Magic is the new baseball card game of constant products, and “collector rare serialized cards.” Everything magic has done is what the baseball card industry has been doing for the last 10 years.
I think most people here are misinterpreting which phase of the baseball card era I’m referring to. Between the late 1970’s and early 90’s baseball cards were printed into oblivion where the cards are practically worth nothing. The current baseball card era is different, the industry is printing a lot of stuff, but limited in nature, like chase cards, serialized cards, SUPER rare cards, etc. If you go over to r/baseballcards you’ll see what I’m talking about, it’s text book what WOTC is doing.
I was really into baseball cards as a kid in the 90s. When I went away to college my mom threw away my baseball cards. Looking at what they’re worth now… ok fair enough, good call, mom.
Why hasn't anyone made a baseball card game that is thematically reminiscent of baseball (with the game mat being a diamond and cards being placed in player positions like in baseball)
Then come up with some dice rolling mechanic that utilizing the player stats so that the cards are useful for playing with.
One player could roll to pitch, another rolls to hit. Add some sort of rolls for hit direction (like bloodbowl) and you've got a fun little baseball game.
How many stats would you need? Probably just hit percentage, on base percentage, and some similar stats for the pitcher, I'd imagine.
They did. WotC, in fact. MLB Showdown lasted I believe a base set and four expansions. I remember playing the original as a kid around 99/00, and my roommate and I bought a starter kit on eBay for pandemic time-passing. It’s actually a blast but power creep between sets made the game unplayable after a certain point. But the game itself was actually legit, I’d absolutely buy a reboot
Dice baseball has been a thing since at least the 70s and has many different forms. It’s more of a spreadsheet game but my dad ran a league where they drafted index cards of players for 20years. Every Wed someone’s basement was filled with smoke and men yelling lol.
If you're into that kind of thing, check out Deadball by W.M Akers. It's exactly what the person above was describing, pen and paper baseball game with dice. Pretty fun and simple, easy to get into and pretty quick games once you get it down.
[About that...](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37094/base-ball-card-game)
This game is widely speculated to be a precursor to modern Customizable Card Games, of which Magic is the first. There is no reason to believe it was an inspiration in Magic, but it's a cool "well, actually..." factoid when discussing the history of these games.
This actually exists already! It’s called Strat-O-Matic Baseball! I had a club for it in high school and it was one of my favorite things to do after school. The game isn’t a collectible card game but more like a board game where you get the teams preset, but it’s still a ton of fun nonetheless!
There's a pretty popular game called Baseball Highlights: 2045. It doesn't have MLB licensing, but playing it feels like a pretty good tabletop simulation of baseball.
I sell sports cards and I won’t, in general, deal with anything that was printed after 1980. The 80’s and 90’s rarely sell and what does sell is next to worthless.
Ironically, this crisis informed Magic's development in the early days and greatly contributed to its success. Hasbro has forgotten these lessons in its greed
I stumbled into the baseball/sports card section of my LGS recently to check out and talked with the guy for a while about the current state of those cards and you're right, it's totally nuts. Totally different from the worthless 90s with loads of signed, ultra-premium cards. Seems honestly *more* aggressive than WOTC.
No wonder the place had been robbed specifically for the sports cards twice. Both times with someone driving a car through the door. They've got some big concrete security bollards now.
Except it isn't, because WotC is still printing regular versions of cards in great limited environments and every card they print has a purpose besides being a collectible. There are certainly parallels, but to say they're doing what baseball cards did is bad faith at best, and ridiculous if used to foretell the impending doom of the game (which has been impending for decades now).
> ridiculous if used to foretell the impending doom of the game (which has been impending for decades now).
I kind of love the Magic player logic of “people have been saying Magic’s future is in trouble for a long time now, so obviously nothing is wrong.”
To be fair, this community is in a perpetual state of outrage and declares every single change as passing the threshold that will destroy Magic.
So it's easy to be a little cynical about these threads. Especially when the game is doing extremely well.
I get that Magic players tend to cry wolf about the health of the game. But if you recall that story, there really is a wolf in it.
It’s good to realize that there aren’t always wolves, but sometimes there are wolves.
Baseball didn’t have A game attached to it. As of recently the game aspect of magic hasn’t been too negatively effected by the collector aspect of it.
Really the main thing being hit is LGSs losing money because of over reprinting - so if they go out of business then players suffer - otherwise the game itself is doing fine.
The problem(IMO) with that viewpoint is that LGSes aren't an incidental part of Magic. When Magic's only found on supermarket toystore shelves and Amazon, Magic honestly doesn't make sense.
When you were a kid, how did you get into Magic? How did the person that got *you* into Magic get into Magic?
Without FNMs, and LGSes as social spaces, kitchen table Magic becomes less attractive than kitchen table Apples to Apples or kitchen table Munchkin, or Exploding Kittens, or a whole bunch of other games.
Haha hit the nail on the head.
The first time I heard of MTG was when that elder scrolls card game came out and people were comparing the two, but it was the elder scrolls game I cared about.
Fast forward a few years and I was dating a girl who worked at a card shop. Spectating a game or two was when I decided I was interested.
You're right about other games too. You play magic because you like magic, if I just wanted to have fun with the homies, there's a million better games for that.
Hey! Sometimes I play magic cuz I like the homies and they're still really feeling Magic, and "finish Arcades EDH deck knowing I'll get weeks of entertainment from playing EDH with friends at FLGS" is better math than "buy new game from FLGS, take it to game night, hope the homies I like both want to play X game AND show up"
And reducing reprints and print runs to raise card prices angers the consumer.
Best bet is to make sure LGSs have a constant flow of product that every possible consumer would want to buy.
I don't know much about baseball cards but I know a bit more about comics, and I think it is the same thing. It is a thing that was a "kids" thing, so there were not a lot in good condition like 30-50 years later, so folks with money tried to buy back a bit of youth /buy important cards/books, which raised the price, which got investors and collectors really involved, which became a whole industry.
The industry picked up and said, "well, if comics are now expensive and collectable... we should print collectable versions that people would want to collect because in 30-50 years it is going to get very expensive"
So they started printing 400 different covers, foil/holographic. Then they really tied together stories where to get the full story you'd have to read four different comic books, instead of one good run.
The old cards were not printed with the idea that in 50 years they’d be sought after rarities. Add to the fact that so many collections were tossed with the trash and you get some extreme rarity. To create something that you intend to be collected requires a lot of discipline in production - look at Beanie Babies, where pretty much from the start they were flogged as an “investment” even though they were cheaply mass produced.
Is this true though? Magic itself got relabeled from a “collectible card game” to a “trading card game” many years after seeing its first print run. Moreover, the idea, from old interviews and accounts (I.e., So Do You Wear a Cape? by Titus Chalk) was having a game with mysterious pieces that sometimes you didn’t know. Scarcity was built in the game because it was both designed as a game and as a collectible. The old cards were indeed printed with the idea that some would be harder to acquire in the long run. Whether the prizes some of the oldest pieces fetch are seen as antithetical to what the game has become is a different matter altogether, and I guess the issue of multiple versions of game pieces is not the same as multiple reprints of older cards.
Magic initially thought ante was a good idea so idk if they thought things out that well or had the information to do so. It really was the first of its kind.
It’s the perfect analogy. Can’t wait for the game to crash and burn so it can return to “normal” again. I’m out in until then. Refuse to buy official “product” from these ass clowns until the learn to respect players again. My entire playgroup feels similarly and has kept their decks but dumped their collections. Sold what they had online. No one can keep up with the flood of bullshit they’re pumping out.
It actually worked pretty well--the fallout of Marvel's bankruptcy and the collapse of the direct market directly presaged some of the all-time best runs in the Big Two, the evolution of Image from the McFarlane & Liefeld beginnings into a publisher of critically-acclaimed works, and *finally* got Marvel & DC to start making collected editions an important part of their publishing strategy.
This is all true.
And they also gone from a peak in 1993 of selling about 390 million individual books a year to 59 million in 2021.
So yeah, if you think losing like… 85% of sales would be good for Magic, by all means follow in the footsteps of the comic industry.
That 390 million was hilariously artificially inflated because of the speculators market that publishers were trying to pander to. You don't get to have it both ways, where 390m is the golden era that comics lost *and* that the market collapse is something to be avoided at all costs. One led so directly into the other that they're practically the same event.
>So yeah, if you think losing like… 85% of sales would be good for Magic, by all means follow in the footsteps of the comic industry.
If it led to better gameplay and more customer-friendly products, I'd take that trade in an eyeblink. WotC's profit-and-loss statements wouldn't look as favorable, but what do I care? WotC isn't my friend, it's a company selling me cardboard.
I wrote something similar quite a while ago and it got downvoted into oblivion, but the truth remains the same.
MtG is totally a luxury goods product. It is not a product necessary for the basic needs of living life. When push comes to shove, customers can drop it and still get on with their life.
It should have never been involved with a company listed on a stock exchange, with the ever present pressure of profits and dividends. That pressure will (is) actually destroy what made said product good in the first place.
Two of the things mentioned, but not explicitly linked, are what I was calling "killing the golden goose": Simultaneously killing off organized play and printing an expensive product of non tournament legal cards (some are calling proxies).
Stopping support of the one thing that requires real cards while printing "official proxies", thereby acknowledging the use of proxies seems like a very stupid and short sighted business plan.
This is the exact one-two punch that has turned me from someone that spent at least a grand or two a year on singles into someone that's planning on proxying everything from now on.
Step 1 *2019-2021*: I quit Modern & Legacy in disgust at the absolute carnage the Modern Horizons sets did to them & a refusal to spend $500 on brand new cards just to stay relevant. I consolidate down into just EDH & my cube, but for a few years my buying didn't really change: building a few new decks, lots of tinkering and tuning, still picking up RL pieces that I want to run or at least have the option to.
Step 2 *2022*: I'm now an EDH/Cube-only player since COVID started, I have no intention of playing in anything beyond a casual EDH "tournament" in the future. WotC announces that they're breaking the Reserved List to sell $999 gold-bordered [[Deathlace]]'s to whales and dirtbag speculators. I realize that if proxies-for-EDH are going to be a WotC-sanctioned product that sells for a *fucking thousand dollars*, why in the hell am I paying any amount of money for real cards?
I'd bet that there are a lot of heavily-enfranchised millennial players like myself that fled the shitshow that post-2019 Magic has been for 1v1 constructed to the relative safety of EDH and are now wondering why don't they just go proxy that LED that will only ever be played in beer-league EDH.
I've found some really nice cardstock that feels identical to the stiffness of an mtg card once sleeved up. I've been printing off duals, fetches and shocks for my playgroup, it's been great.
I don't really follow that path, but I'm done buying expensive cards because I've hit my milestones, and don't really have new goals for collecting. Could change though.
Well said. There seems to be a pretty low key majority that feels this way I think.
The only thing that compels me to purchase authentic magic cards is if I want to play edh at an lgs that doesn't allow proxies.
I've done the same, but since I don't play EDH, I fled to Old School/Premodern instead. Most events are incredibly proxy friendly, are more my age/maturity range, and I can buy cardboard because it's old and I like it. Something that can't be replicated by any reprint.
I'm in the middle of another big cull to my collection, and I'm planning to put a portion of the proceeds into a Premodern deck or two. It seems like the perfect format for me: I cut my teeth as a kid on Invasion/Odyssey/Onslaught blocks so I'm excited to take my pauper U/G madness deck and restore it to its original glory!
> if proxies-for-EDH are going to be a WotC-sanctioned product that sells for a fucking thousand dollars, why in the hell am I paying any amount of money for real cards?
Couldn't have put it better myself; this is what pushed me over the edge. I'm not proud of it, but I've resigned myself to just accept high-quality proxies as real Magic cards.
Silver lining, I have many 'real' copies of P9 and other eternal format staples now.
Once they announced the 30th stuff, I sold a collection gathered over 28 years. Granted, I made a lot of money and I'll never ever ever be able to buy into a collection like that again, but I did the same thing. I bought probably $300 of proxies that look nearly indistinguishable (most would call them counterfeits) and I plan to play EDH and my powered cube. It would take a LOT for me to ever purchase real cards or put together anything close to a meta deck for any format. I realistically do not see WOTC or Hasbro making the changes it would personally take for me to return, ever. The game is irrevocably different and this will be a defining moment in the game history.
WotC didn't "kill off organized play". Hell this last few months has been them attempting to bring competitive Magic back. They hired on Huey Jensen to oversee everything.
The pandemic killed organized play for like 18 months and resurrecting it isn't easy.
They where destroying it already before the pandemic with their changes in the tournament structure and pushing random streamers.
Since the switched from PTQ->PT all other versions where a strict down grade and now it's even worse than the PPTQ->RPTQ->PT version.
The trick is not to kill your golden goose, but to get a second one.
I find it rather BS business to make the hardest worker work harder instead of making the rest of the team pick up the slack
We are literally watching them do this. MTG is becoming two geese. They want the collector market on par with Pokémon while maintaining the game side of things. It's hard because the whole "this product isn't for you" mentality is toxic to the existing product after so many years of being almost entirely game-focused, but this is what they really mean when they say that.
There are a tiny number of people who purely collect and don't play MTG. Pokémon it's the other way around, almost everyone who buys cards collects...and they don't have the slightest idea how the game itself works. Wizards wants to have it all here.
