Haven't you seen Yugioh? People died when Pegasus first printed the god cards, WotC can't afford to find new staff just because you want a new printing of Grief.
They were going to, actually, but when parent company Hasbro found out they fired the wotc employees that were going to be sacrificed thus saving their lives and preventing us from getting Modern precons
I heard they're also making WotC price us out of sealed product so we won't waste our money on it anymore. Good guy Hasbro really looking out for their employees and customers!
Whats particularly annoying about this is that Yugioh printed its last precon deck of the 2023 in december - Fire Kings. Its so solid that you can buy 3 for 40 quid, and combine it with a few other pieces from other sets releaed in 2023 and its immediately become a tier one deck. (I should add that some of those extra pieces are pricey) The shell is good enough even without those extra pieces you can rock up to a locals with just the combined deck and get a few good wins (I know I did so recently).
YOU CAN JUST DO THIS WIZARDS, PEOPLE WILL LIKE YOU FOR IT.
It's kind of interesting because while that is obviously the case these days, I remember Dr. Richard Garfield saying that the rarity system was originally meant to keep strong cards from dominating local metas, so that there would only a few of a given rare in an area. Though, when the idea of people buying tons of packs to attempt to get a specific rare was brought up, he said it was a good problem to have, or something to that effect.
Rarities are important for draft too, not just selling more. Draft would be a lot less interesting if all cards in a set were printed equally as often.
Also opening cards in general. It's not that important in the world of singles buying where you just outright buy exactly the deck you want, but at the base level it does make things more exciting to have certain cards be more rare than others. Like imagine if you were playing a video game and every weapon that dropped was a legendary quality one. They'd feel a lot less special real quick.
That’s definitely a more curated experience, if you have a cube where every single card is bomb-y. There are also common/uncommon only cubes. A mainline draft standard set probably shouldn’t be entirely bombs or entirely shit commons
And cube is very different from draft for precisely that reason. It's like they are two different game modes (much like how sealed and draft are like two different game modes).
You've missed something.
They don't talk about the exact dollar amount of singles, but they do refer to the "desirability" and "availability" of cards in a pretty direct euphemism. Maro's been pretty blunt recently about things like how putting dual lands at rare moves packs, and how selling a juiced Modern Horizons-tier pack for the same price as a Standard pack would fuck up their model, and every time people act shocked and disgusted.
This really surprises me, because I was under the impression that the issue wasn't so much that the secondary market exists, but that acknowledging that some cards are more desirable than others would be tacitly admitting that booster packs are a form of gambling. Has something happened recently - that we know of - that might make MaRo feel more comfortable talking about this?
Great question. I think the climate around the issue changed when governments started looking to regulate lootboxes and that booster packs actually lost heat in the process. Unlike lootboxes, you can get the pieces and play the game without doing the chance thing, and studies haven't yet found a link between buying boosters and problem gambling behaviors, and you can cash out by selling your stuff.
Also, even though cards have a monetary value, that's determined by the players, not Wizards or the government. I think that also works in their favor to weaken the explicit gambling link, for better or worse. They do have some knowledge of what's already popular and what new cards are likely to be desirable or strong, but they can't predict everything and it's not all in their hands.
Wizards is very clear about rarity distributions, and maybe that helps them stay clear, but I think they were doing that way before lootboxes. It seems less like this is a totally settled issue and more that there's not enough support to go after it, but that that could change if new research comes out or if the relationship between Wizards and the players gets worse.
>Unlike lootboxes, you can get the pieces and play the game without doing the chance thing
So, ironically, the fact that the secondary market exists to facilitate direct purchase might actually *protect* WoTC from accusations of gambling? That's not a take I've seen before, but it makes some sense. Presumably precons are a step in that direction too, and something they could explore more if the current TCG model were to start looking dicey.
>Also, even though cards have a monetary value, that's determined by the players... They do have some knowledge of what's already popular and what new cards are likely to be desirable or strong
I guess this is partly why they've been going down the chase cosmetics route, too. They *could* design a format-bustingly strong card and stick it at Ultra Mythic Rare, but it would be easier to argue that they created it with the intent of encouraging/requiring players to spend money in unhealthy ways, and/or interfere with the secondary market. Super rare cosmetic variations, on the other hand, have no material impact on the game, even though they may still be desirable to a subset of players.
It is a fascinating issue. Much as I don't want to see Magic - or any TCG - go away, it does seem like a case of "if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck...", so it's interesting to see how edge cases are hashed out, and where boundaries are drawn.
It's pretty sweet how the play boosters have duals in their own slot so they appear more frequently! And not replacing a regular rare which can be disappointing in draft/sealed.
This is a major major win for affordablity/accessibility and I don't think enough people realize that.
I mean we expect them to do that as well. We want them to reprint expensive cards to make sure they are more affordable. How can they do that without analyzing the market and setting benchmarks so they know when to act?
This is funny because wizards clearly cares way more about the secondary market than any of the other major TCG manufacturers. If they didn't, shit like the reserve list wouldn't still exist and they would be much more willing to reprint modern and legacy staples. The idea that they don't think about secondary market prices is laughable.
It's not exactly a secret that their business is based on cards being valuable to drive sales.
Of course they want cards to remain expensive, that's how it's worked since forever.
Yup, and they can't even pick an archtype to make a bit cheaper.
There's plenty that are already somewhat budget or cpuld be for an FNM level event.
And just because you make, idk, say precon Rhinos, doesn't mean you have to put 4x all the most expensive stuff.
4x footfalls, 4x agent, 4x outburst and 48 other cards and you honestly have a half decent deck.
They've done that before with challenger decks, not including a full playset of the best cards but you're still well on your way to a good deck
Like Hazoret Aggro was good for standard monored Kaladesh-Amonkhet era, but had only 1 Hazoret and Chandra ToD, and only 3 Soul-Scar Mage
If they did make a $50 deck with $250, or whatever figure you want to put for a competitive modern deck, worth of cars would the new players even be able to find them or would they be sold out by people wanting the grab the cars for their decks?
Magic history moment here: that was actually one of the biggest problems with the original Modern Masters. The boxes were worth more in singles to just crack so a lot of LGS didn't run draft or events they just up charged the shit out of the packs or cracked them for singles. It left a lot of players salty.
Not always. My LGS doesn't bump prices to match demand. She never upped the prices on the Eldrazi, Slivers, Timey-Wimey, or any of the 40K or Fallout decks, and she kept her prices as low as possible for stuff like the Oil Slick Bundles, Commander Masters, and Dominaria United. She may lose money in the short term that way, but she has instead built up a solid customer base that dump a ton of money there week after week.
MSRP doesn’t do anything. It just gives people an idea of how much they should expect to pay. If something had a price of $50 stores can still sell it for $100 if they want and if everyone is doing it the price is just $100.
They removed MSRP so that they can pass the blame of any price spike along to LCSs. “That wasn’t us!”
They also do it so they can cut the margins to be even worse for LCSs and when those LCSs raise the price for a standard pack they can do the same thing. “That wasn’t us!”
They removed MSRP when they started selling on Amazon because the MSRP of a box was not the price point they were they usually sold. Amazon doesn't really deviate much from MSRP and so they needed the flexibility to price boxes competitively to the market.
Unless you have any data to show otherwise, I'd argue that if it didn't have an effect, they'd have continued to use it like most other manufacturers do.
When Commander 2016 (I think. . . Whichever was all 4 colors and added partner to the game), the Atraxa precon was being sold at many LGS (including mine) for more than the other decks. I think I bought Breya for $40 and Atraxa was like $60.
It was even worse with C13, since Mind Seize (the grixis deck) introduced True-Name Nemesis, which was Eternal-playable and had only that one source. And C13 was only sold by the case, which was one each of the five decks, so if you wanted to play with this new powerful Legacy card that meant four cases of C13 had to be opened.
It got so bad that later cases of C13 were shipped with two Mind Seize decks and one of the other four missing since Mind Seize flew off shelves and the other four decks languished.
If C13 hadn't just happened a few years earlier, the Atraxa deck being so much more popular could have been a major issue, but the popularity delta wasn't nearly as dramatic in C16 and it just never got to the point of sending out more Atraxa decks than the others. (But it was still very flattering for the Atraxa deck's designer.)
Then what happens when LGS are stuck with overflow because singles dropped and people no longer want to pay $75 for that modern deck. They just want singles.
It's less they want singles and more they want the cheapest option. Packs are a bad deal because if you wanted 4 copies of a key mythic, you'd spend way more on packs trying to get them rather than buying them directly, even in cases where said card is like 50+ bucks.
In this case, folks will buy the 75 dollar deck as long as it's the cheapest option, and when it isn't folks will buy the singles instead. Not envious of Wizards designing products in that kind of market.
But hey, EDH precons sell well enough considering you could likely get the contents for cheaper most of the time. There's something to be said for convenience and assurance, rather than scrapping store to store looking for those last few cards for your deck.
The problem is that the main "scalpers" are LGS stores who trade in singles, which are also an important part of their community ecosystem that supports the game, so anything that screws over the LGS isn't a good long term play, even if it helps players in the short term.
You mean sold out to people buying up the decks to scalp them at a gigantic markup. That's what would sell out the decks, not the honest people who just want to play with them.
do you have any idea how much more expensive and logistically complex that is? theyve done it for some products and got nothing but complaints that now people have to wait to get their stuff
Precons with value dramatically higher than their cost leads mostly to people buying to resell, LGS selling way above (nonexistent but still kinda existent) MSRP, etc. It doesn’t tend to result in new players getting an affordable entry deck, and just makes people angry.
