[THENATHE]

I really miss 2016 MtG. I remember when full art lands and full art promos were RARE and with money for no reason other than their collectability. I really liked when cards were rare because of the fact that they were good and uncommon and maybe because they were the same as the regular card but foil, not because they were arbitrarily a different type of shiny, or like when that one card from Kamigawa had a different color neon border that made it spike to 3k for a while, let alone the new serialized cards.

I wish we could go back to that, because I was so excited about collecting cards back then. Nowadays I feel like unless I open a pack with a crazy reprint or a REALLY lucky list card, there are essentially no cards worth anything. I remember pulling some shock lands and even when they were only 8 bucks it felt really great, like it was gambling. Now, I only ever get packs of remastered sets, and standard sets are wholly uninteresting. I do a $40 draft and get $3 worth of cards, and it is to be seen if these EVER go up in value.

I still love the game, and I play it more than ever. But there are three groups of people: investors, people that realize it is a TCG, and people that think all cards should be worthless. The first is greedy, the middle is realistic, and the latter is idealistic. But I am solidly in the middle, and there is so much pushing on both sides that the middle group is demonized for wanting to play a game and have cards have relative value too.

[__turbobrew__]

I prefer having cheap cards. You are paying for the experience not the cards when you draft.

What I don’t like is wotc printing new powerful cards in non-standard sets. Modern horizons, commander sets, etc print absolutely must play busted cards but the sets are limited print quantity and artificially scarce.

If it was up to me all new cards would be printed in standard sets and supplemental sets are reprints only.

2016 magic was nice because you could play reserved list cards without having to sell a kidney…

[Panzer04]

Part of the point is that a lot of these cards would be busted in standard though, so printing straight to modern is a way to still get these kinds of cards out without powercreeping the standard of the day.

[bart_spoon]

There’s only two camps, investors and gamers. I think that anyone who wants to “have cards that have relative value” are investors, whether they realize it or not. Its one thing to collect because you like something inherent about the cards themselves (I recall a recent Reddit post where the user was trying to collect every single Magic card that depicted an owl in any way). But if your concern is about the monetary value of the cards in your collection, you are an investor, of some kind.

I personally think cards should be for playing, and am pretty opposed to cards being valuable if that means that playing the actual game becomes prohibitively expensive. Standard decks costing hundreds of dollars is not a good thing.

[TacticalCoder]

> There’s only two camps, investors and gamers.

It's not that black and white. I used to play the game in the mid nineties. The most expensive card I bought back then I paid the equivalent of 5 EUR (the Euro didn't even exist yet) because I needed it for a deck but that card came out before I started playing.

I'm not an investor in MtG cards. But my collection went up in value. Nothing crazy (I don't have any of the "power nines") but with 28 dual lands, the most valuable card from Legends (The Tabernacle At Pendrell Vale) and the most valuable card from Arabian Night (Bazaar of Baghdad) and a few others, I'm sitting easily on 20 K EUR atm.

I didn't do it on purpose: I simply never got rid of my cards, not paying attention to the price. I just like my old cards and they bring me back memories when I look at them.

I'm take it I'm in a third category: nostalgic people who simply like their very own (and very old) cards.

[marricks]

An emotional investor is still an investor, and I think people like you are specifically a lot of the reason MTG/Hasboro wants it to be collectible.

It's the "oh this card is valuable because it's powerful, and has good art, AND everyone else thinks it's monetarily valuable which justifies my nostalgia of it"

It's a weird example of how money messes things up. The "it's good in and my deck and has emotional value" should be enough because scarcity makes it hard for the 13 year old with only spare lunch money to get into EDH.

[brightball]

This would have been me. My old collection would have been worth $30k+ today…if I hadn’t gotten rid of them 25 years ago.

[coffeebeqn]

On the other hand- I played in 1999 and looks like my collection would be worth probably less than what I sold it for at the time

[brightball]

The cards that I remember having, specifically 4 of every dual land (about $800 / each as of a couple of years ago) and my most valuable card at the time...a Time Twister ($1,500 now) make up the bulk of it. I don't remember what all else I had.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

https://old.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/13gihbr/today_i_f...

for the owl collector, who at the time of posting seems to have missed a few.

[larksimian]

This sounds good but doesn't actually make sense, like most corporate money-grabs. If cards accumulate in value, everyone is essentially playing for free(or indeed being paid to collect cards since generally the market rose faster than inflation). Everyone can sell their collection and if the secondary market is healthy they can get back what they spent on it and more.