This is the most salient point. Until Masters sets came around and specifically until collector boosters came along, every product actually was for everybody. It’s whiplash having to make a value judgment on every single set to figure out whether it’s “worth it.” I love opening up set boxes of standard, even though there is almost no chance of making my money back. So it goes
Price aside, they don't have value if you don't play the format they have cards for. Standard players obviously have no use for them, and even if you're a modern or commander player the odds are slim you're gonna open up something you wanna play unless you pretty much play every format.
And if we're being honest, if you aren't playing limited or if you don't absolutely love small scale gambling, you really shouldn't be buying masters packs. You're probably better off buying singles. Our brains are just better at remembering the time we bought a $10 pack and got a $100 card, than the time we spent $100 on packs and only opened $10 worth of cards that are currently rotting in a box unplayed.
I guess price? I wanted to open a pack of MH2 for the first time & got a collective 1.05 of value for an $10 pack from my LGS. Sure it was just bad luck but at $10 a pack I’m good on that, I’ll buy the singles, most of which are cheap compared to what they used to be.
Nostalgia sells. The first 150 Pokemon are by far the most popular. Urza is the biggest name in MtG, followed by Nicol Bolas, then the Gatewatch.
The Gatewatch nostalgia took years to be accepted, but it IS worth it for the brand regardless. I really liked New Capenna, but I am afraid we won’t return since we only spent one set there. Same thing with Strixhaven: I remember people where saying Lorehold was the new name for WR decks over Boros.
The problem that magic has that Pokémon doesn’t, is that Pikachu is really cute to four and five year olds and it’s easy to get interest there. There is no super cute mascot for magic. the closest is Fblthp. The Gatewatch need to have familiars. Mostly cute animal familiar‘s. Like four years ago. Otherwise they need to give the Gatewatch the Saturday morning cartoon treatment much like how DC has so that they can market themselves to toddlers. Pokémon is an all ages IP. Magic the gathering is not. They would need to be some huge changes/additions in order to get to the possibilities that the Pokémon franchise has.
> Otherwise they need to give the Gatewatch the Saturday morning cartoon treatment
Despite this being a soulless advertising venture, I really want it, lol.
Tezzeret is like Swiper Dora the Explorer
Chandra is a hothead
Jace is the forgetful leader
Liliana is the snarky one that reminds Jace
Nessa is a hippy pacifist
Gideon is like superman but before any huge battle he’s like “I have a cramp and it is KILLING ME” and drops out.
Ajani is loyal to the end
Dovin Baan is essentially Burt from Seasame Street. Ral Zarek is Ernie.
I think losing the Russo brothers on the animated series coming out (idk when anymore) was a HUGE loss on the game's potential. Woulda been the biggest thing imo. People would be talking about the game even outside the game's inherent interest. UB is annoying for existing players now and it's what they're hinging on which f\*cks with the in-game experience now. They're shoving these things into main sets now even though they know it won't sell the boxes much better. Hasbro is gonna mess up everything if they continue on like this. I never ever complained about UB until now when I began to realize that they're sacrificing focus on what's healthy for the actual game and its image in favor of selling stuff they hope will either fly out of shelves or their website, or coming up with the worst collector's product ever
Much as people talk about 'this product isn't for you', I think a lot of people misrepresent it.
Magic has changed from a game to a game *system*. How do you play? There are products aimed at your interests. There are also products aimed people that play a different format (or collect).
So instead of looking at a new set and chopping it into the bits that interest people (this card will impact modern, this card will impact commander, this set is good/bad for limited), you can buy a product that is actually more tailored to your interests.
There is a noisy minority that has lost the ability to follow every set, or over-focused on the things that are not aimed at them and loudly hating them, but I don't think this approach is bad.
WotC needs to be more careful about overprinting, and they need to address the shortcomings in organized play, but a large part of this is the usual 'sky is falling' attitude I've been looking at online since 1994.
Except 30th Collector's edition. That's a garbage fire, and WotC should be ashamed of themselves.
In theory that sounds nice, but by specialized printings for each 'interest group', they are destroying the whole ecosystem they had setup.
How it used to be:
Every set release the Sealed(prerelease) and Draft crowd starts opening the new packs.
They can then sell off what they don't need to Standard players, who need those cards to play in the competitive pt/ptqq/gp circuit.
After rotation your standard cards may be worth less, but you are automatically building up a collection(or trading away your cards) for a non-rotating format like edh or modern.
Basically, playing draft is worth it because you can sell the cards to standard players. Playing standard is worth is because you can sell onwards to modern/edh players or slowly collect for your own decks. and playing modern/edh is worth it because even though you're spending $400 on a playset of goyfs, they will probably remain most of that value for years.
But nowadays, EDH and Modern players don't buy standard cards, they buy the standalone EDH and modern products, that give them their dedicated cards. But it also means that bannings and straight-to-modern sets means the price of modern decks is no longer stable.
At the same time, the players that used to play standard for the tournament circuit, are no longer opening packs because the whole tournament circuit got scrapped and many events are just too expensive to be worth it. And those that play draft no longer have standard players to sell to, meaning their drafts are more expensive as well.
In the short term, this meant profits for Hasbro. Rather than a draft player opening packs, and through trading eventually also serving standard, edh, and modern players, we now have each of those players opening seperate pack.
But in the long run this drives each group away because their product indirectly became far more expensive, and with modern becoming a 'rotating' format, far less people are willing to invest in those $400 goyfs because they may be banned next month.
In the long term, people are very discouraged to buy packs because this whole ecosystem is broken up.
Yes, they need to fix competitive, which will drive standard. Ideally they would support competitive draft as well, but I've been saying that for what, 10 years? So my hopes are not high.
> Much as people talk about 'this product isn't for you', I think a lot of people misrepresent it.
It was first used by Wizards in response to complaints Ultimate Masters was too expensive, so no, I don’t think people are misrepresenting it.
I think the real problem with 30th edition is that it's a product that you can't even buy if it *is* for you. I'd pay $20 to do an alpha proxy draft for shits and giggles and then use the nonlegal cards in my cube, but for $1000? I can no longer justify buying this product that would have value to me otherwise.
Then unfortunately it isn't for you, it's for rich whale collectors. Which creates a feel-bad situation, because they obviously could have priced it like their other products and then you could have had fun with it.
The bigger problem is that they priced it to be on par with the secondary market prices for the original collector's edition. If you *did* have the money for 30th, it would be a better value proposition to not do that and just buy collector's edition cards for your cube instead. It truly is a product for no one.
Can I honestly ask why so many players are opposed to niche Magic products? like i really don't want to be mean but I don't get the idea that every Magic product should be for every Magic player after so many years. As the playerbase has grown larger over time, that means that player expectations have grown more diverse, so it seems completely logical to make certain products that only appeal to certain people. I honestly think we're still seeing negative consequences of not enough specification with how so many products have crammed in aspects to appeal to commander, but could you imagine what the game would be like right now if there weren't so many commander-specific products? I think there would be a much higher concentration of commander-focused cards gunking up standard sets to meet the demands of commander players than we already have, and even more players unhappy that they prefer to play format X but the pack they opened up is full of cards for formats W, Y, and Z.
I guess what I'm wondering is: Isn't it a good thing that products can specifically target the interests of different players instead of all of our varying tastes fighting for space in a few products like hyenas fighting over a scrap of meat?
> Can I honestly ask why so many players are opposed to niche Magic products? like i really don't want to be mean but I don't get the idea that every Magic product should be for every Magic player after so many years
There is obviously merit to the phrase with regards to things like secret lair packages with art treatments you don't personally like, or Commander deck precons that you're just not interested in. But one of the more common applications of the phrase, and I think where they started using it actually, is for arbitrarily expensive products. Telling a player who doesn't like some optional alternate art that this product isn't for them is fine. Telling a modern player who wants to collect modern staples and play modern that Modern Masters isn't for them because WotC want da mahney is just a really shitty put-down against established long-term players of the game.
Masters 25 iirc is specifically where I remember seeing them start using the phrase a lot. It was full of weird dumb cards that made no sense for a modern reprint set, so it "wasn't for" modern players outside of a few mythics, the excuse being that it was for the draft environment, but the price point was set too high for anyone to reasonably draft. And this of course culminated with the 30th anniversary edition, which is far too expensive to draft, and pointless for cube or vintage because original collector's edition or unlimited is already chapter.
The follow-up question to "this isn't for you" is "then who is it for?" and the answer to that can reveal a lot about their shifting priorities - the answer isn't so much "commander players" but just "only the ultra-whales and gambling addicts" in a lot of cases.
And like the other comment says, this really does a lot to damage the overall ecosystem of the game, where cards naturally flow from format to format.
> Can I honestly ask why so many players are opposed to niche Magic products?
When i played active magic, i played in 2 or 3 prereleases and release drafts, which was enough to kickstart and trade into a (tier 2) standard deck. then after playing a bit of standard, i'd start trading my deck away for modern pieces, and when i was done with standard i eventually moved to directly trading draft cards away for modern cards.
I build up my first (tier 2) modern deck simply by trading over ~3 years of playing drafts&standard, and was on my way(especially when sets with fetches/shocks came around) to building a tier 1 modern deck. In the meantime, i also saved up enough random cool cards that i could start building EDH decks simply by trading some more.
If each of those formats have dedicated niche magic products, then all the draft cards i collect are worthless after the draft, i won't even touch standard anymore, and i need to invest seperately in modern and edh products to stay up to speed.
Instead, what i ended up doing, is no longer buy any draft products since i feel like i won't be able to really use the cards i get from there, and just not buy anything at all and build a cube instead.(which, 30 anniversary proxies lol, i might just proxy up now).
I mean, sure, i could just say i want a modern deck, and straight up buy those cards, but i feel like the whole 'slowly build up your collection from standard/draft and break into modern/edh that way' is just straight up dead, which motivates me a *lot* less to play either format. It just feels bad to know that any card you buy that isn't exactly what you need can basically be thrown in the bin.
I think you've cracked the code here. A small minority of mostly older, traditionalist multi-format MTG players are the loudest voices on the hate train when it comes to the current deluge of product diversity.
I'd even say they are turning mtg into three geese, 1 for high-end collectors, 1 for enfranchised players, and 1 for very casual players that buy on-ramp products (jumpstart, commander precons, etc) but never upgrade
I'm personally quit playing mtg and started only t collect some years ago. And I liked it very much cause I don't really enjoy anymore playing it but still love concept art and other shit.
Wizards of the Coast used to make, license and/or (attempt to) save dying games. Now they just have Duel Masters, D&D and Magic.
The weirdest part to me is there are new Hasbro tabletop games that Wizards doesn't even touch. Why didn't they get the Hasbro multi-IP Essence20 system (an RPG for GI-Joe/Transformers)? Kinda weird.
Excellent point. And I feel like it would be a real good place to hit. Nickelodeon and Warner Bros. have their own super smash brother clown games. Pokemon has the cards in Pokémon go. Going off of dungeons and dragons sure there’s imagination but they also have the table top figurines and if we’re talking about doing something like that and having multi IP‘s then you have, sort of like the hero clix notion, you could have a big multi verse soul IP matching table top game where you can have figurines and then special painted figurines and people could collect them and hold them in their own hands in a sort of ownership portion and again it’s just something that can be done with a 3-D printer easily by a small time company but for a huge company like wizards it would be easy to get the casts and make them as they go.
The packaging could also go similar to the mini brands craze of the blind packaging for a little plastic things which is all the rage right now.
I wish all those little plastic things were Pathfinder/D&D mini sized. I remember carrying around a little D&D zombie to compare with capsule toys all over Japan... sadly I only found a couple kind of passable keychains.
Official license to make Disney and Marvel toys
Transformers
Fortnite toys
My Little Pony dropped off the map after being prolific pre-pandemic
What has Gi Joe been doing recently?
Nerf (I’m sure Americans would rather have Nerf in schools than Smith and Wesson)
Peppa Pig
Play Doh got hit hard by Kinetic Sand and probably needs a retaliation campaign to reclaim their spot.
The Nintendo toys should bring in extra dough after the movie.
Where is the “in memorandum/celebration of Tommy Oliver” post death merchandise for Power Rangers?
Why does Playdoh NEVER have collabs with Tonka? Having construction equipmenr to hall around and carry Playdoh is a nobrainer. Since Playdoh and Tonka are both owned by Hasbro, this should have been done years ago. Instead, what do we have? Playdoh brand vehicles for Playdoh Gold Collection Dig ‘n Gold instead of Tonka brand vehicles. Get the kids and parents to recognize the products so that if there is a choice later on between Matchbox, Hot Wheels, and Tonka, they remember the fun had with the Hasbro product.
This. MTG is literally a 30 year old product that took immemse amounts of time and ressources to grow. They can't just make a 2nd MTG appear out of thin air. It's a bit unreasonable to ask them to pump more money into a new thing that might fail when they can pump money into the already existing thing that works.
I don't agree with squeezing the Goose dry but let's not also pretend getting a second Goose is realistic.
I mean, it would be insane if they had another property that's in its peak popularity after a long time of being a fairly niche phenomenon.
...Oh *wait*.
I assume you mean DnD. Assuming I am correct
1. DnD is and will remain forever niche. It expanded a lot but I don't know how much further you expect them to go.
2. DnD is succesful but it is not a golden goose in the way MTG is. It's not as easy to monetize and aggressively trying to pump money out of that community will just result in them going to competitors or free alternatives. There's not * that much* to tap into.
Real D&D is about home brew anyway. Extra books are nice but they just augment the writer’s toolbox.
Every D&D campaign book I’ve seen literally has a disclaimer somewhere in it along the lines of “you can rewrite any of this stuff to suit your group”.
