|
Oh, I know that.
As I said before, if the competitive community really cared about cost control and decided that the most "fair" format was what we should be playing competitively (i.e. have limited Magic be the predominant format for competitive event rather than Standard) then Wizards would surely oblige because event frequency pretty clearly correlates to the relative popularity of the formats.
But this hasn't happened because, despite being the least economical, Standard is still the most popular format at all levels of play, which is really not WotC's fault in any way.
|
Well, limited also does get expensive if it's your primary mode of playing in tournaments. I don't know much about LGS in the US but they, on average, seem to be way ahead of their European counterparts in both quality and player turnout.
You're simply not always given the option to play drafts as most smaller, local tournaments are either t2 or modern.
Apart from that, building decks and tinkering with them is just plain fun as well as a large part of the mtg experience for many player. If you're not at all given the ability to do so on a budget smaller than what current standard decks cost and at least be remotely competitive it can become really frustrating for many.
Not like card prices have increased tremendously for the majority of cards since the days of $200-300 dollar top decks either. It's just the obscenely overpriced mythics (who ever thought that was a good idea and more than a money making scheme  )as well as WotCs weird policy regarding how they want manabases to look like at different times.
E: Also, limited GPs are expensive as f these days, have a higher of someone getting there simply because their pool is better, and at least in most formats simpler games with fewer ways to mess up, despite what reddit might think. If you're an average GP day 2 competitor you're going to at least make 90%+ of decisions correctly in all but a few limited formats, not like the challenging ones are around these days very often anymore either.
|
On December 09 2015 20:35 dismiss wrote:Show nested quote +The price of magic's secondary market is purely based on supply and demand.
The reason its expensive is because people love playing it.
When people stop liking it for whatever reason (say that its too expensive) then the free market will cut the price points of the secondary market until people love playing it again. However true or not that may be (hint it's not true), it doesn't change the fact that WotC is effectively precluding a large part of society from playing their game past a basic level. Which is all fine and dandy if you want to be some kind of elitist society but not for something that should be a open, inclusive experience like a card game. That's not even considering the growth dampening effect you're getting from the game having such a high price of entry. I'd much rather see them return to a early 2000s release structure than mtg become more and more alike to Games Workshop produced games.
But this is where you're having a lot of misgivings.
There are a LOT more players playing magic now.
There are a LOT more players with access to netdecks now.
There are a LOT more players with the income to just BUY decks now--which was not true before.
Now a days, people will know the full lists by end of day or early morning the next day of the winning brews and can have bought the whole deck by the end of the week. Go back to 98 and it would be MONTHS before people even knew a deck was doing well, let alone what the list was. And by the time that percolated down the magazines and websites the Pro meta had already shifted 2-3 times. Back then you could have a much worse brew than you do today and do much better because everyone had much worse brews.
It was a MUCH different world back then. The price of packs have not gone up at the same rate as the price of cards. Do you know why? Because WotC is making money by selling MORE packs and not by making cards MORE expensive. The higher demand hikes prices--that's how economics works.
|
I'm pretty sure limited GPs are the same price as constructed...and well i disagree with your whole last paragraph really.
I'm just kind of confused about everyone complaining about prices anyway as I didn't have to spend a cent to build a deck this standard. It just seems like everyone is taking trading out the equation. I'm not an MTG Finance type of guy and I don't buy booster boxes....all I do is draft once a week, and I've been able to trade into Abzan Aggro with zero cost. I feel like if you're at least reasonably conscious of your cards, you should be able to do this more or less every rotation.
|
On December 10 2015 02:52 Naracs_Duc wrote:
The higher demand hikes prices--that's how economics works.
That isn't true because supply is elastic and fits the demand perfectly to make a pack worth it's retail price (by the box).
The real reason prices have gone up is ONLY rarity. Mythic rarity is the single thing that enables $1000 standard decks. If jace was printed at rare, BANG standard decks all go down by $200 each. it's very simple.
Even if every person on the planet played standard, card prices wouldn't really change. More packs would be opened to meet the demand and price stays the same.
Note this only applies to in-print cards and sets of course.
|
On December 10 2015 02:58 Whole wrote:
I'm pretty sure limited GPs are the same price as constructed...and well i disagree with your whole last paragraph really.
