I guess Wizards decided that high-end competitive magic was banworthy after all!
Fucking weak.Originally Posted by Wrath of Pie
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Honestly it makes sense. Most pro players I've known have been pretty cool but I think the competitive grinding circuit is generally a breeding pool for toxicity, just in terms of social behavior, to say nothing of rampant cheating and theft.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
You misunderstand: big events with large payouts aren't going away. It's the salaries for players that are.
Why have large events with big payouts when you can instead have large events with small payouts spread out further?
Oh, and obviously tie them in to Commander.
It's almost like they completely ignored forming a competitive scene and once the realized they maybe should do something it wasn't not only too late, they also did it in best WotC fashion, as awful as possible.
What a surprise.
At this point, why not rebrand to "Magic the commandering" and just drop all other formats?
It's not like this won't happen in the next few years anyway.
I don't know, just relaying information. They said there would still be PT and Grand Prix level/size events, and they were going to reinvest the money used for Rivals and MPL for bigger prizes.
It doesn't help that the more interesting formats aren't accessible to most people because of an abominable pricing model that's engineered into the game. Standard was fun when I was a kid. Standard isn't fun in my thirties. Want to try something more interesting? Pay up. $150. No, don't pay the game's manufacturer; pay some other guy. And now, it's actually $500. Why? Because.
A strong narrative with interesting personalities in the pro circuit won't fix this. And it's not just Legacy that has this problem: There are Modern decks that are more expensive than, and worse than, competitive Legacy lists, and it's getting worse.
This is tremendously important. Any and all hot air and corporatese statements of intent exchanged over inclusivity are ultimately overwritten by butthole streamers who act like they're still 12 and attract a fanbase of butthole players who ruin in-person play for everybody else.
This is not a blanket indictment of MtG content creators, but the "thimbleful of shit" analogy applies to the community.
100%.
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Leaving product hype up to content creators is a super risky move imho, unless those creators are expressly on Hasbro's dime they'll be reviewing the product as individuals instead of in lock-step with corporate. Tolarian Community College is a pretty good example of being a dissenting voice, if everyone listened to The Professor we'd never see another Secret Lair.
This is why I am critical of modern wotc printing practices starting with the masters sets and haven't purchased any product in years. They saw that the secondary market was pricing cards very high and instead of trying to alleviate that issue, they essentially co-opted it for their own profit. Instead of getting lots of sales by reprinting expensive cards in standard sets with standard prices, they now reprint expensive cards in non standard sets with non standard pricing simply to capture that portion of the secondary market. Now they go even further with what is basically print to demand "pimp" in the collectors editions and secret lairs. I guess what it boils down to is that the new demographic they care about are much more willing to spend much more money than the people who thought a 50$ baneslayer was ridiculous.
It could be risky, I think the one example was what happened with the walking dead secret lair, some people were very vocal against it but in the end they still fell into line. It isnt really a secret that wotc has messed up a lot recently but they do a pretty good job of not letting criticism stick.
I think TCC is unique since he is basically the biggest one and largely unaffiliated but is still largely nonthreatening, like a softer, controlled opposition (though I could be wrong, I haven't really watched much of his videos). In comparison I think most of the other groups are just uncontroversial yes-men, that understand it is better to not bite the hand that feeds them, be it wotc who give them juicy card reveals or whatever, or to card stores whose sole purpose is to churn cards into the market.
Walking Dead ended up being their best selling Secret Lair.
Unfortunately it's very hard to form a coherent argument against this practice from wotc because all you're basically saying "pwease wotc can you take a hit to your bottom line for me, I want to be able to play your game more cheaply uwu".This is why I am critical of modern wotc printing practices starting with the masters sets and haven't purchased any product in years. They saw that the secondary market was pricing cards very high and instead of trying to alleviate that issue, they essentially co-opted it for their own profit. Instead of getting lots of sales by reprinting expensive cards in standard sets with standard prices, they now reprint expensive cards in non standard sets with non standard pricing simply to capture that portion of the secondary market. Now they go even further with what is basically print to demand "pimp" in the collectors editions and secret lairs. I guess what it boils down to is that the new demographic they care about are much more willing to spend much more money than the people who thought a 50$ baneslayer was ridiculous.
Like if WotC wants to reprint e.g. Mana Drain in a masters set or whatever product where it is relatively scarce, then it's because they think that keeping the secondary market price of the card relatively high can make them the most money in the long run. (Because they can use cards with expensive secondary market prices to justify high MSRP on packs that contain reprints of them).
At the end of the day wotc is a business and like any business they probably make the most money by pricing their product in such a way that it excludes some people as customers.
Of course from the POV of a player it would be fantastic if every card was at most $1 but there are many worse things that wotc could do e.g:
- Never reprint mana drain at all so the price just keeps going up and up and up. This is bad for the players (price of playing the game goes up) and bad for wotc (the high demand for reprint is basically leaving free money on the table). [i.e. Reserved List]
- Print a better mana drain in a standard set to sell packs, obsoleting the old mana drain. (You could make the argument that with the sequence of Oko -> Uro -> Omnath they kind of already did this kind of strategy, but with the last few sets they seem to be toning things down significantly)
- Print a different manadrain in an exclusive limited-availability product. (This was why the backlash for the TWD secret lair was justifiably large, if secret lair exclusives were necessary to play tier 1 decks then a cynical wotc can just introduce whatever powerful card with any pricetag they like). The "print to pimp" model on the other hand is a win-win-win because competitive players can just ignore it, whales get some cool shit, wotc makes money on it. It's dumb af to act like there is a dilemma like "wotc could have printed Care Package: Poverty Edition containing all playsets of fetchlands for $10 but instead they printed secret lair exclusive edition where you get 1 of each for $100+, get the pitchforks". They were never going to do the first option anyway and the 2nd option is generally a pretty harmless way for wotc to make money (from the pov of a competitive player).
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