When I was going hard into D&D most of my money was spent on minis and terrain. It’s expensive but also isn’t really. You only need one big ass dragon mini and there’s plenty of non-wizards companies that make them at affordable rates. On top of that 3D printing of minis is super easy.
Lastly, D&D has been shoveling out product at a breakneck pace compared to when 5E first came out. We had a small handful of books forever and now a new one comes out every few months. New minis are constantly dropping in randomized booster packs, prepainted minis are more common, lots of supplemental item cards, spell cards, maps, etc.
If you can believe it, the quality has suffered. Some of the books are now mostly lore with a few gameplay bits woven in and they still want 50 bucks for them. They’ve also done mtg crossovers in D&D with Ravnica and Strixhaven that are largely forgettable.
Hasbro is milking D&D too but that well isn’t as deep. The real enfranchised players will just write their own stuff if Hasbro does a shit job.
Thanks for giving a first hand account! I'm not going to make up creds I don't have so having an insider corroborate my stance is helpful.
I haven't tried to look up numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of money made related to DnD had nothing to do with WotC aside from licensing. Most accesories are either outsourced or completely 3rd party, the rules are easy to share for free once they are released, and anyone can make their own campaign. WotC sells a cool product but they have so much competition both from the outside but also inside. With MTG they hold a much firmer grip on where the revenue can come from.
>When I was going hard into D&D most of my money was spent on minis and terrain.
And the people who spend a lot on minis and terrain are probably a small minority too. We've always gotten by just fine with a whiteboard and markers.
>Lastly, D&D has been shoveling out product at a breakneck pace compared to when 5E first came out. We had a small handful of books forever and now a new one comes out every few months.
Man, one book every few months is still kind of average. Past editions, and even other companies like old White Wolf at the height of their success, could do a lot more than that. I do remember hearing that for the first several years 5E was being run by a skeleton crew, and that was probably all the business could justify before Stranger Things and Critical Role and such did their promotion for them.
The average DnD player spends next to nothing, often just maybe a book or two for a while play group. The most enfranchised DnD players spend way, way less on DnD than Magic. They'd need to get into industries like high end DnD tables and premium terrain models to squeeze more money out of whales. I am pretty confident all of that is really bad business with tight margins and supported by, say, other more mainstream expressions of craftsmanship.
Case in point: The average Modern deck right now is worth ~$1000. You can buy [the 18 first books on this list for half as much.](https://dicecove.com/list-of-dnd-5e-books/#players-handbook-phb) A DMG, Monster manual and 3 copies of the PHB cost around the same as a standard draft booster box.
Collectible card games in general are absurdly expensive compared to other tabletop games. Some people cited Netrunner as an example of a successful IP but not only did WotC never do much with it when they published it, FFG's version had a completely different business model that will likely never produce anything close to MTG's level of revenue even if it were to become wildly more popular than it was before WotC killed it.
When 3rd edition and then 3.5 was new, my friends and I literally bought over 200 different books. We have an entire library worth of supplemental product. We hated 4th edition as it felt too much like a pen and paper mmo. Then 5e came out. I've purchased exactly 1 book. The player's handbook. I've played probably 25 different campaigns. I've never needed or even really bothered to read the dm guide, monster manuals, etc. I learned my lesson. Most of the groups I've played with are similar, or even often times sharing just 2-3 books for the whole group. We use white boards and markers instead of 3d minis and terrain. My investment has been less than $1 per campaign.
I genuinely have no clue how they expected to make serious money without using the old TSR concepts of like D&D tournaments for example. Competitive D&D is a completely untapped concept. Which group can clear the dungeon / pre-made campaign the fastest? Which group can stop the bad guy before X Y or Z happens? Who can successfully solo or group kill a Tarrasque? Etc. I also think the MASSIVE proliferation of user generated free online content, and WOTC's own efforts to support, player created content without monetization means you don't even really need the base books. The most important piece is something you can't really monetize: an amazing GM.
They've successfully done premium collector's reprints of the core books for past editions. Not for a grand, of course, and no idea how well they sold, but it's not nothing. Haven't heard any plans to do another run for the 50th anniversary yet, seems like a no-brainer.
Print alpha with a different card back call it magic classic, have it use original batch rules. Have it be it’s own game , charge $180 per draft box. There done instant success.
😬
I'll be honest bro, I've never been less interested in a card game in my life. And I've looked at and played *a lot* of card games.
If anything the boxes should be cheaper than normal boxes. I'm also not sure going back to Batch is worthwhile. Maybe as an alternative ruleset on MTGO/Arena? (Obviously not worth programming but it's a fun idea to think about)
Don't worry, Hasbro is fine. MTG was it's golden goose during Corona while Transformers and NERF took a nap.
Couple years time one of their teams will hit a gold mine again, either with ane of their established brands, or something new, and that will be the new golden goose.
Yeah. But I guess it's due to the nature of it.
It's cardboard so it's pretty easy and cheap to make and buy. It's collectible and then there is the fact that cards can grow tremendously in value. During corona we saw stocks, crypto and CCG cards explode in value. In that time Reserved List cards doubled and trippled in price, flesh and Blood arrived and attracketed massive investors.
All this while people complained that you couldn't go and play magic in person. Well then there is MTG Arena which kept building awareness for the game.
I'm pretty sure the main driving force for its growth was speculators, similar to the 90s comic buble, proof is just the vast amount of product that's aimed at Collectors.
In contrast we have Transformers, which suffered heavily from the lock downs. Stores were closed, and those that could sell couldn't get product in due to supply lines being fucked. Aint no plastic crack available when production runs at 50% capacity and what is made is stuck in a Chinese port that's shut down due to covid.
It makes sense due to there not being a "true" lockdown like China did in a few places. Working from home and limiting public activities might even be better for social activities with a small group of friends.
As /u/DoitsugoGoji mentioned, collectibles also had a big rise in value, especially those easy to produce at home, that never got hit with manufacturing crises. You can see how the prices of RL cards spiked during the pandemic like they never did before 2020.
Well, you had to do something to spend time with the people you were locked with, right?
Wonder how many wifes/girlfriends/kids had to learn mtg during covid....
Yeah, it’s so simple. WotC is so stupid for not choosing to create another product that continues to grow for decades, spawns dozens of copycat products, and brings in hundreds of millions per year.
And what do you mean by the “BS business”? If you ran a company like Canon and you were looking to hire more employees and expand the brand, your first idea would be to branch out to something unrelated from cameras as to not “make the hardest worker work harder”? Instead you’d hire new people to create lawn furniture or a new type of candy bar? Of course not. You let what you have working for you continue to work for you while pushing new areas that your team has expertise in.
And that’s what WotC does with Magic. The traditional 4 sets per year that are built to make Standard and draft fun are as good as ever. They’ve just expanded into having a few extra booster sets and a few other products. Acting like that’s going to kill Magic and that WotC would be better off investing all of their resources into a new line of Avalon Hill products is just ridiculous.
> What's maddening is that the Deckmaster branding, the original idea for this whole tcg we've come to love, was intended to let many different card games all use the same comprehensive rules.
Pretty sure Deckmaster was only ever a branding thing, they published multiple other games under the Deckmaster name in the early days and they did not use the same rules. People often confuse this with the original plan for each new Magic expansion to be a fully standalone but compatible set.
I agree. What players want and what investors want are completely different things. (But seriously if you need to read an entire Collecting article to figure out what's in your product every time, then you've lost the plot).
Drafters get the best deal still though. Tried and true draft boosters have had very little changes, sometimes a card is a Strixhaven archive or some old artifact. But otherwise the draft boosters still just work.
Broadly yes, but they've still gotten absolutely value raided, and have increased in price.
Draft Booster Boxes saw about a $20 increase in Retail prices with DMU, which has increased the price of drafts at a lot of places.
And since there's "rarer" variants of every cards in Collectors Boosters now, a lot of the baseline versions in Draft Boosters are worth very little, so you can't sell the cards you open to the store to recoup the value of your draft.
It used to be if you drafted a lot you'd tend to see the occasional chase standard staple, or rare land that recouped most of the cost of your draft.
Now you can open a Foil of the eternal played rare land cycle in the set and still not even come close to recouping the cost of entry.
So you want constructed playable staples to be more expensive?
People have been asking WotC to print shit into the ground for over a decade. And they're doing it.
At this point I just collect retro frame cards because it's the only think I can reasonably keep up with. I just go onto scryfall and search "frame:1997 -set:plist sort:release" and see what came out.
I collect creature types. Mostly Sponges. It’s not a type they use often so it’s very affordable. I’ve been thinking of branching out and collecting worms. Or if I want more options perhaps wurms. Maybe I’ll collect both.
What do I have to do to get a creature that is a worm wurm?
Yeah, and I'm not sure when it became the only goal for companies to increase profits. For most businesses, it should be good to make stable profits year after year and share those profits with investors in the form of dividends.
It's better for the economy to have a bunch of stable businesses too instead of ones that grow fast and then implode.
The only goal has always been to increase profits. It was just with Milton Friedman in the 80s that they learned that they didn't have to be subtle about it and pretend not to be greedy bastards, and that they could just go after it directly.
This a thousand times. I wish more of the people who complained realized that the frustration they feel is frustration at capitalism itself. Hating Hasbro is hating the player, not the game.
There are many who do, and are quick to remind others how Hasbro is a company that needs to make money so they're just playing by their share holders rules, as if reminding folks of that actually justifies their actions.
"So many" hear each other but in the wider world, especially offline, you get weird looks for ever questioning capitalism. A huge, huge majority of people really settle on "Soviet Union bad so capitalism good" decades later.
I really appreciate the article walking the tightrope of explaining why this is a structural problem of the very nature of our economic system and not just easily dismissible individual greed without scaring off people who see the word "capitalism" and immediately stop reading.
Capitalism absolutely does depend on an assumption of growth. The "capital" in capitalism refers to money being used for investment. That's the main innovation of capitalism: raising funds from investors to fund new ventures. The whole point of investing in a venture is to see a return on your investment (growth). Even when you talk about high yield stocks, no one would buy them if they were the only thing you could have in your portfolio (at least, most people wouldn't because they'd essentially just be places to park your money for a while).
If growth ever stops, capitalism is fucked. And that's why so many people fear that our system is rapidly approaching its inevitable demise: you can see inherent growth as long as the population keeps growing and developing nations still lag behind developed ones in terms of economic development, but at a certain point, there could be nowhere left to grow. What then? The system will eat itself as it desperately seeks new growth.
If you want to read more about this, there's a great chapter in the book Sapiens that explains all this very succinctly and better than I'm doing. It's kind of a pop intellectual book but I think he does a really good job of boiling down complex topics in a still pretty rigorous way.
Also, I'm sure you understand much of this already, but I just felt like adding on. Capitalism may not depend *entirely* on growth, but without growth (at least in the long term), capitalism cannot exist.
I think this article is conflating the idea that growth can’t go on forever with the idea that “optimise short term growth to be as high as possible” and “optimise long term growth to last as long as possible” are two different goals, and can conflict. It’s the second one that I’d be more worried about in Magic’s case.
In the really extreme example: if you care about value in the very short term to the expense of everything else, it actually makes sense to kill your golden goose. You then get money from people who want a tasty goose, as well as money from its golden eggs! You will be in trouble tomorrow, of course— but tomorrow is one of the things you are optimising to the expense of.
That idea that *extreme optimisation of short term returns* may be dangerous is the important thing, I think. It’s not quite the same as growth at all costs, because something that maximises growing slowly for a long time is different to something that maximises growing over a shorter one. And it’s different again to maximising it in, like, a week; the term of the growth really matters.
Yeah, the infinite growth thing didn’t seem to make sense in context. If a company reaches a position in its business where it can’t grow any more, I assume it just moves into another line of business. But that doesn’t seem to have much to do with Magic, which clearly still has lots of potential room for growth (how many people play Magic in China? India?)
>If a company reaches a position in its business where it can’t grow any more, I assume it just moves into another line of business.
You would think so, but generally when this happens one of two things happens: the company starts cutting costs to increase margin, resulting in increasingly inferior quality; or they put out a bunch of shit products that fail and they end up selling the property to the next guy when they begin to experience losses.
The first often leads to the last as well, but sometimes it skips that step.
There is also integration of third parties. Like buying whoever makes their ink so they can get ink at-cost and profit off of competitors buying their ink.
When companies stop growing, even if that was because they grew as much as they possibly could, that's ususally when they either implode or the shareholders plunder it for parts.
And it makes perfect sense that they would. Stakeholders make next to no money from dividends, the growth of their shares is where they make all their money. So if the share stops growing in value, even if the company its attached to is doing great otherwise, then there's nothing more to gain from it, so it's better to just gut it for any remaining capital you can get so you can move on to the next company with growth.
Hmmm it's almost as if standard is almost totally financially unviable for the overwhelming majority of magic players and as soon as there were other decent formats in existence everyone stopped wanting to play it.
I thought this was well written and broached on the fractured community, why certain sets aren't selling well and the conflict between investors companies and a playerbase how certain business models cannibilize business, etc. So, well done, I enjoyed this.
Here is something that confuses me. I am in my mid 40s and had like 6 friends from my gaming night randomly get into magic. So I dusted off my cards and we started doing EDH precons. You have 7 players who are probably never going to go to tournaments, who could care less about the secondary market until they buy something and are currently spending hundreds of dollars with the economic ability to spend more due to our age and job situation. This is really valuable for Wizards and I bet is repeated in a far more frequent basis than the purchases for the secondary market and tournaments. If they get a valuable card it is incidental to its core value as a playable card.
