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Due to going off topic a few times in the Magic thread along with a general rise in public attention, I think Flesh and Blood probably deserves its own thread at this point, although this will also include other TCG finance scams going on like MetaZoo. I'm going to put in a vague amount of effort for this post to make it seem like I have an idea of what I'm talking about, although I never bothered to actually play the game despite owning some cards because it's barely a blip in my major metropolitan area. Part One: The Game What is Flesh and Blood (FAB)? Flesh and Blood is a trading card game developed by Legend Story Studios (LSS), a small company based in New Zealand and founded by James White. James supposedly has industry experience but cursory Google searches don't turn up anything really obvious about who he actually worked for previously, and I'm too lazy to listen to a long podcast to try and find that out. FAB was developed over a course of seven years as some sort of competitor to Magic, regardless of whether or not what the game has become in its modern state has anything specific to do with it. The game is hero-centric, and people best describe it as something like starting at end game. You have a hero character and equipment consisting of a head, chest, arms, legs, and some combination of weapon(s) (one or two-handed) or off-hands. There are two primary formats, called "blitz" and "classic constructed" where the most common difference are "young" versions of heroes with 20 health for the former, and then regular ones with 40 health for the latter. Deck sizes go from 40 plus equipment to 60 plus equipment. Cards in your deck are not characters like you'll see with most TCGs, but rather different types of cards, including: - Actions (Attack, Item, etc.) - Attack Reactions - Defense Reactions - Generic Actions To put it extremely simply, heroes go back and forth attacking one another with attack actions from their hand or their weapons, and they go on a combat chain where players go back and forth playing reactions until that chain resolves. Many cards also have a defense value in the bottom right hand corner and simply throw away that card at a given attack in order to reduce damage, and the aforementioned equipment often has the ability to mitigate some limited amount of damage over the course of an entire game. By default you get one action point to do something, and cards that say "Go Again" grant you another action but isn't explicitly an action point. The game ends when one hero's health reaches 0. If a player runs out of cards, the game doesn't end, but they simply don't have anything more to draw. With the exception of the first player's turn, players draw cards at the end of each of their turns up to the "intellect" value depicted on the bottom left of their hero. In most cases this is almost always 4, but can vary. At the end of their turn, before drawing, players can do invoke their inner Yu-Gi-Oh character and set a card face down in their "arsenal" akin to a trap card to be potentially played at some point in the future. Decks can only consist of cards which include the hero's class name or are explicitly labeled as generic. To pay for card costs, players "pitch" cards. Here's an example card, a staple generic action which is used in virtually every deck due to its power:  The top left shows what the card can be pitched for, and the top right shows the cost. Cards will also have red, yellow, or blue strips on top to show their pitch value of 1, 2, or 3, respectively (but the red orbs are always red). The top right shows how much it costs to play. In this case, Command and Conquer costs 2 and can be pitched for 1 to play other cards. The only time you can "float" your pitch amounts is if some remains from paying for another card, e.g. if a card costs 1 to play and you pitch a card for 3. Many cards in each set will often have variations of the same card, albeit with different stats. For example:    Pitched cards go to the bottom of the deck in a chosen order at the end of the turn. Each hero has its own sort of gimmick as far as play style goes; Guardians might be defensively oriented, Warriors offensive, or others like Mechanologists might try to cycle rapidly through their deck via specific mechanics. The third main set, Monarch, introduced talents, so rather than a Warrior, you have a Light Warrior with its own playstyle and action cards. Talented heroes can use their base class's cards, but a basic Warrior cannot use Light Warrior cards. If the latest release, Tales of Aria is any indication, sets now mainly just appear to have certain class and talent combinations, so if you like a certain class or hero, they may not get further support for a long time, if ever. There has been one supplemental set, Crucible of War, which is now out of print. If you want to know more about the actual game, go to the official website, because I don't want to write any more about this part. Part Two: The Finance To frame the finance part better, some context on sets and rarities will be provided. FAB sets have had both first editions and unlimited releases; first editions have an average of one "cold