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.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
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.
Brainstorm Realist
I close my eyes and sink within myself, relive the gift of precious memories, in need of a fix called innocence. - Chuck Shuldiner
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.
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.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
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.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
idk you might seriously consider those in a Punishing Fire deck.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
No, I understand this 100%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".
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 usingAnd 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.
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
Again please feel free to state whatever legal qualifications / credentials you havebecause lol is the idea of legal repercussions for that a joke
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.
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.
This is nonsense, shit like Modern Horizons 2 IS them printing new luxury goods.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.
https://shop.tcgplayer.com/price-gui...ern-horizons-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.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"
Do youHere'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 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?
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
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.
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.
All Spells Primer under construction: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...Tl7utWpLo0/pub
PM me if you want to contribute!
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
All Spells Primer under construction: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...Tl7utWpLo0/pub
PM me if you want to contribute!
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."
All Spells Primer under construction: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...Tl7utWpLo0/pub
PM me if you want to contribute!
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.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
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.
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