I'm just kind of confused about everyone complaining about prices anyway as I didn't have to spend a cent to build a deck this standard. It just seems like everyone is taking trading out the equation. I'm not an MTG Finance type of guy and I don't buy booster boxes....all I do is draft once a week, and I've been able to trade into Abzan Aggro with zero cost. I feel like if you're at least reasonably conscious of your cards, you should be able to do this more or less every rotation.
Because you draft, you have stuff to trade, and you're actively trading instead of reactively trading.
The people complaining about prices are complaining that they cannot, at the last minute, buy a cheap deck that has a good chance to win a GP or PT.
|
Actually if you look at the effect Mythics have on the rare distribution in packs (post-Alara, the number of rares per set was also readjusted) it's not quite just "Mythics make the game more expensive". Old sets (particularly large sets and core sets) actually just had more rares printed. So the frequency of any *particular* rare was actually quite small. In the case of large sets, this actually means that post-Alara Mythics are actually only marginally rarer than old large set rares (since there were typically around 100-ish rares in a set, while current large sets only have 50-ish rares and about 15 mythics).
Even accounting for the fact that only 1/8 packs has a Mythic, the chance to get a *specific* rare in an old large/core set vs. a *specific* mythic in a current large set is actually about the same. And for rares, the likelihood of getting a particular rare is far higher. The math is somewhat different for small sets and in that case rares are slightly less rare, while mythics are still significantly more so.
The takeaway is that mythics actually didn't make the game categorically more expensive, but rather it's a function of rare vs. mythic playability and small set vs. large set playability.
http://imgur.com/a/7ZEMp
|
It's the general shift of power up the rarity curve, which mythic rarity undeniably enables.
Like I don't even hate mythic rarity THAT much although I do wish it was gone but the problem is that it's simply being used as a way to make more money.
And that graph does clearly show that cost-to-playset did go up, if not by THAT much
|
For this current standard, the salient points are the high competitive playability of many mythics across all sets currently in Standard coupled with the manabases slanting the entire playerbase toward *specific* highly playable cards (i.e. rather than only 1 deck archetype in a particular set of colors making use of some mythics, a large percentage of decks can have access to 1 particular card, skyrocketing the demand).
Matt Sperling wrote and article recently saying that fetchlands are Wizards' biggest mistake in Magic. While I wouldn't be that extreme, if you changed that to be "Wizard's biggest mistake that they have never acknowledged", I think that would be a reasonable statement.
On December 10 2015 03:12 Sn0_Man wrote:
And that graph does clearly show that cost-to-playset did go up, if not by THAT much
It went up comparing mythics to rares. But if you deck plays 4 mythics and 32 rares, the overall cost of your deck wouldn't necessarily be higher. It would depend on the specifics of the cards in question.
The problem is that mythic playability is at the point where you don't play just 4 mythics, but could be playing as many as 15.
A secondary problem is how FEW cards at the *lower* rarities are playable (i.e. concerning not the jump of T1 decks from $300->$500+, but the jump of budget T2 decks from $50->$200+), but that's been a longer-standing problem since before mythics came into existence. We're not living in the age of UG Madness where you could make a T1 deck with zero rares in it anymore.
|
On December 10 2015 03:12 Sn0_Man wrote:
It's the general shift of power up the rarity curve, which mythic rarity undeniably enables.
Like I don't even hate mythic rarity THAT much although I do wish it was gone but the problem is that it's simply being used as a way to make more money.
And that graph does clearly show that cost-to-playset did go up, if not by THAT much
Mythics were a FANTASTIC addition to Limited with very little actual downside to constructed. You could suddenly print cards that would be absolutely bonkers in limited, even at rare, without hurting constructed at all.
If you really want to cut the costs of standard decks--all you'd have to do is not have too much mana fixing. One of the reasons that the past rotations have had the mass mythics style is because you could easily grab mythics from 2-4 colors and jam them all into a deck. The less dual land/fetch land type cards the cheaper the format. Always.
|
On December 10 2015 02:52 Naracs_Duc wrote:Show nested quote +On December 09 2015 20:35 dismiss wrote:The price of magic's secondary market is purely based on supply and demand.
The reason its expensive is because people love playing it.