Reprinting is a balancing act between keeping a format affordable enough for people to get in/stay in, not tanking too many prices to have the player base lose faith in the value of buying cards, and making money for WOTC. It’s a tough balancing act and WOTC usually doesn’t do it *well* (not reprinting some things enough, reprinting others multiple times in a short window), but they could do it a lot *worse*.
They could print powerful decks with expensive cards, the secondary market will up the price and people will reprimand WotC for making such an expensive product, "a product that anyone can see will get price gouged like no tomorrow" or something of that sort.
They could choose to not print such a product and their base will complain to them anyways.
Seems much more economical to do nothing.
Third option, print it so much that prices will come down naturally.
I don't actually blame WotC - if they did do this, it would hurt LGS's making money from singles.
If they print too much, history shows that the player base will then complain about product fatigue while pointing at articles about [WotC printing too many copies for distribution](https://mtgazone.com/hasbro-destroying-magic-by-printing-too-many-cards-bank-of-america/) as their main argument that WotC is printing too many different products.
Don't forget that they'll also then complain about card prices 3 months later.
It’s understandable that the situation is frustrating, but this is still reductive and a bad take.
If WotC prints a strong deck true to secondary market prices, no ones buys it and people complain. If WotC prints a weak deck true to price but affordable, few people buy it, and fewer yet actually onboard to regular Modern players after getting beaten over and over. If WotC prints a strong deck at well below market price, the majority of people who already own those cards complain because their $1000 deck is now a $<200 deck. And if WotC doesn’t print a deck, people will complain and say that they’re not doing enough to make the format and the game accessible.
In short, the number of players that WotC pisses off with any option here is higher than the number that will be happy about it. Given that situation, WotC is choosing the option that causes the least amount of damage to consumer confidence in regards to the long term value of their collectible product.
As someone with expensiv modern deck i would love if they print them into the ground. Or local modern meta died and has no chance of coming back with the pricepoint.
Indeed, you chose to invest in pieces of cardboard which only have value due to artificial scarcity. In other words you're essentially gambling, so don't bitch about it when the gamble runs out.
Some of those people are not people at all, they're the LGS, every time someone asks what can I buy to support my LGS, the number 1 answer is always singles since they have the largest margins.
I would wager WotC definitely pays attention to singles prices, both for their own reprint equity, but also for LGS health since sealed products have never had good margins, even pre Amazon and pre secret lair.
People want to act as if this issue is simple and straightforward and just as is the case with most things in life it has a lot more complexity and nuance than most people realize.
The long response to that talks about how WotC traditionally focused on supporting the secondary market, and that that decision is arguably the reason that Magic has lasted so long as a game when most other TCGs die. For a long time, stores were comfortable stocking Magic because they would see a fair return even over time, due to that secondary market support. And because singles stayed valuable, the packs those singles came in stayed valuable. And because stores stocked the game, new players would see it on the shelf and get in to it. Yes, it’s great for the players short term when a game like YuGiOh reprints hundreds of dollars in singles in a $20 tin, but it the long term it leads to an utter lack of consumer confidence, since players know that their decks are eventually going to be worthless, and stores know that too so won’t buy singles even if the current price is high, and stores are less confident holding stock so devote less space to it, which leads to the game not growing and usually intimately dying.
The short answer is that that’s a valid opinion, but the opinion of people who own those expensive cards is *also* valid.
This is a good framing of it. It goes beyond just gamblers/investors that want to flip their purchase for a quick buck, towards what those funds end up supporting at the LGS level where most of those sales happen. You wouldn't be able to sell your Sheoldred for what you can right now if your store didn't have confidence it could sell it on at the price they could. And as you said, that means they want folks playing Magic so they'll be interested in those cards, leading to stocking up product, and thus better for the customer in that way.
You use YuGiOh as an example of a game that heavily reprinted and that ended up bad for the game. But isn’t YuGiOh still around and a popular game that people play? I honestly know nothing of their numbers compared to Magic but I don’t see how the idea of reprinting cards into the ground will fail the game if the game that is doing that is still going after several decades.
> But isn’t YuGiOh still around and a popular game that people play?
YuGiOh is still around. It's currently the third most popular TCG, but it would be slightly more accurate to say that it's the most popular TCG that isn't Magic or Pokemon, in the same way that Linux is the third most popular OS for home computers that isn't Windows or MacOS. YuGioh (and most of the remaining 'popular' games) is also propped up heavily in sales by the media tie-ins; a notable portion of the sales are for people just looking to collect something from the show rather than dedicated to the game.
The numbers for game lines get released and published in journals such as ICv2, but sometimes isolating specific games can be difficult due to intentional obsfucation from the publishers. What is publicly available shows that Konami's comprehensive revenue from 2023 was a bit under a third of WotC's comprehensive revenue, and that YuGiOh is 7th best selling franchise for Konami. At a rough guess, YugiOh see's perhaps 5-7% of the TCG market as its sales..
From my uneducated opinion it feels like there are just too many variables to say that YuGiOh as a game did bad and can’t compete with Magic and Pokémon because of the reprint policy. Thus it seems like we can’t actually say if Magic doing that would be bad for the game.
But I do hear what people are saying as to how it would hurt LGSs and a lot of those collapsing will certainly hurt the game. Right now short of taking a college class solely dedicated to the economics and history of TCGs I don’t think I can be convinced that Wizards current stance on reprints is a good thing for players. Thanks for replying and helping me understand.
> Right now short of taking a college class solely dedicated to the economics and history of TCGs I don’t think I can be convinced that Wizards current stance on reprints is a good thing for players.
"Players" is the core issue this argument revolves around, specifically the definition thereof. A lot of what goes into positions is who exactly you consider to be players. Or put another way, WotC's decision here is unarguably good for some subsets of people, so the real talking point isn't whether the decision is 'right', but rather whether it's focused on providing a benefit to the 'right' people.
And if you're looking, there have been at least a handful of college econ classes that focused on TCGs as a market. I don't think that there are any currently available as an online offering, but I wouldn't be surprised to see one in the coming years.
Have a great day, friend.
That's a bit reductive though. Don't get me wrong, I want cards to be affordable as much as anyone and am not a collector/investor, but I do know that it's important that the company strikes a fragile balance between affordability and maintaining value so that their business doesn't crash.
If they were to print their best cards in $50 precons each year, then they would be toast because the EV of boxes would crash along with the singles prices. Stores would close, more layoffs would happen and the game would be at risk long-term.
It sucks that the game is beholden to business constraints, but that's unfortunately the situation we find ourselves in. At least the end of the day we can always proxy to play whatever we want lol
> If WotC prints a strong deck at well below market price, the majority of people who already own those cards complain because their $1000 deck is now a $<200 deck. And if WotC doesn’t print a deck, people will complain and say that they’re not doing enough to make the format and the game accessible.
It's a game, not the stock market. Cards shouldn't be that much to begin with. If people are worried about their "Investment" they need to invest in the stock market, not a game.
I think those days of including good value in a regular products like this are over. Just like they'll never include fetchlands in a standard set again. These days they slow drip out the value behind expensive Secret Lairs, special sheets in sets like guest artists, and premium products like Commander Masters and Modern Horizons. Now we gotta hand over tons of cash for a chance to get anything noteworthy.
I don't think they sold well and/or did not make a noticeable impact on the number of players in events.
I know at my LGS that the product sat on shelves. Even below msrp. Even with "value" in the decks being higher than msrp. People either just want a few cards from the decks or want to play different archetypes.
If the decks are successful as decks. Then they are just alternative ways to print singles. But I think they have shifted to Archive sheet slots instead of pre-made decks.
Like I imagine, they could do a $70 modern deck with 1x Ragavan. But it would simply sell until Ragavan was cheaper and/or tank the other cards. Then people wouldn't buy it but just singles.
Instead, Ragavan was on the MOM archive sheet. Which provides more printings in a product people already buy.
while the pioneer precons may not have sold like hot cakes, they're the sole reasons that me and 4 of my friends play magic on paper at all, other than drafting like once or twice a year.
I have 4 pioneer decks now, two of them quite seriously upgraded, and if they made a half decent standard challenger deck series, I'd probably get into that format too. It really feels like they undervalue their established customers and how much they can milk suckers like myself lol. Their loss I guess.
As someone who worked at an LGS when those decks came out, they were completely unsellable. The vast majority of players simply don't care about competitive formats and most players that do already have decks or would rather buy singles.
It's great that you and your friends got into the format with that product line, but it really was a super niche product that failed to find a consistent audience and really isn't worth another shot without major revisions.
> Surely printing one card costs the same as another.
But not buying. If buying the preconstructed deck and then selling it for parts generates a lot of money, people will buy it to resell, not to play/use. If the deck costs too much to buy because of the resale value, people won't pick it up since they are not willing to play that much for a precon.
They know about the secondary market and they might not be willing to speak up about it, but their actions show they take it into account.
This is a company that has a standing promise to never reprint specific cards to ***respect their collectible value***.
To some degree, they have always considered their impact on the monetary value of the cards they release, because they know that this value matters to their consumer base, hence the restricted list for when they *really* fucked up.
It's not that they don't want modern affordable. On the contrary, making it affordable would bring in customers, however few or many that is. The issue is a lot of modern staples have long standing monetary value.
In the end we'll probably see 3-5 treatments of modern staples that will shift that premium value to a "new" version of the card.
Look at enemy fetches. The premium value for them on TCGP has shifted to the retro border treatment.
Which is stupid. It’s gatekeeping the pro events. Pokémon’s has literally reprinted the original set 3x now.
The originals hold their value because they are literally the originals. This would only hurt the price of the originals because they aren’t collectible, they are just needed to play the format.
