[zachjbart]

Funny thing I noticed: they didn't mention the creation of the "Reserved List."

For those who don't know, Wizards did everything in the NPR segment in the first couple years of magic. Despite this, and the show's tone doesn't really convey this, the secondary market was still there (for the times) and card scarcity was a big, big problem.

Enter Chronicles.

Wizards of the Coast reprinted basically everything they could from the first couple years of magic in one set.

“Released in July 1995, this 125-card set was created in an effort to satisfy players’ demand for out-of-print cards.”

This tanked the secondary market for cards. Investors who had been holding onto certain rare cards and treating them as an investment suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them.

Long story short, a few years after this, Wizards created the Reserved List (tm), essentially a promise to NEVER reprint all cards contained within. Intended to create a safe haven for investors and collectors, this list covers the first ~5 years of Magic cards and almost all of its most expensive prints. It's a source of huge contention within the community as many people would like the reserved list to be abolished so they have access to play with cards they wouldn't be able to afford otherwise.

Feel free to let me know if I missed something critical, was just an thought I had while listening to the show. The reserved list is a huge reason for the bubble's stability.

[cdr]

Wizards actually came this close to doing away with the reserved list a few years ago. Abolitionists within the company actually got promos printed that violated it, so the issue eventually came to a head. There was a dramatic meeting and things abruptly reversed course: no more promos, no pushing the line at all. Players are likely stuck with the reserved list for the rest of the game's existence.

The reserved list really does hurt great formats like Legacy that include cards covered by the reserved list. The market has gone absolutely crazy for those cards. Many Legacy-playable cards will set you back hundreds of dollars each, and a deck can hit $10,000+. This really limits the number of people that can play the format.

Deciding to keep the reserved list also directly led to the creation of the Modern format, which tries to be Legacy but only with cards Wizards can reprint. Modern has not quite flopped, but is not all that popular considering the amount of resources Wizards has poured into it - and this is attributable to a lack of diversity of decks caused by the more restricted pool of cards.

The reserved list kept the game going at the time, but in the end is probably one of the worst mistakes the company ever made.

[bsder]

> Modern has not quite flopped, but is not all that popular considering the amount of resources Wizards has poured into it - and this is attributable to a lack of diversity of decks caused by the more restricted pool of cards.

The fact that a card like Tarmogoyf goes for $200 shows that Modern is far from unpopular.

Modern isn't as popular because it's 1) expensive and 2) complicated. To play Modern and have any hope of winning you had better be ready to throw down chunks of $1K and know the mechanics of Magic really well (a good Modern player is probably more knowledgeable than most low-level Magic judges). You also have to know which cards out of the 10,000+ can be used against you. etc. That's a big investment of time and money.

Standard format -- $20 gets you into Sealed and Draft. $500 gets you the most expensive deck in Constructed. That's a LOT cheaper and you only have to know about a couple hundred cards.

If they really wanted Legacy or Modern to be popular, the solution is really easy. Put big prizes behind winning them. Suddenly everybody will be playing Modern.

They don't want Modern and Legacy to be driving things. They don't make money from those formats. They make money selling new cards--and that's all about Standard.

[cdr]

> The fact that a card like Tarmogoyf goes for $200 shows that Modern is far from unpopular.

Tarmogoyf is a really poor example. It's popular in every format in existence, including Legacy and even Vintage. Modern is not solely driving its price, likely not even mostly.

Any non-rotating format is going to be more expensive than a rotating format. Modern being as "expensive" as it is is a good argument that they should've ditched the Reserved List, not that they ever will at this point.

> $20 gets you into Sealed and Draft. $500 gets you the most expensive deck in Constructed. That's a LOT cheaper and you only have to know about a couple hundred cards.

With Draft, you have to pay $20 every single time you want to play a game and the cards you come away with may well be worthless. With Standard, you have to pay that $500 every 18 months and those cards tend not to hold value well short term.

> They don't make money from those formats.