When people stop liking it for whatever reason (say that its too expensive) then the free market will cut the price points of the secondary market until people love playing it again. However true or not that may be (hint it's not true), it doesn't change the fact that WotC is effectively precluding a large part of society from playing their game past a basic level. Which is all fine and dandy if you want to be some kind of elitist society but not for something that should be a open, inclusive experience like a card game. That's not even considering the growth dampening effect you're getting from the game having such a high price of entry. I'd much rather see them return to a early 2000s release structure than mtg become more and more alike to Games Workshop produced games. But this is where you're having a lot of misgivings. There are a LOT more players playing magic now. There are a LOT more players with access to netdecks now. There are a LOT more players with the income to just BUY decks now--which was not true before. Now a days, people will know the full lists by end of day or early morning the next day of the winning brews and can have bought the whole deck by the end of the week. Go back to 98 and it would be MONTHS before people even knew a deck was doing well, let alone what the list was. And by the time that percolated down the magazines and websites the Pro meta had already shifted 2-3 times. Back then you could have a much worse brew than you do today and do much better because everyone had much worse brews. It was a MUCH different world back then. The price of packs have not gone up at the same rate as the price of cards. Do you know why? Because WotC is making money by selling MORE packs and not by making cards MORE expensive. The higher demand hikes prices--that's how economics works.
You seem to be under the impression there are some Keynesian economic mechanism at work here. Funnily enough that doesn't work when there's one and only one company that's able to supply a product. In addition please feel free to explain to me how introducing mythic rares wasn't a move to create artificial scarcity, therefore increasing the price of certain, these days necessary in most decks, cards.
Your chain of "logic" assumes players are less likely now than they used to be to open product. If the number of players increased at the same rate of purchased boosters, prices shouldn't increase.
When you take into account that recent sets feature way fewer durdles than they did a few decades ago I bet the EV of opening packs has gone up, so with all your fancy schmancy knowledge of economics you should be able to come to the conclusion that players if anything are more likely to open boosters.
Over the last 10 or so years msrp for packs has increased from 3 to 4 dollars, I'm willing to bet the average rare tournament staple has seen a price increase of less than 33%. Let's not talk about Modern Masters here, that'd get ridiculous really quickly.
The production cost for packs is marginal at best so wizards could meet any increase in demand easily enough, in fact even spreading their fixed costs over a greater number of products and thus being able to sell them cheaper if there really was this gigantic demand for packs.
Another big factor is that cracking packs necessarily is going to be -EV in the long run from a purely monetary perspective which restricts how many packs they are going to sell.
Lastly you're dramatically underestimating the propagation of information over the internet. I, as a wee, not natively English speaking lad of 10 years, had access to pt lists and reasonably accurate card prices in 2000-2001.
|
On December 10 2015 03:32 dismiss wrote:
Over the last 10 or so years msrp for packs has increased from 3 to 4 dollars, I'm willing to bet the average rare tournament staple has seen a price increase of less than 33%.
Again, that has partially to do with the fact that since Shards of Alara, the likelihood of getting any particular rare in a pack has gone up. Your likelihood of getting a particular rare in a pack is actually about twice as high as it used to be in a large set, and about 50% more likely in a small set.
|
I'm hoping that the 2-set cadence combined with new Small-Small-Large drafting will ameliorate some small set card supply issues as well.
|
That's what I was thinking as well.
|
On December 10 2015 03:32 dismiss wrote:Show nested quote +On December 10 2015 02:52 Naracs_Duc wrote:On December 09 2015 20:35 dismiss wrote:The price of magic's secondary market is purely based on supply and demand.
The reason its expensive is because people love playing it.