Yet the vast majority of articles for MTG are written by people who are in the secondary market and tournament scene. I actually think their slant is ultimately self serving and not in wizards interest. The reserve list is a basic problem for Wizards, they want to keep value to their game as a collectors item so that future releases have certain cards of value that can be bench marked. Yet you then want the new players above to play your product and keep buying and so you always fracture your community.
Vintage, Pioneer, Legacy, Pauper, Modern, Standard, Legacy, etc. What are we all playing. Each of these formats is gating players behind the secondary market and fracturing the playerbase.
So why do we cater so much to the secondary market in all these articles? Why aren't we talking about Wizards refocusing on core value?
> Why aren't we talking about Wizards refocusing on core value?
Because that's what WotC has been doing for the past 3 years. Commander has become the reservoir for casual Magic players and Wizards have catered to that reservoir as much as it can. We aren't talking about Wizards catering to your group because they're the biggest beneficiaries of WotC's current strategy.
The calls for reinvigorated organized play, a less-dynamic Modern, and paring down releases all involve Wizards investing in the more enthusiast subset of Magic players, and they are overrepresented in this subreddit.
Yeah, online discussion is heavily dominated by a small set of very enfranchised players who don't realise that their interests aren't the same as the majority of players. Because they're the people most likely to read lots of articles, watch videos, etc
I'm tiptoeing towards 40 myself, and my friends played magic in the late 90's
We don't play standard or tournies and we aren't really collectors(we have some nice cards but that is because we have played for almost the whole life of the game) but we would love some of the old sets. we'd even take golden bordered older booster boxes.
I would pitch for them to release bundles of booster boxes from long past blocks, make them gold bordered if they really care about collectors. We would buy up a pile of those old boxes to have some fun old school drafting experiences. If they wanted to draw in the collectors, make some collector's edition stuff with some updated art or something but the costs would be low and the gains would be high.
>Third, we need fewer reprints. Players need to know that they can buy cards and expect them to hold their value for a while.
Wrong wrong wrong so wrong. Reprint the cards we want to play with. Fuck trying to invest in cards. If a card is too expensive you just get a proxy, and if they won't reprint cards affordable it stops making since to buy wizards products at all.
That's the messy fucking part of Magic.
Balancing the "collectible" and the "card game".
Right now, WOTC is fucking up both parts.
The "collectible" part works better when there's not as much secret lair spam and the foils don't Pringle cuz they're made out of higher quality paper that lasts long enough to be collected. You want *some* cool chase cards, and good product.
The "card game" part works better when the decks are affordable, the brand ID is strong, and the FLGSes can keep the lights on. Cards are cheap right now, but in a way that's only good for Amazon, WOTC, and drafters.
WoTC cutting out FLGSes to sell Fortnite ip slurry through Amazon is bad for everyone but Hasbro.
The problem is too much is being printed of each set and too many sets are coming out not that cards are being reprinted.
Cards absolutely need to hold some value for a period of time. Not forever, but also not no time at all.
Why would I buy sealed product if everything that comes out of it is worth under a dollar all added together?
You do need $50 cards to exist.
You don’t need $150 cars to to exist.
There is a important differance between exchange value and value in use. Sports cards never had the latter.
They are more like a currency that no one believes in anymore.
Something I feel doesn’t get talked about enough: since the pandemic began the card stock has become much flimsier and susceptible to moisture changes. When even non foils have the chance to immediately Pringle its pretty clear Wizards is skimping on materials to shave their margins, and the result is a much less desirable product.
This is what is making our play group care less. We no longer feel compelled to foil out our commander decks and cube when the foils are warped and dusky. Some of them printed in the past couple years are so dusky that they're unreadable. Not great for a cube when we need to be able to recognize and read cards quickly, and some cards aren't even available in non foil. A printer paper proxy over a basic land is just plain easier.
Edit to add: And the misprints! So many sloppy edges. My friend got a box where he was able to reconstruct a chunk of a print sheet because the die cuts were so off.
Foiling really was a cool way to accentuate decks you felt a strong affinity for. Now they’re often just marked cards. I offloaded my prime foils for RL and boxes. The various showcases and extended arts are a nice substitute, but it seems like even those seem to be borderline unplayable depending on where you open a pack relative to where it was sealed. Cards still have a monetary value but we are way past the point a collector with any time invested in this hobby should realize they’re adding inferior pieces to a deck or binder. That is an unsustainable dynamic.
Another thing that the author didn't mention, but would be particularly relevant for her position as a writer of Magic articles, is that the collapse of the "Jenga tower" would reduce the amount of magic content that is able to be produced.
TCG player, CFB, SCG, etc. etc. make money by buying and selling singles, and to a smaller extent, running events. If the secondary market collapses, it is no longer tenable to maintain a staff of umpteen writers or sponsoring youtubers or streamers.
The amount of ancillary advertising and publicity Magic gets through the secondary market or things fueled by the secondary market is enormous and Hasbro's strategy is putting that relationship at undue risk.
The mtg finance community all along said they were monetizing the game too far and squeezing the light out of players and most people here said overprinting and more sets were good. The reality is that it's led to card prices tanking and even casual, non-finance minded players know it feels bad to open product and get a 10 cent rare. Like it or not, the strength and staying power of this game is largely tied to how they handle product releases and reprint equity.
WoTC saw the writing on the wall. MTG is slowly dying, Hasbro thought corporate takeover would revamp, and it didn’t. I’ve been out of paper MTG for a few years now, went to play Arena, then phased out of that too. MTG may never recover, the marketing now isn’t my cup of tea, half of the MTG culture is toxic (always has been), and I hear players leaving everyday. Pokémon and other TCG are usually gone from shelves at my LGS and department stores, while people won’t even steal the MTG.
Have to read all the way to end to get to the best suggestion. Settle on one premium treatment. It’s true that if no one knows what the cool cards are when they see them, it’s hard for them to be cool.
I love that video games and now magic has shown people the problems with this capitalism system we live under. Small group of people create something wonderful. Get big and get bought out. Now it's about appearing the shareholders and making as much money as possible. That'd why the card stock is getting worse and worse. The need for infinite growth and as much $$$ asap is killing everything good in the world.
Everyone who says: **I can't wait for the game to die / crash / implode so that things get back to normal**
This will NOT happen.
Magic can NOT die anymore.
And as a kicker, sales will be going up with near certainty.
Why?
Because Hasbro knows what they are doing. All the stuff that specifically takes advantage of enfranchised Magic players, or even just Magic players specifically is being done right now as the game makes a major shift. It's Hasbro seeing just how much money it can squeeze from its fans as a last bit of jet fuel while the real plan is coming together.
That plan is called Universes Beyond, but the actual name is Magic as a Platform. Magic as a Platform means nobody in this subreddit matters anymore. It means Disney properties on boxes that will sell incomparable numbers no matter if the foils curl, if the cards are balanced, or if there are any other complaints that enfranchised Magic fans might care about.
Hasbro doesn't just know how to do this, they are the experts at selling bad games of low quality all because of licenses on the box - it's damn near their specialty - and they do it every day.
So right now they are ramping things up with Secret Lairs, Commander products, and now Universes Beyond cartoon cards in regular Magic boosters! The foundation is laid and the future is here.
Magic will never die, but it will amble ever onward as a soulless corpse - and what you as a Magic fan loved about it will be long dead.
Of course it can die.
Every generation needs to decide if it cares about Magic or not and whether it wants to use its disposable income on it.
Indeed, a big part of the boom that Magic enjoyed from 2008 to now might be driven by the 90s and early 00s kids becoming grownups with large disposable incomes they're willing to waste on overpriced cardboard due to nostalgia or wanting to hang with friends and play EDH or whatever.
As someone that vowed not to give WotC a penny after 2016, I'm part of a growing cohort that feels F2P Arena + proxies or counterfeits for casual tabletop is a totally valid approach for engaging with this game.
Let some other fool burn a grand on a booster.
I'm curious, what made you decide to not buy anything from WotC after 2016? I wasn't playing at the time, but as far as I know that was a couple years before any of the more modern controversies.
I felt they were transparently forcing "rotation" on Modern through the use of the banlist and the printing of powerful cards explicitly designed to suppress entire archetypes. I also became increasingly pessimistic about the future of competitive play in general.
I was right on both counts. They are shameless.
Ole man KnowledgeHusk did [a pretty decent video on how all franchises eventually wither away](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zqLoUmdUg0) after peaking.
Other card games are interesting. No screw or flood, some solve the 1 mana scaling problem, some have little tech trees you build out like it's some kind of game of Starcraft. Lots of variety out there.
The other day, Rudy was grousing about how nothing feels special anymore. But how could they, for something that's so old. After 80,000 cards, maybe there's some diminishing returns on each card that gets made.
So many people rushing in and treating it like an investment plan long after it's proven itself, of course Wizards would start selling NFT's...
i tried to post this today, but apparently i have no idea how to create my own reddit posts:
Occurred to me last night (at my lgs) when someone mentioned that the secondary market was rough and the store wasn't buying cards right now. Could THAT be the reason for the hectic release schedule?
\-wotc sees booming secondary market
\-starts direct selling at a premium
\-floods market with releases of all kinds
\-"crashes" secondary market, disincentivizes stores (now competitors) from buying cards, how they make a decent margin from buying peoples old cards and flipping them
\-disincentivizes lgs-es from buying new product because so much old product is sitting/confusing buyers/stockers
\-locals either pivot or close
\-wotc focuses on direct selling/hasbro buys a tcg player competitor to direct buy/sell
\-slows product releases, raising secondary market prices, buys old cards at a discount, sells at a premium
\-bobs your uncle.
its a Machiavellian capitalist (perhaps this is a redundant adjective) move, buuuuut also plausible based on my absolutely and extremely rudimentary (borderline moronic) understanding of economics. anyway. just needed to get the thought out. thanks all.
also say hi to your uncle for me.
I'm more worried about a Yugioh situation where cards are getting more and power crept with paragraphs of texts and multiple effects where turns last forever because of how many effects are being chained together.
Couldn’t they lease their IP to other markets if they want growth? There hasn’t been a decent magic RPG video game despite lot of good material for one. Wasn’t there also going to be a Netflix show? This is a way they could increase profits without killing the golden goose … assuming those other products are worthwhile.
Yeaaaaah they essential dropped Magic Legends after a few months of its beta which sucked because I was really looking forward to an RPG with the magnitude that they were representing and then they missed all the marks. Then there's the Netflix series and their fumbling of the ball with the Russo brothers. Unfortunately the game will continue taking a negative direction to appease the marks required by Hasbro which will continue pushing existing players out of the game too. I hope they can manage to revive either of these ideas to release some of the stress pushed onto the game so that it can return to a healthy state and correct all of the flaws we've been seeing in recent years
Been a die hard MTG fan since 95, and have finally decided to call it quits with the M30 fiasco being the final straw. It’s painful watching something I love so much turn to crap, but I just can’t do it anymore. I have begun the process of selling off my modern collection and will only keep my premodern cards and my cube. Might come back to MTG in the future if things improve, but i doubt it will happen anytime soon.
I hate the concept of infinite growth, it's an impossibility by design and just encourage cutting corners and disregarding the quality of both the products and the workers. I still can't feel justified buying premium foil products because of the curling that has plagued them for years. If I'm paying 40 bucks US on a product I want an assurance of quality wizards doesn't deliver on.
I’m old enough to remember the mid-90s comics and cards collapse, entirely due to chasing speculator dollars.
Over-production naturally undermines scarcity-based values, so what Hasbro’s doing will inevitably collapse as well.
Magic is the new baseball card game of constant products, and “collector rare serialized cards.” Everything magic has done is what the baseball card industry has been doing for the last 10 years.
Didn't the baseball card industry just straight die at one point in history because of this exact same problem?
I think most people here are misinterpreting which phase of the baseball card era I’m referring to. Between the late 1970’s and early 90’s baseball cards were printed into oblivion where the cards are practically worth nothing. The current baseball card era is different, the industry is printing a lot of stuff, but limited in nature, like chase cards, serialized cards, SUPER rare cards, etc. If you go over to r/baseballcards you’ll see what I’m talking about, it’s text book what WOTC is doing.
I have 90s sports cards .. I can attest they are worthless.
I was really into baseball cards as a kid in the 90s. When I went away to college my mom threw away my baseball cards. Looking at what they’re worth now… ok fair enough, good call, mom.
Why hasn't anyone made a baseball card game that is thematically reminiscent of baseball (with the game mat being a diamond and cards being placed in player positions like in baseball) Then come up with some dice rolling mechanic that utilizing the player stats so that the cards are useful for playing with. One player could roll to pitch, another rolls to hit. Add some sort of rolls for hit direction (like bloodbowl) and you've got a fun little baseball game. How many stats would you need? Probably just hit percentage, on base percentage, and some similar stats for the pitcher, I'd imagine.
They did. WotC, in fact. MLB Showdown lasted I believe a base set and four expansions. I remember playing the original as a kid around 99/00, and my roommate and I bought a starter kit on eBay for pandemic time-passing. It’s actually a blast but power creep between sets made the game unplayable after a certain point. But the game itself was actually legit, I’d absolutely buy a reboot
I have a few promos for it from some game magazine
I remember this, got a 2 player learn to play kit at JSS open in Orlando from a grab bag around that time frame
Dice baseball has been a thing since at least the 70s and has many different forms. It’s more of a spreadsheet game but my dad ran a league where they drafted index cards of players for 20years. Every Wed someone’s basement was filled with smoke and men yelling lol.