This is the fundamental scam of the game-piece idea: it kills the secondary market and basically means instead of having the option to recycle your old decks into new ones you have to always pay $50/deck or whatever Hasbro is selling decks for.

[gigaflop]

I enjoy having high-value cards in my collection, but the best way to show them off is in a deck that uses them well. I'm not throwing my Surge Foil copy of The One Ring in a random Commander deck.

[j4yav]

I think you can not be an investor and like the gambling aspect. And I personally wouldn't consider gamblers investors.

[johnnyanmac]

>Its one thing to collect because you like something inherent about the cards themselves

I mean, isn't that a collector? I doubt there are more "investors" than "people who thought the card looked cool". A collector might turn into an investor, but people who aren't looking to flip their cards in months time are more likely to be a "collector". So for there card and art quality is key.

If you want my anecdote: I never seriously played YGO but there was a point where I tried to get every single Blue Eyes I could grab. I didn't care about mint condition or even the dozen of rarities. I just wanted to see the different ways Blue eyes was portrayed, even if it was the same exact card with different art.

[THENATHE]

I mean, I wouldnt care if all of the cards were worthless as long as all of the packs are free. Winning tournaments (esp local ones) currently feels bad and unrewarding because a pack of cards is $5 to buy but contains $0 value. Investing implies buying and selling for the sake of profitmaking, whereas I really like the idea of cards fluctuating in value due to organic changes in the game so that you can trade a doubling season for 2 tutors, and then if for some reason one of those tutors goes for a long time without a reprint, you may be able to trade that tutor for a doubling season and another tutor! Like, Im not gonna go on to TCG player and buy cards for the sake of speculatively investing and holding value, but it doesnt feel good when packs are $5 a piece and contain $0.50 of cards. It feels even worse to draft for $40 and walk away with $3. ON AVERAGE a pack of magic cards should hold its value, and over time eventually go up.

Meaning if I spend $500 on packs of cards, I should get $500 worth of cards on the secondary market immediately (or even slightly less, like $300 would be reasonable), and then if I hold that for 5 years, it should be like $700. This is how it has been for all of magic's history pre-Throne of Eldraine (nothing particular about that set, but that is the last set that I really see this happening on)

[gymbeaux]

My theory is that all cards will eventually be under $10, because cards like Mana Crypt are opportunities for WoTC to make money via reprints. I’ve only been playing/buying since March, but I’ve seen so many cards dropping dramatically in price, much more often than seeing a card shoot up in price. Reprints help drive sales and justify the higher prices for booster packs.

Cutting staff implies that, perhaps, they anticipate more Universes Beyond and reprints, and fewer original sets with original mechanics. Universes Beyond is great for Wizards because they don’t have to really invent cards, and fans will pay whatever they ask for cards from their favorite shows and movies and games.

This month people are losing their minds over the Princess Bride and Dr. Malcolm Secret Lair sets.

[Yhippa]

They're in a tough spot because they have to keep several audiences happy: collectors and players. Players generally want the cheapest set pieces while collectors want the value of their collection to grow. I think WotC has done a decent job trying to satisfy both groups and are at least trying different things. As an investor, you should be happy about that. Whether or not this sea change of releases over the pandemic helps or hurts the long-term health of the game is a worry of mine.

[solardev]

I wish playing with third-party "proxy" cards were more accepted (like https://mtg-print.com/set/fallout or https://proxyking.biz/), where you can get any card custom-printed for a dollar or so. Maybe I just have to find a group where nobody cares about collecting.

If WotC did that first-party, I'd buy a shit ton from them even if they had zero resale value. But I guess that would eat into their collectibles and gacha pack market.

[masklinn]

At least in commander casual it seems pretty well accepted.

And with how extensive some alters are, their proxy nature may not be distinguishable (although I don’t think you should mislead people, just be upfront and if you don’t mind bring fallback decks).

[gpderetta]

It might actually be more accepted in competitive EDH (and pretty much required) as most people can't be expected mortgage their homes to buy a deck full of expensive reserve list cards[1] :D. It helps that cEDH is not a sanctioned format.

[1] cEDH is sometimes called singleton multiplayer vintage for a reason.

[masklinn]

I would not be shocked, but I know nothing about cEDH while I have at least some acquaintance with EDH.

Also talking about singleton vintage is a bit funny when vintage is the only format with a restricted list (and thus in a way the original format with singleton restriction).

