[Official] Bitching About Prices, Buyouts and Reprints Thread

[Phoenix Ignition]

I'm happy with it. I'd lose a fuckton of value if they'd reprint duals. I've got at least a playset of each, revised, which is the version of the card which would crash hardest if they'd reprint them. For some of my other stuff, the RL is irrelevant. No way they'd ever reprint power, Library of Alexandria, Candelabra,...

Anyhow, you know this is a toucht topic when they start to whine about it on the high end facebook group, of all places.

So is this because you get satisfaction out of knowing how much your cards are worth, without intending on selling them? I'm actually curious since price only really matters if you're buying or selling them. The prices of duals might not even drop that much with a reprint if they do it carefully, Force of Will for example only dropped 30 dollars total and is now back to within ~10 dollars of it's high prices. Increasing supply would inevitably increase the number of people who could play the format as well, and we've seen what happens to cards in Modern that are sought after just because of its larger player base.

It's weird to me that I can find more proxy legacy tournaments than regular legacy tournaments now, but completely understandable.

[Fox]

Here we go again, Intuition spike beginning perhaps.

[kirkusjones]

I'm curious about what the percentage of players vs. collectors is that support the reserved list. I have a feeling those who favor it are far more likely to have their feet firmly planted in the collector camp than in the player's.

I'm primarily a player, with the exception of two cheap cards that I collect (greg staples diabolic tutor and laboratory maniac, in case anyone was curious) and would gladly see my duals and cradle and such take a hit if I got access to more cards and more people playing legacy at my lgs. They're currently struggling to get a legacy night going, and a big part of that is due to access.

[MaximumC]

So is this because you get satisfaction out of knowing how much your cards are worth, without intending on selling them? I'm actually curious since price only really matters if you're buying or selling them.

Well, actually, the price matters if you're not buying and selling them, too. In that case, it increases the danger of theft or of someone shooting you to take your Magical Card Game.

[TsumiBand]

Still with the Reserve List. As if any format depends for its life on the Reserve List! This is a bit of a cross-post from my discussion the The Drain, but it bears repeating: The Reserve List is a big, fat, red herring. Wizards could reprint cards that challenge or replace every card on that list tomorrow if they chose to do so. They do not because they are concerned those cards would have a bad effect on the game. Even so, we see them print competition ALL THE TIME.

1. Countermagic. Mana Drain and Force of Will have no had a lock on your first 8 counterspell slots for years. Flusterstorm, Mental Mistep, Spell Pierce, etc., are all situationally better.

2. Old hate cards keep getting reprinted, often improved. Sphere becomes Golem. Thorn becomes Thalia. Rod becomes Silence. Moat becomes Magus of the Moat (or Peacekeeper).

3. They try to reprint "safe" versions of the Power Nine all the darn time. Reprinting some form of Time Twister, Ancestrall Recall, and Time Walk is one of WotC's favorite hobbies. Occasionally the make one that is actually a worthy successor (Treasure Cruise!)

4. They print cards that enable new archetypes that compete with the old guard commonly, too. Eye of Ugin and Eldrazi Temple are to Eldrazi what Mishra's Workshop is to artifacts. Cavern of Souls specifically enables tribal strategies. And, each of these are to some level exclusive with each other. As anyone watching the VSL can see, jamming Workshop AND Eldrazi into the same deck causes tension with your mana base forcing you to make decisions or just being greedy and losing because you can't cast your TKS. :)

There's literally nothing stopping them from printing riffs on the Revised Duals or other Vintage staples that are situationally better or worse -- except power level concerns, I suppose. You could easily print these in a Commander or other eternal-only supplementary set:

Strange Dual Land
Forest Island
When this enters the battlefield, each player Scrys 1.

Strange Mox Jet
Artifact
T: Add one black mana to your mana pool.
When this enters the battlefield, each player may draw a card. If he or she does, that player then discards a card.

Neither of these offend the Reserve List in any way, and both are genuine competition for the originals depending on the deck. ("But wait, they'll just get played along side the originals!") Well, of course they will. But, how much space do we really have left in our decks as it is? People jam 5 moxen even when some are off-color. Artifact hate makes it risky to make your entire mana base moxen. Who is going to replace all the basics with duals in a world with Wasteland?

In any event, those kind of considerations are for Design and Development to hammer out. The point is, if you want more Vintage cards, just lobby Wizards to print new ones.

