A week or so ago, Dangerlinto wrote an article looking at how cost and card scarcity might impact the Legacy format, once it appears online. One of his points was that online Legacy was cheaper than paper Legacy. However, he also noted that paper Legacy players generally did not have to start from scratch on building their decks, but often owned many of the cards in that format already. Read his article - I don't agree with everything he said, but I agree with a lot of it.
Mike showed that online Legacy was cheaper than paper Legacy. That got me wondering - is that just true of Legacy, or is that true of all online formats? If so, what does that mean?
Mike also pointed out the massive price
discrepancy
between the online and paper prices of this card:
Online, it costs a buck fifty. In paper, it is a couple hundred dollars for a badly worn copy. (Argh - doing final proofing now, and I just saw that StarCity Games has offered a special on the Tabernacle - just $200. That would change many of the calculations a bit. Not much - Tabernacle is just a one-of - but a bit. I'm not going to recalc this, though. The article has been in production for almost two weeks already. I have to call it done sometime...)
Let’s look at The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale. It was originally printed in Legends, as a rare. To the best of my knowledge – and I checked – it has never been included in a precon or duel deck, and never printed as a promo foil or anything like that. The Legends printing is the total print run.
According to CrystalKeep.com, an excellent source for this sort of data, Wizards announced that the total Legend print run was about 35 million cards. I believe that this includes the Italian Legends cards as well. (Italian Legends came out after the original Legends was off sale, but that's another issue.)
Legends was distributed in 15 card booster packs, with 1 rare, 3 uncommons and 11 commons. The uncommons and commons were printed a bit strangely – some uncommons and commons showed up twice on a print sheet, and others only once. This meant that some uncommons are actually rarer than others. This is why some uncommons are listed as U1s, and others as U2s – U2s, or uncommons 2s, show up twice as often as U1s. Fortunately, all the rares were printed one per sheet, so we don’t have to worry about that. (If we did this calculation for Mana Drain, an uncommon, then we would.)
I don’t think Wizards printed tournament packs or precon decks for Legends. (If they did, I’m assuming the numbers are minimal.) Dividing 35 million cards printed by 15 cards per booster pack gives us about 2.3 million booster packs, from which we can estimate that about 2.3 million rares were printed. Legends had 121 rares in the set, so dividing 2.3 million rares by 121 gives us about 19,300 copies of any given rare.
In short, the paper world has had a total of somewhere around 20,000 copies of The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale to play with. So where are they?
·27 failed to survive an encounter with the washing machine.
·63 are owned by dealers, and can be bought, if you can find the right store.
·5,264 are in landfills, having been thrown out during spring house-cleaning
·1,209 were burned, either deliberately, or as part of the waste disposal process.
·2,466 are in binders, owned by collectors.
·877 are owned by tournament players. (I have one.)
·7,469 are in the hands of casual players or in the closets and attics of former players.
·The remaining 1,800 or so are simply lost.
I want to thank Wizards for allowing me access to the data from their card tracking system.
Seriously, though, the simple fact is that Wizards stopped printing Tabernacles in 1994, over fifteen years ago. A very large percentage of those cards are now out of circulation. Tabernacle is played in a Tier 1 Legacy deck – 43 Lands – and it is in demand. As I write this, the going price is about $250, $200, if you can find one. The major dealers (StarCity Games, ChannelFireball, CardShark, Dan Bock, etc., are all out of stock. StarCity Games has some, again.) EBay has nine auctions for Tabernacles ongoing. Bid on them if you dare – I have been ripped off on eBay once too often to risk buying an expensive single unless I know the seller.
The fact that the number of cards still available is fairly small is not the whole story, however. The number of Tabernacles ever printed is actually lower than the total number of copies of Black Lotus printed. Black Lotus was in Alpha, Beta and Unlimited. Total cards in print from those sets is about 50 million, and there were 117 rares in each of those sets. That means that somewhere in the neighborhood of 28,000 Black Lotuses were once in circulation. The number in circulation now is far lower, which is why they sell for $1,000 and up. The reason for the price difference is demand - Tabernacle is a one-of in a couple specific decks. Black Lotus is a one-of (because it is restricted) in every Tier One Vintage deck.
So what does the relative shortage mean, besides high prices?