foil" per box where specific parts of the card and art have a treatment similar to the foil etching on Magic cards in terms of their appearance. Originally there were six rarities: common, rare, super rare, majestic, legendary, and fabled. Super rares were removed after a couple sets and there are now five, with rares effectively being uncommons. A standard pack will have two rares and one foil, with no guarantee of one card being anything above that rarity, or a cold foil in the case of first edition boxes. Pull rates on above-rare are roughly as follows: Majestic: 6-8 per box Legendary: 1 per 1-2 boxes Fabled: 1 per 35-40 boxes The most obvious problem is that a fabled rarity card could be devastating if one ends up being critical in a deck, but thus far that doesn't seem to be the case and they're mostly collectible. LSS publishes data on their releases, and first edition print runs have been as follows: Welcome to Rathe (WTR) - 400000 booster packs (16,666 boxes) Arcane Rising (ARC) - 400000 booster packs (16,666 boxes) Crucible of War (CRU) - 900000 booster packs (37,500 boxes) Monarch (MON) - TBA Tales of Aria (ELE) - TBA Aside from first edition, unlimited printings exist, but as of October 12th, CRU unlimited is now out of print. That set included some major staple reprints such as Fyendal's Spring Tunic from WTR, as well as new heroes, such as Shiyana, a legendary rarity hero of the Shapeshifter class with 20 HP geared towards blitz (although explicitly not good). Prices on such cards have spiked as a result. Unlimited printings also come out some indeterminate amount of time after the first edition, and in CRU's case it was about a full year before the unlimited printing was even announced, since it wasn't a sure thing to begin with. First edition cards are fully legal for competitive play on release, which could impact pricing for players needing cards, even if cold foils are intended to be collectibles. As we all know, Covid has basically hosed up the world for good and 2020 was a useless year, and of course every year after it. Despite coming out in 2019, FAB basically had no footing whatsoever and everything was dirt cheap. First edition WTR boxes were something like $80. When stimulus checks came out in mid-2020, people were looking for some things to invest in, and along with crypto, sports cards, TCGs, and other collectibles in general, FAB was marketed by people like Rudy (AKA Alpha Investments on YouTube) as the next big thing due to the small print runs. By the time hype for Monarch came out in March, cold foil cards like the original fabled card from WTR, Heart of Fyendal, was going for as much as around $40k. Some notable people in the community were real whales, including both Rudy and another guy named Saint Hung (AKA FaBled Hunters), who's a rich as hell fintech guy and has been in videos with both Rudy and James White. There's another few names but the short of it is that there are maybe half a dozen primary whales who own absolute shitloads of whatever sealed product is left, never mind rare singles. Just before MON's release, boxes of first edition on the market were going for as much as $650+ on sites like Channel Fireball or Star City Games. The set came out, cards and boxes flooded the market, and reception of the set as a whole was somewhat weak due to two of the heroes being bad, one being completely busted, and another just being okay. Boxes are now about $200-250 depending on where you look. In the interim months over the summer, various Magic content creators like Tolarian Community College have started to make more videos about the game, but the most recent set release, Tales of Aria, is barely at retail for its first edition, and reception appears somewhat lukewarm. Pretty much everything that isn't a cold foil or a major staple, of which there aren't all that many, is near worthless. However, the major staples such as Command and Conquer or legendary equipment can go for anywhere from $60-150+ a pop. The most recent thing going on involves Rudy selling what amounts to his own Secret Lair. A couple years back, Rudy worked with James White/LSS by backing them early on and they made him his own promo card: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4SXrBR8D4c The card in question:  In addition to this are some art cards of the fabled cards that were released, both gems, and another unseen one. These would only be available on Patreon and the price was $1000 with a limit of two, only available for 24 hours. with the unsold remainder to be destroyed. Due to apparent investor FOMO, he sold over 1300 of them, and now they're listed on eBay for over two grand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7w1q3y8cFY At this point, with this being more or less an overt scamming of people's money so he could make a cool million dollars, plus the sudden shutoff of a major supplemental set, the game is in a very weird place. This doesn't even begin to talk about shilling MetaZoo, which I'm not even going to get into here other than Rudy working with some guy to make a Pokemon TCG knockoff about cryptids that no one plays, for which early kickstarter boxes are listed in the thousands, with a bunch of garbage merchandise.
