Hammie’s The State of the Program for January 25th
This series is an ongoing tribute to Erik “Hamtastic” Friborg.
In the News this Week:
Gatecrash Prerelease and Release Event Details Announced: Gatecrash prereleases will happen, in the paper world, this weekend. Online, the prerelease events start February 8th at 10:00am PDT. The prereleases will be the same as the RtR prereleases. You choose your guild, and get 5 normal Gatecrash boosters plus one guild specific booster. Details here.
MTGO Cube Returns: As Wizards promised, during the slack time between the paper prerelease and the Gatecrash online prerelease, we will be able to draft the MTGO Cube. The cube is not powered this time around – it reverts to the build used at the Community Cup Championship last year. Details here.
Zendikar Drafts Return: Also during the slack time between the paper prerelease and the Gatecrash online prerelease, Wizards is bringing back Zendikar drafts. The drafts will be WW/Zen/Zen, and prize payouts will be 4-3-2-2 in Zendikar and Wordlwake packs. Details here.
Magic Online Adds a Quick Reference Schedule: Wizards has long has a master schedule here. It was a bit confusing, and you almost had to know what you wanted in advance to find anything. What they have now added is a simple table showing all the major events and deadlines: time and date of PTQs, MOCS events, MOCS and MOPR season end dates, etc. Very helpful.
HammyBot: Still here!HammyBot was created to sell the late Erik Friborg’s MTGO collection to raise money for his widow and son. HammyBot is a great way to get cards while supporting the family of someone who supported the community. Here’s an update on the Bot, plus a note on a cool card that I saw on HammyBot.
Cards left on HammyBot: 28,124
TIX raised so far: 4,928
Cool HammyBot card of the week: Momir Vig Avatar
Multiball! Hammie playing Momir Vig is one of the main reasons we won the first Community Cup Challenge. If you have never played, get your avatar and try it out. The format is wild.
Battling with the New Interface
Each week I intend to record a video of me doing something using the beta interface. I am not an expert, but I am becoming a fan. Wizards really should provide tutorials, but until they do, this is what you get. This week I play around with the collection and trade interfaces. I am trying to get rid of the spare cards I accumulated drafting. An apology for the long pauses in the video – I spent a lot of time (and I mean a lot of time) waiting for the program to load or refresh.
The next update of the beta interface is supposed to include improvements to the trade and collection modules. They need it. I did not really intend to have this section concentrate on the trade interface, but here’s what happened when I tried to shoot a video later on last week.
Repeating last week’s advice – after you download the beta, let it spend some time loading card images, etc. I found performance to be terrible initially, but it improved after about an hour. You don’t want to be playing seriously during that first hour. This happened to me on both of the two machines I have installed the beta on, but that is a small sample size. YMMV.
Opinion Section: The Other Shoe Drops
Late last year, Wizards killed four pack sealed. The format, in which players opened four boosters and played 30 card decks, was extremely popular. Players loved it, and a lot of people complained heartily when it died. I think, now, we know why it had to go.
Dimir guild.
One viable path to victory for the guild will be mill. Even the common mill cards are decent. Some of them have cipher, which allows them to be reused – and Dimir has unblockable creatures. Casting Paranoid Delusions (mill 3, cipher for UB) and ciphering it onto a Deathcult Rogue (2/2 unlockable except for rogues, 1UB) will happen often enough, since both are commons. That combination would mill 6 on turn four (3 for the initial cast, 3 more when the rogue attacks). In a 30 card deck, a player will have about 20 cards left on turn four – 14 after the mill. With just that common creature attacking, ciphered with that common mill card, the player will be decked in just four hits. If the Dimir opponent has any additional mill spells, it will be faster. Most backbreaking would be if the opponent has Psychic Strike (1UB, counter target spell, mill 2) for the removal spell which could kill the ciphered rogue. This would not happen every game, but often enough that the format would be pretty stupid.
Dimir guild is tuned so that a mill strategy is playable when an opponent has a 40 card deck. It would have been way to good in 30 card decks.
Cutting Edge Tech:
Standard: This week I’m going to pull a deck off MTGO, from a recent Premier event. Jund has done well recently, in a variety of events.
Jund
MrTrundle, Winner, Standard Premier #4910575 on 01/21/2013
Return to Ravnica Block Constructed: The most recent RtR Constructed Premier event also featured the usual Azorious and Bant decks, and even a Chromatic Lantern deck. The winner was a Rakdos deck. RtR Block constructed will change with the introduction of Gatecrash, but if you are looking for something new until then, check this out.
Rakdos
NIWAKA, Winner, RTR Block Constructed Premier #4910490 on 01/18/2013
Pauper: I was looking for something relatively new in Pauper. Affinity, and casting Rush of Knowledge with a Myr Enforcer in play, is hardly new, but I have not featured the deck recently.