THERE IS NOTHING SACRED ABOUT THE CARDS ON THE RESERVE LIST.

Reverberate

[MaximumC]

Reverberate

You're not wrong, but I don't like to use Reverberate as an example because of what Maro supposedly said about it:

http://atogblog.tumblr.com/post/8793...al-reprints-of

Reverberate was made while they were trying to loosen the Reserve list a few years ago. Around the same time they tried the premium reprints.

Luckily, you don't have to stray very far from that to be in A-OK town:

http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post...verberate-with

jokey665 asked: I know how you feel about Fork vs Reverberate with regard to the Reserve List, but how about Juzam Djinn vs Plague Sliver? Could we see more Plague Sliver-esque attempts at reserved cards?

Those are allowable, but not something we plan to do a lot.

[MorphBerlin]

Well goal achieved, the market is in total panic. The slightest rumour causes massive buyouts. Now MCM is also allways part of it :/

[Stan]

So is this because you get satisfaction out of knowing how much your cards are worth, without intending on selling them? I'm actually curious since price only really matters if you're buying or selling them. The prices of duals might not even drop that much with a reprint if they do it carefully, Force of Will for example only dropped 30 dollars total and is now back to within ~10 dollars of it's high prices. Increasing supply would inevitably increase the number of people who could play the format as well, and we've seen what happens to cards in Modern that are sought after just because of its larger player base.

It's weird to me that I can find more proxy legacy tournaments than regular legacy tournaments now, but completely understandable.

I don't need the money they're worth at the moment, so why sell now? I got those cards after the reserved list was first formulated with the understanding that there'd be no reprints, I fully expect them to uphold their promise.

Duals may or may not crash after a reprint, who knows? But I do know it's highly unlikely that they'll crash in case of no reprint.

[Phoenix Ignition]

Duals may or may not crash after a reprint, who knows? But I do know it's highly unlikely that they'll crash in case of no reprint.

Good Chinese reprints could totally crash the market. At current price spikes and thinking of 1990 printing technology, I see no reason to believe they won't happen in the next 5 years.

[jrsthethird]

Good Chinese reprints could totally crash the market. At current price spikes and thinking of 1990 printing technology, I see no reason to believe they won't happen in the next 5 years.

Good. Once the market has crashed due to fakes, Shkreli and WOTC can tag team to sue the Chinese, while WOTC, with values of original RL printings destroyed, can feel free to abolish the Reserved List and print new duals with modern anti-fake Holo technology.

[Stan]

Perhaps, but then again why risk the increased scrutiny which comes with the purchase of reserved list cards, if they can just print modern staples. Nobody bats an eye at a GP when some guy passes with a binder full of LotV or fetches.

[Bed Decks Palyer]

I think the article shows the issues facing the game in bright blue lights. Sadly while highlighting the issue is simple, solving it...

I do not know why I would bother with most of the cards I have. Instead of looking at the prices and thing "Fuck, how will I build X" I look at them and think "Why am I still fucking around in this playground"

I swear that my post won't be a troll attempt.

I lost some of my interest in Magic, but as my brain remains rewired after a two decades of expostion to the drug, I cannot unchain myself that easily. I want to move elsewhere (both in my life, and in MtG), so all that I "need" is some semi-serious pile in case my old friends would love to play a game or two with a beer or two. Being a fan of GW, I decided that I could build a deck centred around KotR, LftL and things, a 50 Bucks Solution which I privately called Life Casual (as it should be far away from an Eternal deck; and yes, the name is an allusion), but then I found out what came to happen within this game and alas, the deck won't be...

The repellent trends in prices, buyouts and reprints matter were always foreign to my psyche, but the recent craze is completely beyond my understanding. Or rather maybe beyond my approval, as I always understood what should and could be done in MtG "business", yet I shied away from this kind of a part-time occupation. (Granted, it's also about my distrust in Magic economics.) I should have been a bit more clever in one of these ways:
a) I should have turned into a MtG businessman and today I'd laugh diabolically... but the coming paragraphs are a statement of why I couldn't have embarked on this journey
b) I should have quit this addiction years and years ago, concentrating myself on more satisfying and important things, and man, where I could have been after two decades...