[Eridrus]

The monopoly profit maximizing price for a card is going to depend on the precise shape of the demand curve for each individual card; It may be $10 it may be $50; the fact that they could crash the price whenever they want does not mean it is in their interests to do so.

[gymbeaux]

So my thinking is that if they control supply (they do of course), they control demand, and that there is no “per-card” demand curve. If a card is reprinted and drops from $100 to $50, they can reprint until it’s $10

[Eridrus]

I think you do not understand what a demand curve is and should look up some econ 101.

The demand curve is how many of a given card customers (in aggregate) would buy at a given price.

Wizards could reprint any card into the ground if they wanted to (which would be far below $10), but that would likely not be the strategy that generated them the most profit, and there's no actual reason to think $10 is the price point that would do so either.

[gymbeaux]

Asking someone to look up Econ 101 isn't necessary to make your point.. You probably knew what I meant. You probably knew that my point is they control the supply, so they control the price- the equilibrium price if you like.

[thaumasiotes]

> This month people are losing their minds over the Princess Bride and Dr. Malcolm Secret Lair sets.

Wonderful art on the Princess Bride set.

I can't help but notice that if Inigo Montoya gets into combat with the Man in Black... he'll win.

[gymbeaux]

Purely a consequence of using existing creatures as templates I’m sure

[gigaflop]

I dropped $200 on Dr Malcolm and some others for the Locust God promo. I'm very happy with it all, and now get to build an Egglord deck with Jeff Goldblum's face on it.

And, if you've only experienced a few set releases, price swings will seem weird. Keep in mind that more boxes will be opened for a while, thus making more copies of coveted things available. It's a different story when a set goes out of print.

[gymbeaux]

I haven’t been around long, but based on what I see at local game stores, it seems like they’re still printing sets going back to 2021… so they print a set for 2-3 years typically?

[gymbeaux]

I’m building a Dr. Malcolm deck as well! He’d be a great Dino commander if he were more colors.

Tasha’s Hideous Laughter as him laughing in the helicopter is chef’s kiss

[solardev]

Why don't you buy singles?

(Not trying to be snarky. Just started playing a few months ago and that seems to be the best way to make decks without gambling. What's the point of buying packs?)

[dragontamer]

> What's the point of buying packs?

Draft is probably the best MtG style of playing.

A lot of MtG turns into pay-to-win, since the best cards of the meta inevitably cost more. Drafting on the other hand, ensures that everyone has zero-cards upon the start of the draft and have to make due with the booster-cards that come in the draft.

In many ways, drafting is cheaper. You don't have to worry about making the best deck ever... instead you just have to make the best deck given the cards you draft. Then you can sell the expensive singles after the draft.

[solardev]

As a beginner, I think the drafts are a really unfriendly format that heavily biases experienced players (who know how different mechanics can combo each other, useful counters, deck balance, etc. by heart). I tried that with friends a few times but it was like trying to learn a new game every time, as fast as possible, so you can out-pick the cards before someone else grabs them. Personally I felt it shifted the gameplay from tactical card playing to race-to-viability in drafting.

In non draft games, either self made decks or pre-cons, you can spend time studying your deck and optimizing it before actual play starts. In drafts, much of the actual gameplay IS the drafting and gambling. The actual decks that get built are usually uninteresting, just fast aggressive combos that play like starter decks.

Thankfully I discovered Commander pre-cons, easily upgraded with some cheap singles, and have a lot of fun with that. Especially in 2v2 or free for all. It's all the stuff I love about card games (the deck building and tactics) without gambling. I'd much rather spend $50 on a precon and another $20 or so on singles, knowing exactly what I'll get, than buy or draft a bunch of random packs that almost never give me a useful deck in the end.

Just a matter of taste, I guess. I wish Magic weren't even collectible, personally, but a limited card game like the Fantasy Flight ones (game of thrones, arkham, etc.)

[rtkwe]

Personally even as a player who's pretty good at piloting a deck I dislike draft because it a) requires a good knowledge of the set I don't have the time or inclination to build to know what strategies are supported well b) has a lot of skill in reading 'signals' to have an idea of what colors are being heavily pulled from early enough to change directions and c) gluing that pile of cards into a deck that can be even a little fun to play or have a chance of winning.

[dragontamer]

It sounds like you don't know what to look for in Drafts.

On the 1st cycle, decks are passed to your right. Remember which colors are getting passed to you, especially on turn 7+ in the Draft. this tells you which colors players on your left are _NOT_ going.

