wotc is not currently producing/selling ANY "big diamonds"


I mean it doesn't have to make sense, the point is to boost public confidence not to actually create a safeguard for the public. In fact if you can do the former without doing the latter that's preferable.

Yes Wizards can just print more Ragavans any time it wants and drop their price to nil. Ignoring that they have strong incentives to not do this, or at least not do it cavalierly, what incentive does the public paying $300 a playset have to believe that they won't do this? Only the perception that Wizards doesn't do that kind of thing.
Yes, but that perception is independent of the RL existing


Yes it's just an illusion and sleight of hand to act like the Reserve List is any guarantor of the value of new cards, but it does still affect perception of Wizards and their philosophy towards reprinting valuable cards.
This only makes sense if you assume that the playerbase is totally braindead.

Here's a challenge for you: can you explain why wotc doesn't put Ragavan onto the reserved list? Surely that would result in the maximum amount of player confidence regarding its lasting value. I don't think you will be able to justify wotc not doing this without contradicting yourself.


That's not a strawman, that's reductio ad absurdum, which is not a logical fallacy. It's a legitimate question you need to address. Why shouldn't we take this principle to its extreme?
All I'm suggesting is that it is in wotc interest to treat its "luxury" reserved list cards the same way that it treats its other "luxury" non-RL cards (fetchlands or imperial seal or whatever).
Is there currently a flood of these cards being printed all the time? No. So why are you trying to argue against the idea of printing RL cards on that basis?


Why does Wizards care? Because of how it affects the perceived value of peoples' big boxes of cardboard that are fundamentally close to worthless but go on the market for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Which in turn affects how willing people are to continue paying big money for Magic product.
Again, the idea that people use the reserved list (even subconsciously) to support a belief that their modern-era non-RL printings have lasting value is just utter nonsense


[All the talk about risk vs reward]
- The only risk (assuming the legal basis/foundation of the reserved list is nonexistent and therefore no risk of litigation) that you have identified is this vague idea of loss of brand prestige or loss of trust in the company and I think the people in this thread have done a pretty good job of explaining why that either wouldn't happen or doesn't matter. (Obviously huge collectors or shoestring-budget legacy players that already bought in would be upset about it but the net amount of goodwill from the wider playerbase from making the game more accessible would outweigh that I think).
- Even if the monetary upside is small, so are any other of WotC individual product offerings. The idea that they shouldn't do it because it wouldn't double Hasbro revenue overnight is idiotic


People have the odd idea that the people making business decisions at the top are all subject to the peter principle and are therefore making the de facto wrong decisions. On average this is far from the truth. You have a successful outlet of a successful company that is making intelligent business decisions. Take whatever razor you want to the question of why haven't they obsoleted or got rid of the RL. For whatever reason, either legal, effort, marketing, production it is safe to assume they held a hundred meetings with their C-Level suite, their lawyers and whatever and decided that it would cost more to obsolete or get rid of the RL than they could make reprinting those cards or making just as good or better. If its such a low-hanging money making fruit that we are discussing it, better believe they had that discussion as well and after such discussion they decided not to do it.
I think everybody mostly agrees with this, the disagreement is on which is the most plausible "whatever reason"

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Sure, the point is that Dom P company puts new bottles of Dom P on the shelves every day (even if it's not very many) and so does Gucci etc etc. Can (does) WotC do this with dual lands? No.

Actually they can. Thanks for playing.

[kombatkiwi]

Actually they can. Thanks for playing.

You may have noticed that I covertly put "does" in parentheses in anticipation of this response. Whether WotC choose not to print RL cards because of some overarching long term business goal or because the reserved list is effectively legally-binding (or that they believe that it is), it doesn't matter. The point is that ultimately they don't sell cards that are on the RL, so any argument by analogy to the business practices of these other companies (that do produce their luxury goods in current year) is flawed. All this shit like "hurr durr your tiny brain can't seem to understand why Patek doesn't mass produce 1000s of watches" is missing the point

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

You may have noticed that I covertly put "does" in parenthesis in anticipation of this response.

Yes, you posted two conflicting meanings of your post because your argument doesn't work if they can make more cards, but then you pull a rehtorical trick where you use can and does interchangeably and it's simply not true.

[Clark Kant]

Correct, I want it more but is it 100 times better? To justify the price tag I need to be earning $998 more than had I run Watery Grave instead.

The vast majority of decks are designed to win based on life. Most decks win the game by either bringing their opponents life total from 20 to 0 before their opponents do the same, or by preventing their opponents from bringing their own life total down to 0 by the time they manage to stabilize.

Everytime someone casts an Watery Grave untapped, they are giving up 10% of their starting life total. A deck with 3 Watery Graves is going to lose a lot more life every single game than an identical deck with 3 Underground Sea. Every single Grave that etbs is one less storm your opponent needs, or one less bolt, or one less swing with a creature etc. Now extrapolate the impact of this life loss over 7 rounds and yes absolutely you are atleast 10% less likely to win a tournament for each Watery Grave in your decklist, all because of the lands you could afford.

If you want to win a tournament, you're going to want those Underground Seas or a similar fetchable dual that has a much less significant drawback than causing you to lose 10% of your starting life total every time.

A deck packing 3 Dimir Garden Once upon a time thus only showing a card at random from your hand to your opponent if it is the first land you have played in the whole game, is far far less likely to cause you to lose a tournament than Watery Grave is...

Dimir Garden Once upon a time
Swamp Island
When ~ etb, if it is the first land you have played this game, it enters tapped unless you reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone (I'm sure that could be worded better)

[kombatkiwi]

Yes, you posted two conflicting meanings of your post because your argument doesn't work if they can make more cards, but then you pull a rehtorical trick where you use can and does interchangeably and it's simply not true.

Ok let me try and explain it as simple as possible:

The argument put forward was that not reprinting reserved list cards (for whatever reason) gives the game an aura of exclusivity and therefore makes it more desirable,. similar to various other Luxury/Veblen goods.

However, making the reserved list cards themselves more desirable is of no direct benefit to wotc, because wotc does not produce and sell reserved list cards (for whatever reason). This is totally different to the position that Diamond Miners, Fashion Designers, etc, are in, whereby they are actively selling the thing that they are deliberately limiting the supply of.