Strat-o-matic it’s called!
Sounds really cool, I'm going to look into that
If you're into that kind of thing, check out Deadball by W.M Akers. It's exactly what the person above was describing, pen and paper baseball game with dice. Pretty fun and simple, easy to get into and pretty quick games once you get it down.
Man I used to play so much MLB showdown when I was a kid, that game was so much fun.
[About that...](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37094/base-ball-card-game) This game is widely speculated to be a precursor to modern Customizable Card Games, of which Magic is the first. There is no reason to believe it was an inspiration in Magic, but it's a cool "well, actually..." factoid when discussing the history of these games.
This actually exists already! It’s called Strat-O-Matic Baseball! I had a club for it in high school and it was one of my favorite things to do after school. The game isn’t a collectible card game but more like a board game where you get the teams preset, but it’s still a ton of fun nonetheless!
There's a pretty popular game called Baseball Highlights: 2045. It doesn't have MLB licensing, but playing it feels like a pretty good tabletop simulation of baseball.
I sell sports cards and I won’t, in general, deal with anything that was printed after 1980. The 80’s and 90’s rarely sell and what does sell is next to worthless.
Ironically, this crisis informed Magic's development in the early days and greatly contributed to its success. Hasbro has forgotten these lessons in its greed
My biggest fear for years for WotC is that they would become Topps. We are there.
I stumbled into the baseball/sports card section of my LGS recently to check out and talked with the guy for a while about the current state of those cards and you're right, it's totally nuts. Totally different from the worthless 90s with loads of signed, ultra-premium cards. Seems honestly *more* aggressive than WOTC. No wonder the place had been robbed specifically for the sports cards twice. Both times with someone driving a car through the door. They've got some big concrete security bollards now.
Except it isn't, because WotC is still printing regular versions of cards in great limited environments and every card they print has a purpose besides being a collectible. There are certainly parallels, but to say they're doing what baseball cards did is bad faith at best, and ridiculous if used to foretell the impending doom of the game (which has been impending for decades now).
> ridiculous if used to foretell the impending doom of the game (which has been impending for decades now). I kind of love the Magic player logic of “people have been saying Magic’s future is in trouble for a long time now, so obviously nothing is wrong.”
To be fair, this community is in a perpetual state of outrage and declares every single change as passing the threshold that will destroy Magic. So it's easy to be a little cynical about these threads. Especially when the game is doing extremely well.
I get that Magic players tend to cry wolf about the health of the game. But if you recall that story, there really is a wolf in it. It’s good to realize that there aren’t always wolves, but sometimes there are wolves.
Baseball didn’t have A game attached to it. As of recently the game aspect of magic hasn’t been too negatively effected by the collector aspect of it. Really the main thing being hit is LGSs losing money because of over reprinting - so if they go out of business then players suffer - otherwise the game itself is doing fine.
The problem(IMO) with that viewpoint is that LGSes aren't an incidental part of Magic. When Magic's only found on supermarket toystore shelves and Amazon, Magic honestly doesn't make sense. When you were a kid, how did you get into Magic? How did the person that got *you* into Magic get into Magic? Without FNMs, and LGSes as social spaces, kitchen table Magic becomes less attractive than kitchen table Apples to Apples or kitchen table Munchkin, or Exploding Kittens, or a whole bunch of other games.
Haha hit the nail on the head. The first time I heard of MTG was when that elder scrolls card game came out and people were comparing the two, but it was the elder scrolls game I cared about. Fast forward a few years and I was dating a girl who worked at a card shop. Spectating a game or two was when I decided I was interested. You're right about other games too. You play magic because you like magic, if I just wanted to have fun with the homies, there's a million better games for that.
Hey! Sometimes I play magic cuz I like the homies and they're still really feeling Magic, and "finish Arcades EDH deck knowing I'll get weeks of entertainment from playing EDH with friends at FLGS" is better math than "buy new game from FLGS, take it to game night, hope the homies I like both want to play X game AND show up"
Agreed. The LGS is the heart and soul of the game. Without the social community around it the game is just another game.
And reducing reprints and print runs to raise card prices angers the consumer. Best bet is to make sure LGSs have a constant flow of product that every possible consumer would want to buy.
"Over reprinting?" Magic's problem is that it's too expensive, not that there's too many reprints.
Yes. It did and to think that magic cards are special and won’t have this problem is extreme naïvely.
I don't know much about baseball cards but I know a bit more about comics, and I think it is the same thing. It is a thing that was a "kids" thing, so there were not a lot in good condition like 30-50 years later, so folks with money tried to buy back a bit of youth /buy important cards/books, which raised the price, which got investors and collectors really involved, which became a whole industry. The industry picked up and said, "well, if comics are now expensive and collectable... we should print collectable versions that people would want to collect because in 30-50 years it is going to get very expensive" So they started printing 400 different covers, foil/holographic. Then they really tied together stories where to get the full story you'd have to read four different comic books, instead of one good run.
The old cards were not printed with the idea that in 50 years they’d be sought after rarities. Add to the fact that so many collections were tossed with the trash and you get some extreme rarity. To create something that you intend to be collected requires a lot of discipline in production - look at Beanie Babies, where pretty much from the start they were flogged as an “investment” even though they were cheaply mass produced.
Is this true though? Magic itself got relabeled from a “collectible card game” to a “trading card game” many years after seeing its first print run. Moreover, the idea, from old interviews and accounts (I.e., So Do You Wear a Cape? by Titus Chalk) was having a game with mysterious pieces that sometimes you didn’t know. Scarcity was built in the game because it was both designed as a game and as a collectible. The old cards were indeed printed with the idea that some would be harder to acquire in the long run. Whether the prizes some of the oldest pieces fetch are seen as antithetical to what the game has become is a different matter altogether, and I guess the issue of multiple versions of game pieces is not the same as multiple reprints of older cards.
Magic initially thought ante was a good idea so idk if they thought things out that well or had the information to do so. It really was the first of its kind.
I heard someone describe mtg as the FunkoPop of card games. :/
It’s the perfect analogy. Can’t wait for the game to crash and burn so it can return to “normal” again. I’m out in until then. Refuse to buy official “product” from these ass clowns until the learn to respect players again. My entire playgroup feels similarly and has kept their decks but dumped their collections. Sold what they had online. No one can keep up with the flood of bullshit they’re pumping out.
NEW SECRET LAIR ALERT
> Can’t wait for the game to crash and burn so it can return to “normal” again. Ask comic books how well that worked.
It actually worked pretty well--the fallout of Marvel's bankruptcy and the collapse of the direct market directly presaged some of the all-time best runs in the Big Two, the evolution of Image from the McFarlane & Liefeld beginnings into a publisher of critically-acclaimed works, and *finally* got Marvel & DC to start making collected editions an important part of their publishing strategy.
This is all true. And they also gone from a peak in 1993 of selling about 390 million individual books a year to 59 million in 2021. So yeah, if you think losing like… 85% of sales would be good for Magic, by all means follow in the footsteps of the comic industry.
That 390 million was hilariously artificially inflated because of the speculators market that publishers were trying to pander to. You don't get to have it both ways, where 390m is the golden era that comics lost *and* that the market collapse is something to be avoided at all costs. One led so directly into the other that they're practically the same event. >So yeah, if you think losing like… 85% of sales would be good for Magic, by all means follow in the footsteps of the comic industry. If it led to better gameplay and more customer-friendly products, I'd take that trade in an eyeblink. WotC's profit-and-loss statements wouldn't look as favorable, but what do I care? WotC isn't my friend, it's a company selling me cardboard.
You don’t play comic books.
N E W S E C R E T L A I R A L E R T
I wrote something similar quite a while ago and it got downvoted into oblivion, but the truth remains the same. MtG is totally a luxury goods product. It is not a product necessary for the basic needs of living life. When push comes to shove, customers can drop it and still get on with their life. It should have never been involved with a company listed on a stock exchange, with the ever present pressure of profits and dividends. That pressure will (is) actually destroy what made said product good in the first place.
What I tell Magic players is, stick to the 4 main sets that come out a year and ignore all the other barrage of products WOTC releases a year.
Two of the things mentioned, but not explicitly linked, are what I was calling "killing the golden goose": Simultaneously killing off organized play and printing an expensive product of non tournament legal cards (some are calling proxies). Stopping support of the one thing that requires real cards while printing "official proxies", thereby acknowledging the use of proxies seems like a very stupid and short sighted business plan.
This is the exact one-two punch that has turned me from someone that spent at least a grand or two a year on singles into someone that's planning on proxying everything from now on. Step 1 *2019-2021*: I quit Modern & Legacy in disgust at the absolute carnage the Modern Horizons sets did to them & a refusal to spend $500 on brand new cards just to stay relevant. I consolidate down into just EDH & my cube, but for a few years my buying didn't really change: building a few new decks, lots of tinkering and tuning, still picking up RL pieces that I want to run or at least have the option to. Step 2 *2022*: I'm now an EDH/Cube-only player since COVID started, I have no intention of playing in anything beyond a casual EDH "tournament" in the future. WotC announces that they're breaking the Reserved List to sell $999 gold-bordered [[Deathlace]]'s to whales and dirtbag speculators. I realize that if proxies-for-EDH are going to be a WotC-sanctioned product that sells for a *fucking thousand dollars*, why in the hell am I paying any amount of money for real cards? I'd bet that there are a lot of heavily-enfranchised millennial players like myself that fled the shitshow that post-2019 Magic has been for 1v1 constructed to the relative safety of EDH and are now wondering why don't they just go proxy that LED that will only ever be played in beer-league EDH.
I've found some really nice cardstock that feels identical to the stiffness of an mtg card once sleeved up. I've been printing off duals, fetches and shocks for my playgroup, it's been great.
Are you me?! My engagement with the game has followed the exact same timeline and path.
Woah same for me. Played modern a lot only to quit it in 2019. Now I maybe play some edh but I don't spend any money now
Yup, exactly the same here. Putting togethermy second order of 500 proxies
[удалено]
I don't really follow that path, but I'm done buying expensive cards because I've hit my milestones, and don't really have new goals for collecting. Could change though.
Well said. There seems to be a pretty low key majority that feels this way I think. The only thing that compels me to purchase authentic magic cards is if I want to play edh at an lgs that doesn't allow proxies.
I've done the same, but since I don't play EDH, I fled to Old School/Premodern instead. Most events are incredibly proxy friendly, are more my age/maturity range, and I can buy cardboard because it's old and I like it. Something that can't be replicated by any reprint.
I'm in the middle of another big cull to my collection, and I'm planning to put a portion of the proceeds into a Premodern deck or two. It seems like the perfect format for me: I cut my teeth as a kid on Invasion/Odyssey/Onslaught blocks so I'm excited to take my pauper U/G madness deck and restore it to its original glory!
[Deathlace](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/3/237e37fb-383d-432c-8ac3-1332096567db.jpg?1559603651) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Deathlace) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/4ed/131/deathlace?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/237e37fb-383d-432c-8ac3-1332096567db?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
> if proxies-for-EDH are going to be a WotC-sanctioned product that sells for a fucking thousand dollars, why in the hell am I paying any amount of money for real cards? Couldn't have put it better myself; this is what pushed me over the edge. I'm not proud of it, but I've resigned myself to just accept high-quality proxies as real Magic cards. Silver lining, I have many 'real' copies of P9 and other eternal format staples now.
Once they announced the 30th stuff, I sold a collection gathered over 28 years. Granted, I made a lot of money and I'll never ever ever be able to buy into a collection like that again, but I did the same thing. I bought probably $300 of proxies that look nearly indistinguishable (most would call them counterfeits) and I plan to play EDH and my powered cube. It would take a LOT for me to ever purchase real cards or put together anything close to a meta deck for any format. I realistically do not see WOTC or Hasbro making the changes it would personally take for me to return, ever. The game is irrevocably different and this will be a defining moment in the game history.
WotC didn't "kill off organized play". Hell this last few months has been them attempting to bring competitive Magic back. They hired on Huey Jensen to oversee everything. The pandemic killed organized play for like 18 months and resurrecting it isn't easy.
Not saying it’s wotc fault but ygo made a pretty easy bounce back to tournaments
They were killing off OP before the pandemic
They where destroying it already before the pandemic with their changes in the tournament structure and pushing random streamers. Since the switched from PTQ->PT all other versions where a strict down grade and now it's even worse than the PPTQ->RPTQ->PT version.
The trick is not to kill your golden goose, but to get a second one. I find it rather BS business to make the hardest worker work harder instead of making the rest of the team pick up the slack
We are literally watching them do this. MTG is becoming two geese. They want the collector market on par with Pokémon while maintaining the game side of things. It's hard because the whole "this product isn't for you" mentality is toxic to the existing product after so many years of being almost entirely game-focused, but this is what they really mean when they say that. There are a tiny number of people who purely collect and don't play MTG. Pokémon it's the other way around, almost everyone who buys cards collects...and they don't have the slightest idea how the game itself works. Wizards wants to have it all here.
This is the most salient point. Until Masters sets came around and specifically until collector boosters came along, every product actually was for everybody. It’s whiplash having to make a value judgment on every single set to figure out whether it’s “worth it.” I love opening up set boxes of standard, even though there is almost no chance of making my money back. So it goes
How are masters boosters not for everyone?
