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It’s possible the historical moment is weird enough that FAB will buck the trend, but my experience is that it’s overwhelmingly bad strategy to quickly go to big payouts like that. You tend to successfully bribe some sharks and dissatisfied Magic pros to play your game for a little bit but don’t tend to develop the casual play groundswell that actually sustains a game. Magic’s pro scene was healthy because the casual scene is huge, not vice versa.
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Nov 3, 2021 07:20
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LeafHouse posted:Magic did that after the game had blown up though. Cutting their OP program left a big opening in the market and I don't think it's entirely foolhardy for FAB to pounce on that as a selling point. It being a “big opening in the market” assumes that money-driven top level play actually generates revenue. Unless you can get a lot of sponsors somehow, it just doesn’t - it’s a marketing expense. There’s no opening in the market because it’s not a product you sell. Organized play in general can drive sales, and having a tied-in top level can drive grassroots play, but doing it top down like that just lights money on fire.
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Nov 4, 2021 00:04
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MTG also has limited-time printings, but they try to make the product available during that time. Like, there might be a short-term shortage of a current set, but it's been a long time since a set went truly out of print (ie, no reprints) much before rotating out of standard. Availability has been spottier lately, but that's not policy on their part, it's failure, apparently due to both the current global production issues and also due to them vastly increasing the size of their product catalog. (And even then, they've been consistently available through WOTC's official Amazon store, they just have not been as consistently available to shops, sigh.) It'd be very unusual for WOTC to just announce out of the blue and on no schedule that a set had "gone out of print;" when they print a set they announce either that it's a supplemental set with a single printing, in which case you know that if you don't get it initially you're getting it at second market rates, or it's a standard-legal normal set, in which case you can be pretty confident they'll go back to print on it if needed throughout a predictable period (roughly a year).
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Dec 5, 2021 23:42
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triple sulk posted:The price spikes haven't really happened because the total player base size is extremely small and the rarity system is garbage. At least MTG’s prints don’t work like that, though - the point is generally determinate and corresponds with when the set rotates out of standard. If you can play a card in your standard deck, you can generally buy the pack it comes from. Not that I disagree over the larger point but I can see why, even compared to mtg, the “oh this is out of print now” thing is jarring.
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Dec 8, 2021 17:57
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Tarnop posted:I realise that I didn't make it clear what the point of the second paragraph of my post was. It'd be incredibly stupid for anyone to replicate the Reserve List because WOTC doesn't benefit from it. (That somehow their lawyers have managed to stop what has to be an alliance between the suits and the designers to lift it is frankly shocking to me - it's a policy that's bad for everyone who doesn't already own the things on it.)
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Dec 9, 2021 03:44
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That ChannelFireball has MetaZoo videos boggles my mind and really highlights how rough/weird the Magic ecosystem has gotten, too. WOTC's made a lot of eyebrow-raising decisions but COVID and especially it just dragging on with no end in sight seems like an extinction-level event for the way these games used to work, and perhaps even the games themselves, sadly.
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Jan 26, 2022 05:20
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HootTheOwl posted:I think its just them searching for an MTG replacement. I own an LGS, I’m with you on MTG’s trajectory being worrying. But I’m pretty sure when it dies, it won’t be another paper CCG that captures most of that market share.
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Jan 26, 2022 17:22
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Toshimo posted:When it dies, how much of the rest of the industry tanks with it? Probably virtually all of the local stores on the community-space model, board games and RPGs are on an upswing but they just don’t have the kind of sales volume MTG does. Unclear about what knock-on effects of that are. (And of course WOTC systematically cutting us out and so forth might do that even if MTG carries on.) Maybe I’m overstating but my own business would definitely be badly hurt by an MTG collapse. And I don’t mean singles which I don’t do a ton with, I just mean sealed product sales.
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Jan 26, 2022 18:06
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Yeah and part of the issue I think is that MTG’s singles market is pretty unusual and enabled heavily by the history of the game allowing it to support multiple formats plus a pure collectibility/speculation market for old garbage cards. It’s just not possible to jump start that situation IMO, which is one reason new similar games will struggle to fill the space even if MTG collapses. Doubly so, of course, because at this point the instant that happens comparisons to Magic will stop having the same kind of value. All these new games benefit from the dream of being on the Black Lotus ground floor this time, and if Magic goes it’ll damage that a lot.
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Jan 26, 2022 18:42
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:I spent a year hitting up events in the tri-state area with a group of friends, anyone that qualified for day 2 typically received an offer of $250-800 bucks (depending on size of event and placement) to wear a branded shirt just in case they got a spotlight match. The very top players maybe, but unless things have changed a whole lot since I was running qualifiers in the mid-20teens, not really up to anything like a sustainable level. And of course that sort of ad hoc sponsorship doesn't really help at all if you want to be an actual pro, because you can't reasonably do something as a job if all your payouts are contingent on having a good tournament in a game where there's a pretty serious soft cap on win rates at high level events of ~70%. I know a fair number of very successful Magic folks and virtually none of them got by without a day job even when there was the pro player's club that guaranteed qualification and sometimes even appearance fees for pro tours. Lots had day jobs that were related to the game, writing being the most popular but card dealing, etc, not that uncommon, but it's never been anything like pro athletes where your whole job is practicing for events and then competing. Maybe for a few hall of fame players during the time they were totally focused on the game, but we're talking about probably single digit numbers of people at any given time. The only time it seems to have been feasible was the MPL era, and of course there were big problems with that too, both presumably in the cost to WOTC and in that it was such an elite group that the aspirational value was quite low.
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Jan 27, 2022 00:01
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HootTheOwl posted:Going pro wasn't the only aspiration. Simply getting recognized as 'good enough' is aspirational. Oh sure, and they definitely could have supplemented the MPL era with other aspirational stuff that was more achievable, I'm just noting that as a way to ensure you get a certain number of actual pros, one of the down sides was that the small number meant that particular part of the system wasn't very aspirational.
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Jan 27, 2022 00:48
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Fantastic Foreskin posted:There were enough people who wanted to be one to support paywalled strategy articles and $100-200 Goyfs. It was by any metric a dumb aspiration, but there were plenty of 18-25 year old ubernerds who wanted to play Magic for a living badly enough to support the ecosystem. Sure, and my point is that the MPL era damaged that because, compared to the prior systems, it was vastly less clear how one might get to the highest levels of play. Though that said, paywalled strategy articles and expensive cards aren't solely (or likely even primarily) motivated by that kind of aspiration. It certainly contributes, but there are plenty of ludicrously expensive cards that are commander staples, and people are certainly willing to pay subscription fees just to be FNM heroes or (even more importantly) just read about the game they're passionate about. I think it's a mistake to say there's a single cause of any of this, it's just that several of these factors are in crisis at the same time between COVID, prioritization of Arena, and so forth.
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Jan 27, 2022 02:35
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HootTheOwl posted:So where I'm at there's no flesh and blood secene at all. I'm not even seeing it on shelves. Part of it is that, at least last time I checked, it’s in pretty limited distribution in the US. I’d have gotten some in if I could just to try, but none of my current distributors carried it last I looked, and my store is too small to make adding one for a single CCG without an extant local base worth it.
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Jan 28, 2022 17:22
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