Therefore, for to wotc have the ability to print RL cards without legal consequence and yet choose not to as a business decision, you have to instead make the claim that the high price and exclusivity of reserved list cards generate a kind of transferred desire for e.g. Theros boosters. This is an entirely different (and much less convincing) argument

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Ok let me try and explain it as simple as possible:

The argument put forward was that not reprinting reserved list cards (for whatever reason) gives the game an aura of exclusivity and therefore makes it more desirable,. similar to various other Luxury/Veblen goods.

However, making the reserved list cards themselves more desirable is of no direct benefit to wotc,

Nope. Past collectable versions absolutely can drive modern prices. See: Sneakers.

[Reeplcheep]

I don't think its possible to put a quantitative data on something where in a match with some thing going down the wire, where 1 life matters, you can justify not using underground sea over watery grave.

When you need the win you have to make that sacrifice. Its more than just calculating whether you would get a Rate of return on the card. And if you win a top GP of the year with YOUR custom decklist, you are able to be a top quality streamer making content. There's more intangibles than meets the eye.

Semi-pro bicyclists don’t always spend 10 000$ getting the 2 gram lighter wheels. Not every team in formula 1 is Ferrari. At some point small optimization don’t make sense; which is why everyone doesn’t go out and buy a tabernacle when lands is 0.2% better than the rest of the field.

There are definitely intangibles, otherwise no one would play legacy in the first place. But most people don’t value the intangibles at >100 000$.

[kombatkiwi]

Nope. Past collectable versions absolutely can drive modern prices. See: Sneakers.
I don't know anything about shoes but my suspicion would be that this is closer to the fetchland / imperial seal / designer bag situation, where the company produces collectible new items with relatively limited supply

Like lets say that first edition original Air Jordans are worth $10,000 (I have no idea of the actual amount I guess it's probably much higher)
Nike currently sells whatever other shoe model in its modern current catalogue for e.g. $200
For the two situations to be comparable and form an argument in favour of WotC not printing RL cards, you have to make the claim that if Nike began to produce (or made it clear that they were willing to produce) replica OG Air Jordans then the demand for the $200 shoe would tank, which doesn't seem realistic to me. Can you explain this rationale in the mind of the buyers?

An argument that would make some sense to me is that the "$200 buyers" would think "oh no, Nike has shown they are willing to make additional supply of their shoes in the future, therefore their current releases won't be very collectible and I won't buy them", but

- WotC already makes it clear that its current offerings are liable to be reprinted at their discretion (Fetchlands are reprinted semi-regularly, Ragavan is not on the reserved list)
- Reprinted cards are obviously visibly distinct from the originals (they have new expansion symbol, frame, foil treatment etc) so the originals retain value as a purely collectible item, which may or may not be true for the re-release of a shoe

So I'm not convinced by this but I am willing to hear more

[PirateKing]

Therefore, for to wotc have the ability to print RL cards without legal consequence and yet choose not to as a business decision, you have to instead make the claim that the high price and exclusivity of reserved list cards generate a kind of transferred desire for e.g. Theros boosters. This is an entirely different (and much less convincing) argument

I was thinking about this yesterday, now that we're in a post Secret Lair world, you can't entirely dismiss the effects the RL has had on Wizard's bottom line.
This is not to say any sort of direct sales, I imagine there are zero people saying "I wish I could buy a Fungus Elemental so I guess I'll buy a pack of Strixhaven"
Rather, concurrent with the growth and success of the game, the Reserved List blew the ceiling off card prices in the secondary market, and along with it has since dragged the whole idea of Magic as a durable good into public acceptance.

It has been made okay for Black Lotus to be $20,000
Because of that is has been made okay for Underground Sea to be $1,000
Because of that is has been made okay for Polluted Delta to be $100
And so because of that it is okay for Ragavan to debut at $70

You don't get there based on late 90s Duelist Magazine price guides. Jace, the Mind Sculptor was a $100 Standard legal card, and now that it's just a historical point of data, the consumer has been conditioned to be all good seeing similar prices now. So enter the direct to buyer singles that is Secret Lair, and you can start to see what leeway they have in producing content to match the consumer's idea of acceptable value. You can run a focus group and say you're selling a Secret Lair of 4 cards for $40, what do those cards need to be? 12 years ago you'd get answers like Mox Diamond. Today it can be Island. Not because Island got any better over the decade, but because the collective idea of what an "expensive" card is has grown to absurd levels.

And so this gets realized by Wizards in the form of the Masters sets ever growing price. Modern Horizons 2 is ~$8 per pack, but still will sell well because the cards are worth it to the players.

I don't think any of this was the absolute intention of the Reserve List, and there are no 1:1 comparisons that because X cards is $, Y card is $. In a more amorphous way, we're living in the effects of the RL now. The huge success of the game and traditional supply and demand models are also at play here, but you don't get to new card single prices through that alone.

And I'm confident the damage is done. Even if they abolish the Reserve List today, the price memory is permanent. Cards might drop in value, but never ever again will they be what the were before. Ragavan will still be $70.

[kombatkiwi]

It has been made okay for Black Lotus to be $20,000
Because of that is has been made okay for Underground Sea to be $1,000
Because of that is has been made okay for Polluted Delta to be $100
And so because of that it is okay for Ragavan to debut at $70


I think this is simply an example of the popularity / success of MTG in general increasing over time rather than "the maximum price of tarmogoyf that the market will tolerate is controlled directly by the price of black lotus through a kind of scaling function"

Like if this assertion was true you would expect to see the price of standard mythics trending upwards over time in the same way that RL cards have but instead (as you might expect) they remain relatively pegged to the price of boosters

Ragavan debut at $70 because it is a highly playable mythic rare in a set where the packs cost $8. You didn't have any sensible comparison to that in 2005 or whatever.
You can argue that WotC have only become comfortable printing $8 packs because they see that lotus is $20000 but that seems like a bit of a reach to me


because the collective idea of what an "expensive" card is has grown to absurd levels.
Because MTG has grown a lot since then (more players/demand) but the supply of these cards have not increased. I think it's much less of a 'beanie babies' type situation than you are implying

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

I don't know anything about shoes but my suspicion would be that this is closer to the fetchland / imperial seal / designer bag situation, where the company produces collectible new items with relatively limited supply

Like lets say that first edition original Air Jordans are worth $10,000 (I have no idea of the actual amount I guess it's probably much higher)
Nike currently sells whatever other shoe model in its modern current catalogue for e.g. $200
For the two situations to be comparable and form an argument in favour of WotC not printing RL cards, you have to make the claim that if Nike began to produce (or made it clear that they were willing to produce) replica OG Air Jordans then the demand for the $200 shoe would tank, which doesn't seem realistic to me. Can you explain this rationale in the mind of the buyers?