The limited number of Black Loti and Moxen is the reason that Wizards will never run a Vintage Grand Prix or use Vintage as a format for Pro Tour Qualifiers. The fact that the cards are too scarce to allow enough players access to the format makes such large events impossible. If Wizards did hold a Grand Prix, and if that Grand Prix got the 500-750 players typical for a constructed Grand Prix, many of those players would simply be unable to get ahold of Moxen and a Black Lotus. This would put them at a severe disadvantage. (I have played Vintage, and I own a Lotus. I know.)
Wizards clearly stated, over five years ago, that Vintage could never be a GP or PTQ format. (Okay, technically Wizards said that about Type I, back before they changed the name to "Vintage," but the statement still applies.) In the years since that time, the supply of Black Loti has, if anything, shrunk, while the number of tournament players has markedly increased.
The scarcity is also why paper Vintage tournaments almost never fire - unless they allow players to use proxy cards. A few non-proxy Vintage events do happen in Europe, but in the US, true Vintage is pretty much limited to a couple events in New England and the Championships at GenCon. There is simply nothing within a thousand kilometers of where I live. This is why I have concerns about the future of Legacy if Wizards can't pump more old cards into the format.
Time to move on to the question of whether online Legacy being cheaper than paper Legacy is a fluke, or if that is generally true of all online formats.
Mike looked at the top decks in a recent Legacy event, and priced them out using both StartCity Games and MTGOTraders.com. Here are his results: (I added the percentage, which equals MTGO cost / paper cost.)
Legacy
StarCity Games
MTGOTraders
Ratio
Zoo
38 Land
Fish
Imperial Painter
Fish
Threshold
U/W Tempo
Imperial Painter
Dredge
Aggro Loam
Dark Zoo
ANT
Countertop
Dream Halls
A quick note - the relative price of paper decks is a bit inflated in these tables, because the price of commons from online stores is inflated. Commons almost never cost less than $0.25 from online retailers in the paper world. This is only partly due to the value of the card. Most of the price of a common is there to cover other costs. These costs include the cost of warehousing cards, the cost of the labor needed to sort the cards once bought, and to find and pull the cards when ordered. Sorting, storing and finding cards are no problem online, so online prices for random commons are a couple pennies. Want more evidence of this? StarCity Games also sells a random assortment of 1000 cards - including rares, foils, uncommons, commons and lands - for $15.99. In short, 16 bucks gets you 1000 cards if StarCity does not have to sort them, or 64 non-chase commons if you specify. It's all about the labor costs.
Let's move on to Standard. The most recent big Standard paper event was won by Vampires (probably a fluke), but a number of other decks were also represented, so quite often. Here are the big names.
Standard
StarCity Games
MTGOTraders
Ratio
Jund
Valakut Ramp
Barely Boros
All American Control
Grixis Control
Vampires
$326.45
$78.48
$498.01
$526.05
$227.73
$269.90
$161.80
$61.18
$310.87
$324.46
$92.12
$151.74
50%
78%
62%
62%
40%
56%
Finally, we'll do Extended. For this group, I took the decks that are most commonly making Top 8s in Pro TOur qualifiers (pre-Worldwake, of course.)
For ease of comparison, here are the average costs, and the average ratios, for the three formats commonly played by paper players. For comparison, I priced out an online format as well. I took the top two Classic decks decks from the January 31st Classic tournament and calculated the costs to purchase them in paper and online. The online Oath of Druids deck played by Wizards not of the Coast is actually more expensive than the paper equivalent (due mainly to the online cost of Oath, Force of Will, Strip Mine and Daze.)
Format
StarCity Games
MTGOTraders
Ratio
Legacy
Standard
Extended
Classic
$857.14
$269.90
$517.67
$1,062.60
$511.80
$151.74
$368.95
$924.97
62%
56%
67%
87%
Overall, (almost) everything is a bit cheaper online. A lot of this is because the relative costs of running a paper store and an online BOT are so wildly different. Let me explain. Let's look at everything you need to operate these businesses, aside from inventory and time.
Costs to run an online store: computer, Internet connection, BOT.
Cost to run a paper store: shelves and fixtures, retail space, insurance, heat, power, a vendors permit, employees (you can't sit on the cash register 10+ hours a day), accounting services, advertising, cleaning products/services, etc. etc., - plus a computer and an Internet connection.
Running a virtual store is infinitely cheaper. Just ask all the bookstores closing due to competition from Amazon.com, or the video stores facing NetFlix (and now video vending machines in grocery stores.)
