sit on my Facebook posted:

Yeah but that was only after they implemented their weird aborted rotation change. And I'd still take the Bant Company format over any of the subsequent ones.

ItBreathes posted:

I don't think you can even call the scarcity of any in-print card artificial. The supply of any given card is infinite while its in print, retailers will open product continuously as long as there's demand, and with equal chances to get any given rare an infinite number of each will opened and made available on the market. But there's a price floor on a set of cards as the retailers opening product have to recoup their costs, Wizards isn't/can't just give the cards away. Typically, this is also the price ceiling, as there's enough competition selling identical products that it takes some very special circumstances to be competitive while selling above the minimum viable price. So a set of cards (easiest thought of here as one of every card in a set) has a value somewhere between the wholesale price and MSRP of the amount of sealed product it takes to open that set, and all of the cards in that set have to share the value. Obviously, demand for the cards in the set will be uneven, as people purchasing cards on the market typically want the most competitive cards¹ so those cards receive a disproportionate amount of demand and thus command a price according to their demand ratio. Whether the value of a given card in set matters to Wizards depends on the position of the set within standard. If there's no demand for the cards retailers won't open product, but the closer to even the distribution of standard playable cards becomes between sets, the less incentive Wizards has to care about the value of any given card as they are not competing with themselves in that scenario. We also know that they're capable of actively making cards that will be dominant in standard, but also that if they go too far in this direction it hurts the demand for standard and backfires on them. Relatedly, we know that besides 'obviously pushed' they're not great at knowing which cards will be good and therefore in high demand. So they are incentivized to build power levels slightly each set to increase demand for the new things, but they don't have the skill to do so subtly with any accuracy, and they also know that if the power level gets too high people stop playing / demand falls. Furthermore, if they have to print a low power set to reset standard it won't be popular, so ultimately its in Wizards best interest to keep power levels roughly consistent between sets. As established, if they can achieve this they have no reason to care about demand for any given card in the set and thus relatively small incentive to make any given card actively better than the others, though it will always be the case that some cards are better than others as a function of how TCGs work. So with infinite supply and no strong reasons for Wizards to influence demand, we can conclude that the price of a card in standard is a function of real demand by players and the price floor set by Wizards / distributors. (They could cut their margins to lower this floor, but at $4/pack there's not a whole lot of room to play with).

The fact that they have competition now has changed, but also makes it more important that they can capture new players, as pretty much all of their competitors have much simpler rules to begin with, and all of the interactions are handled by computers, making knowing the rules unnecessary to play.


Have you ever seen people try to learn to play Magic, especially without someone who knows the rules handy? Hell, there are people who care enough to post in this thread that don't know the rules. New core sets (I'm betting) are more like Portal 4.0 than anything else. Hopefully they'll release a draft product contemporaneously, but beyond the side effect of putting hard to flavor cards into standard, the product probably just isn't intended for you, or anyone else in this thread. Not that its ever worked before, but I really don't have a good answer for this one, and after 25 years, neither do they,

¹Also, wizards makes all of their product readily available for free, you can go print off all the copies of $Chase_rare from Gatherer (or somewhere better) you want, the only thing you need their actual product for is to play in the tournaments they sponsor. Or if your friends only let each other play with real cards, which they all do, but I'm not sure Wizards can be blamed for that.

Tainen posted:

Trip Report on the Replicator deck

Went 1-2
I won every game I played an Antiquities War on turn 4
I lost every game I played a Replicator
I never got to make more than two replicators

I think there might be a half way decent Antiquities deck. I'm going to try taking out the Replicators and replacing them with some mixture of Renegade Maps and Treasure Maps.

vandalism posted:

they really are pussy cowards that just wanna make tumblr posts about gender fluid elves.

The Shortest Path posted:

That's what the Intro Decks have been but instead of good cards they keep classics like Shivan Dragon in standard.

Angry Grimace posted:

Yah but if they reprinted Necropotence we would see the end of their comical effort to make a non-broken but still good Necro variant. It’s a 20 year old experiment.

TheKingofSprings posted:

And it got progressively worse from there.

The Shortest Path posted:

That's what the Intro Decks have been but instead of good cards they keep classics like Shivan Dragon in standard.

GoutPatrol posted:

How else can I play Mind Rot in standard?

Tainen posted:

https://twitter.com/saffronolive/status/994663858458451969

TheKingofSprings posted:

M10 - powerful cards, fine
M11 - powerful, fine
M12 - powerful, fine
M13 - definitely a downtick, still has some neat cards
M14 - Young Pyromancer is fantastic but why is everything else so bad

And it got progressively worse from there.

Some Numbers posted:

Bulky Bartokomous posted:

So this probably another one of my dumb posts but I have a question about set rotations. This will be the first rotation I've experienced. I've been really intrigued by Metallic Mimic. To my untrained eye it looks like something that might have potential in modern or legacy. I thought about putting it in Merfolk deck but it seems to be running fine without for now. Will the price on a card like that drop significantly when it drops out of the standard rotation?

sit on my Facebook posted:

You know what was fun and good? Magic Origins limited.environment.

Fuzzy Mammal posted:

What origins was terrible. M13 was where it's at.

Some Numbers posted:

Star of Extinction with Lifelink is pretty funny.

A big flaming stink posted:

search r/spikes for "Anguished Affinity", its a antiquities war improvise deck that looks pretty cool.

Siivola posted:

All I ask for the Core set is a Flying Men reprint.

vandalism posted:

If they don't print some cool good stuff with simple poo poo like thoughtseize, hero's downfall, etc then they really are pussy cowards that just wanna make tumblr posts about gender fluid elves.

Also sets like masters 15/17 in core set format with decent card stock. gently caress wizards and their 10 dollar booster poo poo greedy cunts.

Also gently caress mtg investors they don't even play but set the tone for reprints because wizards is worried about devaluing lili down to a reasonable price for a piece of cardboard. Wizards has no balls and no soul just like modern video game companies. gently caress venture capitalism and gently caress my phone for autocorrecting gently caress to duck every time.

Eat mu rear end.

InterrupterJones posted:

That’s reminiscient of Soulfire Grandmaster + Anger of the Gods against all those GW Manifest decks a few standards ago. Good times.

moush posted:

I think magic as a whole would be better if there was a set of cards that was always legal in standard (lightning bolt, counterspell, etc.). The problem is wizards has this obsession with certain effects not being in standard all the time so they mess it up.

Owlbear Camus posted:

There are two strictly better Flying Men in standard right now tho?