An argument that would make some sense to me is that the "$200 buyers" would think "oh no, Nike has shown they are willing to make additional supply of their shoes in the future, therefore their current releases won't be very collectible and I won't buy them", but

- WotC already makes it clear that its current offerings are liable to be reprinted at their discretion (Fetchlands are reprinted semi-regularly, Ragavan is not on the reserved list)
- Reprinted cards are obviously visibly distinct from the originals (they have new expansion symbol, frame, foil treatment etc) so the originals retain value as a purely collectible item, which may or may not be true for the re-release of a shoe

So I'm not convinced by this but I am willing to hear more
There's so many stupid teams here I don't even know which one you're on.
Wait are you in favor of printing RL cards because I thought you were on the opposite team.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

The vast majority of decks are designed to win based on life. Most decks win the game by either bringing their opponents life total from 20 to 0 before their opponents do the same, or by preventing their opponents from bringing their own life total down to 0 by the time they manage to stabilize.

Everytime someone casts an Watery Grave untapped, they are giving up 10% of their starting life total. A deck with 3 Watery Graves is going to lose a lot more life every single game than an identical deck with 3 Underground Sea. Every single Grave that etbs is one less storm your opponent needs, or one less bolt, or one less swing with a creature etc. Now extrapolate the impact of this life loss over 7 rounds and yes absolutely you are atleast 10% less likely to win a tournament for each Watery Grave in your decklist, all because of the lands you could afford.

If you want to win a tournament, you're going to want those Underground Seas or a similar fetchable dual that has a much less significant drawback than causing you to lose 10% of your starting life total every time.

A deck packing 3 Dimir Garden Once upon a time thus only showing a card at random from your hand to your opponent if it is the first land you have played in the whole game, is far far less likely to cause you to lose a tournament than Watery Grave is...

Dimir Garden Once upon a time
Swamp Island
When ~ etb, if it is the first land you have played this game, it enters tapped unless you reveal a card at random from your hand to everyone (I'm sure that could be worded better)
These numbers are made up and bad (seriously, are you telling me one out of every ten games is decided by weather or not you paid two life to have a singular land in your deck, which you could have fetched around, enter untapped?) but even if they're true and it's 10%. That makes Watery Grave 90% of an underground sea. so I expect Underground Seas to cost 22 bucks right? 111% the price of a Watery Grave?

[PirateKing]

I think this is simply an example of the popularity / success of MTG in general increasing over time rather than "the maximum price of tarmogoyf that the market will tolerate is controlled directly by the price of black lotus through a kind of scaling function"

Like if this assertion was true you would expect to see the price of standard mythics trending upwards over time in the same way that RL cards have but instead (as you might expect) they remain relatively pegged to the price of boosters

Ragavan debut at $70 because it is a highly playable mythic rare in a set where the packs cost $8. You didn't have any sensible comparison to that in 2005 or whatever.
You can argue that WotC have only become comfortable printing $8 packs because they see that lotus is $20000 but that seems like a bit of a reach to me


Because MTG has grown a lot since then (more players/demand) but the supply of these cards have not increased. I think it's much less of a 'beanie babies' type situation than you are implying

I'm not saying it is the reason, I'm saying a claim that it is zero influence on the current pricing of new cards might not be true.

[kombatkiwi]

There's so many stupid teams here I don't even know which one you're on.
Wait are you in favor of printing RL cards because I thought you were on the opposite team.

My position on this has been consistent through the whole thread (and basically forever, definitely at least for the last several years)

- I think it would be a good thing from player perspective and wotc business perspective for wotc to print reserved list cards. I have not seen any strong argument that it would be bad business for wotc to reprint reserved list cards.
- I am not insisting that wotc should e.g. reprint so many copies of the card until it costs some arbitrarily cheap amount on the secondary market, because this would require some kind of additional anti-capitalist framing. Rather, that they simply bring RL cards into the pool of "luxury reprints" that they treat similarly to other cards in this position such as fetchlands, JTMS, whatever (likely with even more selective reprints than these currently non-RL cards, due to the higher price/scarcity, but it would be up to wotc discretion).
- Controlled reprints like this that are only eternal-format legal are already a clear part of wotc business strategy (with secretlairs and sets like eternal masters / modern horizons).

Conclusion: the only compelling reason for wotc to not print reserved list cards is because to the best of wotc knowledge the reserved list is 'legally binding' and breaking it would expose them to litigation (edit: or that the potential risk thereof is too great, etc as explained in the subsequent post below by 'H')

If anyone supports a different conclusion for why wotc isn't printing RL cards then they have to argue both of the following:
1. The reserved list is legally irrelevant. (I don't think a layperson [such as myself] has a good ability to assess this because it requires too much domain-specific legal knowledge which is why I am simply not interested in hearing about it unless you state your legal authority, and if you have such authority I recommend offering your consulting services to Hasbro)
2. WotC printing RL cards would not be profitable. (None of the arguments for this point have been convincing)

[H]

Well, I been doing my best to stay out of this, but I want to just point out that there are nonmarket based (to some degree) considerations that could, possibly, hypothetically, contribute to them not wanting to face even possible litigation over the Reserve List.

That hypothetically, speculatively, could include some worry over the specter of possible discovery, disclosure and/or deposition in a given suit.