When people stop liking it for whatever reason (say that its too expensive) then the free market will cut the price points of the secondary market until people love playing it again. However true or not that may be (hint it's not true), it doesn't change the fact that WotC is effectively precluding a large part of society from playing their game past a basic level. Which is all fine and dandy if you want to be some kind of elitist society but not for something that should be a open, inclusive experience like a card game. That's not even considering the growth dampening effect you're getting from the game having such a high price of entry. I'd much rather see them return to a early 2000s release structure than mtg become more and more alike to Games Workshop produced games. But this is where you're having a lot of misgivings. There are a LOT more players playing magic now. There are a LOT more players with access to netdecks now. There are a LOT more players with the income to just BUY decks now--which was not true before. Now a days, people will know the full lists by end of day or early morning the next day of the winning brews and can have bought the whole deck by the end of the week. Go back to 98 and it would be MONTHS before people even knew a deck was doing well, let alone what the list was. And by the time that percolated down the magazines and websites the Pro meta had already shifted 2-3 times. Back then you could have a much worse brew than you do today and do much better because everyone had much worse brews. It was a MUCH different world back then. The price of packs have not gone up at the same rate as the price of cards. Do you know why? Because WotC is making money by selling MORE packs and not by making cards MORE expensive. The higher demand hikes prices--that's how economics works. You seem to be under the impression there are some Keynesian economic mechanism at work here. Funnily enough that doesn't work when there's one and only one company that's able to supply a product. In addition please feel free to explain to me how introducing mythic rares wasn't a move to create artificial scarcity, therefore increasing the price of certain, these days necessary in most decks, cards. Your chain of "logic" assumes players are less likely now than they used to be to open product. If the number of players increased at the same rate of purchased boosters, prices shouldn't increase. When you take into account that recent sets feature way fewer durdles than they did a few decades ago I bet the EV of opening packs has gone up, so with all your fancy schmancy knowledge of economics you should be able to come to the conclusion that players if anything are more likely to open boosters. Over the last 10 or so years msrp for packs has increased from 3 to 4 dollars, I'm willing to bet the average rare tournament staple has seen a price increase of less than 33%. Let's not talk about Modern Masters here, that'd get ridiculous really quickly. The production cost for packs is marginal at best so wizards could meet any increase in demand easily enough, in fact even spreading their fixed costs over a greater number of products and thus being able to sell them cheaper if there really was this gigantic demand for packs. Another big factor is that cracking packs necessarily is going to be -EV in the long run from a purely monetary perspective which restricts how many packs they are going to sell. Lastly you're dramatically underestimating the propagation of information over the internet. I, as a wee, not natively English speaking lad of 10 years, had access to pt lists and reasonably accurate card prices in 2000-2001.
Really?
Because in 2000 and 2001 unless you A.) Had internet access and B.) had an income, then card prices didn't matter.
How would it? How would a ten year old afford to go to the store and pay the $20 for either 4 Birds of Paradise or a Dual Land? The same arguments were made back then as well that the game was too expensive, too much scarcity, all the exact same arguments that are being made now. Do you remember that? Do you remember when Lotus was the most expensive card in magic at $300-$400?
Maybe you remember when PTs and GPs were only 100-200 players? In 2000 card prices were vastly different from store to store let alone nationally or globally. People focused majority of their energy on Draft. It was about buying packs and buying boxes--so you could draft. And then making casual/T2 decks afterwards. Do you remember that?
The big events were smaller, fewer, attendance was also smaller, less tournaments, less everything. Do you recall how PT's were the MAIN form of metagames? As opposed to now where people can see the meta shifting in MTGO in the span of days as opposed to months back in 2000. Or that weekly VODs of SCGs, PTs, GPs, etc.. are all contributing to accelerated metagame juggle? It used to be you could just play the same deck week in and week out and still be PT capable since metagames shifted so slowly. But now? A winning deck is obsolete less than 24 hours after winning.
With higher churn, higher player base--the only thing that has happened is people are LESS likely to buy packs and MORE likely to buy singles. So who buys all the packs then? Drafters and Stores. Mythics, Rares, are all irrelevant to today's crop of standard players since no one buys boosters to increase their collection, and then makes decks from them. People net deck, or metadeck on cockratice before just buying singles. Why do you think stores gives store credit for cards? So drafters funnel everything back to them.
People are buying way more packs because Draft is SO much better than it was before. The new rarity system means you don't have Wrath of God at common wrecking pools with 1-3 of them. You don't have JANK rares like one with nothings ruining your sealed. The system allows WotC to actually make a pack you can play limited with while still making constructed cards in the mythic/rare slot. Its a great system that helps everyone except the whiners.
|
Straight outta Johto18973 Posts
On December 10 2015 03:52 Sn0_Man wrote:
I'm hoping that the 2-set cadence combined with new Small-Small-Large drafting will ameliorate some small set card supply issues as well.
Well from a price perspective faster rotations means that post-rotation value crash time comes faster, so I get to snap up Standard staples I can use in Modern sooner.
