Current Events > A little out of the loop, what happened with MTG (the card game)?

(+) Yeah! (+)

$1k pack of cards

dude posed with all the exposed buttcracks

Wow, nice write up. Thanks.

I never got into Magic (the amount of cards was intimidating), but the game has always looked really cool and interesting. I feel sorry for the diehard fans who probably are addicted to card collecting and will be exploited by that $1000 cost.

So an already P2W card game offers a $1k pity reward and people are up in arms about it?

Wow, nice write up. Thanks.

I never got into Magic (the amount of cards was intimidating), but the game has always looked really cool and interesting. I feel sorry for the diehard fans who probably are addicted to card collecting and will be exploited by that $1000 cost.

People build winning decks for less than $20 all the time. It's predominantly about strategy. The insane prices are idiot collector taxes.

As a bit of a lead up there has been a general increase in the displeasure of the overall landscape prior to the current, relevant events. Far too many to really go over but generally they can be summed up from two major aspects: the removal of the Pro Tour (basically the "do Magic as a job!" tournaments) caused many of the big names to leave the game and thus caused the overall game to not have near the level of hype that it once did, and the increasing number of Magic products (to the point where this is a very real amount of "card fatigue", even when you are a diehard fan of the game, that makes it hard to keep track of what is even going on). Thus going into what I'm going to go over you should generally view it as something that is as bad as it is in part because of all of the build up.

So Magic is getting its 30th year anniversary and thus decided to hype it up. Now having poor product isn't unusual for companies, but the level of badness here is pretty insane. Their first product was a 30th anniversary reprint of the very first set in Magic. However, these are not normal cards: they are just proxies. Thus they are utterly useless for basically everyone because their only value is just to sit around and collect dust 99.9% of the time (you can't use them in any official stuffs, they have very not-normal backs so you can't play them without sleeves that can heavily block the back, etc.). Thus they are only really collectors items, and that is putting it nicely. However, despite all this they decided that the best way to go about this was to charge *$1000* for the privilege of opening a pack. Like, imagine you were in any hobby and you were told that you were going to be sold a non-functioning *insert hobby thing here* but it was going to cost you 250x the normal price. Would you have the ability to have any emotion beyond utter outrage and confusion?

Shortly afterwards they announced a "30th Edition Secret Lair" (Secret Lairs being a sort of promotional art version of cards that you can buy from their site). This one was actually reasonably liked as a concept despite its rather hefty $150 price tag (as should be obvious, this price tag is also pretty greedy on their part) it both had actual cards in it and had cards that actually made the price somewhat reasonable (assuming no special printings the value of the set was >$300 in current cards). However, unlike with normal Secret Lair printings this one was pre-printed instead of being printed to order which meant that only a limited number were ever going to be available (this was to have them ready to ship for the holidays, which is actually probably true and not just a deflection/overt scumminess on their part). In addition this one was randomly limited to 30 being able to be ordered at once. These combined with the site kind of borking up due to the traffic and the entire stock went away almost immediately, with the obvious implication that that vast majority went to scalpers (normal players definitely would not have desired near the amount of copies that would have eaten through the stock and it really had to come from people ordering 30x, with the chance of them potentially doing it multiples of times under different accounts).

Thus for Magic's "biggest" celebration of the next ten years we got an absurdly overpriced chachkie and an expensive advent calendar that sold out within the day of it being available.

I haven't played since 2005 Ravnica but why did they do away with the Pro Tour?

Bad business decisions.

Basically, all companies, not just Wizards, have started this trend of "screw absolutely everything that isn't the bottom line" as the actual effects of player engagement are hard to really relay to upper management in $ terms. In this case when Wizards had their internal meeting they had to decide how they were going to continue into the future, found that the Pro Tour wasn't giving them money by itself, and then cancelled it. Yes, this change will obviously hurt their bottom line in the long run (and by that I mean it already has) but from the perspective of "does the Pro Tour make money" it obviously had no actual advantage to the company itself. This is the same sort of logic why the 30th anniversary products came out as massive speculative spenders made up the lion's share of the profits in recent years and while the collector's proxy set is really bad for the normal player it is a gold mine for the speculative buyer (with the obvious end result to anyone paying attention that it won't actually be good for anything but a cheapening of the brand/flash in the pan profit followed by a lull that won't go away without intervention).

You could spend $20 on an FNM winning deck *or* you could spend it on a single copy of Post Malone to add to your deck. I'm pretty sure that you know which is the better one to go with.

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