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Embracing Legacy

It seems WoTC got themselves a New Year's resolution for 2010 late last year which, simply stated, said they are going to be bringing Legacy to MTGO. Legacy has been gaining in notoriety amongst the WoTC folk it seems, and the Star City Games $5,000 tourneys are probably not hurting that notoriety at all. Of course there are many ways to spin this kind of news: One could suppose that WoTC simply wants to bring the popular gaming option online, or perhaps they feel they aren't getting a big enough piece of the Legacy pie and want Urza's Saga to sell really, really well online this year. There were a lot of different ways to go with this news, and ultimately, I might write about many of them – but what struck me as the most interesting and newsworthy portion of the news was the almost instantaneous way the community seemed to jump on the secondary market concerns that bringing Legacy to MTGO would cause. Tell me if any of these sound familiar to you:

"I'm not paying for these"

"Seems like they'll have trouble with Exodus cards so scare"

"No way am I paying $240 for Force of Will and $40 for Daze!"

"I'm not sure how big of an impact it will have on card prices when there are so many cards still missing"

"People are going to need those cards to do their Legacy testing"

There are more of the same if you look around I'm sure. What struck me as a consistent through line in these type of comments was that there were certain cards that were bound to be a bottleneck for Magic Online, and to some factions this would make playing online unpalatable on price alone.

Now I'll admit that it had probably been a year, perhaps even two, since the last time I took a really good look at the landscape of the eternal paper card market. In many ways I simply took these knee-jerk reactions as a sort of truth. Force of Will is expensive. Exodus cards are hard to get. There were definitely cards missing. However, being a slightly enterprising individual (read: I'm not above buying extras of cards I think will go up in value) I started to question the logic behind these "truths". First and foremost I got an indicator that that there were certain cards – important cards - that were similarly more expensive in paper than they were online. At which point I knew I had a research project on hand. Exactly which is more expensive (competitively speaking) – Legacy Digital or Legacy Cardboard?

The question of course, is much harder to solve than simple addition, but that seemed to be the only way to go about it. A completely comprehensive search of every card in existence would be foolish, as so many cards simply never need to be purchased to be competitive, and of course, price changes are happening all the time. I could re-write this article in perhaps two or six or 12 months and it would be possible for each iteration to come up with a different answer. So I simply decided to avoid such difficulties by rephrasing the question: Which is more expensive if you wanted (and could) start playing right now (competitively speaking) – Legacy Digital or Legacy Cardboard?

With the hypothesis being set, I had to come up with an easy to use method of gathering data. In this particular case, I went with two very well-known (perhaps the biggest in their business) purveyors of Magic Cards – the aforementioned Star City Games for Paper, and the host of this very site, MTGOTraders for online cards. I understand (skip this part, Heath) that you might be inclined to believe those sites to be misrepresentative of the actual going prices for cards in their respective platforms. Whether or not you believe that to be true, I submit that, if you believe it to be so, feel free to reduce the prices given later on by whatever percentage you feel is necessary, but then I implore you to understand that it's my belief that these two sites, if they are overpriced, are at least equally so. As such, they are good enough for the experiment. Note that I used NM (near mint) prices only for paper cards – not heavily played or slightly played values – only fair – digital cards don't suffer degradation.

Another issue that cropped up was what to do with those cards that are available in paper but not online? (There is no such thing as the opposite for tournament legal cards) The only fair method I found was to assume that the online card would be exactly as expensive as the paper one, and was therefore a wash in terms of deck value. Largely I believe that would be a negative on the scales for online, but that presupposes sales of Urza's Sets and Master's Sets will be fairly good (most of the missing cards are either in or would be in those sets). Other cards, like Submerge, might be more expensive as most people expect sales of Mercadian Masques to be terrible, but by and large I felt online got a bit hosed in that department.

Might be hard to get - who wants to play Masques?

Lastly, I had to decide what I determined was going to be called competitive. In order to keep the experiment plausible for me to finish before the chore of data collecting became insurmountable to the boredom that would result in collecting it, I decided to use decklists from the latest SCG $5K Tournament.

Ok, by this time you are probably getting impatient with my ongoing blathering and would like something of substance. Not one to deny instant gratification, I'll quickly give you the Legacy Decklist that is cheaper in paper than it is online .

…

Get that? Exactly

Not Found. It's 404 baby.

What happened? Force of Will and Daze are sooooo expensive online! How could not a single deck be less expensive in paper?! Well, first, I suppose I should give you the totals. Rather than clutter the article with 16 + 1 decklists and the individual breakdown, I'll simply include the Excel spreadsheet I used to track the data.

But for simplicity's sake, here are the costs of each of the decklists in the event

Place	Deck	$ SCG	$ MTGO
1st	Zoo	$834.00	$421.75
2nd	38 Land	$1191.25	$626.25
3rd	Fish	$969.50	$683.25
4th	Imperial Painter	$1002.00	$381.25
5th	Fish	$533.25	$442.75
6th	Fish	$518.00	$426.00
7th	Threshold	$1109.75	$707.75
8th	U/W Tempo	$755.98	$509.75
9th	Imperial Painter	$987.50	$336.75
10th	Dredge	$189.00	$126.25
11th	Fish	$485.50	$420.75
12th	Fish	$514.50	$420.50
13th	Aggro Loam	$1029.75	$736.25
14th	Dark Zoo	$956.50	$484.50
15th	ANT	$603.25	$419.75
16th	Countertop	$1333.25	$853.25
19th	Dream Halls	$505.00	$435.75

Ummm... small difference.