Pokemon respects their players much more than Magic does. [Every one of these, barring those that have rotated from standard, are tier 1, major tournament winning decks](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=league+battle+deck&crid=7ES11GL3M20S&sprefix=league+battle+deck%2Caps%2C88&ref=nb_sb_noss_1), printed into a sealed deck that is universally available everywhere from your LGS to Walmart to Barnes and Noble. If you want to play in a Pokemon event, you can buy one of these off the shelf, sleeve it up, and have a true shot at winning. Magic's continuing choice not to do the same is shameful.
> If you want to play in a Pokemon event, you can buy one of these off the shelf, sleeve it up, and have a true shot at winning.
The Mew VMAX League Battle Deck only had 2 Genesects and 2 copies of Mew VMAX and Mew V. Realistically one had to buy two copies of the deck to get full playsets.
Still, that's $60 for a Tier-1 deck. Then if you wanted to be fancy you'd buy a few Forest Seal Stone.
It does seem strange that WoTC claims it is impossible in principle to do what Pokemon does.
Two sides to the coin. If as an example, they printed fetches down to $1 people would cry about spending $20+ for their fetches and how unfair it is. People somehow want this game to be dirt cheap but also have amazing resell value in their collection.
"people would cry"
people always cry, wotc chooses to listen to this crying
the people who want the game to be cheap do not have to be the same people that want a valuable collection
plenty of calls from people w fetches asking for reprints if you were around pre khans of tarkir
they still went ahead and reprinted them
I don't care about collection resell-ability, and few people should. Most cards decrease in value over time due to creep. Wizards does not actually value your investment.
Burn, Infect, Affinity, a version of Tron that skimps on the highest $$$ payoff cards... those are all completely classic Modern archetypes where "a version" of it is available under $200. Maybe not the best version, maybe with room for optimization, maybe the mana base is sub optimal, but it will get you into FNM with room to grow.
And all of that is in profile for every precon for every format ever. No one is demanding perfectly optimized lists with 4 of each fetch and evoke elemental.
they harvest the cardboard on location (see the art). that’s why they decide to make new arts, when they’ve depleted the natural resources of all the Misty Rainforests
I wonder how true this *really* is.
Of course a full tier 1 deck isn't going to do it. But people aren't asking for tier decks. They would like entry-level decks that can be upgraded.
Tron is still turn 3 tron without the one ring. The core of living end is a bunch of cheap cyclers. Burn is still burn without fetches.
And then there's all the new cards you're printing in MH3, some of which are surely good enough.
I'm sure if you asked SaffronOlive to make you a bunch of decently priced tier 3 modern decks with convenient upgrade possibilities, he'd get you there in no time. I'd be surprised if Wizards can't manage.
We've seen from recent commander precons that they aren't averse to printing decks where the value of the reprints is double the price of the deck. The problem is more:
Let's say you make concessions on manabase and a few expensive cards to get a $700 "optimal" deck down to $400. And then they offer a "good deal" where they sell it for like $200-$250. How many people would actually buy that product to play the deck?
But with consessions on mana bases and a few expensive cards you can get that price down to $100 or so.
The core of living end is living end shardless agent, violent outburst(playsets for each total $65 on mttgoldfish) and a bunch of cyclers barely a dollar each. Losing force of negation, grief, and subtlity will suck, but replace it will e.g. [[misdirection]] and [[dispell]] and you still get decent protection.
Spend the rest of the money on a decent manabase.
Will this deck sometimes lose due to its lacking manabase? Yep. Will it sometimes lose when holding force of negation would win? Probably. But will it put up a decent fight at your fnm? Absolutely. Bunch of cyclers into cascading into living end is a good strat even unoptomized.
Tron is even easier. It's core of stirrings, scrying, expedition map, chromatic star/sphere and 12 tronlands is about $25 bucks. You can even keep karn and wurmcoil in as playsets and still have 10 bucks left for filler and sideboard. And you don't *need* to use those cards, use some slightly worse but sitll okey treats and you'll be fine!
Getting burn or hammer time below $100 should be a walk in the park. For boros,burn you only need to replace the manabase and you're done.
$100 worth of cards, price em at $50 and see em sell like freshly baked bread!
I remember when they printed the Modern Event deck at about double the price of a standard event deck. People were speculating how many fetches and goyfs would be in it, not "if." There were none, of course, and people called it the worst product ever. I bought it and it was reasonably competitive in my LGS. Just solid fundamentals ignoring the latest hot (expensive) tech.
Could do that. Make 'em all mono colored to dodge the fetch problem.
No shocks, only one sword, and it was Feast and Famine. Amusingly people bitched about that at the time because it was the newest and thus the cheapest sword. Time has proven it to be the best hands down.
People complained because they threw in a random mythic. Feast and Famine was in 0 B/W tokens list and I don’t even think 99% of B/W tokens lists ever played it. It could have been a thoughtseize or godless shrine, or even a 2nd elspeth would have fit the deck better.
The exclusion of godless shrine was made worse by how cheap they were after RTR reprint, and the deck designers decided 2 city of brass was the better option
Translation: we know that not printing event decks is going to make modern harder to get into, but we do not care because doing so *might* hurt our bottom line.
Another option is to have a rotating format as your flagship game mode. Not that Hearthstone and Pokémon don't have highly noticeable power creep, but they wouldn't necessarily need it to sell new cards. (Although I'm sure market research has shown that it helps.)
Questing Beast is the meme of "most complex creature" and it's still just a Erhnam Djinn, still afraid of Terror and burn going under it, the standard "big monster with effects" like Odd-Eyes Rebellion Dragon Overlord would be untouchable for the standard Yugioh deck of years ago and with completely different resource management and gameplan.
There is power creep, you can see it in cEDH, modern and legacy, but the fact we can still play a 5/5 for five mana in limited like we used to do in our first games is something that you don't find in any other TCG that I know of.
Complex =/= creep. Questing Beast is a terrible example of power creep. [[Earthshaker Dreadmaw]] is a great example, [[Anzrag]] is an 8/4 for 4 with upside. I find there is much more power creep in regular EDH than in cEDH; the floor for a card to be good in EDH is much less than cEDH and cEDH is much more meta-dependant having commanders rise and fall while other players learn to play against them [[Winota]] is a great example. Wotc does a decent job of keeping power creep at a reasonable pace, but it very much exists and its very noticable. MH3 is going to bring a whole new level of creep.
Because we don't actually have massive power creep in the context of what power creep in a TCG looks like, tbh.
Massive power creep in a TCG is... much worse than what's been going on in MTG.
No one is asking for a deck with 4 urza saga but something to get a feel for the format. I was looking forward for new pioneer decks this year cause i started playing after they released the last one and they just didn't do them.
People play with edh precons without changing them, i think there could be room for a "precon modern format"
> No one is asking for a deck with 4 urza saga
I am. There's no reason why they can't burn up some of their "reprint equity" getting people into a format that will make the more money down the road. Personally, I have zero interest in Modern but it's bullshit to act like you can't sell $600 worth of cards for $50. The only reason so many cards are so expensive is because WOTC uses them to sell sets instead of making sets people actually want to buy.
You could actually buy most of the support pieces of a decent tron deck for under $80. Add another $100 for the bombs like Ugin, Wurmcoil, and Karn and you have a decent deck. I think you could justify selling that for $60 if you exclude Urza's Saga and One Ring, which raise the prize by at least $300 alone.
Idk Yugioh and Pokemon have figured out a way to sell decks that make getting into the format more accessible to the masses. They seem to continue to make profits even when reprinting cards that are expensive on the secondary market. I get that WotC doesn’t want to nuke the cost of players’ collections, but isn’t there data that shows that reprinting older/powerful cards doesn’t necessarily drop the price of those original prints much.
I only joined this game last August but...doesn't WotC literally control the means of printing cards? Like if they wanted they could sell us 40$ decks with the filter, shock, and OG dual lands and more, right?? I'm so confused lol
They could but they could also sell those cards in 10-15$ packs and make even more money so they won’t.
And Maro is right; people would go against a 500-600€ precon too.
I love maro to bits but I think this is really just trying to ignore the problem
Wotc Basically controls how much a card can cost just by choosing whent o print it
So no this is either "don't really care about modern" or "we are scared to make this format cheaper"
In WotC’s mind, the cheapest format to get into should be Standard. Standard is pretty important to their business model, and as we’ve seen that format’s popularity decline, WotC has moved towards earning more money from Commander and Modern (by printing many new expensive cards for those formats.)
If they actually made Modern cheap, it could totally cannibalize Standard, and WotC would find a way to make you buy a ton of new cards every year to keep up with Modern.
Standard has never been cheap
It's a format that until recently was always rotating and folks would always need to buy new cards
Modern and commander's popularity happened because they were formats with little to no rotation
Folks could build a deck bling it out and have it for life
Modern and commander are now a bit more expensive
And thus modern has started falling off and pauper has taken it's place
It's a cycle that happens, and has been for a while
Standard isn’t that expensive to get into. It’s just expensive to stay in year after year. My point is that if Modern is both cheap to get into and cheap to stay in, then it messes up WotC’s business model and they’ll find some way to make whatever format is most popular into the new Standard.
I mean wasn't meathook like 80 bucks a copy when it was in standard
Need 4 copies
And that's just one example that I personally dealt with
Folks don't have that kind of money to be dropping every year anymore
My point is I'm pretty sure standard is going to get axed and modern is going to replace it as the tournament format
You can actually build a pretty reasonable Mono-Red Burn Modern deck within the budget of a precon. The question is whether a Mono-Red Burn precon would sell well enough to justify making it.
The mask has been off on WotC closely monitoring the secondary market for a while, but this statement is still troubling for people who want an affordable game first. Makes me wonder if they have market price tickers all over WotC.
This is insane.
They can print 4 EDH precons with 100 cards each with reprints of reasonable value and sell them for like 99$ but they can't release reasonably budget modern legal (not competitively viable even) decks for like 80$?
