MTG and Pokemon seem to be the only TCGs with staying power. Dozen's of TCGS fail and it is true ( and I agreed with you in the case of FoW) that many of them fail, because the game sucked to begin with. Reprints have to happen in a TCG. However, excessive reprints can have a negative effect. I can't express this enough. Confidence is the only reason you pay a premium for MTG cards. They are made of cardboard. If people don't have confidence that they will hold value in the long term, then they will simply not buy it. Even standards cards which drop like rock post rotation, eventually go up in modern or commander. This is all I am saying and there is strong proof with other "collectibles" that once companies start to over produce them, their collectibility starts to fade, due to over supply and loss of confidence.
With MTG it is both collectible and playable. Legacy with the reserve list is part collectible. There is a non-rotating format that can be reprinted at anytime and that is Modern. That is Wotc's response to the
reserve list. No one seems to be happy with that.
Legacy will not fall as far as Vintage, but it will be a fringe format. Modern is the new standard for non-rotating formats. I love Legacy like most of you do. But I have accepted that Modern is the new King with
respect to non-rotating formats. Remember, that Vintage was the King before Legacy. All good things come to an end. It's Modern's turn to shine.
If Wotc violates the reserve list, there will be lawsuits and alot of them. Based on the clear and strong language and the fact that people made financial decisions on MTG's policy, I would not want to be the lawyer to defend Wotc.
I would much rather be the lawyer defending the store owner who can claim damages in the thousands.
Think about the stupid things that people sue for. One person sued because the coffee was too hot, Another sued because they got too much ice in their drink. Wotc will get sued and have to defend
thousands of lawsuits.
To be fair, she was hospitalized for a week for skin grafts and had two years of treatment that totaled $18k in expenses. Her own defamation as the "hot coffee lady who sued McDonalds" has led to a steep decline in lawsuits since then (also she did not live long after everything was settled). Hard to imagine that disputes over a reprint policy (not contract) for a card game is more reasonable than actual physical harm done.Originally Posted by dragonwisdom
Maybe I could be wrong. I doubt they'll ever change it though since they seem to be cutting off support for Legacy anyway.
You can argue whether you think the "coffee" lawsuit was frivolous or not. I can see both sides. If you boil water, and if YOU spill it on yourself, you will burn yourself. If YOU fall on top of a hot stove, you will burn yourself. If YOU
drop a knife on your foot, you will likely cut yourself. Many people blame the flatware company, stove company or knife company.
Now if in her case the coffee was hotter than all the other cups of coffee sold to millions of people, than she has a strong case. And if her lawyers proved this fact, than I an see her winning the case.
Imagine this for a lawsuit.
Store owner invests 20,000 dollars in reserve list cards
Wotc violates reserve list
Store owner goes out of business
Store owner sues Wotc for 300,000 dollars claiming that Wotc's reversal of policy caused the business to fold
This is a very real scenerio.
Here is a more inventive one
Store owner invests 30,000 in modern cards
Wotc violates reserve list
Store owner goes out of business claiming that modern card prices dropped when everyone wanted to play Legacy instead of Modern. And this person said that he/she made her business decisions based
on the reserve list.
Less likely scenerio, but I have seen people sue for less.
Some people have their lives invested in MTG. Decisions were made based on the reserve list. There is no way any CEO of Wotc will take a chance abolishing the reserve list.
There are ways around the reserve list, but an outright violation of it, has the potential to blow up in their face.
And these are just the store owners. Have you met the MTGfinance people.
Extremely accurate, which is why the solution would be to repeal the Reserve List and do absolutely nothing for a while. Let the market adjust, because you can be damn sure it will.
Edit: Also, the hot coffee lawsuit was far from frivolous.
ideas to get around reserve list.
1) Allow sanctioned proxies that Wotc produces and make it a card type or something like it
2) trade in program for reserved list cards
3) Alter the cards just a little
4) Someway to compensate the collectors/investors
5) Abolish and wait - that might be possible. This would eliminate some and maybe many but not all lawsuits.
6) Once Wotc loses popularity and the value of ALL cards fall, I can see it as well.
I am sure that their are others.
coffee- I will agree with you there. If you can argue the other side of the case, it does not make it frivolous. Though as a juror, I would have given weight to the fact that the person spilled it.