Now, before anyone wants to jump in and say that this is not possible, or exteremely unlikely, or that I am not qualified to make such speculation given that I am not a lawyer, I want to clarify I am not saying this is the case, or is the most likely reasoning. All I want to point out is that there could be more factors in play than just how much money they could hypothetically make, or if litigation could/would/should be successful. A case doesn't need to be won by the litigant, per se, to be potentially damaging. It is also possible (although unknowable how probable) that just the discovery/disclosure would be much more damaging than any financial compensation they could ever be made to give litigants. Finally, there is the possibility that these are simply quantities that are sufficiently unknown/unknowable that Hasbro simply is not willing to broach them unless they absolutely have no choice (and they do, seemingly, right now). Hasbro is generally pretty risk-averse, because WotC is one of the few divisions (IIRC) it has that really makes them a good bit of money.

Again, when I say possible, I mean logically possible, which is not a rating of it's probability in any sense.

[Clark Kant]

That makes Watery Grave 90% of an underground sea. so I expect Underground Seas to cost 22 bucks right? 111% the price of a Watery Grave?

Lol, that's not how any of this works. It's basic supply and demand. If lighting bolt was a reserve list card only ever printed as a rare and never reprinted after ABUR, Lighting Bolt would be a $1000+ card and Shock would not be worth 66% as much as lightning bolt.

Your own manabase shocking you is a huge drawback that makes it easier for your opponents to kill you, makes you have to play more defensively with your life total and both of these will cost you plenty of games. That's just basic Magic 101.

If one player starts each game at 16-18 life while everyone else starts at 20 life, the 16-18 life player is going to have a much harder time winning a tournament than the players that start at 20 life.

[Reeplcheep]

Lol, that's not how any of this works. It's basic supply and demand. If lighting bolt was a reserve list card only ever printed as a rare and never reprinted after ABUR, Lighting Bolt would be a $1000+ card and Shock would not be worth 66% as much as lightning bolt.

You are conflating two things. There is what the card should cost, which is indeed supply and demand. Commander players, money launderers and nostalgic millennials can make anything cost way too much.

But there is a second question: if a legacy player in a monthly 1k should feel like they need to buy the card. The answer is profoundly no. Just like saying an amateur bicyclist shouldn’t bike if they only have aluminum wheels instead of carbon fibre is silly. Or that the average beer league hockey player shouldn’t even get on the ice with a budget composite stick.

The 4% I assumed is a large difference: it’s the difference between even and quite unfavoured, and tier 1 vs tier 0. If you think 2-4 points of life determines 10% or more of games in this format that is a very bold claim.

[KobeBryan]

Semi-pro bicyclists don’t always spend 10 000$ getting the 2 gram lighter wheels. Not every team in formula 1 is Ferrari. At some point small optimization don’t make sense; which is why everyone doesn’t go out and buy a tabernacle when lands is 0.2% better than the rest of the field.

There are definitely intangibles, otherwise no one would play legacy in the first place. But most people don’t value the intangibles at >100 000$.

Lots of people pay double the price for dura ace over ultegra man. LOTS

So the intangibles and the marginal value that may increase is worth it to MANY. Sometimes that 1 ounce would help you cross that finish line. You never want to be that guy where "if only I had this, i could have won"

[phonics]

This issue only matters to people who play sanctioned paper legacy/ vintage magic, and people who play paper, no proxy competitive edh, no other players really care about duals since they wont ever play them, and WOTC only cares about the demographic that spends money on actual magic product and not secondary market singles. What percentage of the magic playing population do you think that overlapping niche is, and do you think that such a niche is worth specifically marketing towards (on top of whatever costs are associated with breaking their reserve list promise)? Any rationalization as to whether or not it is good for the game isn't really relevant.

[kombatkiwi]

This issue only matters to people who play sanctioned paper legacy/ vintage magic, and people who play paper, no proxy competitive edh, no other players really care about duals since they wont ever play them, and WOTC only cares about the demographic that spends money on actual magic product and not secondary market singles. What percentage of the magic playing population do you think that overlapping niche is, and do you think that such a niche is worth specifically marketing towards (on top of whatever costs are associated with breaking their reserve list promise)? Any rationalization as to whether or not it is good for the game isn't really relevant.

If WotC starts printing RL cards then RL cards become "actual magic product"
Do you not think WotC is already marketing towards non-proxy edh players

[TsumiBand]

Lol, that's not how any of this works. It's basic supply and demand. If lighting bolt was a reserve list card only ever printed as a rare and never reprinted after ABUR, Lighting Bolt would be a $1000+ card and Shock would not be worth 66% as much as lightning bolt.

Your own manabase shocking you is a huge drawback that makes it easier for your opponents to kill you, makes you have to play more defensively with your life total and both of these will cost you plenty of games. That's just basic Magic 101.

If one player starts each game at 16-18 life while everyone else starts at 20 life, the 16-18 life player is going to have a much harder time winning a tournament than the players that start at 20 life.

My guess is the people that are arguing with you have never attempted to play a real Legacy deck with shocks instead of duals.

I have "fond" memories from like a decade ago of being out-aggroed while playing Naya Zoo with shocks and fetches, by control decks. It's actually kind of a big deal if you're Bolting yourself every turn because you're just trying to curve out, you're at 11 by turn 3. I know we like to think the only point of life that matters is the last one, but try having one player start the game at 11 and then see WhO's ThE bEaTdOwN. Shocks just cannot replace duals.

[Captain Hammer]

My guess is the people that are arguing with you have never attempted to play a real Legacy deck with shocks instead of duals.

I have "fond" memories from like a decade ago of being out-aggroed while playing Naya Zoo with shocks and fetches, by control decks. It's actually kind of a big deal if you're Bolting yourself every turn because you're just trying to curve out, you're at 11 by turn 3. I know we like to think the only point of life that matters is the last one, but try having one player start the game at 11 and then see WhO's ThE bEaTdOwN. Shocks just cannot replace duals.

Very well said. The idea that replacing duals with shocks makes little difference to your win percentage is laughable.

[dte]

Very well said. The idea that replacing duals with shocks makes little difference to your win percentage is laughable.

Taking the example of a wild nacatl deck is wrong. There are not that many cards that interact with land types in legacy: daze, by far the most important (and yes, a non-shadow daze deck with shocklands is not on par with original duals), quirion ranger (a feel bad with anything else than basic Forest and original duals), KotR, choke (against which fastlands are better than duals)... And some time ago, there was nacatl, which required that you had three different land types by T2.
Definitely not a good, generic argument to use nacatl to compare shock and duals.