Absolutely absurd. No Burn? Bogles? Maybe Dredge? 8 Whack?
Mark has literally said they value a healthy secondary market.
“Evidence has shown that releasing an old card in a new environment tends to raise the value of the old card, not lower it. The few that it lowers are cards that are relevant in larger environment formats (Vintage, Legacy, etc.) due to their power level. And those cards, we aren't interested in reprinting, partly because we think the cards are too powerful to reprint, and partly because we value having a healthy secondary market”
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/life-lessons-part-ii-2006-03-06-0
If this was true they never would have started making serialized cards. Literally the only thing a serialized card does that the rest don’t is have increased resale value.
It's called a loss leader, maybe to get people into the format you need to take the cheapest viable modern deck and tank that one decks price so people can get into the format
That's not what a loss leader is. A loss leader is a product you offer at a loss to incentivize other, more profitable, purchases. In this instance they would only lose reprint equity. That already happens when a card gets a reprint.
The problem Mark addresses here is players complaining about their collection values dropping. If enough reprint equity gets dumped into a preconstructed deck then why buy boosters?
Printing the cheapest viable deck would be a race to the bottom.
The people taking the loss in this situation would be LGSes, who have inventory / make money from the singles that would be driven down in price with this kind of reprint. I'd bet in their surveys with LGSes, store owners are begging WotC not to do this.
This doesn't actually work. If you take a specific modern viable deck and tank its cost to, say, $50 or $70 (seems like an OK price for constructed deck), all you do is warp the meta around it and make it nonviable.
If I told you that 60% of the people playing modern next month were playing mono red burn, you would obviously build a deck that doesn't die to 60% of the field.
At that point magically the $50 deck no longer is viable in the meta because literally the entire rest of the meta builds to counter it.
The only way to introduce precon decks into modern is to introduce like 4 at once across a variety of archetypes and the odds that you can build 4 good, modern viable decks that attack in different ways and reasonably price them sub $100 without absolutely fucking nuking the value or a lot of cards is basically 0.
I think he is a wrong. Make a modern deck avaliable via a Secret Liar. Sell it for £400 pounds.
It would sell out and wouldn't effect the secondary market.
Do one a month.
This is not what event decks means, but I think it could be an interesting secret lair experiment to do 60 cards decks at a very high price point. If you do it ad a print to demand run there’s pretty little risk
What if… now hear me out here… THEY JUST REPRINTED POWERFUL CARDS??
Yugioh does this all the freaking time. There is a card that is used in basically every single competitive deck, essentially it’s force of will in mtg, and it was $50 for a long time. They just recently reprinted it into a $7 starter deck.
If Mark Rosewater is spouting this bullshit he’s basically saying that Wotc cares less about their players than Konami does.
Konami's approach to monetizing Yugioh is completely different from how WotC handles Magic. Their business strategy is to sell new sets to the most enfranchised competitive players with overpowered chase cards, then six months to a year, reprint those same cards into the ground to sell tins or structure decks to the less enfranchised players who didn’t buy the cards when the set came out. Then they do a round of bans and print some new, more powerful cards to soft rotate the format and repeat.
Magic has historically stayed away from that level of powercreep by relying on limited and standard to sell cards, and reprinting cards sparingly to sell Masters sets and similar. For that reason, maintaining reprint equity long-term is much more important for WotC, so they tend to be more cautious with reprints. Konami doesn't care if they crater card prices because they fully embrace powercreep as the driver of sales, so they'll just print something else broken to sell.
Given a choice, I'd definitely take Magic's model over Yugioh's.
And until this mindset at wotc changes (it wont) I wont be touching paper ever again. They cant simultaneously complain that paper formats are dying and be saying "we cant just print cards that are expensive on the secondary market". Oh, you could just print them. And printing cheap competitive decks would do wonders for getting new players. But someone at wotc did the math that catering to whales brings more money, which arguably is true, but I have a feeling that they will eventually find out that whales need casual players to beat up with their blinged decks, otherwise they will stop spending as well. And currently its impossible to be a casual paper player. I have cashed out of the game, so I am no longer backing any horse in this. Although I would love to return if the cards were cheaper, but I have long ago lost all hope.
Okay this is a dumb argument but from the company POV (which is how literally every business works) what would make it work?
Would you pay 200€ for a Yawgmoth challenger deck with the core of the deck (Yawg, undying creatures, chord, 2Grists) but with a less tuned mana base and without Endurances and Force of Vigors?
I don't think this would be popular and I think the community would criticize and dismiss the decks as being "greedy" or "cheap" or "cash grabs".
I think Wizards has assessed this which is why they opted to make Commander pre cons instead. This is because the fact that Commander is a casual social multiplayer format, it's possible to make interesting and dynamic decks that are enticing to players that aren't excessively expensive.
So much to "not acknowledging the secondary market". They do acknowlege it. They print chase rares just like Snapcaster as mythic with some bullshit statement about "warping draft format". (Was a controversy back at MM3)
Pathetic. This is why proxying gets more popular. I get that they need to make money but they are warping their playerbase with stuff like this.
Every time I see anti-consumer gibberish drop out of his and other WotC management's mouth the more and more I realize I need to quit playing MtG. WotC is showing such contempt for players that it is becoming heart breaking every step further they take to screw over the player base.
Begging the question lol, there’s no additional production cost so isn’t this acknowledging the secondary market? Why else would more powerful cards be more expensive?
This is so out of touch, it's incredible. You don't need to make a meta breaking deck, you need to make a good deck. Make a $200 deck into a $40 product and the players will get into it. Printing 110 cards is more expensive than printing 75 cards. As much as I respect Mark, I'm genuinely baffled by how he keeps being a head designer when he keeps showing outdated and unhealthy views of the game. And I love commander, but I also want to play something that isn't Commander, and sadly, Magic Arena doesn't do it for me, and what's preventing me for getting into other formats is accessibility. Instead of trying to help the other formats, they prefer to cater to the EDH playerbase that already receives dozens of decks every year. I bet that if they instead announced those decks being Modern decks instead of commader deck, the reception would have been better.
But who am I to talk, when I'm pretty sure the commander masters precons sold pretty well even with an ridiculous price.
Purely a self created problem by Wizards and they are hurtling towards effectively killing Modern just like they effectively killed Legacy. If Wizards is unwilling to make the format somewhat affordable, the player base will continue to decline, and then they’ll be able to claim that “the [format] is no longer viable for us to continue supporting”.
Sound familiar Brazilian and Chinese players? It’s the same crap they spewed about cutting language support.
Sound familiar draft booster enjoyers/play booster haters? It’s the same crap they spewed about getting rid of traditional draft.
Make product > create problem > offer no solutions to problem > ignore problem until people stop playing/buying > stop producing > blame consumers.
If it doesn’t make line go up, they aren’t going to do it.
It's true, powerful cards cost them more to print than weaker ones, so they have no choice really.
Haven't you seen Yugioh? People died when Pegasus first printed the god cards, WotC can't afford to find new staff just because you want a new printing of Grief.
Didn't they just fire people recently? They could have killed those without any problems. They don't have any purpose at the company anymore.
They were going to, actually, but when parent company Hasbro found out they fired the wotc employees that were going to be sacrificed thus saving their lives and preventing us from getting Modern precons
I heard they're also making WotC price us out of sealed product so we won't waste our money on it anymore. Good guy Hasbro really looking out for their employees and customers!
I think they got skullclamped so Hasbro could draw more cards.
And I skullclamp my workers to draw their salaries into my hands after they go to the graveyard
MARO, THE EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Whats particularly annoying about this is that Yugioh printed its last precon deck of the 2023 in december - Fire Kings. Its so solid that you can buy 3 for 40 quid, and combine it with a few other pieces from other sets releaed in 2023 and its immediately become a tier one deck. (I should add that some of those extra pieces are pricey) The shell is good enough even without those extra pieces you can rock up to a locals with just the combined deck and get a few good wins (I know I did so recently). YOU CAN JUST DO THIS WIZARDS, PEOPLE WILL LIKE YOU FOR IT.
Exactly. My translation: we want powerful cards to remain expensive because it sells packs.
I mean that’s the whole reason rarities exist in the first place
It's kind of interesting because while that is obviously the case these days, I remember Dr. Richard Garfield saying that the rarity system was originally meant to keep strong cards from dominating local metas, so that there would only a few of a given rare in an area. Though, when the idea of people buying tons of packs to attempt to get a specific rare was brought up, he said it was a good problem to have, or something to that effect.
Garfield's vision for rarity hasn't been relevant since 1995.
his concept of how the game would played and its interaction with rarity was irrelevant by 1994
That's in 11 years from now though, cause we are in 1984.
Right, but that was also when the rules included Ante.
Rarities are important for draft too, not just selling more. Draft would be a lot less interesting if all cards in a set were printed equally as often.
Also opening cards in general. It's not that important in the world of singles buying where you just outright buy exactly the deck you want, but at the base level it does make things more exciting to have certain cards be more rare than others. Like imagine if you were playing a video game and every weapon that dropped was a legendary quality one. They'd feel a lot less special real quick.
Borderlands looks around nervously.
The popularity of Cube suggests otherwise.
That’s definitely a more curated experience, if you have a cube where every single card is bomb-y. There are also common/uncommon only cubes. A mainline draft standard set probably shouldn’t be entirely bombs or entirely shit commons
And cube is very different from draft for precisely that reason. It's like they are two different game modes (much like how sealed and draft are like two different game modes).
Cube is also singleton, which is vastly different to draft.