But I think pack openings is still going to be drive by the fun of the cards and chase cards. Like how so many of the Khans Rares are dirt cheap cause people went nuts trying to get Fetchlands, or how new Jace is still probably going to be a some-what money card post-rotation because Origins wasn't opened that much.
|
On December 10 2015 04:08 Naracs_Duc wrote:Show nested quote +On December 10 2015 03:32 dismiss wrote:On December 10 2015 02:52 Naracs_Duc wrote:On December 09 2015 20:35 dismiss wrote:The price of magic's secondary market is purely based on supply and demand.
The reason its expensive is because people love playing it.
When people stop liking it for whatever reason (say that its too expensive) then the free market will cut the price points of the secondary market until people love playing it again. However true or not that may be (hint it's not true), it doesn't change the fact that WotC is effectively precluding a large part of society from playing their game past a basic level. Which is all fine and dandy if you want to be some kind of elitist society but not for something that should be a open, inclusive experience like a card game. That's not even considering the growth dampening effect you're getting from the game having such a high price of entry. I'd much rather see them return to a early 2000s release structure than mtg become more and more alike to Games Workshop produced games. But this is where you're having a lot of misgivings. There are a LOT more players playing magic now. There are a LOT more players with access to netdecks now. There are a LOT more players with the income to just BUY decks now--which was not true before. Now a days, people will know the full lists by end of day or early morning the next day of the winning brews and can have bought the whole deck by the end of the week. Go back to 98 and it would be MONTHS before people even knew a deck was doing well, let alone what the list was. And by the time that percolated down the magazines and websites the Pro meta had already shifted 2-3 times. Back then you could have a much worse brew than you do today and do much better because everyone had much worse brews. It was a MUCH different world back then. The price of packs have not gone up at the same rate as the price of cards. Do you know why? Because WotC is making money by selling MORE packs and not by making cards MORE expensive. The higher demand hikes prices--that's how economics works. You seem to be under the impression there are some Keynesian economic mechanism at work here. Funnily enough that doesn't work when there's one and only one company that's able to supply a product. In addition please feel free to explain to me how introducing mythic rares wasn't a move to create artificial scarcity, therefore increasing the price of certain, these days necessary in most decks, cards. Your chain of "logic" assumes players are less likely now than they used to be to open product. If the number of players increased at the same rate of purchased boosters, prices shouldn't increase. When you take into account that recent sets feature way fewer durdles than they did a few decades ago I bet the EV of opening packs has gone up, so with all your fancy schmancy knowledge of economics you should be able to come to the conclusion that players if anything are more likely to open boosters. Over the last 10 or so years msrp for packs has increased from 3 to 4 dollars, I'm willing to bet the average rare tournament staple has seen a price increase of less than 33%. Let's not talk about Modern Masters here, that'd get ridiculous really quickly. The production cost for packs is marginal at best so wizards could meet any increase in demand easily enough, in fact even spreading their fixed costs over a greater number of products and thus being able to sell them cheaper if there really was this gigantic demand for packs. Another big factor is that cracking packs necessarily is going to be -EV in the long run from a purely monetary perspective which restricts how many packs they are going to sell. Lastly you're dramatically underestimating the propagation of information over the internet. I, as a wee, not natively English speaking lad of 10 years, had access to pt lists and reasonably accurate card prices in 2000-2001. Really? Because in 2000 and 2001 unless you A.) Had internet access and B.) had an income, then card prices didn't matter. How would it? How would a ten year old afford to go to the store and pay the $20 for either 4 Birds of Paradise or a Dual Land? The same arguments were made back then as well that the game was too expensive, too much scarcity, all the exact same arguments that are being made now. Do you remember that? Do you remember when Lotus was the most expensive card in magic at $300-$400? Maybe you remember when PTs and GPs were only 100-200 players? In 2000 card prices were vastly different from store to store let alone nationally or globally. People focused majority of their energy on Draft. It was about buying packs and buying boxes--so you could draft. And then making casual/T2 decks afterwards. Do you remember that? The big events were smaller, fewer, attendance was also smaller, less tournaments, less everything. Do you recall how PT's were the MAIN form of metagames? As opposed to now where people can see the meta shifting in MTGO in the span of days as opposed to months back in 2000. Or that weekly VODs of SCGs, PTs, GPs, etc.. are all contributing to accelerated metagame juggle? It used to be you could just play the same deck week in and week out and still be PT capable since metagames shifted so slowly. But now? A winning deck is obsolete less than 24 hours after winning. With higher churn, higher player base--the only thing that has happened is people are LESS likely to buy packs and MORE likely to buy singles. So who buys all the packs then? Drafters and Stores. Mythics, Rares, are all irrelevant to today's crop of standard players since no one buys boosters to increase their collection, and then makes decks from them. People net deck, or metadeck on cockratice before just buying singles. Why do you think stores gives store credit for cards? So drafters funnel everything back to them. People are buying way more packs because Draft is SO much better than it was before. The new rarity system means you don't have Wrath of God at common wrecking pools with 1-3 of them. You don't have JANK rares like one with nothings ruining your sealed. The system allows WotC to actually make a pack you can play limited with while still making constructed cards in the mythic/rare slot. Its a great system that helps everyone except the whiners.