However, if her lawyers could prove that her coffee was hotter than all other cups of coffee among millions and millions sold, I would side with her right away.
I've often posted the "Official Proxy" idea and I've not yet seen a good rebuttal to it.
This is how it would work:
WotC releases official tournament-legal proxies of RL cards, but with a catch: for each proxy you register in your deck, you have to pay a fee per card on top of the tournament entry fee. The fee I've proposed is $5 because most of the time people would be proxying duals, so the average player would be paying around $30 more to register a deck for a Legacy event, which is not a lot of money for a single payment. Now, people have complained that this is "too expensive" but that's a misguided line of reasoning: people who want to go to many Legacy events will most likely have all their cards already, and these proxies are targeted at the occasional Legacy player (e.g. a disgruntled Modern player who can't afford or doesn't want to buy in just yet–aka the players that are priced out of Legacy right now) so they can get a taste for the format in a competitive setting. Proxies aren't meant to replace the real thing, so if you only go to 1 or 2 Legacy events a year then it's much more financially sensible to use the proxies and pay $60 more on top of the tournament entry fee rather than drop $1000 on a manabase. However, it's much less financially sensible to use these several times, and why shouldn't it be? Again, these aren't meant to replace RL cards, just hold their place as the user explores the format. People who don't want to dedicate themselves to Legacy would still be able to use these in their EDH decks and for casual events, and people who want to commit to Legacy (or Vintage) would start saving up while still being able to go to the occasional Legacy event and just pay the usage tax.
In short, it's a win-win-win-win-win situation:
- WotC gets money from players for the proxies, less people pay Chinese counterfeiters for fakes
- TOs running Legacy events get more money (addresses the "eternal doesn't make stores money" problem)
- Players priced out of eternal formats can now OFFICIALLY try out the format for much cheaper than buying in only to find out they don't like it
- If the proxy user ends up not liking the format, they can still use their proxies in casual/unsanctioned play
- It wouldn't hurt RL card prices a lot–if at all–because in the long run repeated use of the proxies would be more expensive than owning the cards outright for someone who wants to become a regular eternal player, so demand for the expensive RL cards (e.g. duals) stays the same and keeps the prices where they are at
This could work as well, but it only really addresses the counterfeit concern (in other words, 1000 Revised duals traded in for 1000 holostamp duals is lateral movement, so you would expect prices to stay relatively constant). Values would still go down if the RL gets abolished.2) trade in program for reserved list cards
I don't see how they would be able logistically to do that; there's a LOT of people with expensive RL cards that WotC probably wouldn't be able to compensate all of them, not to mention people would have to prove that they actually own these RL cards in order to receive money. I guess one way would be to have LGSes act as intake centers for the vetting process and submit official WotC-supplied compensation request forms before a set deadline, after which point anyone with RL cards that haven't opted in would have missed the boat, though this would have an extremely high risk of being abused. Another idea would be to have WotC representatives at large events (Opens, GPs) and just have players queue up to sign up for the compensation. But then how do you know these players aren't just borrowing their friend's duals? There aren't serial numbers so there's no way of tracking this.4) Someway to compensate the collectors/investors
The only sure-fire way would be to have all the RL card owners mail the RL cards they own that they want compensation for to WotC, WotC then holds them until the compensation opt-in deadline, then returns all the cards to their respective owners along with a compensation I.O.U. with a TBD value based on what cards were sent in to be tallied and a notation of their price at the time of opt-in deadline. Then, abolisht the prices stabilize. Then after say 2 months everyone with an I.O.U. would be able to return that I.O.U. form and get compensated for whatever value was lost off the cards that WotC "registered" to them.
I don't think compensation is possible to do in a way that wouldn't be a logistical nightmare.
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
Er... Yu-Gi-Oh? That thing is relentless in reprinting expensive cards, and it's still really popular.
But my problem with your claim of Force of Will is that you claimed "massive reprints" hurt the game, but there weren't massive reprints. You ignored the factors that existed that caused it to lose popularity (the halfhearted attempts to subdue Reflect/Refrain instead of just banning it outright, for example) and then made something up and claimed that made-up thing was the reason for its loss of popularity.Dozen's of TCGS fail and it is true ( and I agreed with you in the case of FoW) that many of them fail, because the game sucked to begin with.