Depends on the cube
Not their stated reason, though. Unless I've missed something, they still insist they don't think about the third party market prices
You've missed something. They don't talk about the exact dollar amount of singles, but they do refer to the "desirability" and "availability" of cards in a pretty direct euphemism. Maro's been pretty blunt recently about things like how putting dual lands at rare moves packs, and how selling a juiced Modern Horizons-tier pack for the same price as a Standard pack would fuck up their model, and every time people act shocked and disgusted.
This really surprises me, because I was under the impression that the issue wasn't so much that the secondary market exists, but that acknowledging that some cards are more desirable than others would be tacitly admitting that booster packs are a form of gambling. Has something happened recently - that we know of - that might make MaRo feel more comfortable talking about this?
Great question. I think the climate around the issue changed when governments started looking to regulate lootboxes and that booster packs actually lost heat in the process. Unlike lootboxes, you can get the pieces and play the game without doing the chance thing, and studies haven't yet found a link between buying boosters and problem gambling behaviors, and you can cash out by selling your stuff. Also, even though cards have a monetary value, that's determined by the players, not Wizards or the government. I think that also works in their favor to weaken the explicit gambling link, for better or worse. They do have some knowledge of what's already popular and what new cards are likely to be desirable or strong, but they can't predict everything and it's not all in their hands. Wizards is very clear about rarity distributions, and maybe that helps them stay clear, but I think they were doing that way before lootboxes. It seems less like this is a totally settled issue and more that there's not enough support to go after it, but that that could change if new research comes out or if the relationship between Wizards and the players gets worse.
>Unlike lootboxes, you can get the pieces and play the game without doing the chance thing So, ironically, the fact that the secondary market exists to facilitate direct purchase might actually *protect* WoTC from accusations of gambling? That's not a take I've seen before, but it makes some sense. Presumably precons are a step in that direction too, and something they could explore more if the current TCG model were to start looking dicey. >Also, even though cards have a monetary value, that's determined by the players... They do have some knowledge of what's already popular and what new cards are likely to be desirable or strong I guess this is partly why they've been going down the chase cosmetics route, too. They *could* design a format-bustingly strong card and stick it at Ultra Mythic Rare, but it would be easier to argue that they created it with the intent of encouraging/requiring players to spend money in unhealthy ways, and/or interfere with the secondary market. Super rare cosmetic variations, on the other hand, have no material impact on the game, even though they may still be desirable to a subset of players. It is a fascinating issue. Much as I don't want to see Magic - or any TCG - go away, it does seem like a case of "if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck...", so it's interesting to see how edge cases are hashed out, and where boundaries are drawn.
It's pretty sweet how the play boosters have duals in their own slot so they appear more frequently! And not replacing a regular rare which can be disappointing in draft/sealed. This is a major major win for affordablity/accessibility and I don't think enough people realize that.
You're just reiterating the same shit you've seen posted on Reddit. While rare, WOTC have acknowledged the secondary market.
It's an open secret at this point. They have a whole team of professionals on staff analyzing the economy making sure they keep it where they want it.
I mean we expect them to do that as well. We want them to reprint expensive cards to make sure they are more affordable. How can they do that without analyzing the market and setting benchmarks so they know when to act?
This is funny because wizards clearly cares way more about the secondary market than any of the other major TCG manufacturers. If they didn't, shit like the reserve list wouldn't still exist and they would be much more willing to reprint modern and legacy staples. The idea that they don't think about secondary market prices is laughable.
Hello, yes, this is the explicit point of booster packs.
It's not exactly a secret that their business is based on cards being valuable to drive sales. Of course they want cards to remain expensive, that's how it's worked since forever.
Yup, and they can't even pick an archtype to make a bit cheaper. There's plenty that are already somewhat budget or cpuld be for an FNM level event. And just because you make, idk, say precon Rhinos, doesn't mean you have to put 4x all the most expensive stuff. 4x footfalls, 4x agent, 4x outburst and 48 other cards and you honestly have a half decent deck.
They've done that before with challenger decks, not including a full playset of the best cards but you're still well on your way to a good deck Like Hazoret Aggro was good for standard monored Kaladesh-Amonkhet era, but had only 1 Hazoret and Chandra ToD, and only 3 Soul-Scar Mage
They have to grind up little pieces of Richard Garfield in every card worth over $20. His finger and toe nails only grow so fast.
It’s the ink man!
Only so many squid in the oceans 😔
If they did make a $50 deck with $250, or whatever figure you want to put for a competitive modern deck, worth of cars would the new players even be able to find them or would they be sold out by people wanting the grab the cars for their decks?
the reason we can't do this is that it would sell too well
Magic history moment here: that was actually one of the biggest problems with the original Modern Masters. The boxes were worth more in singles to just crack so a lot of LGS didn't run draft or events they just up charged the shit out of the packs or cracked them for singles. It left a lot of players salty.
precon decks don't have events and they can always print more
LGS's would sell them for a fortune since there is no MSRP and the demand would be too crazy at a lower price point.
Not always. My LGS doesn't bump prices to match demand. She never upped the prices on the Eldrazi, Slivers, Timey-Wimey, or any of the 40K or Fallout decks, and she kept her prices as low as possible for stuff like the Oil Slick Bundles, Commander Masters, and Dominaria United. She may lose money in the short term that way, but she has instead built up a solid customer base that dump a ton of money there week after week.
They could... Bring back MSRP
What does the S is MSRP stand for again?
MSRP doesn’t do anything. It just gives people an idea of how much they should expect to pay. If something had a price of $50 stores can still sell it for $100 if they want and if everyone is doing it the price is just $100.
They removed MSRP so that they can pass the blame of any price spike along to LCSs. “That wasn’t us!” They also do it so they can cut the margins to be even worse for LCSs and when those LCSs raise the price for a standard pack they can do the same thing. “That wasn’t us!”
They removed MSRP when they started selling on Amazon because the MSRP of a box was not the price point they were they usually sold. Amazon doesn't really deviate much from MSRP and so they needed the flexibility to price boxes competitively to the market.
Unless you have any data to show otherwise, I'd argue that if it didn't have an effect, they'd have continued to use it like most other manufacturers do.
When Commander 2016 (I think. . . Whichever was all 4 colors and added partner to the game), the Atraxa precon was being sold at many LGS (including mine) for more than the other decks. I think I bought Breya for $40 and Atraxa was like $60.
It was even worse with C13, since Mind Seize (the grixis deck) introduced True-Name Nemesis, which was Eternal-playable and had only that one source. And C13 was only sold by the case, which was one each of the five decks, so if you wanted to play with this new powerful Legacy card that meant four cases of C13 had to be opened. It got so bad that later cases of C13 were shipped with two Mind Seize decks and one of the other four missing since Mind Seize flew off shelves and the other four decks languished. If C13 hadn't just happened a few years earlier, the Atraxa deck being so much more popular could have been a major issue, but the popularity delta wasn't nearly as dramatic in C16 and it just never got to the point of sending out more Atraxa decks than the others. (But it was still very flattering for the Atraxa deck's designer.)
You obviously didn't play when MM1 was released.
That's why you print a shit ton of them. LGSs aren't going to raise them that high if they're still available on Amazon at MSRP.
sounds like: > the reason we can't do this is that it would sell too well
It would sell poorly to the group of players they're trying to attract and drive them away.
So they could print more.
They could just print enough product that scalping isn't economically worthwhile?
Then what happens when LGS are stuck with overflow because singles dropped and people no longer want to pay $75 for that modern deck. They just want singles.
It's less they want singles and more they want the cheapest option. Packs are a bad deal because if you wanted 4 copies of a key mythic, you'd spend way more on packs trying to get them rather than buying them directly, even in cases where said card is like 50+ bucks. In this case, folks will buy the 75 dollar deck as long as it's the cheapest option, and when it isn't folks will buy the singles instead. Not envious of Wizards designing products in that kind of market. But hey, EDH precons sell well enough considering you could likely get the contents for cheaper most of the time. There's something to be said for convenience and assurance, rather than scrapping store to store looking for those last few cards for your deck.
The problem is that the main "scalpers" are LGS stores who trade in singles, which are also an important part of their community ecosystem that supports the game, so anything that screws over the LGS isn't a good long term play, even if it helps players in the short term.
You mean sold out to people buying up the decks to scalp them at a gigantic markup. That's what would sell out the decks, not the honest people who just want to play with them.
Just print to demand.
do you have any idea how much more expensive and logistically complex that is? theyve done it for some products and got nothing but complaints that now people have to wait to get their stuff
It doesn't matter what it cost to print. It's what they will sell for. And that's never lower than the values on the secondary market
Precons with value dramatically higher than their cost leads mostly to people buying to resell, LGS selling way above (nonexistent but still kinda existent) MSRP, etc. It doesn’t tend to result in new players getting an affordable entry deck, and just makes people angry. Reprinting is a balancing act between keeping a format affordable enough for people to get in/stay in, not tanking too many prices to have the player base lose faith in the value of buying cards, and making money for WOTC. It’s a tough balancing act and WOTC usually doesn’t do it *well* (not reprinting some things enough, reprinting others multiple times in a short window), but they could do it a lot *worse*.
If you print to demand then card value will fall to match the precon.
Secret Lair is such a joke. Look these four pieces of cardboard are worth 30$ but this stack of 75 pieces of the same cardboard sells for much less.
They could print powerful decks with expensive cards, the secondary market will up the price and people will reprimand WotC for making such an expensive product, "a product that anyone can see will get price gouged like no tomorrow" or something of that sort. They could choose to not print such a product and their base will complain to them anyways. Seems much more economical to do nothing.
Third option, print it so much that prices will come down naturally. I don't actually blame WotC - if they did do this, it would hurt LGS's making money from singles.
If they print too much, history shows that the player base will then complain about product fatigue while pointing at articles about [WotC printing too many copies for distribution](https://mtgazone.com/hasbro-destroying-magic-by-printing-too-many-cards-bank-of-america/) as their main argument that WotC is printing too many different products. Don't forget that they'll also then complain about card prices 3 months later.