On the 2nd cycle, booster-packs are passed to your left. Same same, you're getting information from the other side of the table, so you know what to hate-draft (a draft-pick to hurt someone, rather than help yourself) in the 3rd phase.

The drafting phase also tells you which bombs and removal cards to look out for. Of course, 1st deck / 1st pick bombs are always taken and are fully secret, but 3rd round, its unlikely that the rare is going to be in the colors of your left-side opponent. So there's a good chance that the rare-to-your-left is passed to you, giving you information on what that opponent has drafted (whether that card matched their deck or not).

There are also incredibly powerful commons (ex: Lightning Bolt a few years ago...) that would be 1st-draft 1st-pick and better than the rare. So if you're 2nd pick and there's a good rare on the passed deck, it means the person to your left is likely going red/lightning bolt 1st pick.

Or in another set, when Doom Blade was in format, that'd be the 1st-pick / 1st draft card as a very powerful removal spell despite being a common.

> that almost never give me a useful deck in the end.

But everyone has the same condition in a draft. The card pool is closed: everyone had access to the same card pool and is therefore nearly fair. Obviously if your 1st pack / 1st pick was much better than everyone else's, that's a bit of the luck to the draft.

The "goal" of Draft is to pick the color that "the table has ignored". If your 7 other opponents are white, red, blue, green, red, green, and white... then you can pickup all the powerful black-cards. The "winner" of the draft will likely be fought between blue vs black (the only two "uninterrupted drafters") in the table that set.

There's only so many good cards for any given strategy. If *EVERYONE* goes early-aggro / rushdown (IE: White/Red/Green), then the one guy who drafted all the control cards (Blue/Black) probably just beats everyone at the table.

-----------

I'd say the main problem with Draft is the unbalanced nature of it all. If you're sitting to the right of a newbie who passes you good cards (or is otherwise ignorant of the Drafting format), you end up building a deck far more powerful than everyone else.

IE: The biggest advantage you can get in a Draft is sitting to the right of a newbie (2x rounds where you pass to the right). The 2nd biggest advantage is sitting to the left of a newbie (1x round where you pass to the left).

But if everyone at the table is of roughly the same skill level, its a great format. The drafting phase innately self-balances, as everyone is picking (and changing their picks) in relation to what they've been passed.

---------

> I'd much rather spend $50 on a precon and another $20 or so on singles,

Competitive decks "in the meta" are closer to $200 to $500 in my experience. 60x cards, and a chunk of them cost $20 to $80.

Preparation and Money ruins the game since you're just buying up known combos and 4x of the best $50 cards that on the last tournament...

[solardev]

> It sounds like you don't know what to look for in Drafts.

[snip]

Yeah, exactly. It's that whole meta-game I have zero interest in (competitive card-picking, as opposed to competitive card-playing). Just different strokes for different folks and all that.

> I'd say the main problem with Draft is the unbalanced nature of it all. [...] But if everyone at the table is of roughly the same skill level, its a great format.

That makes sense, especially in MTG where there are like 20,000 cards to choose from. The P2W can definitely come out.

Ironically that's actually one of the reasons I prefer another card game, Elder Scrolls: Legends (https://bethesda.net/game/legends), a Morrowind/Oblivion-themed digital card game that's technically "collectible", but they stopped making new cards a few years ago. Now it's just the same set of a few hundred old cards, but people still keep coming up with new metas without spending any more money. It's awesome, and there are no new overpowered cards to be surprised by, just interesting new uses of them. Despite having been technically abandoned, the community is still very active (no more than 20-30 seconds to find a match, which is sometimes faster than even MTG Arena!)

I feel like MTG suffered the opposite fate, where it became a victim of its own runaway success, and draft was popularized amongst older players who got sick of trying to keep up with the incessant power creep. Is that fair?

[dragontamer]

> Now it's just the same set of a few hundred cards, but keep still come up with new metas without spending more money.

That's called a "Cube" in Magic the Gathering.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/building-your-firs...

https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Cube_Draft

We draft Cubes from our old collections all the time, to help recycle our older cards.

> That makes sense, especially in MTG where there are like 20,000 cards to choose from. The P2W can definitely come out. > Now it's just the same set of a few hundred cards, but keep still come up with new metas without spending more money.

A typical Draft's card pool is only ~300ish cards or so, whatever is in the newest set. Its actually small enough to memorize.