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Oct 13, 2021 17:31
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A big flaming stink posted:Isn't one of these major issues that equipment only appears at the second highest rarity? Generally yes. Every pack has one piece of equipment (I forget if it replaces a slot if it's legendary) but they do appear at other rarities, though generally weapons occupy majestic rarity slots as far as equipment goes. Often the difference is that the higher rarity equipment has passives whereas the common stuff blocks a piece of damage or does some simple one-time use thing before being destroyed. A good example using the Illusionist class, where the first is the card that comes with the precon deck for the class and then the legendary equipment from Monarch:   The first one isn't horrible or anything if you use the effect at the right time, but it simply isn't going to beat out the passive effect on the second one. Fyendal's Spring Tunic is the prime example of equipment that can actually be played by any class and is generally at absolute worst the second best option if there's a class-specific chest available which does something better (never mind the cold foil going for obscene amounts):  The WTR version is $220 on TCGPlayer, and CRU (non-foil reprint) is $210, both for the unlimited versions.
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Oct 13, 2021 18:25
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The only argument that the game is doing "well" is that their pro tournament called The Calling had one event in Vegas with about a thousand people and another one about to happen in Dallas, and everyone who wasn't there basically says "well if not for Covid, I'd have been there too!" although we'll never know if that's the actual truth in the end. The meta there was horrific and one hero was like 40% of it, with two heroes taking up over half. I didn't even mention it, but it was so bad that they banned all three pitch versions of one of the key cards in the deck, and preemptively banned a Runeblade weapon in the newest set (because they've put some form of a Runeblade in three main sets in a row for some reason), as it wasn't talent-specific and they basically said they didn't playtest it at all but rather shoved it in late for flavor purposes or something. That said, I think people's impressions are just going off the local community without considering that a thousand people doesn't really mean anything if a lot of big metros don't have much going on. Stores in my area finally sell it now but the product mostly just sits. Fundamentally it isn't a horrible game but I don't think the game is objectively good enough to even sit at #4 right now in the market (which most likely goes to Digimon at the moment from what I can tell) since it doesn't do anything particularly exciting and suffers from a problem similar to Vanguard regarding how support works, which also greatly inhibits innovative deckbuilding. Any TCG not based on a popular existing IP also has an even harder road, to boot. The decline has been dragging on but the gap in how explosive Monarch was leading up to release with how abysmal Tales of Aria sales are right now is really something. If you want to go full conspiracy theory economist, the promo and cutting off production of CRU was almost timed for something like this to create the dead cat bounce before everything finally goes to poo poo.
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Oct 13, 2021 18:56
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A big flaming stink posted:as in people buying boxes to immediately flip for egregious sums are not able to do so If you had any idea about the market and bought as many boxes as you could from Team Covenant for $76 each before Monarch released, you could have instantly sold them at release for a minimum of $300-350 a piece, and by that I mean posted on a Facebook marketplace group to sold in under 15 minutes. The set was arguably a dud because two of the heroes (Boltyn and Levia) sucked at a competitive level, and Chane dominated half the meta as a busted hero. A Prism player won the Vegas tournament but the hero didn't totally dominate the meta in the same way. Each set now is just a few new heroes with some combination of [Talent] [Class] that may or may not suck, and you're more likely to not see new toys for your favorite hero than anything else. You could say the same kind of thing happens in a popular game like Yu-Gi-Oh because of all the archetypes, but occasionally you get some cool new archetype or support for an existing one that works with your favorite when mashed together, so you find innovative strategies. Magic is another beast because of the color system unless you're explicitly trying to build a mill deck or something. To add, despite being an eternal format, the way FAB rotates so to speak is through hero bans based on how much they're winning over time, and one of the legendary cards in Monarch, was a card that while not-so-great required to be in a Chane deck, so when the hero's inevitably banned the card is completely useless and making it worth less than it already was. Leperflesh posted:In the world of stocks and finance, a very common practice is for analysts to disclose positions they have - or clearly state they have no position and will not be opening one - in any stock or investment vehicle they discuss. "I have 1000 shares of this stock" adds a critical context to a buy, hold, or sell recommendation, or a prediction of future price action, etc. This pertains somewhat, but some of FAB whales out there own absolutely obscene numbers of sealed product. At least one or two of the people closely tied to Rudy probably own thousands of various first edition boxes. Incredibly normal and healthy market.