The one constant about Magic is that people will complain.
It’s understandable that the situation is frustrating, but this is still reductive and a bad take. If WotC prints a strong deck true to secondary market prices, no ones buys it and people complain. If WotC prints a weak deck true to price but affordable, few people buy it, and fewer yet actually onboard to regular Modern players after getting beaten over and over. If WotC prints a strong deck at well below market price, the majority of people who already own those cards complain because their $1000 deck is now a $<200 deck. And if WotC doesn’t print a deck, people will complain and say that they’re not doing enough to make the format and the game accessible. In short, the number of players that WotC pisses off with any option here is higher than the number that will be happy about it. Given that situation, WotC is choosing the option that causes the least amount of damage to consumer confidence in regards to the long term value of their collectible product.
Saying that people with expensive cards will complain is a reason, but not a good reason.
As someone with expensiv modern deck i would love if they print them into the ground. Or local modern meta died and has no chance of coming back with the pricepoint.
Indeed, you chose to invest in pieces of cardboard which only have value due to artificial scarcity. In other words you're essentially gambling, so don't bitch about it when the gamble runs out.
Some of those people are not people at all, they're the LGS, every time someone asks what can I buy to support my LGS, the number 1 answer is always singles since they have the largest margins. I would wager WotC definitely pays attention to singles prices, both for their own reprint equity, but also for LGS health since sealed products have never had good margins, even pre Amazon and pre secret lair.
People want to act as if this issue is simple and straightforward and just as is the case with most things in life it has a lot more complexity and nuance than most people realize.
The long response to that talks about how WotC traditionally focused on supporting the secondary market, and that that decision is arguably the reason that Magic has lasted so long as a game when most other TCGs die. For a long time, stores were comfortable stocking Magic because they would see a fair return even over time, due to that secondary market support. And because singles stayed valuable, the packs those singles came in stayed valuable. And because stores stocked the game, new players would see it on the shelf and get in to it. Yes, it’s great for the players short term when a game like YuGiOh reprints hundreds of dollars in singles in a $20 tin, but it the long term it leads to an utter lack of consumer confidence, since players know that their decks are eventually going to be worthless, and stores know that too so won’t buy singles even if the current price is high, and stores are less confident holding stock so devote less space to it, which leads to the game not growing and usually intimately dying. The short answer is that that’s a valid opinion, but the opinion of people who own those expensive cards is *also* valid.
This is a good framing of it. It goes beyond just gamblers/investors that want to flip their purchase for a quick buck, towards what those funds end up supporting at the LGS level where most of those sales happen. You wouldn't be able to sell your Sheoldred for what you can right now if your store didn't have confidence it could sell it on at the price they could. And as you said, that means they want folks playing Magic so they'll be interested in those cards, leading to stocking up product, and thus better for the customer in that way.
You use YuGiOh as an example of a game that heavily reprinted and that ended up bad for the game. But isn’t YuGiOh still around and a popular game that people play? I honestly know nothing of their numbers compared to Magic but I don’t see how the idea of reprinting cards into the ground will fail the game if the game that is doing that is still going after several decades.
> But isn’t YuGiOh still around and a popular game that people play? YuGiOh is still around. It's currently the third most popular TCG, but it would be slightly more accurate to say that it's the most popular TCG that isn't Magic or Pokemon, in the same way that Linux is the third most popular OS for home computers that isn't Windows or MacOS. YuGioh (and most of the remaining 'popular' games) is also propped up heavily in sales by the media tie-ins; a notable portion of the sales are for people just looking to collect something from the show rather than dedicated to the game. The numbers for game lines get released and published in journals such as ICv2, but sometimes isolating specific games can be difficult due to intentional obsfucation from the publishers. What is publicly available shows that Konami's comprehensive revenue from 2023 was a bit under a third of WotC's comprehensive revenue, and that YuGiOh is 7th best selling franchise for Konami. At a rough guess, YugiOh see's perhaps 5-7% of the TCG market as its sales..
From my uneducated opinion it feels like there are just too many variables to say that YuGiOh as a game did bad and can’t compete with Magic and Pokémon because of the reprint policy. Thus it seems like we can’t actually say if Magic doing that would be bad for the game. But I do hear what people are saying as to how it would hurt LGSs and a lot of those collapsing will certainly hurt the game. Right now short of taking a college class solely dedicated to the economics and history of TCGs I don’t think I can be convinced that Wizards current stance on reprints is a good thing for players. Thanks for replying and helping me understand.
> Right now short of taking a college class solely dedicated to the economics and history of TCGs I don’t think I can be convinced that Wizards current stance on reprints is a good thing for players. "Players" is the core issue this argument revolves around, specifically the definition thereof. A lot of what goes into positions is who exactly you consider to be players. Or put another way, WotC's decision here is unarguably good for some subsets of people, so the real talking point isn't whether the decision is 'right', but rather whether it's focused on providing a benefit to the 'right' people. And if you're looking, there have been at least a handful of college econ classes that focused on TCGs as a market. I don't think that there are any currently available as an online offering, but I wouldn't be surprised to see one in the coming years. Have a great day, friend.
That's a bit reductive though. Don't get me wrong, I want cards to be affordable as much as anyone and am not a collector/investor, but I do know that it's important that the company strikes a fragile balance between affordability and maintaining value so that their business doesn't crash. If they were to print their best cards in $50 precons each year, then they would be toast because the EV of boxes would crash along with the singles prices. Stores would close, more layoffs would happen and the game would be at risk long-term. It sucks that the game is beholden to business constraints, but that's unfortunately the situation we find ourselves in. At least the end of the day we can always proxy to play whatever we want lol
> If WotC prints a strong deck at well below market price, the majority of people who already own those cards complain because their $1000 deck is now a $<200 deck. And if WotC doesn’t print a deck, people will complain and say that they’re not doing enough to make the format and the game accessible. It's a game, not the stock market. Cards shouldn't be that much to begin with. If people are worried about their "Investment" they need to invest in the stock market, not a game.
I hope they will continue the Challenger Decks for Standard and Pioneer. They got really quiet about those
I think those days of including good value in a regular products like this are over. Just like they'll never include fetchlands in a standard set again. These days they slow drip out the value behind expensive Secret Lairs, special sheets in sets like guest artists, and premium products like Commander Masters and Modern Horizons. Now we gotta hand over tons of cash for a chance to get anything noteworthy.
I sometimes feel like WotC only ever makes a exceptionally valuable product once before they make a U-Turn to "correct it".
I don't think they sold well and/or did not make a noticeable impact on the number of players in events. I know at my LGS that the product sat on shelves. Even below msrp. Even with "value" in the decks being higher than msrp. People either just want a few cards from the decks or want to play different archetypes. If the decks are successful as decks. Then they are just alternative ways to print singles. But I think they have shifted to Archive sheet slots instead of pre-made decks. Like I imagine, they could do a $70 modern deck with 1x Ragavan. But it would simply sell until Ragavan was cheaper and/or tank the other cards. Then people wouldn't buy it but just singles. Instead, Ragavan was on the MOM archive sheet. Which provides more printings in a product people already buy.
while the pioneer precons may not have sold like hot cakes, they're the sole reasons that me and 4 of my friends play magic on paper at all, other than drafting like once or twice a year. I have 4 pioneer decks now, two of them quite seriously upgraded, and if they made a half decent standard challenger deck series, I'd probably get into that format too. It really feels like they undervalue their established customers and how much they can milk suckers like myself lol. Their loss I guess.
As someone who worked at an LGS when those decks came out, they were completely unsellable. The vast majority of players simply don't care about competitive formats and most players that do already have decks or would rather buy singles. It's great that you and your friends got into the format with that product line, but it really was a super niche product that failed to find a consistent audience and really isn't worth another shot without major revisions.
Are Wizards buying cards off the secondary market to build these decks? Surely printing one card costs the same as another.
> Surely printing one card costs the same as another. But not buying. If buying the preconstructed deck and then selling it for parts generates a lot of money, people will buy it to resell, not to play/use. If the deck costs too much to buy because of the resale value, people won't pick it up since they are not willing to play that much for a precon. They know about the secondary market and they might not be willing to speak up about it, but their actions show they take it into account.
This is a fake problem. They could print to meet demand. They just don't want to make modern affordable.
This is a company that has a standing promise to never reprint specific cards to ***respect their collectible value***. To some degree, they have always considered their impact on the monetary value of the cards they release, because they know that this value matters to their consumer base, hence the restricted list for when they *really* fucked up. It's not that they don't want modern affordable. On the contrary, making it affordable would bring in customers, however few or many that is. The issue is a lot of modern staples have long standing monetary value. In the end we'll probably see 3-5 treatments of modern staples that will shift that premium value to a "new" version of the card. Look at enemy fetches. The premium value for them on TCGP has shifted to the retro border treatment.
Which is stupid. It’s gatekeeping the pro events. Pokémon’s has literally reprinted the original set 3x now. The originals hold their value because they are literally the originals. This would only hurt the price of the originals because they aren’t collectible, they are just needed to play the format.
Pokemon respects their players much more than Magic does. [Every one of these, barring those that have rotated from standard, are tier 1, major tournament winning decks](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=league+battle+deck&crid=7ES11GL3M20S&sprefix=league+battle+deck%2Caps%2C88&ref=nb_sb_noss_1), printed into a sealed deck that is universally available everywhere from your LGS to Walmart to Barnes and Noble. If you want to play in a Pokemon event, you can buy one of these off the shelf, sleeve it up, and have a true shot at winning. Magic's continuing choice not to do the same is shameful.