There are other decks that cannot replace duals by shocklands, like storm decks. That doesn't mean that shocks cannot be used and tournaments won with them.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

I think if UR delver replaced two of its three duals with shocks you would lose less than 3% of games because of it
The only decks that are going to lose significant percentage points are the ones that would need to fetch shock every turn and unlike Naya zoo that just isn't most decks in legacy.
What does hogaak even care about starting at 14 life if both it's badlands and byou shock into play. You're already dead.
Or you're playing against storm. All your lands could be ancient tombs for all it matters, that's not how you're losing the game.

[Ronald Deuce]

Taking the example of a wild nacatl deck is wrong. There are not that many cards that interact with land types in legacy: daze, by far the most important (and yes, a non-shadow daze deck with shocklands is not on par with original duals), quirion ranger (a feel bad with anything else than basic Forest and original duals), KotR, choke (against which fastlands are better than duals)... And some time ago, there was nacatl, which required that you had three different land types by T2.
Definitely not a good, generic argument to use nacatl to compare shock and duals.

There are other decks that cannot replace duals by shocklands, like storm decks. That doesn't mean that shocks cannot be used and tournaments won with them.

Saying he could've picked a stronger example isn't the same as saying that his argument is invalid, though. And it sounds like he was speaking from experience.

That said, I'm avoiding this argument like the plague. I find it hard to believe that people are really arguing that the difference between nine and ten 'Drils is trivial, or that because it's possible to win with worse cards, the difference between those cards and better cards is negligible. Or that you can assign a percentage to something this nebulous without plotting every win or loss and every turn a person would've survived but didn't because Temple Garden across the world Legacy scene.

[Cire]

I have not seen any strong argument that it would be bad business for wotc to reprint reserved list cards.

It would probably make them money, but by not doing it they clearly looked at their options and see that expected time and cost of settling nuisance level law suits outweighs or cuts into the profit that they could generate above and beyond just printing other stuff.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Even in a three color deck, if you have one proper dual of each color pair, it feels like you’re not actually going to lose many games if the rest are shocklands. I don’t really know where that falls in the argument because tbh I don’t really see the point of the argument. A more relevant thing you could do if you don’t want to spend used car prices (or more) on a Magic deck is just not play Legacy

[Goaswerfraiejen]

It would probably make them money, but by not doing it they clearly looked at their options and see that expected time and cost of settling nuisance level law suits outweighs or cuts into the profit that they could generate above and beyond just printing other stuff.



I wouldn't conclude anything so strong (especially since the prospect of a successful lawsuit on the subject is vanishingly dim). As I see it, it's something they have in their back pocket, for a rainy day. Remember Time Spiral?

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Yeah I made this point repeatedly and I feel it's been overlooked but Wizards doesn't just have to analyze the risk v reward of breaking the RL at all vs. never, but of breaking it now vs later.

It's not clear why now would be a good time to reprint duals but it's easy to imagine a future scenario where you break open that piggy bank. Like, when sales are declining instead of growing enormously for example.

[TsumiBand]

Taking the example of a wild nacatl deck is wrong. There are not that many cards that interact with land types in legacy: daze, by far the most important (and yes, a non-shadow daze deck with shocklands is not on par with original duals), quirion ranger (a feel bad with anything else than basic Forest and original duals), KotR, choke (against which fastlands are better than duals)... And some time ago, there was nacatl, which required that you had three different land types by T2.
Definitely not a good, generic argument to use nacatl to compare shock and duals.

There are other decks that cannot replace duals by shocklands, like storm decks. That doesn't mean that shocks cannot be used and tournaments won with them.

I mean if we're concerned with making generic arguments, you can make the "you can with with X" argument about a lot of things. You can win games with Suntail Hawk. You can win games with a 62 card deck. But we don't give those options serious thought because there are more optimal choices to be made. Shocks versus duals is a no-brainer before "games you can win" even enters the discussion.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

I mean if we're concerned with making generic arguments, you can make the "you can with with X" argument about a lot of things. You can win games with Suntail Hawk. You can win games with a 62 card deck. But we don't give those options serious thought because there are more optimal choices to be made. Shocks versus duals is a no-brainer before "games you can win" even enters the discussion.

If the difference between a 60 card deck and a 62 one was a thousand bucks I'd run 62 every time.

[Watersaw]

Just dropping by to say that we had tons of paper tournament data from the SCG years and it was rare to ever see a shockland in a top 8 or 32. The difference does matter.

[phonics]

If WotC starts printing RL cards then RL cards become "actual magic product"
Do you not think WotC is already marketing towards non-proxy edh players

Yeah, but who wants that "actual magic product", who is it for and what would it cost? The people who want duals to play with, and are actually willing to spend the money for them is very small. Based on precedence they wouldn't just dump a bunch of cheap duals onto the market, that would be foolish and greedy hasbro would never leave money on the table so WOTC would milk the whales for market-ish price like every other staple reprint they have done. For the average edh player, would they rather buy a dual land, or all of the commander product released that year with all those super cool timmy and johnny cards, plus upgrades for those products? So that leads to wotc, who are making record profits yoy, breaking the reserve list to print something like a super expensive cash grab secret lair almost exclusively for rich collector whales, which optically is about 1000x worse than when they decided to do the fetchland secret lairs.


Yeah I made this point repeatedly and I feel it's been overlooked but Wizards doesn't just have to analyze the risk v reward of breaking the RL at all vs. never, but of breaking it now vs later.

It's not clear why now would be a good time to reprint duals but it's easy to imagine a future scenario where you break open that piggy bank. Like, when sales are declining instead of growing enormously for example.

Pretty much this, I think I made a similar post at the start of the thread. As far as the card availability issue goes, wotc probably feels like mtgo is a satisfactory solution. If you want to play without dumping thousands of dollars on lands, play online. If you want to play with friends, play with proxies.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Just dropping by to say that we had tons of paper tournament data from the SCG years and it was rare to ever see a shockland in a top 8 or 32. The difference does matter.