Obviously, the top 16 was missing some decks, like Enchantress or Belcher or probably a number of other decks. But first thing to note was that even the decks sporting 4x Force of Will and 4x Daze were still cheaper online. There is a general answer to why paper decks came out on the high end – paper mana bases are more expensive. The biggest offenders were fetchlands (Onslaught and Zendikar) , which currently run about 3x more in paper than they do online. Next up were the dual lands, which also run about 2-3x the price, especially the duals in MED3. And of course, the format's most ubiquitous land, Wasteland, ran a cool $25 - $15 more than online. Then there were the ridiculous cards, like The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale weighing in at $250 in paper and $1.50 online, and Imperial Recruiter hefting a large $150 price tag as cardboard, but only $1.75 online. And sure, Force is nearly double what is offline – but then since you need Standstills, Aether Vials and Umezawa's Jittes to play Merfolk and they are all for more expensive in paper, all the savings is lost.

So apart from individual decks, which you might possibly be able to slap together in cardboard if you scoured eBay and found a list with all the right cards that are more expensive online (Scepter Chant, maybe?), let's take a look at it from another angle. Let's say you didn't just want a single deck to play in Legacy, but to start a Legacy collection.

In order to be able to make every deck out of those 17 decks (and without needing more than the maximum number of cards in a deck – so if the most a card appeared in any deck was twice, like Vedalken Shackles, we'd only count it twice) you need to spend $5484.75 for a paper collection and $2958.5 online. That's $2526.25 or 85% more for your paper collection. You might be able to nickel and dime your way into a cheaper deck in paper, but there is no amount of cost savings measures that any reasonable person could take to save that much money (much less that couldn't also be applied online to the same effect).

There are some holes in the experiment, obviously. For one thing, currently extended season is in swing and all the extended Tier one cards which also happen to be good in Legacy are more expensive at the moment. I know this a hugely driven up the price of cards online like Engineered Explosives and others, but I'm not sure to what degree the same thing has happened offline, so it was a measure I was unable to control.

Likewise, because there is no current Legacy offering online, cards that are Eternal only online (7^th, IPA, OTJ, OLS) might be cheaper simply because they see less play – however, if you look through the list of those cards, they are either very inexpensive all around (cards like Kird Ape and Wild Nacatl ), or they are heavily used in classic anyway (like Onslaught Fetchlands and Duals) – and we know from the prices of FoW and others that classic has no problem driving the price of cards. Hence I didn't consider that a large contributing factor.

So, the facts point at online being cheaper – queue the rush of players online, right?

Well, no, there's a problem there. You see, even though those are the current prices of cards, the price of those cards for people who already own them are effectively zero. While I hear a great deal about online being used for "Legacy testing" and other insinuations that the minute Legacy is released online it will suddenly have a huge following, this is grossly ignorant of the fact that while online is cheaper, it certainly isn't cheap. The people who own several thousand dollars worth of cards in paper are unlikely to a) sell them in order to play online instead or b) have the funds to keep up two separate collections. While it's possible some might be able to do either of those, expecting a large number of people to fall into either group would be foolhardy.

Not only are the monetary difficulties hard to overcome, there is still at least a sizeable faction of eternal players who think paying for digital cards is like committing economic suicide. Lastly, for these people, there still exists the resistance to playing in a format with decks that are sub-optimal from their Legacy counterpart because of the missing cards. You can't test against Land.dec if there is no Maze of Ith or Rishadan Port – it's just not the same deck.

In other words, the people already playing Legacy in paper aren't coming in droves to play online, either by addition or by exodus.

Another faction are those who are already playing online who will, by the natural course of owning cards that are no long legal in any other format, will turn to Legacy. My guess is, initially, these are the people who will make the first large contribution to the Legacy player base other than those who aren't already playing Classic. The most obvious time for these players to join is when Extended rotates in November, and another chuck of their collection (in this case, Mirrodin Block – a highly significant block) leaves Extended. These people have all the reason in the world to join Legacy at that time. It might also be said that they would choose to join earlier when the Extended season is effectively over in the spring – either time might see more members. However, in my experience, the people who are interested in leaving Extended for good at some point in the future are already playing classic, and our player base is, shall we say, barely enough to make the format go.

That leaves what I will assume is a very small group of people who are lapsed Magic Enthusiasts waiting to jump into the magic pool by say, buying a $400 deck and continuing to spend to build up their Legacy collection. It's hard to gauge how many of these people there are – whether they play online or not, starting with Eternal formats is not generally the way most people indoctrinate themselves into Magic.

I think the only conclusion I can reach from here is that whenever WoTC decides to open Legacy online, the move toward it will not be a gush of players joining the scene and instantly creating a vibrant Legacy presence, but more of a steady stream of players who'll consistently build the player base. Legacy is still too expensive - even online - for many players to jump in – most will have to wade into the pool. However, if those players are at all price-conscious, they'll be wading into the digital end of the pool when the time comes.