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Oct 13, 2021 19:58
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Toshimo posted:Why is Crucible OoP? I thought they were keeping Unlimited runs going in perpetuity (of course they aren't). I don't even think the issue is about whether or not it runs forever, but that the unlimited printing only first came out three months ago after a year of not existing at all while containing a fair number of actively used staples and cards not in other sets. At this point it feels like LSS is either directly trying to manipulate the market by creating more FOMO hype or completely clueless.
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Oct 14, 2021 01:41
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Codeacious posted:Hah, I was in the middle of writing my own OP for this yesterday and glad I checked before writing the second half of it tonight. They announced those print runs and the implication was at the very least that it was not going to be in major supply to begin with, not that the unlimited printing would be cut short after three weeks. I want to iterate that personally I'd never expect a set labeled as unlimited to be literally that in terms of time, but short of a game shutting down I can't think of a good, recent example where a set release only lasted this long before going out of print, especially when it wasn't strictly composed of reprints and a number of the cards were staples. They've also now established a precedent for whenever the next supplemental set comes out, if ever, and people will assume that the print runs won't be either large or long, thus leading to the same exact hype bubble that Monarch had. Meanwhile Monarch is collecting dust. Jcam posted:I'm legitimately not very well tapped in to the money side of card games, so this is a sincere question: When you say the newest set hasn't been selling well, what do you mean? Referring to booster boxes, singles, or what? To be completely transparent, I've spent probably $40 on the game at this point, just on a pre-made deck, some card sleeves, and a couple of fun singles that looked good, so I'm probably the last person this game is now being (maliciously?) marketed to, so I'm not running in here out of breath to defend anything, I don't have any irons in the fire or whatever. I'm sorry I didn't address this earlier! By not selling well, to my last point, Monarch unlimited is collecting dust and Tales of Aria's first edition is basically at retail price. Because LSS has a minimum advertised pricing (MAP) that drops after a period of time, after Monarch unlimited came out there were a lot of deals going on where retailers would bundle unlimited boxes of WTR/ARC so that the price of all of them averaged out to maybe $60 just so that they could clear Monarch from their inventory. The EV of the box was probably about $20-30 unless you pulled one of 2-4 cards that had any value. Because the structure of the game is very much an exaggerated version of Vanguard with its clan system, without supplemental sets you might now go another 3-4 years without ever seeing a card that fits in a Light Warrior deck, since every set is going to end up introducing whatever talents they have coming out, e.g.: Monarch: Light/Shadow Tales of Aria: Elemental (Earth/Ice/Lighting) ???: Something Else WTR and ARC were basically just intro sets with talentless heroes in order to simplify learning the game for people. IIRC there's supposed to be something like eight talents and we've now seen three of them, so a bunch still have to be filled out and there's nothing stopping them from adding more. However, with the more that are added, the less likely you are to see support moving forward unless the supplemental sets are pretty huge, which could mean more room for something poorly tested to get through. If a set comes out and has unpopular class/talent combinations or a lackluster draft experience, perhaps like Tales of Aria (never mind the banned card), it's one more thing sitting on shelves.
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Oct 14, 2021 15:27
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Dr. Clockwork posted:I’m surprised it took this long for people to realize that Rudy is manipulating an unregulated market. He’s been doing this since the beginning. Hell he compared himself to the Wolf of Wall Street and clearly quit his own Wall Street job because of regulations. I’m constantly baffled when I see discussions from other FLGS owners thinking Rudy is helping them in any way. He did the same thing with Monarch. The Patreon bundle was $1000 and had two first edition boxes which were then valued based on the market at around $500 a pop, along with an included playmat and promo. The boxes tanked after release; the week of they were around $375-400, two weeks after maybe $325-350, and as far as I know without going to look it up, they're still all the way down in the $200-250 range depending on what kind of deal you find because the value just isn't there. Rudy had been offering to buy cases (four boxes) for $800 since. I don't think they'll go up very much, especially if the game dies, but he's rich enough where it doesn't really matter even if it all went to zero. There's another major issue with the community and secondary market having to do with cold foils and the grading boom. Because FAB card quality is pretty bad and collectors/investors are just sleeving from the outset to eventually grade them, every CF that someone lists will be judged even worse than you'd see with Magic. Edit: I should add that this adds another dynamic because then all that's left if you take away CFs are just the regular rainbow foils, with some minor exceptions where certain cards can have variants such as full/full-ish art in the first edition printings. At that point nothing is really special so there's essentially zero point in owning first edition cards unless the price difference is basically nothing or you really want that printing. triple sulk fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Oct 14, 2021 |