The difference in price has never been this high. Even before scg dropped legacy

[kombatkiwi]

It would probably make them money, but by not doing it they clearly looked at their options and see that expected time and cost of settling nuisance level law suits outweighs or cuts into the profit that they could generate above and beyond just printing other stuff.
Did you read the rest of the post or did you stop after that sentence


Yeah, but who wants that "actual magic product", who is it for and what would it cost? The people who want duals to play with, and are actually willing to spend the money for them is very small. Based on precedence they wouldn't just dump a bunch of cheap duals onto the market, that would be foolish and greedy hasbro would never leave money on the table so WOTC would milk the whales for market-ish price like every other staple reprint they have done. For the average edh player, would they rather buy a dual land, or all of the commander product released that year with all those super cool timmy and johnny cards, plus upgrades for those products? So that leads to wotc, who are making record profits yoy, breaking the reserve list to print something like a super expensive cash grab secret lair almost exclusively for rich collector whales, which optically is about 1000x worse than when they decided to do the fetchland secret lairs.
Breaking the RL would not be bad optics (outside of potential lawsuits from big collectors) no matter what the prices were. The only people buying RL cards now are essentially rich collector whales anyway. Worst case scenario for players is the cards are still worth almost the same as they were before. Would some % of the playerbase be upset that Underground Sea is reprinted but they can't buy it for $2? Sure. But people already did (do) that with Scalding Tarn now and the drama about the fetchland secretlairs was forgotten in like a week.

Your argument is also predicated on the idea that WotC would maximise profit by keeping the price of duals (almost) exactly the same, which is a significant assumption


Pretty much this, I think I made a similar post at the start of the thread. As far as the card availability issue goes, wotc probably feels ... satisfactory solution.... proxies.
Ok buddy

[Michael Keller]

If one player starts each game at 16-18 life while everyone else starts at 20 life, the 16-18 life player is going to have a much harder time winning a tournament than the players that start at 20 life.

But aren’t the vast majority of players immediately dropping themselves four to six life points a game because of a higher density of fetchlands in their decks? And what about Ancient Tomb decks just recklessly blowing their own life totals out? You really can’t use that as an argument because most decks in Legacy can win the game long before the damage from a single shock (or two) becomes relevant, and Legacy in a vacuum is a format with high risk, high reward - hence the reason why people aren’t afraid to plug their own life totals to win.

Attrition-based matchups are truer to your argument, and I agree it does add up. The fact is dual lands are the gold standard, and the only way to print something of equal footing would be lands that add two or more colors and aren’t heavily conditional. Fetches make shocks better because you can search up a land in the end step of an opponent when you’re out a turn one play, but if you’re jamming Brainstorm, then there’s no argument even trying to justify using shocks because your Brainstorm costs you potentially two life and you’re likely keeping your fetch up for that shock in your opponent’s turn to find something - or even as a sorcery, but it’s still two life.

What it really comes down to is money. If you can’t afford duals and you’re playing paper, no one is forcing you to play duals - run shocks. Just keep in mind it’s very rare in 2021 for anyone in Legacy to stay at 20 life their first or second turn.

[phonics]

Breaking the RL would not be bad optics (outside of potential lawsuits from big collectors) no matter what the prices were. The only people buying RL cards now are essentially rich collector whales anyway. Worst case scenario for players is the cards are still worth almost the same as they were before. Would some % of the playerbase be upset that Underground Sea is reprinted but they can't buy it for $2? Sure. But people already did (do) that with Scalding Tarn now and the drama about the fetchland secretlairs was forgotten in like a week.

Your argument is also predicated on the idea that WotC would maximise profit by keeping the price of duals (almost) exactly the same, which is a significant assumption

How can you say that it would not be bad optics, when every outcome of WOTC attempting to circumvent the reserve list ended up with WOTC further restricting their interpretation of that promise they made?

I never said anything about the prices of the current cards changing so I am not sure what point you are trying to make regarding that. Based on the history of WOTC reprinting cards, I would say that it is the most likely possibility if they were to be reprinted. Duals would never go into a regular set, they haven't released a secret lair drop costing more than 50$, and any other set they get released in would get scalped, which means they are obliged to charge those prices anyways so they see the profit instead of a scalper. Your comparison with Tarn doesn't make sense since it isn't reserve list and it had been teased that it would be reprinted for years now so there was always an expectation that they would be reprinted, and on top of that WOTC went in the other direction and made the fetch lands the type of card that would not be printed in regular sets again because they had become so expensive. If they won't even do that on cards that are less than 100$ and can be reprinted without reserve list issues, why do you have an expectation that they would do it for cards that are many times more expensive and on the reserve list?

You also say people have forgotten about the fetchland secret lairs which is true because apparently it did so poorly and had such backlash that they backed off completely and released a completely benign second ultimate edition instead of something like finishing the rest of the fetches.


Ok buddy

I don't think it is a stretch, WOTC has explicitly decided that they want absolutely nothing to do with getting rid of the reserve list, this is a fact and isn't up for debate of interpretation. Since they aren't touching the reserve list, making legacy and vintage playable on mtgo is the only way they can make cards in those formats accessible. If you have another solution for them to print even more money that avoids their reserve list restrictions then you should probably let WOTC know because I'm sure they would love to hear it.