Wizards absolutely makes money from "eternal" formats. Even setting aside the products they print with eternal-only cards - which sell like gangbusters - Wizards makes money from players treating the game as a long term investment. If Standard was the only format, cards would plunge in value once they turned 18 months old.

[jaimebuelta]

There's also the fact that standard format is constantly changing, and that adds a huge effort in being up-to-date with the cards, the metagame, etc.

Playing Standard is actually quite demanding, while Legacy/Vintage changes in a much slower pace, making it great for people that likes to play from time to time to "the same game they already know".

[bigger_cheese]

I play legacy a lot but I dislike modern because WOTC have been so heavy handed with the banlist everytime an archetype gets popular they nerf it and as a result the format feels really anemic to play and makes a lot of people feel uncertain about investing in the format.

Also the "eggs" deck did a lot to kill the format. I top 8'd a PTQ (playing 5 color zoo - which was essenitally a tribal flames burn deck) this was my best result in a large tournament but was one of the most miserable days of magic due to the shear amount of time it over-ran due to all the eggs players. My friend ended up winning the PTQ (playing affinity) and we didn't get home until the very early hours of the morning it was riddiculous.

[awalton]

> Many Legacy-playable cards will set you back hundreds of dollars each, and a deck can hit $10,000+.

This is why Vintage is basically a dead format. You either have to have been playing from the dawn of Magic and just so happen to have acquired all of the cards you have needed through advantageous trades, pack openings or tournament winnings, or you have to be absurdly wealthy with tons of money to dump into your hobby.

This is the reason a lot of modern collectors like myself overbuy cards in more recent sets. They're doing better about it now that they're more committed to making Modern cards available for play, but I remember e.g. buying a ton of Mirrodin cards simply because the reserved list was always a threat and "how else would you get a playset of these things later".

[ThrustVectoring]

There are quite a few good budget Legacy decks. They tend to be one-color and try to hate out the expensive non-basic lands that the expensive multi-color decks run.

There's usually something along the lines of Sligh with Blood Moon, or mono-blue control with Back to Basics. I did a decent number of local tournaments with the latter - it worked rather well, though I did have to shell out around $200 for a playset of Force of Will. Ended up being something like a $300-400 deck.

[_raoulcousins]

The head designer of mtg (I'm getting this from his Drive to Work podcast) seems to imply that a lot of what was done in the early years was not nearly as planned as the NPR story says. From what I understand, they were printing as much as they could in the early years. Checking whether packs were selling above or below retail may have started after the disaster that was Fallen Empires (late 1994), which was so overprinted and underpowered that it still sells today for below retail.

Interesting also that NPR said Wizards was very concerned with the secondary market prices, when Wizards spokespeople never mention secondary prices directly, referring to secondary prices indirectly with the phrase ``card availability''.

[derefr]

Something I've never understood: the collectors value the Reserved cards for their rarity, not their usefulness, right? So you can do whatever you like as long as you don't reprint those exact cards.

So why not just create a Chronicles-alike with new cards, which just so happen to be mechanically equivalent to the Reserved List cards?

[DrStalker]

In my limited experience with collectable card games (not magic) it was common to see reprints with a different color border. These cards were otherwise identical to the originals and played exactly the same, but to a collector they were worth less because more might be printed at any time.

I've no idea why that isn't done for magic so collectors can collect rare originals while players can build decks full of lotuses and moxes and whatever other powerful cards they want so they can compete on skill, not wealth.

[dwd]

Reprints have a different set symbol, and in some cases border colour. For example the Arabian Knights cards that came out in Legends.

There are also differences allowing you to pick an Alpha from a Beta from a 1st Ed.

4th edition onwards, the reprints have a white rather than black border.

The Lotus and Moxes were discontinued after 1st Ed for being too powerful due to their zero casting cost. Instead you have cards that will cost you life and at least some mana to cast so it's not game over first turn.

[derefr]

You'd think that if there was widespread agreement that a card was "too powerful", then it could just be decreed as banned in all formats. Or, to put it another way: why would players want to play a match in which a Lotus or Mox could be played against them, if they themselves might not have the opportunity to also have one? By analogy, who would play a fighting game where your opponent can select a highest-tier character but you're unable to?