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Oct 14, 2021 16:40
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Toshimo posted:All else aside, LSS has effectively paid Rudy $1,400,000 in one instance to promote their game. That's not a "gift" or "thank you". It's quid pro quo. It's income. That's on top of the special sweetheart deals they gave him on all the other stuff he's pumped and dumped. FaBled Hunters (Saint, who's been in some of the box opening videos on Rudy's channel) is just as bad in a lot of ways. Just like how Rudy's had the MetaZoo guy on his videos, Saint has had James White on his channel. Just to give you an idea of how rich the guy is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDHeww4QPmQ Just in the first few seconds you can see 7 columns of six cases of WTR first edition, which is 168 boxes. Purely at retail cost, that's $14k worth. Assuming he owned no other cases and didn't open any of those on the first print run of WTR, that means he has 1% of the entire print run. If half of that print run (16,666 boxes) have been opened, which realistically might be a conservative estimate, you can double that number and presume he owns 2% of the entire remaining sealed boxes alone. That doesn't seem like much, but relatively speaking it's a lot, and he probably has more than just that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knCZoFWa0gE Totally cool and healthy thing for a person like this to have YouTube videos with the game creator, here. Like, owning this much stuff as one person is obscene and the very idea that Saint, Rudy, and a couple other guys control most of the secondary market for sealed product is comical.
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Oct 15, 2021 15:58
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Here's what people paid $1000 for and the promo doesn't even appear to be foiled https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MAjJJR7mVQ
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Oct 17, 2021 16:42
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very cool game that no one seems to know how to play even in top 8 with judges and casters watching
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Oct 17, 2021 20:10
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Covermeinsunshine posted:Apart from the whole finance thing, is this game actually any fun to play? Artwork looks kinda uninspired but what about mechanics? Like I said or implied the first post, I think the game suffers from fairly linear deckbuilding due to the small card pool and the fact that you're restricted to whatever class or generic cards are available. Generic cards could be interesting, but given the nature of combat, they're generally either so good that they fit into most or all decks (e.g. Command and Conquer) or not worth putting in over a class card because they won't boost the strength of your primary mechanic. I think if you like hero-oriented games that commander in Magic just has far more options and lets you find a commander that really resonates with you with a low risk of banning unlike with how FAB does it. Limited formats have seemed kind of bad so far where one hero is generally just a lot better than the others, and constructed before recent bans was even worse. The new Runeblade was 5/8 of the top 8 in the Dallas tournament, and while the Guardian player won, they had at least one "misplay" that was probably just cheating given the player experience level. To use Magic terms, they activated a sorcery speed ability on their equipment as instant speed in order to defend an attack that had a major swing in the game tempo.
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Oct 18, 2021 14:16
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Paul Zuvella posted:Rudy’s entire patreon is designed to grift people into spending massive amounts of money because of Fomo, because they might miss the amazing “deals”. And to reiterate, the kinds of deals we're talking about is one where the Monarch bundle was $1000 for two first edition boxes, a playmat, and a promo, and now all of those things together might get $600 if you're lucky and find a buyer. The set has lost almost all of its value and you now can still easily buy Tales of Aria for like $110 online because it's so widely available, which means the seller is probably breaking even at best. Some number of people probably preordered it poo poo at $200+.
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Oct 20, 2021 15:50
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7t7Sfiv0xo MetaZoo is going to be an even funnier scam than FAB
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Oct 30, 2021 16:42
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Captain Invictus posted:he still sold out of it all in about an hour, I guess. 
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Oct 30, 2021 16:59
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The wildest thing is at least two shops in my area are selling this garbage and I almost can't believe it.
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Oct 30, 2021 17:01
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PleasantDirge posted:More MZ drama This owns Long story short: supposedly the manufacturer is a place that makes counterfeit Magic cards
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Nov 2, 2021 20:52
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Lone Goat posted:apparently nobody actually knows how to play it though This isn't the first time as something happened in one of the other recent tournaments on stream and IIRC the same person won the entire thing. From what I can tell the major tournaments in the US are getting fewer and fewer people and the prizes are garbage. 1st place in the national championship gets a whopping $1500.