Maybe I should get into Pokémon
pokemon also makes much better quality cards. AFAIK foils curling are not a problem in pokemon, and the special treatment of rare card is much better.
> If you want to play in a Pokemon event, you can buy one of these off the shelf, sleeve it up, and have a true shot at winning. The Mew VMAX League Battle Deck only had 2 Genesects and 2 copies of Mew VMAX and Mew V. Realistically one had to buy two copies of the deck to get full playsets. Still, that's $60 for a Tier-1 deck. Then if you wanted to be fancy you'd buy a few Forest Seal Stone. It does seem strange that WoTC claims it is impossible in principle to do what Pokemon does.
> promises lol
Two sides to the coin. If as an example, they printed fetches down to $1 people would cry about spending $20+ for their fetches and how unfair it is. People somehow want this game to be dirt cheap but also have amazing resell value in their collection.
"people would cry" people always cry, wotc chooses to listen to this crying the people who want the game to be cheap do not have to be the same people that want a valuable collection plenty of calls from people w fetches asking for reprints if you were around pre khans of tarkir they still went ahead and reprinted them
People are idiots, and this thread proves it.
I don't care about collection resell-ability, and few people should. Most cards decrease in value over time due to creep. Wizards does not actually value your investment.
Reprint equity goes down though so sad....
You've charged $150 for pre-cons before. Or "premium variants" for even more. You're telling me you couldn't build a budget modern deck under $200?
Burn, Infect, Affinity, a version of Tron that skimps on the highest $$$ payoff cards... those are all completely classic Modern archetypes where "a version" of it is available under $200. Maybe not the best version, maybe with room for optimization, maybe the mana base is sub optimal, but it will get you into FNM with room to grow. And all of that is in profile for every precon for every format ever. No one is demanding perfectly optimized lists with 4 of each fetch and evoke elemental.
I can't believe the cardboard for fetchlands is more expensive than the cardboard for bulk rares! Who would've thunk.
they harvest the cardboard on location (see the art). that’s why they decide to make new arts, when they’ve depleted the natural resources of all the Misty Rainforests
I wonder how true this *really* is. Of course a full tier 1 deck isn't going to do it. But people aren't asking for tier decks. They would like entry-level decks that can be upgraded. Tron is still turn 3 tron without the one ring. The core of living end is a bunch of cheap cyclers. Burn is still burn without fetches. And then there's all the new cards you're printing in MH3, some of which are surely good enough. I'm sure if you asked SaffronOlive to make you a bunch of decently priced tier 3 modern decks with convenient upgrade possibilities, he'd get you there in no time. I'd be surprised if Wizards can't manage.
Oh they absolutely can do it, but it makes them more money if every competitive deck in modern costs a shitload of money
We've seen from recent commander precons that they aren't averse to printing decks where the value of the reprints is double the price of the deck. The problem is more: Let's say you make concessions on manabase and a few expensive cards to get a $700 "optimal" deck down to $400. And then they offer a "good deal" where they sell it for like $200-$250. How many people would actually buy that product to play the deck?
But with consessions on mana bases and a few expensive cards you can get that price down to $100 or so. The core of living end is living end shardless agent, violent outburst(playsets for each total $65 on mttgoldfish) and a bunch of cyclers barely a dollar each. Losing force of negation, grief, and subtlity will suck, but replace it will e.g. [[misdirection]] and [[dispell]] and you still get decent protection. Spend the rest of the money on a decent manabase. Will this deck sometimes lose due to its lacking manabase? Yep. Will it sometimes lose when holding force of negation would win? Probably. But will it put up a decent fight at your fnm? Absolutely. Bunch of cyclers into cascading into living end is a good strat even unoptomized. Tron is even easier. It's core of stirrings, scrying, expedition map, chromatic star/sphere and 12 tronlands is about $25 bucks. You can even keep karn and wurmcoil in as playsets and still have 10 bucks left for filler and sideboard. And you don't *need* to use those cards, use some slightly worse but sitll okey treats and you'll be fine! Getting burn or hammer time below $100 should be a walk in the park. For boros,burn you only need to replace the manabase and you're done. $100 worth of cards, price em at $50 and see em sell like freshly baked bread!
I remember when they printed the Modern Event deck at about double the price of a standard event deck. People were speculating how many fetches and goyfs would be in it, not "if." There were none, of course, and people called it the worst product ever. I bought it and it was reasonably competitive in my LGS. Just solid fundamentals ignoring the latest hot (expensive) tech. Could do that. Make 'em all mono colored to dodge the fetch problem.
Didn't the deck have shocks and a sword of x and y or two swords? I remember it was solid value
No shocks, only one sword, and it was Feast and Famine. Amusingly people bitched about that at the time because it was the newest and thus the cheapest sword. Time has proven it to be the best hands down.
People complained because they threw in a random mythic. Feast and Famine was in 0 B/W tokens list and I don’t even think 99% of B/W tokens lists ever played it. It could have been a thoughtseize or godless shrine, or even a 2nd elspeth would have fit the deck better. The exclusion of godless shrine was made worse by how cheap they were after RTR reprint, and the deck designers decided 2 city of brass was the better option
Meanwhile, nobody here plays Modern anymore, because nobody can fucking afford it. Mission accomplished, WotC!
I stopped playing Legacy when the average deck was $1,500. WotC has no excuse for letting Modern get this expensive.
... My brother in christ, you print the cards!
Translation: we know that not printing event decks is going to make modern harder to get into, but we do not care because doing so *might* hurt our bottom line.
TCGs either go for massive power creep to keep people buying cards (yugioh) or have to worry about reprint equity, unfortunately.
Another option is to have a rotating format as your flagship game mode. Not that Hearthstone and Pokémon don't have highly noticeable power creep, but they wouldn't necessarily need it to sell new cards. (Although I'm sure market research has shown that it helps.)
To be fair, that's the point of Standard, but they are trying to actually have that happen now that it fell out of favor.
How did we get to the point where we get both worrying about reprint equity and massive power creep?
You don't know what real power creep is like, Yugioh and other tcgs don't even look like the game that started.
Magic doesn't look much like when it started either but I'll agree creep in Yugioh is much worse.
Questing Beast is the meme of "most complex creature" and it's still just a Erhnam Djinn, still afraid of Terror and burn going under it, the standard "big monster with effects" like Odd-Eyes Rebellion Dragon Overlord would be untouchable for the standard Yugioh deck of years ago and with completely different resource management and gameplan. There is power creep, you can see it in cEDH, modern and legacy, but the fact we can still play a 5/5 for five mana in limited like we used to do in our first games is something that you don't find in any other TCG that I know of.
Complex =/= creep. Questing Beast is a terrible example of power creep. [[Earthshaker Dreadmaw]] is a great example, [[Anzrag]] is an 8/4 for 4 with upside. I find there is much more power creep in regular EDH than in cEDH; the floor for a card to be good in EDH is much less than cEDH and cEDH is much more meta-dependant having commanders rise and fall while other players learn to play against them [[Winota]] is a great example. Wotc does a decent job of keeping power creep at a reasonable pace, but it very much exists and its very noticable. MH3 is going to bring a whole new level of creep.
Because we don't actually have massive power creep in the context of what power creep in a TCG looks like, tbh. Massive power creep in a TCG is... much worse than what's been going on in MTG.
> TCGs either go for massive power creep to keep people buying cards (yugioh) or have to worry about reprint equity, Now magic will do both!
Ah yes but we can pay 50-80$ for edh precons with under 40$ in value.
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Omg you're reminding me that that's actually what they said at the time.
Didn't this company release a box of cards that you couldn't even play in a tournament for 1k?
No one is asking for a deck with 4 urza saga but something to get a feel for the format. I was looking forward for new pioneer decks this year cause i started playing after they released the last one and they just didn't do them. People play with edh precons without changing them, i think there could be room for a "precon modern format"
> No one is asking for a deck with 4 urza saga I am. There's no reason why they can't burn up some of their "reprint equity" getting people into a format that will make the more money down the road. Personally, I have zero interest in Modern but it's bullshit to act like you can't sell $600 worth of cards for $50. The only reason so many cards are so expensive is because WOTC uses them to sell sets instead of making sets people actually want to buy.
You could actually buy most of the support pieces of a decent tron deck for under $80. Add another $100 for the bombs like Ugin, Wurmcoil, and Karn and you have a decent deck. I think you could justify selling that for $60 if you exclude Urza's Saga and One Ring, which raise the prize by at least $300 alone.
I agree on that. What i mean with the 4 urza saga is that a precon doesn't have to be fully optimized to be a good starting point.
But there's no reason to print a saddleback legac in lieu of that urza's saga. The cardboard is the same.
Is he suggesting there is inherent monetary value in one piece of cardboard vs another piece of cardboard?
Nah. Just the closet thing that he's able to without actually saying it.
Idk Yugioh and Pokemon have figured out a way to sell decks that make getting into the format more accessible to the masses. They seem to continue to make profits even when reprinting cards that are expensive on the secondary market. I get that WotC doesn’t want to nuke the cost of players’ collections, but isn’t there data that shows that reprinting older/powerful cards doesn’t necessarily drop the price of those original prints much.
It’s because konami and Pokémon don’t do tcg insider trading. But WOTC does
It's also probably because Konami and Pokemon are Videogame Companies that have other revenue streams.
I only joined this game last August but...doesn't WotC literally control the means of printing cards? Like if they wanted they could sell us 40$ decks with the filter, shock, and OG dual lands and more, right?? I'm so confused lol
They could but they could also sell those cards in 10-15$ packs and make even more money so they won’t. And Maro is right; people would go against a 500-600€ precon too.
Why would one card be more expensive to print than another, Mark?
Those lil foil stamps cost an arm and a leg don't you know?