The other difference in the cost of some cards is availability, of course. Cards like Daze and Rancor are very expensive Online right now, because they are/were only available in Duel Decks or From the Vault packages, while paper can also draw from their original sets. This is why Strip Mine is $20 online, and $1.50 in paper, where it was included in a number of sets. Once Urza's block and Masques block appear online, expect the price of Daze and Rancor to crash, much the way the price of Swords to Plowshares did.
In his article, Dangerlinto predicted that online Legacy will grow slowly as a format, and not see a major influx of players. I disagree. I think that will be true until Online and paper Legacy have access to the same cards and until just before the next big Legacy format Grand Prix. Then it will boom, if the cards are available. Legacy will be comparable to Extended online - for 9 months out of the year, it will be nearly dead. Then, once the PTQ / GP season rolls around, the online tournaments tournaments are huge. I expect the same to happen with Legacy, once online matches offline.
I can't agree or disagree with your premise because I don't have a way to verify the facts but it is an interesting topic to be sure. I know that I was taken aback by how cheap modo prices were when I first came back to it. Part of it was at that time the cheapness of tickets (.79 via paypal on some vendors I think) but also the massive amounts of drafted dumps hitting the bots in huge numbers. I for one probably won't be anymore prepared to play legacy than I am extended or classic. The expensive cards will continue to be out of reach while the cheap ones will be plentiful and largely irrelevant. Thanks for the food for thought.
I think that both this and dangerlinto's article are good but miss a few key things.
- Key cards online are very expensive.
In paper some of the most expensive legacy cards are the dual lands. You can work around this by running more fetchlands, or basics.
Online cards like Strip Mine, Force of Will, and Oath of Druids are not cards you can "cheat" on. If you're playing blue you want FoW. If you're playing Oath you need Oaths.
- Online there is less borrowing.
When playing paper (or another paper format) you can often borrow that last Tropical Island or that playset of Dazes. For a number of reasons this is less common online.
Pete, while the price difference between std and extended is a nice extension of mikes article, i have to wonder, what is the point of the article? You spend almost the entirety of the article regurgitating mikes and then add a a few extra price graphs and say that u disagree with mikes evaluation of how onliny legacy will be imbraced, kind of. You say that it will be hopping, but only during gp season.
I think what you fail to realise is that legacy is a very fun format much more so then std, and probably more then extended on a player by player basis, depending on how they veiw broken interactions. Ie scapeshift may be pushing the line for some players while others think that its kindergarden rules compared to combo legacy decks.
So we have a fun format, we have a format where it is now almost half the price on a paper version of any given deck, and you have the fact that scg is doing about another 10 legacy 5 k's throught out the year + the american and european legacy grand prix, when exactly is the off season?
IA4L- I know that this may be a very very small part of the comuunity, but the majority of classic players I know wouldnt hesitate to lend some duals or such, and at second to worse (worse being no u cant borrow) they ask for collateral. The thing is that your lending out possibly hundreds of dollars worth of cards it dosent matter if its paper or legacy, that kind of trust is earned and not given lightly, would you lend out 6 duals in paper top someone your an aquaintence with? would you lend out 6 duals to someone online that you play and or talk to every day and think you can trust? I think its the same risk reward except that you cant eaisly find a modo scammer and beat them up.
also yea fow is high we all get it, but duals are dirt cheap, wouyld yopu rather pay 20-25 bucks a fow and 70 a sea and 50 a trop? or would you rather pay 50 for fow and 15 and 28 for trop and sea? the work around seems silly too, would you rather run a cheaper deck or a better deck if your playing for prizes?
I don't necessarily disagree with you, except that I find Standard to be a lot more fun that Legacy right now, and I play them both in paper. I find Classic very much like Vintage, which I have stopped playing except in the very rare cases that I can find someone else with fully powered decks. Playing my full power deck against "budget" Vintage is a blowout. I do play plenty of casual "Vintage" - but those are not really Vintage decks.
Of course, that's just opinion - you like Classic, I like Standard. Neither of us is "right" - we just have different tastes.
I do think we will see swings based on GPs, though. While I love the SCG $5k series, and I'm head judging a Legacy event in a month or so, they just do not produce the widespread interest and playtesting that a GP does - except for the areas near the $5k site, I guess. A GP is going to bring in 500-1,000 players, or more, from around the world. The Legacy $5k are 100-200.