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Nov 3, 2021 02:32
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Toshimo posted:They are deliberately hiding the prize payouts for the National championships. It's supposed to have a total pool of $50,000, which extrapolated from their $10,000 "The Calling" Pool is probably in the neighborhood of $5,000 or so for first. However the real value is getting paid in The UK stream showed $1500 for first place and $1000 for the runner up, but either way and to your point they're probably assuming that the gold cold foils are somehow worth another ten grand or something on the secondary market.
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Nov 3, 2021 02:51
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ilmucche posted:How do you borderline cheat? Angle shooting as gently caress? There's a sometimes annoying number of triggers and things going on even if the board state itself doesn't build up all that much, so it could have to do with that. The rules are sometimes way too complicated (or at least confusing) for a game that's a couple years old.
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Nov 3, 2021 15:53
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HootTheOwl posted:It's not figuratively a pokemon knock-off. My long running assumption has been that the second any actual growth occurs for the game, Nintendo/The Pokemon Company send a C&D and everything gets shut down instantly.
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Nov 3, 2021 15:54
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Toshimo posted:Nah. The game's more YGO than Pokemon.  Looks like Pokemon to me
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Nov 3, 2021 16:00
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Unless we're talking about the actual game itself, which then maybe it is, but no one actually plays it and I think that includes the creator
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Nov 3, 2021 16:02
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Tangentially related, Steve Aoki is absolutely in on the pump and dump right now with the TCGPlayer partnership https://www.tcgplayer.com/featured-collections/steve-aoki This is all gonna tank hard soon, isn't it, especially given that Celebrations is probably going to be printed into the ground.
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Nov 3, 2021 16:05
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I can't believe how people just love making him even richer and that he won't ever need to sell a single Magic card because of how much he's made off just FAB and MetaZoo in the last six months
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Nov 5, 2021 14:40
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  Very cool and healthy game here
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Nov 8, 2021 18:50
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Apparently MetaZoo is landing in Walmart next year so we'll get to see if they get hit with the C&D soon from Nintendo.
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Nov 11, 2021 19:52
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And now Arcane Rising is out of print. Arcanite Skullcap is getting a reprint but it's still going to be legendary rarity, so lol at perpetuating the problem
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Nov 12, 2021 00:32
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Tarnop posted:Absolutely hilarious to me that a defining feature of this game's business model was supposed to be unlimited reprints and they ditched it the moment it became convenient to do so. A few points here: I think the unlimited terminology was disingenuous or misinterpreted from the get go; unlimited wasn't something they'd print for 10-20 years, but given the game is still supposed to be growing and Arcane Rising still isn't that old a set, it seems a bit goofy to announce it going OOP. To make matters worse, people are excited about the reprint of Arcanite Skullcap based on the article (with a different set code) but are ignoring the fact that it's still a legendary which means it isn't going to be any cheaper unless far more boxes are opened, and that's still not a guarantee unless the game and market completely die. They could and should have done the Konami/Yu-GI-Oh approach and downshifted the rarity, but surprise, they did absolutely nothing to differentiate it besides the rarity icon. No new art or anything like that unless it's a mock image no representative of the final product, but I doubt that's the case. Even in Magic you'll often see shifts up or down in rarity but at least the art is different. YGO has the benefit of foil treatments on different rarities too so they'll often upshift rarities in special tin sets and such for players to bling out decks. Lastly, much with Crucible of War, I think they may realize that the meta is poo poo and most of the cards are generally worth nothing on the secondary market, so they're trying another last gasp boost to value by deeming it out of print. I'm not sure why this happened before WTR other than beyond trying to get fewer new people to play with a Runeblade. I presume this will do the same thing that happened with CRU where you'll see a small bump and then it'll start to bottom out. A lot of people who aren't investors appear pissed off by the poor communication and I suspect they'll go back to Magic or some other game soon enough.
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Nov 12, 2021 14:28
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ShaneB posted:Game good. Game dead and only two worthless sets are in print any more
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Dec 4, 2021 06:58
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The price spikes haven't really happened because the total player base size is extremely small and the rarity system is garbage. Unlimited really just means "indeterminate total print run to end at some point in time" which is pretty much every TCG ever, but reprinting Arcanite Skullcap at legendary rarity again doesn't solve the problem at all, especially when it's in a supplementary set. In my personal view, putting 3/5 sets out of print was a last minute ditch to boost the secondary market, and the game is effectively dead and no one will care about it any more by this time next year.