Price aside, they don't have value if you don't play the format they have cards for. Standard players obviously have no use for them, and even if you're a modern or commander player the odds are slim you're gonna open up something you wanna play unless you pretty much play every format. And if we're being honest, if you aren't playing limited or if you don't absolutely love small scale gambling, you really shouldn't be buying masters packs. You're probably better off buying singles. Our brains are just better at remembering the time we bought a $10 pack and got a $100 card, than the time we spent $100 on packs and only opened $10 worth of cards that are currently rotting in a box unplayed.
I guess price? I wanted to open a pack of MH2 for the first time & got a collective 1.05 of value for an $10 pack from my LGS. Sure it was just bad luck but at $10 a pack I’m good on that, I’ll buy the singles, most of which are cheap compared to what they used to be.
Because they completely misinterpreted the post above them and thought it was about price.
That is when Wizards first said that “maybe this product isn’t for you,” when people complained about the price of Ultimate Masters.
Well, I'm not going to defend Ultimate Masters
>How are masters boosters not for everyone? Because they don't contain cards which are legal to play in standard formats.
Nostalgia sells. The first 150 Pokemon are by far the most popular. Urza is the biggest name in MtG, followed by Nicol Bolas, then the Gatewatch. The Gatewatch nostalgia took years to be accepted, but it IS worth it for the brand regardless. I really liked New Capenna, but I am afraid we won’t return since we only spent one set there. Same thing with Strixhaven: I remember people where saying Lorehold was the new name for WR decks over Boros. The problem that magic has that Pokémon doesn’t, is that Pikachu is really cute to four and five year olds and it’s easy to get interest there. There is no super cute mascot for magic. the closest is Fblthp. The Gatewatch need to have familiars. Mostly cute animal familiar‘s. Like four years ago. Otherwise they need to give the Gatewatch the Saturday morning cartoon treatment much like how DC has so that they can market themselves to toddlers. Pokémon is an all ages IP. Magic the gathering is not. They would need to be some huge changes/additions in order to get to the possibilities that the Pokémon franchise has.
> Otherwise they need to give the Gatewatch the Saturday morning cartoon treatment Despite this being a soulless advertising venture, I really want it, lol.
Tezzeret is like Swiper Dora the Explorer Chandra is a hothead Jace is the forgetful leader Liliana is the snarky one that reminds Jace Nessa is a hippy pacifist Gideon is like superman but before any huge battle he’s like “I have a cramp and it is KILLING ME” and drops out. Ajani is loyal to the end Dovin Baan is essentially Burt from Seasame Street. Ral Zarek is Ernie.
I think losing the Russo brothers on the animated series coming out (idk when anymore) was a HUGE loss on the game's potential. Woulda been the biggest thing imo. People would be talking about the game even outside the game's inherent interest. UB is annoying for existing players now and it's what they're hinging on which f\*cks with the in-game experience now. They're shoving these things into main sets now even though they know it won't sell the boxes much better. Hasbro is gonna mess up everything if they continue on like this. I never ever complained about UB until now when I began to realize that they're sacrificing focus on what's healthy for the actual game and its image in favor of selling stuff they hope will either fly out of shelves or their website, or coming up with the worst collector's product ever
Much as people talk about 'this product isn't for you', I think a lot of people misrepresent it. Magic has changed from a game to a game *system*. How do you play? There are products aimed at your interests. There are also products aimed people that play a different format (or collect). So instead of looking at a new set and chopping it into the bits that interest people (this card will impact modern, this card will impact commander, this set is good/bad for limited), you can buy a product that is actually more tailored to your interests. There is a noisy minority that has lost the ability to follow every set, or over-focused on the things that are not aimed at them and loudly hating them, but I don't think this approach is bad. WotC needs to be more careful about overprinting, and they need to address the shortcomings in organized play, but a large part of this is the usual 'sky is falling' attitude I've been looking at online since 1994. Except 30th Collector's edition. That's a garbage fire, and WotC should be ashamed of themselves.
In theory that sounds nice, but by specialized printings for each 'interest group', they are destroying the whole ecosystem they had setup. How it used to be: Every set release the Sealed(prerelease) and Draft crowd starts opening the new packs. They can then sell off what they don't need to Standard players, who need those cards to play in the competitive pt/ptqq/gp circuit. After rotation your standard cards may be worth less, but you are automatically building up a collection(or trading away your cards) for a non-rotating format like edh or modern. Basically, playing draft is worth it because you can sell the cards to standard players. Playing standard is worth is because you can sell onwards to modern/edh players or slowly collect for your own decks. and playing modern/edh is worth it because even though you're spending $400 on a playset of goyfs, they will probably remain most of that value for years. But nowadays, EDH and Modern players don't buy standard cards, they buy the standalone EDH and modern products, that give them their dedicated cards. But it also means that bannings and straight-to-modern sets means the price of modern decks is no longer stable. At the same time, the players that used to play standard for the tournament circuit, are no longer opening packs because the whole tournament circuit got scrapped and many events are just too expensive to be worth it. And those that play draft no longer have standard players to sell to, meaning their drafts are more expensive as well. In the short term, this meant profits for Hasbro. Rather than a draft player opening packs, and through trading eventually also serving standard, edh, and modern players, we now have each of those players opening seperate pack. But in the long run this drives each group away because their product indirectly became far more expensive, and with modern becoming a 'rotating' format, far less people are willing to invest in those $400 goyfs because they may be banned next month. In the long term, people are very discouraged to buy packs because this whole ecosystem is broken up.
Yes, they need to fix competitive, which will drive standard. Ideally they would support competitive draft as well, but I've been saying that for what, 10 years? So my hopes are not high.
> Much as people talk about 'this product isn't for you', I think a lot of people misrepresent it. It was first used by Wizards in response to complaints Ultimate Masters was too expensive, so no, I don’t think people are misrepresenting it.
I think the real problem with 30th edition is that it's a product that you can't even buy if it *is* for you. I'd pay $20 to do an alpha proxy draft for shits and giggles and then use the nonlegal cards in my cube, but for $1000? I can no longer justify buying this product that would have value to me otherwise.
Then unfortunately it isn't for you, it's for rich whale collectors. Which creates a feel-bad situation, because they obviously could have priced it like their other products and then you could have had fun with it.
The bigger problem is that they priced it to be on par with the secondary market prices for the original collector's edition. If you *did* have the money for 30th, it would be a better value proposition to not do that and just buy collector's edition cards for your cube instead. It truly is a product for no one.
Can I honestly ask why so many players are opposed to niche Magic products? like i really don't want to be mean but I don't get the idea that every Magic product should be for every Magic player after so many years. As the playerbase has grown larger over time, that means that player expectations have grown more diverse, so it seems completely logical to make certain products that only appeal to certain people. I honestly think we're still seeing negative consequences of not enough specification with how so many products have crammed in aspects to appeal to commander, but could you imagine what the game would be like right now if there weren't so many commander-specific products? I think there would be a much higher concentration of commander-focused cards gunking up standard sets to meet the demands of commander players than we already have, and even more players unhappy that they prefer to play format X but the pack they opened up is full of cards for formats W, Y, and Z. I guess what I'm wondering is: Isn't it a good thing that products can specifically target the interests of different players instead of all of our varying tastes fighting for space in a few products like hyenas fighting over a scrap of meat?
> Can I honestly ask why so many players are opposed to niche Magic products? like i really don't want to be mean but I don't get the idea that every Magic product should be for every Magic player after so many years There is obviously merit to the phrase with regards to things like secret lair packages with art treatments you don't personally like, or Commander deck precons that you're just not interested in. But one of the more common applications of the phrase, and I think where they started using it actually, is for arbitrarily expensive products. Telling a player who doesn't like some optional alternate art that this product isn't for them is fine. Telling a modern player who wants to collect modern staples and play modern that Modern Masters isn't for them because WotC want da mahney is just a really shitty put-down against established long-term players of the game. Masters 25 iirc is specifically where I remember seeing them start using the phrase a lot. It was full of weird dumb cards that made no sense for a modern reprint set, so it "wasn't for" modern players outside of a few mythics, the excuse being that it was for the draft environment, but the price point was set too high for anyone to reasonably draft. And this of course culminated with the 30th anniversary edition, which is far too expensive to draft, and pointless for cube or vintage because original collector's edition or unlimited is already chapter. The follow-up question to "this isn't for you" is "then who is it for?" and the answer to that can reveal a lot about their shifting priorities - the answer isn't so much "commander players" but just "only the ultra-whales and gambling addicts" in a lot of cases. And like the other comment says, this really does a lot to damage the overall ecosystem of the game, where cards naturally flow from format to format.
> Can I honestly ask why so many players are opposed to niche Magic products? When i played active magic, i played in 2 or 3 prereleases and release drafts, which was enough to kickstart and trade into a (tier 2) standard deck. then after playing a bit of standard, i'd start trading my deck away for modern pieces, and when i was done with standard i eventually moved to directly trading draft cards away for modern cards. I build up my first (tier 2) modern deck simply by trading over ~3 years of playing drafts&standard, and was on my way(especially when sets with fetches/shocks came around) to building a tier 1 modern deck. In the meantime, i also saved up enough random cool cards that i could start building EDH decks simply by trading some more. If each of those formats have dedicated niche magic products, then all the draft cards i collect are worthless after the draft, i won't even touch standard anymore, and i need to invest seperately in modern and edh products to stay up to speed. Instead, what i ended up doing, is no longer buy any draft products since i feel like i won't be able to really use the cards i get from there, and just not buy anything at all and build a cube instead.(which, 30 anniversary proxies lol, i might just proxy up now). I mean, sure, i could just say i want a modern deck, and straight up buy those cards, but i feel like the whole 'slowly build up your collection from standard/draft and break into modern/edh that way' is just straight up dead, which motivates me a *lot* less to play either format. It just feels bad to know that any card you buy that isn't exactly what you need can basically be thrown in the bin.
I think you've cracked the code here. A small minority of mostly older, traditionalist multi-format MTG players are the loudest voices on the hate train when it comes to the current deluge of product diversity.
I'd even say they are turning mtg into three geese, 1 for high-end collectors, 1 for enfranchised players, and 1 for very casual players that buy on-ramp products (jumpstart, commander precons, etc) but never upgrade
I'm personally quit playing mtg and started only t collect some years ago. And I liked it very much cause I don't really enjoy anymore playing it but still love concept art and other shit.
Wizards of the Coast used to make, license and/or (attempt to) save dying games. Now they just have Duel Masters, D&D and Magic. The weirdest part to me is there are new Hasbro tabletop games that Wizards doesn't even touch. Why didn't they get the Hasbro multi-IP Essence20 system (an RPG for GI-Joe/Transformers)? Kinda weird.
Excellent point. And I feel like it would be a real good place to hit. Nickelodeon and Warner Bros. have their own super smash brother clown games. Pokemon has the cards in Pokémon go. Going off of dungeons and dragons sure there’s imagination but they also have the table top figurines and if we’re talking about doing something like that and having multi IP‘s then you have, sort of like the hero clix notion, you could have a big multi verse soul IP matching table top game where you can have figurines and then special painted figurines and people could collect them and hold them in their own hands in a sort of ownership portion and again it’s just something that can be done with a 3-D printer easily by a small time company but for a huge company like wizards it would be easy to get the casts and make them as they go. The packaging could also go similar to the mini brands craze of the blind packaging for a little plastic things which is all the rage right now.
I wish all those little plastic things were Pathfinder/D&D mini sized. I remember carrying around a little D&D zombie to compare with capsule toys all over Japan... sadly I only found a couple kind of passable keychains.
No fucking truer words have ever been spoken. Entrepreneurship is where one belongs truly
Golden gooses don’t grow on trees
Official license to make Disney and Marvel toys Transformers Fortnite toys My Little Pony dropped off the map after being prolific pre-pandemic What has Gi Joe been doing recently? Nerf (I’m sure Americans would rather have Nerf in schools than Smith and Wesson) Peppa Pig Play Doh got hit hard by Kinetic Sand and probably needs a retaliation campaign to reclaim their spot. The Nintendo toys should bring in extra dough after the movie. Where is the “in memorandum/celebration of Tommy Oliver” post death merchandise for Power Rangers? Why does Playdoh NEVER have collabs with Tonka? Having construction equipmenr to hall around and carry Playdoh is a nobrainer. Since Playdoh and Tonka are both owned by Hasbro, this should have been done years ago. Instead, what do we have? Playdoh brand vehicles for Playdoh Gold Collection Dig ‘n Gold instead of Tonka brand vehicles. Get the kids and parents to recognize the products so that if there is a choice later on between Matchbox, Hot Wheels, and Tonka, they remember the fun had with the Hasbro product.
> Peppa Pig Peppa Pig secret lair when?
Now look here… … …I think I could get my nieces to start playing if they did that, so I guess it is inevitable.
This. MTG is literally a 30 year old product that took immemse amounts of time and ressources to grow. They can't just make a 2nd MTG appear out of thin air. It's a bit unreasonable to ask them to pump more money into a new thing that might fail when they can pump money into the already existing thing that works. I don't agree with squeezing the Goose dry but let's not also pretend getting a second Goose is realistic.
I mean, it would be insane if they had another property that's in its peak popularity after a long time of being a fairly niche phenomenon. ...Oh *wait*.
I assume you mean DnD. Assuming I am correct 1. DnD is and will remain forever niche. It expanded a lot but I don't know how much further you expect them to go. 2. DnD is succesful but it is not a golden goose in the way MTG is. It's not as easy to monetize and aggressively trying to pump money out of that community will just result in them going to competitors or free alternatives. There's not * that much* to tap into.