Sure, some MODO players loan cards. I just don't see the flurry of borrowing that happens before the start of every constructed PTQ, etc. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong areas.
I should also point out that the price of playing paper legacy has spiked a huge amount in the last 12 months or so. A lot of the arguments about the cost of online classic are old and have not been updated as it were for $70 Seas and $25 Wastelands.
fao: iceage4life
by endless_nameless (not verified)
at Thu, 02/04/2010 - 16:19
I'm not sure with you, but I've done lots of lending online. I've lent cards within my clan, and to closer friends online and have never had issues.
Second: The argument about most paper legacy players already having a lot of the cards is a bit weak. I already own most of the legacy cards too through my classic collection. There's very few cards I need to make every single one of the top legacy decks. Most of those cards were bought at much lower prices than today also. I believe I paid 4 tix for stripmine + berserk.
My only hope is that they don't totally torpedo classic with the intro of legacy. All of the legacy restricted cards I own, and they tend to be expensive. It would be a major piss off to have no place to play them.
No way to boom
by RavenNagicxx (not verified)
at Sat, 02/27/2010 - 23:17
There's a few tens of thousands of still-active paper players from the early 90s, and a few thousand copies of the high end vintage cards. Add to that players from the more current eras, who would happily own high end vintage cards and you have $1,000 loti and $400 moxen and $250 Tabernacles. Basic supply and demand, and we have a good idea of what the number of these cards were printed and can formulate an idea of what level of circulation there actually is for these cards.
It's a lot harder to know how many Force Of Wills were ever opened/awarded online. 500? 5,000? 50,000? 500,000? How many active online legacy tournament players are there, and how many does wizards envision having in the future? If that number is 10,000, and there are less than, say, 25,000 online FoWs in existence, there will be a supply/demand crunch that prohibits players from getting involved in legacy, at least with the same decks that the paper players do.
This phenomenon was already seen with previous extended seasons. The online results simply did not match up with paper ones. In that case it was Orim's Chant, and to a lesser extent Pernicious Deed. MTGO Traders has a foil chant right now running for $227.00, and regulars running $40. When winning first prize in a tournament might only get you a tiny portion of the cost of ONE rare slot, the basic economics of the situation prohibit large numbers of players from joining. It gives credence to players complaining about MTG being a game in which you can buy a victory. And basically, for situations like these, YOU CAN. Someone with a $500 budget is not going to be able to compete across a range of formats, and maybe even a single format, with someone with a $2,500. And even $500 is itself a LOT to ask for in the middle of the worst recession in 60 years.
8 Comments
I can't agree or disagree with your premise because I don't have a way to verify the facts but it is an interesting topic to be sure. I know that I was taken aback by how cheap modo prices were when I first came back to it. Part of it was at that time the cheapness of tickets (.79 via paypal on some vendors I think) but also the massive amounts of drafted dumps hitting the bots in huge numbers. I for one probably won't be anymore prepared to play legacy than I am extended or classic. The expensive cards will continue to be out of reach while the cheap ones will be plentiful and largely irrelevant. Thanks for the food for thought.
My only thought is with Legacy comming online this year I expect around Urza's block time, what effect would this have on ME4 sales.
Some cards would be sellers but maybe not the expectd Mox's and Lotus if they are included.
I think that both this and dangerlinto's article are good but miss a few key things.
- Key cards online are very expensive.
In paper some of the most expensive legacy cards are the dual lands. You can work around this by running more fetchlands, or basics.
Online cards like Strip Mine, Force of Will, and Oath of Druids are not cards you can "cheat" on. If you're playing blue you want FoW. If you're playing Oath you need Oaths.
- Online there is less borrowing.
When playing paper (or another paper format) you can often borrow that last Tropical Island or that playset of Dazes. For a number of reasons this is less common online.
Pete, while the price difference between std and extended is a nice extension of mikes article, i have to wonder, what is the point of the article? You spend almost the entirety of the article regurgitating mikes and then add a a few extra price graphs and say that u disagree with mikes evaluation of how onliny legacy will be imbraced, kind of. You say that it will be hopping, but only during gp season.