Journey to Nowhere

Back when I started to play the game, I especially liked one aspect that someone already mentioned on these boards, moreover in a more eloquent words: I loved all the beautiful, distant lands that I might travel to, and it gave me an immense joy, as it somehow satiated my hunger of an explorer; the game and namely deckbuilding also filled "The Engineer" need in me.
This must be something carried in the genes of a hunter-gatherer, some urge to explore, even if it's just a virtual travel with a cardboard ax in hand and a summon common mammoth to hunt down.

Now twenty years have passed and the community is swarmed with all kinds of small people full of ground concerns whose main interest is to stuff their cheeks like a hamster, and this particular human segment (geez, that sounds like Dinner Brothel album...) turned the past land of an exploration into a nowadays business office. The land of Magic (read the very word, ffs, the game's called "Magic" for a reason!) became a cubicle prison. Whenever I listen to an unending stream of MtG-related money-talk, I'm reminded of what happened not only to Magic and its community, but also to all the society. You cannot avoid being bothered by this, as every conversation in a subway, every article in every newspaper, everything around us is filled with greed, gold-fever and consumerism.

Our land is spoiled.


Is this Sparta? Madness!

There's one interesting aspect of MtG that I realized during my abrupt visit of the GP:Prague and the stroke of this find was so forceful that I withstood a mere hour of the spectacle before I hastily left. It's once again related to the gold-rush syndrome and the accountants' spirituality. (No offense, there must be, of course, a solid number of accountants with a strong will, powerful mind and whatever else it takes to become a bridge to Overman.)

Even if we think of the "exploration through Magic" as a sort of escapism (and it clearly is exactly that), it's still a kind of an adventurous affair and at least for some people it fills the void within their souls/lives. While the naïve casuals might be laughed at, they still carry more of my admiration that the strictly competitive players, whose machine minds hardly ever noticed any "transcendent" and "spiritual" values in game, because for them there's nothing to gain; moreover this kind of thoughts would hamper them from feeding the various MtG bedbugs, leeches, and vampires ever more faster and fully.

Btw and imesho, banging a girl would be of gigantically more worth than the whole GP combined. One needs just to imagine the inherent creative force of this community, a force that only needs to be chanelled into less degenerate direction than deckbuilding (which in itself debilitated into netdecking), and with this force unleashed we'd be invincible, great, and exalted for eternity. The depressive view of the GP site, where the hordes of young males, who could have been inventors, adventurers or warriors (hell, at least one of them must have in his veins at least one drop of Leonidas' blood!), but who rather perspired their fattening asses and wasted lives in such deeds of unmanly worthlessness as slinging the cardboard javelins, made me indescribably saddened and I turned away my face as bitter tears rolled down my cheeks. And on the top of it we have the MtG business, the card sharks and whatnot, and I have just few words for this utter fall of humanity. This inclination towards hoarding mostly occurs in a specific populational stock that I'm not a part of; no surprise that I find this "business" silly and disgusting.

I idly imagined one of our mighty and brave forebears, now buried by time and dust, who through some miracle of either metempsychosis or time walk would be able to behold how the terminal stages of his once proud people express themselves in his posterity. And it's natural that it was exactly Sparta (not limited only to the three hundred men immortalized in their bravery and famous even to the illiterate ones thanks to the recent Hollywood spectacle), a polar antithesis of modern degeneracy, what came to my mind while I observed the untold horror of GP.

I don't wanna take a part in this voyage of exploration anymore; we moved far away from the land of Thawing Glaciers somewhere towards the Bazaar of Baghdad, and I feel alien here.

I hate what has become of this format.

For the long time I thought that there needs to be just some fix (abolish Reserve List, collect all staples, concentrate on one deck, test with better players, etc., etc., you may name one for yourself) and with this tiny little trick I could return back in time to the land of pink unicorns and little fluffy clouds where everything is nice and calm, and where the Magic is strong with me. It took me very long before I realized that the trouble is inherent to the game and to the world we live in and to the blood in my veins that makes me partially incompatible with the surroundings.
I cannot gather-hunt anymore, and not even the surrogate Magic: the Hunting-Gathering spell works on me anymore. You've got it the same, you just didn't know what's wrong.

I beg pardon of anyone offended, it definitely wasn't my intention to spill even more oil into this firestorm. I just wanted to make a few things clear that a few close people seemed to be concerned, if I did understood them well enough.

I hate what has become of this game.

De haten.
With a vengeance.

[Stan]

Bed Decks Palyer wins.