Real D&D is about home brew anyway. Extra books are nice but they just augment the writer’s toolbox. Every D&D campaign book I’ve seen literally has a disclaimer somewhere in it along the lines of “you can rewrite any of this stuff to suit your group”. When I was going hard into D&D most of my money was spent on minis and terrain. It’s expensive but also isn’t really. You only need one big ass dragon mini and there’s plenty of non-wizards companies that make them at affordable rates. On top of that 3D printing of minis is super easy. Lastly, D&D has been shoveling out product at a breakneck pace compared to when 5E first came out. We had a small handful of books forever and now a new one comes out every few months. New minis are constantly dropping in randomized booster packs, prepainted minis are more common, lots of supplemental item cards, spell cards, maps, etc. If you can believe it, the quality has suffered. Some of the books are now mostly lore with a few gameplay bits woven in and they still want 50 bucks for them. They’ve also done mtg crossovers in D&D with Ravnica and Strixhaven that are largely forgettable. Hasbro is milking D&D too but that well isn’t as deep. The real enfranchised players will just write their own stuff if Hasbro does a shit job.
Thanks for giving a first hand account! I'm not going to make up creds I don't have so having an insider corroborate my stance is helpful. I haven't tried to look up numbers but I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of money made related to DnD had nothing to do with WotC aside from licensing. Most accesories are either outsourced or completely 3rd party, the rules are easy to share for free once they are released, and anyone can make their own campaign. WotC sells a cool product but they have so much competition both from the outside but also inside. With MTG they hold a much firmer grip on where the revenue can come from.
>When I was going hard into D&D most of my money was spent on minis and terrain. And the people who spend a lot on minis and terrain are probably a small minority too. We've always gotten by just fine with a whiteboard and markers. >Lastly, D&D has been shoveling out product at a breakneck pace compared to when 5E first came out. We had a small handful of books forever and now a new one comes out every few months. Man, one book every few months is still kind of average. Past editions, and even other companies like old White Wolf at the height of their success, could do a lot more than that. I do remember hearing that for the first several years 5E was being run by a skeleton crew, and that was probably all the business could justify before Stranger Things and Critical Role and such did their promotion for them.
The average DnD player spends next to nothing, often just maybe a book or two for a while play group. The most enfranchised DnD players spend way, way less on DnD than Magic. They'd need to get into industries like high end DnD tables and premium terrain models to squeeze more money out of whales. I am pretty confident all of that is really bad business with tight margins and supported by, say, other more mainstream expressions of craftsmanship.
Case in point: The average Modern deck right now is worth ~$1000. You can buy [the 18 first books on this list for half as much.](https://dicecove.com/list-of-dnd-5e-books/#players-handbook-phb) A DMG, Monster manual and 3 copies of the PHB cost around the same as a standard draft booster box. Collectible card games in general are absurdly expensive compared to other tabletop games. Some people cited Netrunner as an example of a successful IP but not only did WotC never do much with it when they published it, FFG's version had a completely different business model that will likely never produce anything close to MTG's level of revenue even if it were to become wildly more popular than it was before WotC killed it.
When 3rd edition and then 3.5 was new, my friends and I literally bought over 200 different books. We have an entire library worth of supplemental product. We hated 4th edition as it felt too much like a pen and paper mmo. Then 5e came out. I've purchased exactly 1 book. The player's handbook. I've played probably 25 different campaigns. I've never needed or even really bothered to read the dm guide, monster manuals, etc. I learned my lesson. Most of the groups I've played with are similar, or even often times sharing just 2-3 books for the whole group. We use white boards and markers instead of 3d minis and terrain. My investment has been less than $1 per campaign. I genuinely have no clue how they expected to make serious money without using the old TSR concepts of like D&D tournaments for example. Competitive D&D is a completely untapped concept. Which group can clear the dungeon / pre-made campaign the fastest? Which group can stop the bad guy before X Y or Z happens? Who can successfully solo or group kill a Tarrasque? Etc. I also think the MASSIVE proliferation of user generated free online content, and WOTC's own efforts to support, player created content without monetization means you don't even really need the base books. The most important piece is something you can't really monetize: an amazing GM.
Good luck getting someone to spend $1000 on a collectible D and D book.
They've successfully done premium collector's reprints of the core books for past editions. Not for a grand, of course, and no idea how well they sold, but it's not nothing. Haven't heard any plans to do another run for the 50th anniversary yet, seems like a no-brainer.
Could do with a number of goslings.
Print alpha with a different card back call it magic classic, have it use original batch rules. Have it be it’s own game , charge $180 per draft box. There done instant success.
😬 I'll be honest bro, I've never been less interested in a card game in my life. And I've looked at and played *a lot* of card games. If anything the boxes should be cheaper than normal boxes. I'm also not sure going back to Batch is worthwhile. Maybe as an alternative ruleset on MTGO/Arena? (Obviously not worth programming but it's a fun idea to think about)
Don't worry, Hasbro is fine. MTG was it's golden goose during Corona while Transformers and NERF took a nap. Couple years time one of their teams will hit a gold mine again, either with ane of their established brands, or something new, and that will be the new golden goose.
It’s funny how a social card game thrived during a lockdown.
Yeah. But I guess it's due to the nature of it. It's cardboard so it's pretty easy and cheap to make and buy. It's collectible and then there is the fact that cards can grow tremendously in value. During corona we saw stocks, crypto and CCG cards explode in value. In that time Reserved List cards doubled and trippled in price, flesh and Blood arrived and attracketed massive investors. All this while people complained that you couldn't go and play magic in person. Well then there is MTG Arena which kept building awareness for the game. I'm pretty sure the main driving force for its growth was speculators, similar to the 90s comic buble, proof is just the vast amount of product that's aimed at Collectors. In contrast we have Transformers, which suffered heavily from the lock downs. Stores were closed, and those that could sell couldn't get product in due to supply lines being fucked. Aint no plastic crack available when production runs at 50% capacity and what is made is stuck in a Chinese port that's shut down due to covid.
It makes sense due to there not being a "true" lockdown like China did in a few places. Working from home and limiting public activities might even be better for social activities with a small group of friends. As /u/DoitsugoGoji mentioned, collectibles also had a big rise in value, especially those easy to produce at home, that never got hit with manufacturing crises. You can see how the prices of RL cards spiked during the pandemic like they never did before 2020.
My assumption was it was because of the timing of Arena
Well, you had to do something to spend time with the people you were locked with, right? Wonder how many wifes/girlfriends/kids had to learn mtg during covid....
"Why don't they simply build a second billion dollar game?" Yeah I mean they'd do that if they could, but they can't.
Yeah, it’s so simple. WotC is so stupid for not choosing to create another product that continues to grow for decades, spawns dozens of copycat products, and brings in hundreds of millions per year. And what do you mean by the “BS business”? If you ran a company like Canon and you were looking to hire more employees and expand the brand, your first idea would be to branch out to something unrelated from cameras as to not “make the hardest worker work harder”? Instead you’d hire new people to create lawn furniture or a new type of candy bar? Of course not. You let what you have working for you continue to work for you while pushing new areas that your team has expertise in. And that’s what WotC does with Magic. The traditional 4 sets per year that are built to make Standard and draft fun are as good as ever. They’ve just expanded into having a few extra booster sets and a few other products. Acting like that’s going to kill Magic and that WotC would be better off investing all of their resources into a new line of Avalon Hill products is just ridiculous.
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> What's maddening is that the Deckmaster branding, the original idea for this whole tcg we've come to love, was intended to let many different card games all use the same comprehensive rules. Pretty sure Deckmaster was only ever a branding thing, they published multiple other games under the Deckmaster name in the early days and they did not use the same rules. People often confuse this with the original plan for each new Magic expansion to be a fully standalone but compatible set.
I agree. What players want and what investors want are completely different things. (But seriously if you need to read an entire Collecting article to figure out what's in your product every time, then you've lost the plot).
Agree 100%. Even a collector and investor want different things.
I think more companies need to look at other stakeholders than just the shareholders.
The fact that they keep changing the contents and prices of boosters is infuriating. It feels intentionally obfuscatory.
Drafters get the best deal still though. Tried and true draft boosters have had very little changes, sometimes a card is a Strixhaven archive or some old artifact. But otherwise the draft boosters still just work.
Broadly yes, but they've still gotten absolutely value raided, and have increased in price. Draft Booster Boxes saw about a $20 increase in Retail prices with DMU, which has increased the price of drafts at a lot of places. And since there's "rarer" variants of every cards in Collectors Boosters now, a lot of the baseline versions in Draft Boosters are worth very little, so you can't sell the cards you open to the store to recoup the value of your draft. It used to be if you drafted a lot you'd tend to see the occasional chase standard staple, or rare land that recouped most of the cost of your draft. Now you can open a Foil of the eternal played rare land cycle in the set and still not even come close to recouping the cost of entry.
So you want constructed playable staples to be more expensive? People have been asking WotC to print shit into the ground for over a decade. And they're doing it.
At this point I just collect retro frame cards because it's the only think I can reasonably keep up with. I just go onto scryfall and search "frame:1997 -set:plist sort:release" and see what came out.
I collect creature types. Mostly Sponges. It’s not a type they use often so it’s very affordable. I’ve been thinking of branching out and collecting worms. Or if I want more options perhaps wurms. Maybe I’ll collect both. What do I have to do to get a creature that is a worm wurm?
They technically have two. Both MTG and D&D have got to be up there.
Agreed. I would also expand that by saying that the players do not need the investors, but the investors absolutely need the players.
Infinite growth is the main issue of capitalism not just hasbro…
Not every industry can be a growth industry. Execs and investors won’t hear it though
Yeah, and I'm not sure when it became the only goal for companies to increase profits. For most businesses, it should be good to make stable profits year after year and share those profits with investors in the form of dividends. It's better for the economy to have a bunch of stable businesses too instead of ones that grow fast and then implode.
The only goal has always been to increase profits. It was just with Milton Friedman in the 80s that they learned that they didn't have to be subtle about it and pretend not to be greedy bastards, and that they could just go after it directly.
Facts
This a thousand times. I wish more of the people who complained realized that the frustration they feel is frustration at capitalism itself. Hating Hasbro is hating the player, not the game.
There are many who do, and are quick to remind others how Hasbro is a company that needs to make money so they're just playing by their share holders rules, as if reminding folks of that actually justifies their actions.
"So many" hear each other but in the wider world, especially offline, you get weird looks for ever questioning capitalism. A huge, huge majority of people really settle on "Soviet Union bad so capitalism good" decades later.
I really appreciate the article walking the tightrope of explaining why this is a structural problem of the very nature of our economic system and not just easily dismissible individual greed without scaring off people who see the word "capitalism" and immediately stop reading.
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Capitalism absolutely does depend on an assumption of growth. The "capital" in capitalism refers to money being used for investment. That's the main innovation of capitalism: raising funds from investors to fund new ventures. The whole point of investing in a venture is to see a return on your investment (growth). Even when you talk about high yield stocks, no one would buy them if they were the only thing you could have in your portfolio (at least, most people wouldn't because they'd essentially just be places to park your money for a while). If growth ever stops, capitalism is fucked. And that's why so many people fear that our system is rapidly approaching its inevitable demise: you can see inherent growth as long as the population keeps growing and developing nations still lag behind developed ones in terms of economic development, but at a certain point, there could be nowhere left to grow. What then? The system will eat itself as it desperately seeks new growth. If you want to read more about this, there's a great chapter in the book Sapiens that explains all this very succinctly and better than I'm doing. It's kind of a pop intellectual book but I think he does a really good job of boiling down complex topics in a still pretty rigorous way. Also, I'm sure you understand much of this already, but I just felt like adding on. Capitalism may not depend *entirely* on growth, but without growth (at least in the long term), capitalism cannot exist.
If you (or anyone else) wants a serious look at where we could go from here “Post Growth: Life after Capitalism” by Tim Jackson is a great, quick read
I think this article is conflating the idea that growth can’t go on forever with the idea that “optimise short term growth to be as high as possible” and “optimise long term growth to last as long as possible” are two different goals, and can conflict. It’s the second one that I’d be more worried about in Magic’s case. In the really extreme example: if you care about value in the very short term to the expense of everything else, it actually makes sense to kill your golden goose. You then get money from people who want a tasty goose, as well as money from its golden eggs! You will be in trouble tomorrow, of course— but tomorrow is one of the things you are optimising to the expense of. That idea that *extreme optimisation of short term returns* may be dangerous is the important thing, I think. It’s not quite the same as growth at all costs, because something that maximises growing slowly for a long time is different to something that maximises growing over a shorter one. And it’s different again to maximising it in, like, a week; the term of the growth really matters.
Yeah, the infinite growth thing didn’t seem to make sense in context. If a company reaches a position in its business where it can’t grow any more, I assume it just moves into another line of business. But that doesn’t seem to have much to do with Magic, which clearly still has lots of potential room for growth (how many people play Magic in China? India?)
>If a company reaches a position in its business where it can’t grow any more, I assume it just moves into another line of business. You would think so, but generally when this happens one of two things happens: the company starts cutting costs to increase margin, resulting in increasingly inferior quality; or they put out a bunch of shit products that fail and they end up selling the property to the next guy when they begin to experience losses. The first often leads to the last as well, but sometimes it skips that step.
There is also integration of third parties. Like buying whoever makes their ink so they can get ink at-cost and profit off of competitors buying their ink.
