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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
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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.
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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
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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?
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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:
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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.... ?
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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