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

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Originally Posted by Ronald Deuce

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Grizzlenasty

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"

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I'm outta here!

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.

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Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin

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

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Don't Sign Your Posts!

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Originally Posted by Grizzlenasty

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.

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This is gonna make us SO much money!

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.

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Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by Ronald Deuce

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

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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.

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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")

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?

Dimir Guildgate does what Underground Sea does.

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

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

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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.

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

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That. That's literally what artificial scarcity is.

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin

Dimir Guildgate does what Underground Sea does.

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QED.

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Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin

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.

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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.

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Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin

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

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

Like it's probably worth talking about the archetypical example, which is the diamond market. You can go read an article on it 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.

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Originally Posted by Ronald Deuce

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

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You need it demonstrated to you that a $500,000 piece of cardboard is a luxury good

Okay buddy pal

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that they were manufactured as luxury goods

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Irrelevant

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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?

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QED.

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

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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.

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

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by TheInfamousBearAssassin

You need it demonstrated to you that a $500,000 piece of cardboard 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?

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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:

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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.

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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)

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“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!”

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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

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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.

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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)

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

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Originally Posted by FourDogsinaHorseSuit

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by kombatkiwi

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)

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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.

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?

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Originally Posted by kombatkiwi

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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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)

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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.

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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

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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?

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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)

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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?

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.

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

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Originally Posted by Maximus

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by FourDogsinaHorseSuit

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

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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.

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Originally Posted by kombatkiwi

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

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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.

Is an Undergroudn Sea 100 times better than a Watery Grave?
Y/N