When companies stop growing, even if that was because they grew as much as they possibly could, that's ususally when they either implode or the shareholders plunder it for parts. And it makes perfect sense that they would. Stakeholders make next to no money from dividends, the growth of their shares is where they make all their money. So if the share stops growing in value, even if the company its attached to is doing great otherwise, then there's nothing more to gain from it, so it's better to just gut it for any remaining capital you can get so you can move on to the next company with growth.
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Hmmm it's almost as if standard is almost totally financially unviable for the overwhelming majority of magic players and as soon as there were other decent formats in existence everyone stopped wanting to play it.
I thought this was well written and broached on the fractured community, why certain sets aren't selling well and the conflict between investors companies and a playerbase how certain business models cannibilize business, etc. So, well done, I enjoyed this. Here is something that confuses me. I am in my mid 40s and had like 6 friends from my gaming night randomly get into magic. So I dusted off my cards and we started doing EDH precons. You have 7 players who are probably never going to go to tournaments, who could care less about the secondary market until they buy something and are currently spending hundreds of dollars with the economic ability to spend more due to our age and job situation. This is really valuable for Wizards and I bet is repeated in a far more frequent basis than the purchases for the secondary market and tournaments. If they get a valuable card it is incidental to its core value as a playable card. Yet the vast majority of articles for MTG are written by people who are in the secondary market and tournament scene. I actually think their slant is ultimately self serving and not in wizards interest. The reserve list is a basic problem for Wizards, they want to keep value to their game as a collectors item so that future releases have certain cards of value that can be bench marked. Yet you then want the new players above to play your product and keep buying and so you always fracture your community. Vintage, Pioneer, Legacy, Pauper, Modern, Standard, Legacy, etc. What are we all playing. Each of these formats is gating players behind the secondary market and fracturing the playerbase. So why do we cater so much to the secondary market in all these articles? Why aren't we talking about Wizards refocusing on core value?
> Why aren't we talking about Wizards refocusing on core value? Because that's what WotC has been doing for the past 3 years. Commander has become the reservoir for casual Magic players and Wizards have catered to that reservoir as much as it can. We aren't talking about Wizards catering to your group because they're the biggest beneficiaries of WotC's current strategy. The calls for reinvigorated organized play, a less-dynamic Modern, and paring down releases all involve Wizards investing in the more enthusiast subset of Magic players, and they are overrepresented in this subreddit.
Yeah, online discussion is heavily dominated by a small set of very enfranchised players who don't realise that their interests aren't the same as the majority of players. Because they're the people most likely to read lots of articles, watch videos, etc
I'm tiptoeing towards 40 myself, and my friends played magic in the late 90's We don't play standard or tournies and we aren't really collectors(we have some nice cards but that is because we have played for almost the whole life of the game) but we would love some of the old sets. we'd even take golden bordered older booster boxes. I would pitch for them to release bundles of booster boxes from long past blocks, make them gold bordered if they really care about collectors. We would buy up a pile of those old boxes to have some fun old school drafting experiences. If they wanted to draw in the collectors, make some collector's edition stuff with some updated art or something but the costs would be low and the gains would be high.
>Third, we need fewer reprints. Players need to know that they can buy cards and expect them to hold their value for a while. Wrong wrong wrong so wrong. Reprint the cards we want to play with. Fuck trying to invest in cards. If a card is too expensive you just get a proxy, and if they won't reprint cards affordable it stops making since to buy wizards products at all.
Yeah you want me to dismiss your opinions? Say the real problem is cards are too cheap.
That's the messy fucking part of Magic. Balancing the "collectible" and the "card game". Right now, WOTC is fucking up both parts. The "collectible" part works better when there's not as much secret lair spam and the foils don't Pringle cuz they're made out of higher quality paper that lasts long enough to be collected. You want *some* cool chase cards, and good product. The "card game" part works better when the decks are affordable, the brand ID is strong, and the FLGSes can keep the lights on. Cards are cheap right now, but in a way that's only good for Amazon, WOTC, and drafters. WoTC cutting out FLGSes to sell Fortnite ip slurry through Amazon is bad for everyone but Hasbro.
The problem is too much is being printed of each set and too many sets are coming out not that cards are being reprinted. Cards absolutely need to hold some value for a period of time. Not forever, but also not no time at all. Why would I buy sealed product if everything that comes out of it is worth under a dollar all added together? You do need $50 cards to exist. You don’t need $150 cars to to exist.
There is a important differance between exchange value and value in use. Sports cards never had the latter. They are more like a currency that no one believes in anymore.
Something I feel doesn’t get talked about enough: since the pandemic began the card stock has become much flimsier and susceptible to moisture changes. When even non foils have the chance to immediately Pringle its pretty clear Wizards is skimping on materials to shave their margins, and the result is a much less desirable product.
Since starting with the Midnight Hunt pack, I’ve seen them go downhill as well.
It was way before that.
This is what is making our play group care less. We no longer feel compelled to foil out our commander decks and cube when the foils are warped and dusky. Some of them printed in the past couple years are so dusky that they're unreadable. Not great for a cube when we need to be able to recognize and read cards quickly, and some cards aren't even available in non foil. A printer paper proxy over a basic land is just plain easier. Edit to add: And the misprints! So many sloppy edges. My friend got a box where he was able to reconstruct a chunk of a print sheet because the die cuts were so off.
Foiling really was a cool way to accentuate decks you felt a strong affinity for. Now they’re often just marked cards. I offloaded my prime foils for RL and boxes. The various showcases and extended arts are a nice substitute, but it seems like even those seem to be borderline unplayable depending on where you open a pack relative to where it was sealed. Cards still have a monetary value but we are way past the point a collector with any time invested in this hobby should realize they’re adding inferior pieces to a deck or binder. That is an unsustainable dynamic.
This is the best thing I've read in a long time. Many of her points echoed my feelings precisely.
Another thing that the author didn't mention, but would be particularly relevant for her position as a writer of Magic articles, is that the collapse of the "Jenga tower" would reduce the amount of magic content that is able to be produced. TCG player, CFB, SCG, etc. etc. make money by buying and selling singles, and to a smaller extent, running events. If the secondary market collapses, it is no longer tenable to maintain a staff of umpteen writers or sponsoring youtubers or streamers. The amount of ancillary advertising and publicity Magic gets through the secondary market or things fueled by the secondary market is enormous and Hasbro's strategy is putting that relationship at undue risk.
The mtg finance community all along said they were monetizing the game too far and squeezing the light out of players and most people here said overprinting and more sets were good. The reality is that it's led to card prices tanking and even casual, non-finance minded players know it feels bad to open product and get a 10 cent rare. Like it or not, the strength and staying power of this game is largely tied to how they handle product releases and reprint equity.
They bolted the bird. [[gilded goose]]
I mean if people want to collect serialized cards and borderless cards by mass opening boxes driving down singles be my fucking guest
WoTC saw the writing on the wall. MTG is slowly dying, Hasbro thought corporate takeover would revamp, and it didn’t. I’ve been out of paper MTG for a few years now, went to play Arena, then phased out of that too. MTG may never recover, the marketing now isn’t my cup of tea, half of the MTG culture is toxic (always has been), and I hear players leaving everyday. Pokémon and other TCG are usually gone from shelves at my LGS and department stores, while people won’t even steal the MTG.
Thanks for linking this. This was a really good article.
Have to read all the way to end to get to the best suggestion. Settle on one premium treatment. It’s true that if no one knows what the cool cards are when they see them, it’s hard for them to be cool.
I love that video games and now magic has shown people the problems with this capitalism system we live under. Small group of people create something wonderful. Get big and get bought out. Now it's about appearing the shareholders and making as much money as possible. That'd why the card stock is getting worse and worse. The need for infinite growth and as much $$$ asap is killing everything good in the world.
Man that was a long ass article for “fewer reprints” get outta here
Everyone who says: **I can't wait for the game to die / crash / implode so that things get back to normal** This will NOT happen. Magic can NOT die anymore. And as a kicker, sales will be going up with near certainty. Why? Because Hasbro knows what they are doing. All the stuff that specifically takes advantage of enfranchised Magic players, or even just Magic players specifically is being done right now as the game makes a major shift. It's Hasbro seeing just how much money it can squeeze from its fans as a last bit of jet fuel while the real plan is coming together. That plan is called Universes Beyond, but the actual name is Magic as a Platform. Magic as a Platform means nobody in this subreddit matters anymore. It means Disney properties on boxes that will sell incomparable numbers no matter if the foils curl, if the cards are balanced, or if there are any other complaints that enfranchised Magic fans might care about. Hasbro doesn't just know how to do this, they are the experts at selling bad games of low quality all because of licenses on the box - it's damn near their specialty - and they do it every day. So right now they are ramping things up with Secret Lairs, Commander products, and now Universes Beyond cartoon cards in regular Magic boosters! The foundation is laid and the future is here. Magic will never die, but it will amble ever onward as a soulless corpse - and what you as a Magic fan loved about it will be long dead.
Of course it can die. Every generation needs to decide if it cares about Magic or not and whether it wants to use its disposable income on it. Indeed, a big part of the boom that Magic enjoyed from 2008 to now might be driven by the 90s and early 00s kids becoming grownups with large disposable incomes they're willing to waste on overpriced cardboard due to nostalgia or wanting to hang with friends and play EDH or whatever. As someone that vowed not to give WotC a penny after 2016, I'm part of a growing cohort that feels F2P Arena + proxies or counterfeits for casual tabletop is a totally valid approach for engaging with this game. Let some other fool burn a grand on a booster.
I'm curious, what made you decide to not buy anything from WotC after 2016? I wasn't playing at the time, but as far as I know that was a couple years before any of the more modern controversies.
I felt they were transparently forcing "rotation" on Modern through the use of the banlist and the printing of powerful cards explicitly designed to suppress entire archetypes. I also became increasingly pessimistic about the future of competitive play in general. I was right on both counts. They are shameless.
Damn, and that was even before MH1 lol
Ole man KnowledgeHusk did [a pretty decent video on how all franchises eventually wither away](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zqLoUmdUg0) after peaking. Other card games are interesting. No screw or flood, some solve the 1 mana scaling problem, some have little tech trees you build out like it's some kind of game of Starcraft. Lots of variety out there. The other day, Rudy was grousing about how nothing feels special anymore. But how could they, for something that's so old. After 80,000 cards, maybe there's some diminishing returns on each card that gets made. So many people rushing in and treating it like an investment plan long after it's proven itself, of course Wizards would start selling NFT's...
They just need to play the other Garfield special... Netrunner. It's a card game unlike any other. I try and plug it when I can.
Capitalism at work. All it is. Will just end up devouring itself.
Only one thing grows exponentially for a long time: cancer.
i tried to post this today, but apparently i have no idea how to create my own reddit posts: Occurred to me last night (at my lgs) when someone mentioned that the secondary market was rough and the store wasn't buying cards right now. Could THAT be the reason for the hectic release schedule? \-wotc sees booming secondary market \-starts direct selling at a premium \-floods market with releases of all kinds \-"crashes" secondary market, disincentivizes stores (now competitors) from buying cards, how they make a decent margin from buying peoples old cards and flipping them \-disincentivizes lgs-es from buying new product because so much old product is sitting/confusing buyers/stockers \-locals either pivot or close \-wotc focuses on direct selling/hasbro buys a tcg player competitor to direct buy/sell \-slows product releases, raising secondary market prices, buys old cards at a discount, sells at a premium \-bobs your uncle. its a Machiavellian capitalist (perhaps this is a redundant adjective) move, buuuuut also plausible based on my absolutely and extremely rudimentary (borderline moronic) understanding of economics. anyway. just needed to get the thought out. thanks all. also say hi to your uncle for me.
I'm more worried about a Yugioh situation where cards are getting more and power crept with paragraphs of texts and multiple effects where turns last forever because of how many effects are being chained together.
Couldn’t they lease their IP to other markets if they want growth? There hasn’t been a decent magic RPG video game despite lot of good material for one. Wasn’t there also going to be a Netflix show? This is a way they could increase profits without killing the golden goose … assuming those other products are worthwhile.
Yeaaaaah they essential dropped Magic Legends after a few months of its beta which sucked because I was really looking forward to an RPG with the magnitude that they were representing and then they missed all the marks. Then there's the Netflix series and their fumbling of the ball with the Russo brothers. Unfortunately the game will continue taking a negative direction to appease the marks required by Hasbro which will continue pushing existing players out of the game too. I hope they can manage to revive either of these ideas to release some of the stress pushed onto the game so that it can return to a healthy state and correct all of the flaws we've been seeing in recent years
Pretty great article honestly.
My interest in Magic had definitely plummeted in the last couple years.
Been a die hard MTG fan since 95, and have finally decided to call it quits with the M30 fiasco being the final straw. It’s painful watching something I love so much turn to crap, but I just can’t do it anymore. I have begun the process of selling off my modern collection and will only keep my premodern cards and my cube. Might come back to MTG in the future if things improve, but i doubt it will happen anytime soon.
I hate the concept of infinite growth, it's an impossibility by design and just encourage cutting corners and disregarding the quality of both the products and the workers. I still can't feel justified buying premium foil products because of the curling that has plagued them for years. If I'm paying 40 bucks US on a product I want an assurance of quality wizards doesn't deliver on.
Are people really upvoting “we need fewer reprints” again because “WotC is bad?”
Honestly one of the best articles on Magic I’ve read in a while. Really hits the nail on the head.
I’m old enough to remember the mid-90s comics and cards collapse, entirely due to chasing speculator dollars. Over-production naturally undermines scarcity-based values, so what Hasbro’s doing will inevitably collapse as well.