[lbotos]

It's kind of both rarity and usefulness. For example, Black Lotus, is rare but also incredibly useful.

Creatures have mana cost (1 mana, 2 mana etc) in the game. To play creatures you need mana and mana cards can only be placed on the board 1 per turn. this means usually a deck with a some creatures having 1 mana cost so you can hopefully play them turn one, some with a cost of 2 for turn 2 ... etc.

Black Lotus let's you get 3 mana when you play it. So you can put serious pressure if you have a BL because it's basically "turbo" and let's you put bigger creatures on the board "earlier" than normal. (In theory a creature costing 6mana wouldn't come into play until at least turn 6 because of the 1 mana played per turn.) There are also ways to use cards that copy other cards abilities so if you copied BL you could make a lot of mana fast. That "breaks" the game because everyone would start to use that tactic and you'd get a less diverse metagame.

If WoTC made a "red lotus" that did the same exact thing as BL, the value of the Black lotus would drop (pissing off collectors) and they'd have to restrict this red lotus the same way (You can only have one BL per deck in the current rules) or the red lotus would end up more valuable than the black because it wouldn't be restricted to one per deck and people would want 4 of them. (the max of a regular card per deck.) This would also probably piss off current players because it "broke the meta" and would be expensive.

The reserved list isn't the best solution in the world but it's pretty solid to avoid making even more people mad. Most people that have "invested" in a BL are still playing magic or involved in some way so why make them mad?

[arvinsim]

I am not sure but I read somewhere that mechanical equivalents are covered by the agreement on the Reserved list.

[zachjbart]

This is correct, they included all functional reprints on the reserved list. That's why people are praying for snow-covered dual lands, but honestly those will never see the light of day.

[ufo]

This is correct. This issue even pops up from time to time when the developers accidentally create a card that is mechanically equivalent to something in the reserved list and have to change it to something else before the card goes to print. For example, one of the cards in the reserved lists is Thunder Spirit, a simple 2/2 flier with first strike.

[eli]

Why not just print your own cards?

[lbotos]

They aren't tournament legal so people do (they call them proxies) but that's just for "fun".

[eli]

But a bunch of players could get together and decide to play the game however they want, right? If people are upset there are no "rare" cards to play, whey not create a league where certain proxy cards are legal?

[derefr]

Having asked this of a few friends who are MTG league judges: a lot of players feel a sort of "fiscal sympathy" for Wizards. They like the game, and want its continuing development to be incentivized, so they want to pay for cards rather than "pirating" them. Or rather, they want to act in such a way that cards still have value. It's similar to Bitcoin, in a way—nobody who holds the stuff is going around suggesting people should build their own private virtual economies instead.

[devindotcom]

Yeah, Chronicles and 4th edition really took a lot of the fun out of having some of the cool old cards. Of course, it also let you actually play with them, even if people would say "Oh man is that a... oh, it's 4th."

[rasz_pl]

>"Reserved List."

I dont quite get it. You can print and laminate whatever you want at costco/home depot, why arent players making their own 'reproductions'?

[apocolyps6]

why aren't people printing their own money?

a more serious answer:

1) The printing process is pretty difficult. There are multiple things you have to get right

2) There are people making fakes, most of them not good enough to pass as real cards.

3) The main point of having the real cards is to play in tournaments, where this stuff is enforced. If you are just playing with friends or trying out decks before settling on making one, it is common to make proxies of the cards you want.

4) Well made fake cards, like fake money will do Bad Things (tm) to the internal economy of the game.

[ObligatoryRef]

There have been a lot of attempts, including a recent wave from China. However, there are unique features about how the cards are printed that make it difficult to reproduce: cards bend in a certain way, use a proprietary font, have a strip embedded between the layers, etc. High quality fakes can fool some people, but not usually those who can afford to fork over hundreds or thousands for the really valuable cards.

(not to mention if you use fakes in sanctioned Magic and are caught, big penalties can ensue)

[mhomde]

But but... only n00bs black with white border cards ;)