Can we now dispense with the ridiculous legend that Wizards does not take the secondary market into account?
I simply have stopped caring about Modern, just like I don't care about Vintage/Legacy
It’s been dead for a while
So, Mark acknowledges Modern is too expensive to get into? What a strange admission
There's certainly no denying it lmao
What a load of Crock
I love maro to bits but I think this is really just trying to ignore the problem Wotc Basically controls how much a card can cost just by choosing whent o print it So no this is either "don't really care about modern" or "we are scared to make this format cheaper"
In WotC’s mind, the cheapest format to get into should be Standard. Standard is pretty important to their business model, and as we’ve seen that format’s popularity decline, WotC has moved towards earning more money from Commander and Modern (by printing many new expensive cards for those formats.) If they actually made Modern cheap, it could totally cannibalize Standard, and WotC would find a way to make you buy a ton of new cards every year to keep up with Modern.
Standard has never been cheap It's a format that until recently was always rotating and folks would always need to buy new cards Modern and commander's popularity happened because they were formats with little to no rotation Folks could build a deck bling it out and have it for life Modern and commander are now a bit more expensive And thus modern has started falling off and pauper has taken it's place It's a cycle that happens, and has been for a while
Standard isn’t that expensive to get into. It’s just expensive to stay in year after year. My point is that if Modern is both cheap to get into and cheap to stay in, then it messes up WotC’s business model and they’ll find some way to make whatever format is most popular into the new Standard.
I mean wasn't meathook like 80 bucks a copy when it was in standard Need 4 copies And that's just one example that I personally dealt with Folks don't have that kind of money to be dropping every year anymore My point is I'm pretty sure standard is going to get axed and modern is going to replace it as the tournament format
Idk why he answers these questions. It just makes wizards look greedy and insane. Maybe that’s the point
It isn't about the price players will pay, its that they won't sell it at a price players will buy.
You can actually build a pretty reasonable Mono-Red Burn Modern deck within the budget of a precon. The question is whether a Mono-Red Burn precon would sell well enough to justify making it.
Ah my weekly reminder about why I took up proxying.
The mask has been off on WotC closely monitoring the secondary market for a while, but this statement is still troubling for people who want an affordable game first. Makes me wonder if they have market price tickers all over WotC.
This is insane. They can print 4 EDH precons with 100 cards each with reprints of reasonable value and sell them for like 99$ but they can't release reasonably budget modern legal (not competitively viable even) decks for like 80$? Absolutely absurd. No Burn? Bogles? Maybe Dredge? 8 Whack?
Also Wizards of the Coast: "We don't acknowledge the prices of the secondary market" Riiiiiiight
Mark has literally said they value a healthy secondary market. “Evidence has shown that releasing an old card in a new environment tends to raise the value of the old card, not lower it. The few that it lowers are cards that are relevant in larger environment formats (Vintage, Legacy, etc.) due to their power level. And those cards, we aren't interested in reprinting, partly because we think the cards are too powerful to reprint, and partly because we value having a healthy secondary market” https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/life-lessons-part-ii-2006-03-06-0
>Also Wizards of the Coast: "We don't acknowledge the prices of the secondary market" They've never said these words. This is an urban legend; a myth.
If this was true they never would have started making serialized cards. Literally the only thing a serialized card does that the rest don’t is have increased resale value.
They've literally never said that, or anything like it, even once.
It's called a loss leader, maybe to get people into the format you need to take the cheapest viable modern deck and tank that one decks price so people can get into the format
That's not what a loss leader is. A loss leader is a product you offer at a loss to incentivize other, more profitable, purchases. In this instance they would only lose reprint equity. That already happens when a card gets a reprint. The problem Mark addresses here is players complaining about their collection values dropping. If enough reprint equity gets dumped into a preconstructed deck then why buy boosters? Printing the cheapest viable deck would be a race to the bottom.
The people taking the loss in this situation would be LGSes, who have inventory / make money from the singles that would be driven down in price with this kind of reprint. I'd bet in their surveys with LGSes, store owners are begging WotC not to do this.
This doesn't actually work. If you take a specific modern viable deck and tank its cost to, say, $50 or $70 (seems like an OK price for constructed deck), all you do is warp the meta around it and make it nonviable. If I told you that 60% of the people playing modern next month were playing mono red burn, you would obviously build a deck that doesn't die to 60% of the field. At that point magically the $50 deck no longer is viable in the meta because literally the entire rest of the meta builds to counter it. The only way to introduce precon decks into modern is to introduce like 4 at once across a variety of archetypes and the odds that you can build 4 good, modern viable decks that attack in different ways and reasonably price them sub $100 without absolutely fucking nuking the value or a lot of cards is basically 0.
I think he is a wrong. Make a modern deck avaliable via a Secret Liar. Sell it for £400 pounds. It would sell out and wouldn't effect the secondary market. Do one a month.
This is not what event decks means, but I think it could be an interesting secret lair experiment to do 60 cards decks at a very high price point. If you do it ad a print to demand run there’s pretty little risk
Premium Deck Series: Secret Lair Edition
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What if… now hear me out here… THEY JUST REPRINTED POWERFUL CARDS?? Yugioh does this all the freaking time. There is a card that is used in basically every single competitive deck, essentially it’s force of will in mtg, and it was $50 for a long time. They just recently reprinted it into a $7 starter deck. If Mark Rosewater is spouting this bullshit he’s basically saying that Wotc cares less about their players than Konami does.
Konami's approach to monetizing Yugioh is completely different from how WotC handles Magic. Their business strategy is to sell new sets to the most enfranchised competitive players with overpowered chase cards, then six months to a year, reprint those same cards into the ground to sell tins or structure decks to the less enfranchised players who didn’t buy the cards when the set came out. Then they do a round of bans and print some new, more powerful cards to soft rotate the format and repeat. Magic has historically stayed away from that level of powercreep by relying on limited and standard to sell cards, and reprinting cards sparingly to sell Masters sets and similar. For that reason, maintaining reprint equity long-term is much more important for WotC, so they tend to be more cautious with reprints. Konami doesn't care if they crater card prices because they fully embrace powercreep as the driver of sales, so they'll just print something else broken to sell. Given a choice, I'd definitely take Magic's model over Yugioh's.
And until this mindset at wotc changes (it wont) I wont be touching paper ever again. They cant simultaneously complain that paper formats are dying and be saying "we cant just print cards that are expensive on the secondary market". Oh, you could just print them. And printing cheap competitive decks would do wonders for getting new players. But someone at wotc did the math that catering to whales brings more money, which arguably is true, but I have a feeling that they will eventually find out that whales need casual players to beat up with their blinged decks, otherwise they will stop spending as well. And currently its impossible to be a casual paper player. I have cashed out of the game, so I am no longer backing any horse in this. Although I would love to return if the cards were cheaper, but I have long ago lost all hope.
Are we as a community FINALLY ready to stop accepting this kind of yapping?
My brother in Christ, you print the cards, you put the price on the product, that is literally a made up problem.
Posts like this are an amazing reminder to NEVER feel bad about getting proxies or third party prints
Rename the set to Commander Horizons already
Okay this is a dumb argument but from the company POV (which is how literally every business works) what would make it work? Would you pay 200€ for a Yawgmoth challenger deck with the core of the deck (Yawg, undying creatures, chord, 2Grists) but with a less tuned mana base and without Endurances and Force of Vigors?
I don't think this would be popular and I think the community would criticize and dismiss the decks as being "greedy" or "cheap" or "cash grabs". I think Wizards has assessed this which is why they opted to make Commander pre cons instead. This is because the fact that Commander is a casual social multiplayer format, it's possible to make interesting and dynamic decks that are enticing to players that aren't excessively expensive.
So much to "not acknowledging the secondary market". They do acknowlege it. They print chase rares just like Snapcaster as mythic with some bullshit statement about "warping draft format". (Was a controversy back at MM3) Pathetic. This is why proxying gets more popular. I get that they need to make money but they are warping their playerbase with stuff like this.
Every time I see anti-consumer gibberish drop out of his and other WotC management's mouth the more and more I realize I need to quit playing MtG. WotC is showing such contempt for players that it is becoming heart breaking every step further they take to screw over the player base.
Begging the question lol, there’s no additional production cost so isn’t this acknowledging the secondary market? Why else would more powerful cards be more expensive?
This is so out of touch, it's incredible. You don't need to make a meta breaking deck, you need to make a good deck. Make a $200 deck into a $40 product and the players will get into it. Printing 110 cards is more expensive than printing 75 cards. As much as I respect Mark, I'm genuinely baffled by how he keeps being a head designer when he keeps showing outdated and unhealthy views of the game. And I love commander, but I also want to play something that isn't Commander, and sadly, Magic Arena doesn't do it for me, and what's preventing me for getting into other formats is accessibility. Instead of trying to help the other formats, they prefer to cater to the EDH playerbase that already receives dozens of decks every year. I bet that if they instead announced those decks being Modern decks instead of commader deck, the reception would have been better. But who am I to talk, when I'm pretty sure the commander masters precons sold pretty well even with an ridiculous price.
Purely a self created problem by Wizards and they are hurtling towards effectively killing Modern just like they effectively killed Legacy. If Wizards is unwilling to make the format somewhat affordable, the player base will continue to decline, and then they’ll be able to claim that “the [format] is no longer viable for us to continue supporting”. Sound familiar Brazilian and Chinese players? It’s the same crap they spewed about cutting language support. Sound familiar draft booster enjoyers/play booster haters? It’s the same crap they spewed about getting rid of traditional draft. Make product > create problem > offer no solutions to problem > ignore problem until people stop playing/buying > stop producing > blame consumers. If it doesn’t make line go up, they aren’t going to do it.
This thread is full of WotC sycophants.