[kombatkiwi]

How can you say that it would not be bad optics, when every outcome of WOTC attempting to circumvent the reserve list ended up with WOTC further restricting their interpretation of that promise they made?
This is why I added the "outside of potential lawsuits from big collectors" parenthetical. I mean "not be bad optics" in terms of "the general playerbase / broader community" however you might like to define it, in terms of affecting their present-day retail business operations and not any tangential courtroom shenanigans. If what you are saying is "the reason why they don't print RL cards is because of the threat of lawsuits from megawhales" then I agree with you, this has been my position on it from the beginning


they haven't released a secret lair drop costing more than 50$
They don't have many non-RL cards on the secondary market that cost much more than $50


You also say people have forgotten about the fetchland secret lairs which is true because apparently it did so poorly and had such backlash that they backed off completely and released a completely benign second ultimate edition instead of something like finishing the rest of the fetches.
"We have printed this card in some kind of cheaper product before in recent memory but we are now selling it for a high premium" is a different proposition to "We weren't making this product available at all (in 25 years +) before but now we are selling it for a high premium"


I don't think it is a stretch, WOTC has explicitly decided that they want absolutely nothing to do with getting rid of the reserve list, this is a fact and isn't up for debate of interpretation. Since they aren't touching the reserve list, making legacy and vintage playable on mtgo is the only way they can make cards in those formats accessible. If you have another solution for them to print even more money that avoids their reserve list restrictions then you should probably let WOTC know because I'm sure they would love to hear it.
The idea that they like the idea of people playing with proxies is ridiculous. They have "explicitly decided that they want absolutely nothing to do with getting rid of the reserve list", yes I agree with this observation: I am trying to make the point that the threat of lawsuits is the only sensible remaining explanation. Things like "They aren't reprinting duals because they want legacy to die so that everybody only plays standard" don't hold up to scrutiny

[Mr. Safety]

But aren’t the vast majority of players immediately dropping themselves four to six life points a game because of a higher density of fetchlands in their decks? And what about Ancient Tomb decks just recklessly blowing their own life totals out? You really can’t use that as an argument because most decks in Legacy can win the game long before the damage from a single shock (or two) becomes relevant, and Legacy in a vacuum is a format with high risk, high reward - hence the reason why people aren’t afraid to plug their own life totals to win.

Attrition-based matchups are truer to your argument, and I agree it does add up. The fact is dual lands are the gold standard, and the only way to print something of equal footing would be lands that add two or more colors and aren’t heavily conditional. Fetches make shocks better because you can search up a land in the end step of an opponent when you’re out a turn one play, but if you’re jamming Brainstorm, then there’s no argument even trying to justify using shocks because your Brainstorm costs you potentially two life and you’re likely keeping your fetch up for that shock in your opponent’s turn to find something - or even as a sorcery, but it’s still two life.

What it really comes down to is money. If you can’t afford duals and you’re playing paper, no one is forcing you to play duals - run shocks. Just keep in mind it’s very rare in 2021 for anyone in Legacy to stay at 20 life their first or second turn.

There is also a bunch of tag-along lifegain added to many new cards, Uro being the best example.

[PirateKing]

There is also a bunch of tag-along lifegain added to many new cards, Uro being the best example.

Right, but if I can't draw 3 cards with Sylvan Library for turn after turn, what is even the point? Might as well go play standard jump off a bridge.

[Ronald Deuce]

But aren’t the vast majority of players immediately dropping themselves four to six life points a game because of a higher density of fetchlands in their decks? And what about Ancient Tomb decks just recklessly blowing their own life totals out? You really can’t use that as an argument because most decks in Legacy can win the game long before the damage from a single shock (or two) becomes relevant, and Legacy in a vacuum is a format with high risk, high reward - hence the reason why people aren’t afraid to plug their own life totals to win.

This argument feels a bit disingenuous to me. Ancient Tomb into Generic Artifact just lets you lock people out of the game on the first turn; fetches, duals, and shocks don't without dedicated support. So the difference isn't between "lose 1 (or 3) life and play some card" and "lose 2 life and play some card"; it's between "lose 1 (or 3) life and play some card" and "lose 2 life and win the game." The same is true to an even greater degree with Agadeem's Awakening, which regularly reads, "lose 3 life and win the game." I also think it's important to note that Ancient Tomb is factually way better than the comparable lands that don't cost life to use. That's not true of shocks vs. duals.

So in your examples, the worst thing you can be doing is playing shocklands (barring a specific deck choice). You're bleeding yourself for 1 Storm to only maybe do as well as other reactive players with deeper pockets.

[Watersaw]

But aren’t the vast majority of players immediately dropping themselves four to six life points a game because of a higher density of fetchlands in their decks? And what about Ancient Tomb decks just recklessly blowing their own life totals out? You really can’t use that as an argument because most decks in Legacy can win the game long before the damage from a single shock (or two) becomes relevant, and Legacy in a vacuum is a format with high risk, high reward - hence the reason why people aren’t afraid to plug their own life totals to win.

Attrition-based matchups are truer to your argument, and I agree it does add up. The fact is dual lands are the gold standard, and the only way to print something of equal footing would be lands that add two or more colors and aren’t heavily conditional. Fetches make shocks better because you can search up a land in the end step of an opponent when you’re out a turn one play, but if you’re jamming Brainstorm, then there’s no argument even trying to justify using shocks because your Brainstorm costs you potentially two life and you’re likely keeping your fetch up for that shock in your opponent’s turn to find something - or even as a sorcery, but it’s still two life.

What it really comes down to is money. If you can’t afford duals and you’re playing paper, no one is forcing you to play duals - run shocks. Just keep in mind it’s very rare in 2021 for anyone in Legacy to stay at 20 life their first or second turn.

Starting at a lower life total than your opponent sucks whether they start at 20 or 14. And Anchient Tomb decks regularly lose gutting themselves on their own manabase.


The difference in price has never been this high. Even before scg dropped legacy
So what? People rightfully bitched and doomsayed about prices when Volcanics were what, $200? The point is there was such a large data set that if shocklands were real cards we would have seen them at the top tables.

[phonics]

This is why I added the "outside of potential lawsuits from big collectors" parenthetical. I mean "not be bad optics" in terms of "the general playerbase / broader community" however you might like to define it, in terms of affecting their present-day retail business operations and not any tangential courtroom shenanigans. If what you are saying is "the reason why they don't print RL cards is because of the threat of lawsuits from megawhales" then I agree with you, this has been my position on it from the beginning

From my experience, "the general player base" doesn't really care about the reserve list, so while it may be true that they don't think of it in a bad light, it is more of the case that they don't think about it at all, with the exception of a fairly small minority. So while the lawsuit guys are a small minority of the general magic population, they are probably a larger, significant proportion of the demographic that does care about the issue, they are also by nature much more invested in said issue than others.