I think what you fail to realise is that legacy is a very fun format much more so then std, and probably more then extended on a player by player basis, depending on how they veiw broken interactions. Ie scapeshift may be pushing the line for some players while others think that its kindergarden rules compared to combo legacy decks.
So we have a fun format, we have a format where it is now almost half the price on a paper version of any given deck, and you have the fact that scg is doing about another 10 legacy 5 k's throught out the year + the american and european legacy grand prix, when exactly is the off season?
IA4L- I know that this may be a very very small part of the comuunity, but the majority of classic players I know wouldnt hesitate to lend some duals or such, and at second to worse (worse being no u cant borrow) they ask for collateral. The thing is that your lending out possibly hundreds of dollars worth of cards it dosent matter if its paper or legacy, that kind of trust is earned and not given lightly, would you lend out 6 duals in paper top someone your an aquaintence with? would you lend out 6 duals to someone online that you play and or talk to every day and think you can trust? I think its the same risk reward except that you cant eaisly find a modo scammer and beat them up.
also yea fow is high we all get it, but duals are dirt cheap, wouyld yopu rather pay 20-25 bucks a fow and 70 a sea and 50 a trop? or would you rather pay 50 for fow and 15 and 28 for trop and sea? the work around seems silly too, would you rather run a cheaper deck or a better deck if your playing for prizes?
I don't necessarily disagree with you, except that I find Standard to be a lot more fun that Legacy right now, and I play them both in paper. I find Classic very much like Vintage, which I have stopped playing except in the very rare cases that I can find someone else with fully powered decks. Playing my full power deck against "budget" Vintage is a blowout. I do play plenty of casual "Vintage" - but those are not really Vintage decks.
Of course, that's just opinion - you like Classic, I like Standard. Neither of us is "right" - we just have different tastes.
I do think we will see swings based on GPs, though. While I love the SCG $5k series, and I'm head judging a Legacy event in a month or so, they just do not produce the widespread interest and playtesting that a GP does - except for the areas near the $5k site, I guess. A GP is going to bring in 500-1,000 players, or more, from around the world. The Legacy $5k are 100-200.
Sure, some MODO players loan cards. I just don't see the flurry of borrowing that happens before the start of every constructed PTQ, etc. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong areas.
I should also point out that the price of playing paper legacy has spiked a huge amount in the last 12 months or so. A lot of the arguments about the cost of online classic are old and have not been updated as it were for $70 Seas and $25 Wastelands.
I'm not sure with you, but I've done lots of lending online. I've lent cards within my clan, and to closer friends online and have never had issues.
Second: The argument about most paper legacy players already having a lot of the cards is a bit weak. I already own most of the legacy cards too through my classic collection. There's very few cards I need to make every single one of the top legacy decks. Most of those cards were bought at much lower prices than today also. I believe I paid 4 tix for stripmine + berserk.
My only hope is that they don't totally torpedo classic with the intro of legacy. All of the legacy restricted cards I own, and they tend to be expensive. It would be a major piss off to have no place to play them.
There's a few tens of thousands of still-active paper players from the early 90s, and a few thousand copies of the high end vintage cards. Add to that players from the more current eras, who would happily own high end vintage cards and you have $1,000 loti and $400 moxen and $250 Tabernacles. Basic supply and demand, and we have a good idea of what the number of these cards were printed and can formulate an idea of what level of circulation there actually is for these cards.
It's a lot harder to know how many Force Of Wills were ever opened/awarded online. 500? 5,000? 50,000? 500,000? How many active online legacy tournament players are there, and how many does wizards envision having in the future? If that number is 10,000, and there are less than, say, 25,000 online FoWs in existence, there will be a supply/demand crunch that prohibits players from getting involved in legacy, at least with the same decks that the paper players do.
This phenomenon was already seen with previous extended seasons. The online results simply did not match up with paper ones. In that case it was Orim's Chant, and to a lesser extent Pernicious Deed. MTGO Traders has a foil chant right now running for $227.00, and regulars running $40. When winning first prize in a tournament might only get you a tiny portion of the cost of ONE rare slot, the basic economics of the situation prohibit large numbers of players from joining. It gives credence to players complaining about MTG being a game in which you can buy a victory. And basically, for situations like these, YOU CAN. Someone with a $500 budget is not going to be able to compete across a range of formats, and maybe even a single format, with someone with a $2,500. And even $500 is itself a LOT to ask for in the middle of the worst recession in 60 years.