You don't draft booster-cards from all of MtG. A Draft is innately around the ~300ish cards of some set. Lost Caverns of Ixalan only consists of 291 cards.

[extraduder_ire]

I have always found it funny how there's a game format that requires you to buy new cards to play it. Though I doubt they invented it, it really works out for those selling the cards.

I'm sure there's a guide out there somewhere for repacking cards you already own though. Hopefully one that doesn't need one person to do it and not play because they know which cards are included.

[gigaflop]

I prefer a rich man's draft: Buy a box for myself, and see what I can cobble together.

- A magpie, with approx $300 of MtG on my desk rn

[THENATHE]

I do almost exclusively by singles. That doesnt mean that a) winning packs from tournaments and LGS FNM doesnt feel satisfying or fun or valueable, and b) it wasnt fun to gamble on getting good value out of all pre-Throne of Eldraine sets, or c) that draft doesnt feel like a complete waste of money considering it is usually $30-50 buy in and winning gets you like 3 packs ($50 for 6 packs of cards each worth under a dollar feels bad). There used to be a lot of fun to be had in paying $10 for an FNM entry, getting a pack from entering, paying an extra $10 to get 2 more packs and rolling the dice. Sometimes you got trash, other times you got $50 worth of cards, but it was at least fun because there was a chance of good cards. Now, even if the card is very playable it still has no value.

[nextlevelwizard]

If you are exclusively buying singles that screams to me you are just powergaming and netdecking your decks instead of actually figuring out the game and playing it.

Sure you can get a better deal that way - meaning a higher win rate deck while spending less money, but a lot of the fun of MtG is (or at least was when I played) the discovery of new cards in the set, trading cards with your gaming group(s), and trying to build the best deck(s) you collectively had access to. When people started to just look what wins tournaments and just order whole decks as singles from web stores it ruined the hobby.

A) There was less cards to go around for the rest of us

B) they were just playing something someone else designed and play tested and tuned for GP or PT

[solardev]

I actually just enjoy building decks that are interesting in some way, and singles let me do that without going bankrupt.

I don't know what netdecking is (buying singles to make someone else's posted deck? no fun in that). I don't play competitively and I don't care about the meta or anything, I just have the most fun arranging decks to fit some purpose without having to gamble.

For what it's worth, the decks I've built weren't really meant to win (they rarely do), but to explore some aspect of Magic I felt interesting. An example one is a Mindflayers copy deck that just spawns a bunch of mind flayers and copies them and takes over enemy creatures one at a time. It almost never works (it's easy to counter and has a slow ramp), but in the rare instances it succeeds, it's fun to watch. I only built that deck because I was really enjoying Baldur's Gate 3.

I only started playing Magic a few months ago, and the pay to win aspect had zero appeal to me. I have no interest in collecting and selling cardboard cards, I just want to design fun new decks and experiment with them. Singles and proxies make that possible.

People who play Magic the random gamble way are IMO playing a different game. That's fine, just not what I'm into :)

[gigaflop]

I copped this version of the Hidetsugu you're thinking of for $30 at my LGS a few weeks ago: https://scryfall.com/card/neo/432/hidetsugu-devouring-chaos

Prices of swaggy stuff is always irrational until the smallest attention spans have moved on.

I assume you know about Collector Packs, those are my favorites for splashing a chunk of money on a set. If I can afford to preorder a box, or pick one up on some random sale, they have the highest swag tier.

The only card I've sold in the past several years has been a copy of Parallel Lives. It got me enough store credit to cop a Chatterfang, and some other goodies to build a first Commander deck after not touching my cards in years. I had 4 or 5 copies, so it was easy to part with. I also gave one copy away to a friend who had just bought some sort of 'Hobbits and food tokens' precon deck.

[gymbeaux]

The Food and Fellowship LoTR precon is insanely boosted for the price (~$60 retail, $100ish on secondary markets).

[dontlaugh]

That seems like a ridiculous attitude. Surely players should want all cards to be as cheap as possible, so everyone can play whatever deck they’d like.

[THENATHE]

Yes, we would. That's why most of us are okay with proxies. But the fact of the matter is that when all of the good cards cost a lot of money, and you need to play good cards to win tournaments, and you cannot use proxies in tournaments, spending money to win nothing at all feels really bad.

If all the cards were free and we were competing for $500 instead of decks cost $2k and we're playing for a $600 card I wouldn't care. I probably would enjoy it. But we live in a society and as it is, I would rather modern cards have more value than none.