They don't have many non-RL cards on the secondary market that cost much more than $50

Yes but they do have a fairly good non-rl analog for duals in fetchlands, there is essentially nothing stopping them from printing them into the ground or releasing a regular secret lair drop with all 10 or even 5 for $39.99. I would say that some kind of similar policy change that demonstrates that WOTC is disregarding secondary market prices for expensive cards would have to happen before anyone would even consider reserve list cards getting reprinted in a way that would alleviate card availability.


"We have printed this card in some kind of cheaper product before in recent memory but we are now selling it for a high premium" is a different proposition to "We weren't making this product available at all (in 25 years +) before but now we are selling it for a high premium"

Both still give the message that they can print things much cheaper but choose not to for monetary reasons, which is what upset people in the first place. That was why WOTC had to announce that enemy fetches were getting reprinted in the near future after the ultimate series set.


The idea that they like the idea of people playing with proxies is ridiculous. They have "explicitly decided that they want absolutely nothing to do with getting rid of the reserve list", yes I agree with this observation: I am trying to make the point that the threat of lawsuits is the only sensible remaining explanation. Things like "They aren't reprinting duals because they want legacy to die so that everybody only plays standard" don't hold up to scrutiny

I was never making that argument, and if they wanted legacy to die they wouldn't have made eternal sets for mtgo to fill out the card pools. Whether or not wotc likes people playing with proxies isn't really relevant since that doesn't strictly apply to eternal formats for card availability reasons, people that proxy aren't buying cards in the way wotc wants anyways so they aren't the type of consumer that is worth marketing towards. This is also probably the case with the people who complain about the game a lot. It is much easier to convince their habitual consumers to buy more cards (which is probably why they release so many sets now) than it is to convince someone who proxies (either because they cant afford them or they are disgruntled) to spend more of their money on cardboard. Those habitual consumers are the type of consumer they care about and design/ market for, and from the data shown it is working very well. I would say it is a combination of collector influence and the apathy of the general magic population towards the issue means they have no incentive to reneg on their promise regarding the reserve list. I think because this is a legacy oriented forum people over exaggerate the degree to which this is an issue for magic, wotc seems perfectly content in having legacy and vintage be known as weird esoteric formats inhabited by nostalgic boomers. There aren't very high costs in this for them to maintain the status quo, they can always reneg in the future when they actually need to.

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

So what? People rightfully bitched and doomsayed about prices when Volcanics were what, $200? The point is there was such a large data set that if shocklands were real cards we would have seen them at the top tables.
So in 2010 I could take a risk on duals when they were just over 200 and I could make it all back if I cashed the weekly SCG. Nowadays the risk to pay off those thousand dollar Seas is so high that it isn't worth it. And Since the delta between these two cards became so high something else happened: People stopped playing paper magic. If you wanted to play legacy you'd play online and there the price of duals is much lower, less than 10bux each. But also you're baking a false dichotomy into your premise:
The options are not "play shocks" or "play duals" they're:
Play shocks, play duals, play something else, or not play at all. Players are not required to play legacy, and players told "duals are best, yeah, but you'll only lose 3% more if you played a shock over them" are still not going to build a deck with shocks. They'll just not play legacy.
Except one other thing: We do see shocks at the top tables. Death's Shadow became a deck and every primer and article about it cites how you can build it without duals!

Also, because it appears I have to do your homework here's three decks that played Watery Grave and weren't Shadow.
https://www.tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=29767&iddeck=250259 3 of 72 Reanimator using Watery Grave over Underground Sea
https://www.tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=29533&iddeck=246966 8 of 52 Using Both Watery Grave and Blood Crypt
https://www.tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=30390&iddeck=257410 7 of 47 Again with shocks.

[Clark Kant]

So in 2010 I could take a risk on duals when they were just over 200 and I could make it all back if I cashed the weekly SCG. Nowadays the risk to pay off those thousand dollar Seas is so high that it isn't worth it. And Since the delta between these two cards became so high something else happened: People stopped playing paper magic. If you wanted to play legacy you'd play online and there the price of duals is much lower, less than 10bux each. But also you're baking a false dichotomy into your premise:
The options are not "play shocks" or "play duals" they're:
Play shocks, play duals, play something else, or not play at all. Players are not required to play legacy, and players told "duals are best, yeah, but you'll only lose 3% more if you played a shock over them" are still not going to build a deck with shocks. They'll just not play legacy.
Except one other thing: We do see shocks at the top tables. Death's Shadow became a deck and every primer and article about it cites how you can build it without duals!

Also, because it appears I have to do your homework here's three decks that played Watery Grave and weren't Shadow.
https://www.tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=29767&iddeck=250259 3 of 72 Reanimator using Watery Grave over Underground Sea
https://www.tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=29533&iddeck=246966 8 of 52 Using Both Watery Grave and Blood Crypt
https://www.tcdecks.net/deck.php?id=30390&iddeck=257410 7 of 47 Again with shocks.

Excellent Point!

Cheaper alternatives to duals would be exactly what paper legacy needs in order to survive. The original duals will always be the vintage and most valuable cards. The more popular legacy gets, the more the price of duals soar, even if these lands were availabile.

But pilots like the players above could have competed on a budget.

[Clark Kant]

Its really shocking how shocks remain the only reasonable alternative to duals in legacy.

By now, at the very least I would have expected that a commander set would have released shocks that only deal you 1 damage rather than 2 for legacy and commander use.

[Wrath of Pie]

Its really shocking how shocks remain the only reasonable alternative to duals in legacy.

Not really, there isn't really a need for untapped dual lands with land types because the primary market is Commander for most paper cards at this point, and those players will happily buy up any dual land variant given.

(The real surprise is that indestructible etbt dual lands with land types haven't been printed.)

[FourDogsinaHorseSuit]

Typed Fast Lands I think are in the realm of possibility but the issue is that they can't be too good because you shouldn't have 8 duals in the format/deck.
So either you reprint duals, make something almost as good and ban the originals.
Or let the format die (theyre choosing this one)

[Clark Kant]

I dont think 8 duals in the format is really a big deal.

I don't think 90% of decks would ever use more than 4 duals, and the ones that do will be even more vulnerable to Blood Moon, Wasteland, Back to Basics, Choke etc than they already are.

There really is no reason not to print typed fast lands or something similar that makes duals (and $1000 manabases) no longer an absolute necessity to play Legacy.