It's a shame, too. I thought its base system was essentially a better version of Magic's, and it was one of the few TCGs outside of Magic that actually seemed to care at all about its art quality. I'm hoping they manage to recover and come back, because the game was actually quite fun.
You'd rather be a lawyer who doesn't exist? Okay.If Wotc violates the reserve list, there will be lawsuits and alot of them. Based on the clear and strong language and the fact that people made financial decisions on MTG's policy, I would not want to be the lawyer to defend Wotc.
I would much rather be the lawyer defending the store owner who can claim damages in the thousands.
No, seriously. A lawsuit is going to run you, at a minimum, $10,000. Maybe a lot more than that. Are you going to spend $10,000+ to get, in your words, several thousand dollars? And let's not forget what happens if you bring a lawsuit and lose: The court can, if it deems your lawsuit frivolous enough, force you to pay them for the expenses your lost lawsuit cost them.
You claim there will be "alot [sic] of lawsuits". But again, look at how much money it costs to get a lawsuit going. Do you think many store owners are going to spend all that money (assuming they even have that much to spare to begin with) and take all that risk just to recoup a small amount? And in doing so, annoy the company that creates a product they likely rely heavily on?
To be fair, many such cases have the lawyer pay for the bulk of it, in exchange for a certain percentage of the amount that's won (if they win the case). But that means that the lawyer you're claiming you want to be is the guy spending a lot of money and taking on risk... rather than the guy who works for WOTC and presumably has a steady job and high income.
No, the person sued because the coffee was so hot that they had to get surgery after it spilled on them. She spent a week in the hospital. To say it was "because the coffee was too hot" was is completely disingenuous. Here is a better description of the case than "the coffee was too hot."Think about the stupid things that people sue for. One person sued because the coffee was too hot,
No comment on the ice one, which I'm not familiar with. I wouldn't be surprised if it, like the coffee one, had more to it than you're claiming, however.Another sued because they got too much ice in their drink. Wotc will get sued and have to defend
thousands of lawsuits.
But as noted above, I think you're also overestimating how many people would actually bother to sue over it. Lawsuits are darn expensive. In practice, you'd see only a handful of lawsuits, maybe even just one, either because all those plaintiffs combined into one class-action lawsuit (which is one lawsuit, not thousands), or because most people would rather stay back and see how the handful of plaintiffs end up being. If someone sues WOTC and loses, that'll be the end of it because why would anyone else go through the time and expense just to end up losing like the first person did? Now, granted, if someone sues them and wins, then there'd probably be a lot more lawsuits, though due to the high cost you'd likely see it all settled in a few class-action suits rather than "thousands."
Referencing people who sue doesn't mean anything at all. In the US (and probably most other countries represented on this forum) you have the right to sue anyone for anything, that's how the legal system works. It doesn't guarantee you'll win or even that the case will go to court.
As for compensation, playing the MTG finance game is like a bad version of the stock market. Are you going to sue a company you own stock in because the market fluctuated?
I remember it outselling Magic by quite a bit in 2011, world record and all. I do wonder how the numbers look nowadays, especially revenue-wise.
I'm not sure if Yu-Gi-Oh ever outsold Magic in the United States. The best place I know of to try to figure out how the TCGs are stacking up against each other is ICv2's Internal Correspondence Report, which ranks the most popular based on interviews with distributors/retailers/manufacturers. Their three categories are mass channel, hobby channel, and overall. It's unfortunately limited to the US and it only gives rankings without much of a clue how close those rankings are, but it still can be useful. Here is their most recent one and here is their issue from summer 2011. In both editions, Magic beat out Yu-Gi-Oh in all three categories (interestingly, Pokemon has jumped from #5 to #2 in the hobby channel in the intervening years, and swapped space with Magic in the mass channel, going from #2 to #1).
It's my understanding that Yu-Gi-Oh, at least back then, made up the difference internationally. Though I don't know if it still outsells it on an international basis.
Thanks for the info. Although I don't understand what exactly the difference between the hobby channel and mass channel is.
LGS vs WalMart, I believe.
If there's enough clients, a large(r) firm could make it a mass-action lawsuit and not charge the plaintiffs anything unless they win the suit. Even a 40% cut of "a few thousand dollars" would still leave the investors/collectors with a couple grand.
The purpose of any moat is to impede attack. Some are filled with water, some with thistles. Some are filled with things best left unseen.