Card prices mattered a lot so you wouldn't get ripped off too badly when trading. :>
I'd also contest that drafting was the main way of playing the game, at least for us locally. Most people played something mixed between kitchen table and T1/T2 magic with LGS tournaments firing as T1 but effectively seperating into 2 pods after the first few rounds while larger tournaments and the odd professional level event were mostly T2 except for extended season.
Of course there was less video coverage but lots of articles, tournament reports and so on. Maybe the latest and greatest tech showcased at an event spread around a bit slower but people knew what was hot in general.
As it's always been, competitive magic players, read people who buy singles in sizable quantities, are not a large part of the magic community, if anything they're the exception. Most product is bought by casual players even if each individual only buy a couple packs since they outnumber the people who invest more time into the game by several orders of magnitude.
Packs were designed with draft in mind since what, Tempest? Personally I enjoyed drafting a lot of old formats a lot more since they were more complex and didn't feel like the guy who's drawing better is much more likely to win unless both players are super durdles. Owing to that the way most drafts play out has dramatically shift from synergistic strategies to raw power. Other major design decision such as moving more play to the board and neutering spells has attributed to this as well.
The argument about ridiculous mythic being fined in a limited environment is, in my opinion, silly. When they show up they absolutely wreck the game, warping formats on their own. Granted there are also vampire nighthawk esque cards, but the wingmate rocs are printed way more often
|
On December 09 2015 05:11 NewSunshine wrote:Given your complaints about Magic's current business model, posting an article that defends and justifies that business model probably isn't in your best interest. Just saying.
Basically I disagree with everything in the post. It's all wrong and on top of that his final question "would I prefer that world?" is that yes, I prefer an acceptable game over an unacceptable one.
But you guys convinced me though. This game isn't for players only. It is for collectors and that is a detriment to the players. And WotC has never pretended otherwise, so it's way harder to be angry about a joke game than an actual game.
|
It's not a detriment to the players in any way. Lots of people buying singles means singles will be more expensive. Less people buying mean singles become less expensive. Wanting to blame WotC as being this conspiracy theory evil org just because their customers buy too much product is asinine. They don't set the prices in any way and they get all the flack. So stupid.
|
On December 10 2015 04:38 dismiss wrote:
Packs were designed with draft in mind since what, Tempest? Personally I enjoyed drafting a lot of old formats a lot more since they were more complex and didn't feel like the guy who's drawing better is much more likely to win unless both players are super durdles. Owing to that the way most drafts play out has dramatically shift from synergistic strategies to raw power. Other major design decision such as moving more play to the board and neutering spells has attributed to this as well.
You're going to do a lot of work to convince people that older sets made better draft formats than newer ones. Modern draft formats like RoE x3 or INN x3 are widely considered contenders for "best draft format of all time" and both were definitely complex, synergistic sets (though, amusingly, the other sets in both blocks did no favors to their respective draft formats)
Khans and Origins are much more raw power/value-centric formats (this is clearly intentional for Origins, as Core Set design typically lends itself to being a very simple format), but BFZ is conversely a relatively complex and synergy-based format.
WotC's design can be wildly inconsistent as far as Limited design goes still, but I really don't think that they're doing worse than they used to in the average case. The highs are very high (you'd still be hard-pressed to find many old sets that draft as well as RoE x3 or INN x3), and the lows not quite as bad.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