/endthread

[LegacyIsAnEternalFormat]

You can do whatever manly things you want... im going to keep enjoying this game. There is nothing wrong with playing this game, if your fat it is your fault not the game's fault... Playing on a friday night after a long week is a great feeling and I dont see why one should stop

[kirkusjones]

You can do whatever manly things you want... im going to keep enjoying this game. There is nothing wrong with playing this game, if your fat it is your fault not the game's fault... Playing on a friday night after a long week is a great feeling and I dont see why one should stop

Blaming the game for people being fat is your big takeaway from a really well written explanation of disillusionment with the culture of a game that has changed significantly in the last twenty years? I agree with Stan. Bed Decks Palyer wins the thread.

[square_two]

I agree with Stan. Bed Decks Palyer wins the thread.

It really deserves its own thread.

I've always had that struggle with gaming. Video games, board games, card games all excite me and feed into a need to innovate, strategize, and overcome problems. And yet, the nagging thoughts in the back of my mind have always poked and prodded about You Could Be Doing More. And surely more noble efforts on tangible problems would be more satisfying, no? Not exactly what Bed Decks is talking about, but he touches on the idea of, what should I/We be doing now? Human potential is huge. Guilt-riddenly huge at times.

There are no local legacy events where I'm at, I've had a horrible streak for online leagues lately...considering what I could do with the cash if I sold out of both paper and online collections. Actually have a house down payment perhaps.

[Capt4in]

I'm curious about what the percentage of players vs. collectors is that support the reserved list. I have a feeling those who favor it are far more likely to have their feet firmly planted in the collector camp than in the player's.

I'm primarily a player, with the exception of two cheap cards that I collect (greg staples diabolic tutor and laboratory maniac, in case anyone was curious) and would gladly see my duals and cradle and such take a hit if I got access to more cards and more people playing legacy at my lgs. They're currently struggling to get a legacy night going, and a big part of that is due to access.

I consider myself pretty firmly a player (basically my entire collection is two legacy decks with a few extras for variations on them) but I'd be pretty sorry if the reserved list went. I bought into one of the decks last year in cash and my choice was at least in part motivated by the fact that most of the expensive staples in the deck are reserved, which increases my confidence that I could trade or sell that deck and break even or gain a bit if I want to play something else in the future.

[Mammutti]

While I'm 100% against the RL and not seeing any good coming out of the current state of the market, I feel a need to defend the "hordes of young males, who could have been inventors, adventurers or warriors (hell, at least one of them must have in his veins at least one drop of Leonidas' blood!), but who rather perspired their fattening asses and wasted lives in such deeds of unmanly worthlessness as slinging the cardboard javelins"

I found GP Prague to be a very successful and FUN event with great people, great atmosphere and great players. These type of amazing premiere events are the sole reason I still keep on playing Legacy. I, as most of the legacy players I know are grown men with careers and responsibilities in their lives and travel to such large scale events once or twice a year. It is a vacation more than anything, an escape from the weekly routines. And I consider myself a competitive player. My interest in Magic has had it's ups and downs throughout the years I've played, and I've definitely felt the frustration of wasting countless hours into this seemingly "meaningless" game. But in the end it's about your time management. What do you want from the game, what do you want from life? If Magic feels wearing and a waste of time, take a year off, play less... Hell, Legacy is one of those formats where you can actually have a longer break and come back and it doesn't really affect your ability to master the format. No one forced you to go to Prague did they?

Sorry for the offtopic vent. I too am feeling the anxiety from the market manipulation and "card sharks" but in the end, my livelihood is not dependent on these cards, so why bother feeling angry. Sun's shining and it's Friday. I'm gonna grab a beer. Cheers and keep on doing things you enjoy in life!

[keys]

^ New winner! Cheers

[Stuart]

Sun's shining and it's Friday. I'm gonna grab a beer. Cheers and keep on doing things you enjoy in life!

Thanks for this! Magic shouldn't be a source of existential angst. If you're not deriving meaning from it, find something instead of/in addition to Magic that's more fulfilling (reading, writing, other forms of art, sports, family, charity, etc).

That said, there is potential to suck the joy out of Magic if it gets too finance-oriented. I consider myself fortunate to own most of the cards (RL or otherwise) I need, but others aren't so lucky. I can't count how many people I've met who, for instance, want to play Elves but still need Cradles, and now that's becoming more and more of a distant possibility . . .