Sort of true. A larger firm doing a mass-action lawsuit might be feasible, as individual people don't have the luxury of spending tens of thousands of dollars to try to get a few thousand. Though if the lawyers take on all the expenses, a 40% cut of "a few thousand dollars" would not be close to enough to warrant their time. They'd have to get a lot of people together to demand a pretty high amount.
At any rate, even if such a thing is on the table, my point was that the scenario that was proposed was quite frankly ridiculous. The funny thing is that stores were mentioned when stores would actually not be particularly affected adversely by a Reserved List repeal. Remember that stores are constantly selling those cards, so they wouldn't be particularly hurt, if hurt at all, by a reduction in their value, unless the price crash is completely unexpected and happens extremely quickly; I can't think of any cases of that offhand. People either knew it was coming (a reprint) or it was gradual. Or both. So all you have to do is to reduce your buying price along with your selling price and you come out ahead still. That's what stores, at least the smart ones, do when a card's value is trending downward. A removal of the Reserved List just means they treat those cards the same as all the other cards, which for the most part they already do. Remember, they're constantly buying and selling, not just buying a card and planning to sell it months or years down the road. There was actually an article on Star City Games from quite a while ago going into how the removal of the Reserved List wouldn't cost them money and discussing things like the buying/selling price as a factor in preventing that, but unfortunately I can't remember where I saw it.
Also I can't help but feel that a store would have reservations about suing the company whose product brings them a lot of business. If anyone was going to try to file a lawsuit over this, it would be the speculators who just buy cards and product and sit on it, hoping for them to spike. A mass reduction in their assets would be more aggravating because they aren't selling the stuff constantly like a store. They might band together, as they'd be the ones most adversely affected and have no particular loyalty to WOTC. But again, to be able to claim a high amount that might be able to be worth it, you need to get at least a decent number of people together.
Though, of course, for a larger firm to take it, they would have to believe that it has at least a reasonable chance of winning to warrant spending all that money and time on the case. I'd actually be very curious to see any similar cases to this and see what the results were or the opinion of an actual lawyer who works in these kinds of cases.
About this coffee case that everybody talks about but knows nothing, please watch this documentary - http://www.hotcoffeethemovie.com/
And how much do you think it will cost for an individual to sue WotC anyway? Are you a layer? Have you talked to to a lawyer? What are chances to win? These are rhetorical questions, by the way.
The reserve list (or broadly speaking old cards) is important only for those folks who started playing in the 90s of the last century, like myself, and for sentimental reasons still keep their collections. And it doesn't look like monetary considerations are really important for them. You know, MtG is a hobby. And any hobby costs money and time. It's a different story though, if one speculates or runs a trading business, but these folks should accept business risks.
WotC doesn't make any money on the secondary market and doesn't have any binding obligations. Other than reputation, there is nothing to lose for the company. So yes, the company can reprint whatever it wants. However, soon or later those stubborn players who continue playing Vintage and Legacy will change priorities, kids you know require a lot of time and money, and there will be no issue with shortage of the cards from the list. And new players ... new players will not know anything other than Standard, or perhaps Modern too.
Life goes on. And a decade or so later there will be only a bunch of old dudes bidding for stupid painted cardboards that have some collectible value only for them because they want to remember their childhood and all those good memories.
And a good example for you about value of collectibles. Do you remember beanie babies? If not, for example please check this - http://fortune.com/2015/03/11/beanie...ilure-lessons/
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Carpe Diem
I have suggested this before: player trade ins for revised duals.
Send two duals to wotc to be destroyed.
You get one mint bb anti-counterfeit stamped dual in return.
The other dual gets randomly inserted in some pack.
Mail three duals to wotc and get a foil bb version. Sign me up today!
Wouldn't such a policy only raise the value of Revised duals? As more and more are turned in to be destroyed, they become more rare...
And its still stupid, starting the logistics and insurance matter on hand over to card condition going further with talking duals out of circulation and ending up with having to reprint RL cards.
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Do you even know anything about the lawsuit? The point was that the coffee was being served at temperatures of around 80-90 C and this was a standard for McDonalds coffee around that time. She was one of hundreds of people who had reported that they got serious burns from coffee. She asked for $10,000 to cover medical expenses and McDonalds offered her $800. Making it sound like she just got free money is just a tad insulting.
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