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Dec 7, 2021 18:18
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Dr. Clockwork posted:You could always fire up another thead for FAB fans and discussion of the actual game, but I imagine the finance drama will leak into that pretty quickly. Doesn't hurt to try though? The thread would get half a dozen posts a month at best and fade into obscurity, much like the game is currently doing
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Dec 10, 2021 19:31
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Drowning Rabbit posted:I cannot fathom anyone making money 'investing' in MetaZoo or FaB at this point. The stickers are already in now, and trying to get more suckers to buy your poo poo at this point is going to be harder. I've never seen anyone playing FaB near me, but at least it's available. MetaZoo is something I've only seen online. If probably but one pack to just like at the ridiculously rear end art and silly rules, but not to play the game. Digimon seems fine but it suffers pretty bad from power creep from what I understand and it's made by Bandai who have a history of poorly managing TCGs There's no money left in FaB. It's arguably dead in the water at this point. Monarch is worthless after its massive pump and withheld inventory, Tales of Aria was a bit above MSRP and plummeted back down at release, the new set looks stupid, and it's becoming harder and harder for paper TCGs to succeed to begin with, especially given Covid. MZ was always a scam but its peak was probably at or just after FaB's.
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Jan 26, 2022 05:14
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LaSquida posted:I enjoy Arena and Alchemy, but Wizards has clearly left what's left of the professional scene out to die. For people with a lotol of time l, effort, and money invested into it, that must really hurt. I'm sure Hearthstone has had some decent payouts in the digital space, but as far as paper goes I can't really think of a single TCG in history that's been anything anyone could make an actual career out of. It looks like the all-time Magic earnings leader is at a million dollars or so, but it drops off heavily and by #20 there's 2-3 years' salary for someone who wants to be able to live in some of the most expensive parts of the US. The whole concept of being a "pro" at these games seems shortsighted at best and I get why WOTC has basically dropped it. In the same vein it's why I think LSS is dumb, to put it bluntly, to think that they can do any different when their prize support so far seems pretty pitiful for the cost in terms of travel and lodging for players. This excludes all of the really bad decisions they've made thus far regarding the game itself.
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Jan 26, 2022 16:42
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Toshimo posted:Much like eSports, the idea is that you supplement your meager cash winnings with sponsorships. So, the "earnings" isn't actually that relevant. (BTW, that's how a lot of competitive sport/game industries work) I get that, and I could be wrong, but I can't imagine as many sponsors for something like a TCG. It's not like PC games where you have a million different companies making computer parts or accessories. With paper TCGs you're more or less limited to sleeves and deck boxes, and I don't see Ultra Pro or Dragon Shield needing to fork out a lot of cash because they own the market and people buy their stuff any way due to so few decent options. If Magic dies I don't think the TCG industry totally goes, but there won't be as much value in anything. Japanese TCGs will probably stick around with their usual niches if only because of theming, at least.
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Jan 26, 2022 17:39
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Anecdotally I've found that certain parts of the US are much more amenable to holding events and selling products of TCGs not in the big three. You seem to hear a lot about communities for games in Texas, but the upper midwest in general seems to be that way too. There are exceptions (major metros where you might have enough shops to find one or two places), but a lot of those places are still pretty heavy on Magic. That's why you'll occasionally hear the game is doing great when there's barely any new content that isn't from the same dozen individuals. It's a bad time all around for paper TCGs given Covid and anything that isn't Magic will become harder and harder to find games for. You can go look at the Yu-Gi-Oh thread as a good example of the power of digital games, which with the release of Master Duel has picked up a ton of steam relative to how slow it was previously, with a few pages of posts alone in the week it's been out. Konami seems to want to make a move in that direction with support for competitive play. Games are moving in that direction now whether people like it or not, and I don't think FAB survives all that much longer aside from being some mostly dead also-ran, which it kind of already is. The 2020 collector bubble popped somewhat hard and people will probably be pretty apprehensive moving forward.
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Jan 28, 2022 17:58
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