Affinity
Foolishpuppy, 4-0, Pauper Daily #4910654 on 01/22/2013
Modern: We have had a bunch of PTQs, but the largest Modern event this week was GP Bilbao. Almost a thousand players showed up, and in the end a new archetype beat Jund in the finals. Coverage is here.
Legacy: SCG is back after the holiday season. Last week’s Legacy Open was held in Dallas. The top deck lists start here. The winner is a good indication of why the price of Show and Tell is still climbing, and why Sneak Attack is almost expensive enough to warrant a slot in the price lists.
Sneak and Show
Will Craddock, Winner, SCG Legacy Open Dallas, 1/20/2013
Classic: No Classic events fired this week. On the plus side, Round Three of the Classic Quarter Invitational will start after Gatecrash is in the stores. More details when they become available.
Card Prices:
Notes: All my prices come from MTGOTraders.com. For cards that are available in multiple sets, I am quoting the most recent set’s price. Thus, the price I’m quoting for Garruk Relentless is from M13. These cards are also available from the MTGOTraders Bots, so check out mtgotradersbot, mtgotradersbot2,mtgotradersbot3, mtgotradersbot4, mtgotradersbot5, CardCaddy and CardWareHouse. These Bots often have the cards in stock even when the online store shows as out. Now, on to prices.
Standard prices are falling. This is not too surprising, since we are at the end of the Standard cycle. The PTQ season is Modern, and Standard is about to change with the arrival of Gatecrash. The drop is not surprising, and nothing to worry about. People are just liquidating any spares while getting ready for the prerelease and release events.
Modern prices gave up some of last week’s gains. Goyf has crashed, a bit. A few marque cards from decks that are dropping in popularity, like Robots, are also dropping in price.
Legacy and Classic prices are much more stable than Modern prices. The big mover is Show and Tell. That amuses me – I remember when Show and Tell was pretty much a bulk rare, saved only by casual interest. That’s a long time ago.
Here’s this week’s list of the non-foil, non-premium cards on MTGO that cost more than $25 each. Note the Force of Will has fallen again, but Goyf fell faster. The list itself has shrunk – a half dozen cards dropped below $25. Here’s this week’s list of MTGO gold:
Card
Rarity
Set
Price
Lion's Eye Diamond
R
MI
$ 96.17
Force of Will
R
MED
$ 83.90
Tarmogoyf
R
FUT
$ 74.12
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
M
WWK
$ 70.54
Rishadan Port
R
MM
$ 65.10
Wasteland
U
TE
$ 54.25
Show and Tell
R
UZ
$ 39.98
Vendilion Clique
R
MOR
$ 38.73
Gaea's Cradle
R
UZ
$ 36.40
Tangle Wire
R
NE
$ 36.27
Misdirection
R
MM
$ 35.94
Geist of Saint Traft
M
ISD
$ 33.44
Bonfire of the Damned
M
AVR
$ 31.75
Thundermaw Hellkite
M
M13
$ 31.58
Underground Sea
R
ME4
$ 29.83
Liliana of the Veil
M
ISD
$ 29.16
Linvala, Keeper of Silence
M
ROE
$ 28.81
Vampiric Tutor
R
VI
$ 28.55
Underground Sea
R
ME2
$ 28.35
Flusterstorm
R
CMD
$ 26.68
Thoughtseize
R
LRW
$ 26.45
Vindicate
R
AP
$ 25.81
Mishra's Workshop
R
ME4
$ 25.21
Null Rod
R
WL
$ 25.16
The big number is the retail price of a playset (4 copies) of every non-foil card available on MTGO. Assuming you bought the least expensive version available, the cost of owning a playset of every card on MTGO you can own is $22,438. Down a couple hundred bucks – but wait until Gatecrash arrives…
Weekly Highlights:
Nothing much this week. I was travelling on business, and the hotel internet was not all it could be. This weekend, however, will be all paper prereleases, both as a player and judge.
I haven't said this in a while, so I figured that I would again:
Pete, you are the perfect person to write this article. I love the detail that you put in every week. I love the history that you bring to the game. I love your editorials. Thank you so much for writing these.
So WotC promo's out FoW and drops the price and the result is......everything else that goes in decks with FoW becomes more expensive (Jace, Sea, Wasteland, Show and Tell...). Congrats, Wizards...you accomplished nothing in making Classic/Legacy any less expensive. Thats how Supply and Demand work. This is why attempts to control the market price of things almost never pan out and why using price as a determinant for whats gets promo'd is such a bad idea.
I mostly agree with this. There is a certain demand for Tier One decks in any format, and that tends to set the combined price for the most widely played staples of the format, so that when one goes down others go up because more people are willing to try to buy in. Polluted Deltas and Flooded Strands are way up right now from what they were a couple weeks ago (18 tix for Delta and 15 for Strand). This is what I'm predicting happens to Modern when the MM reprints come, the fetches will skyrocket and keep the price of a Tier One modern deck about where it is -- the cards will be plenty "accessible" to anybody who's played MTG for a few years, but won't necessarily be any more affordable.
That being said, the other cards you mentioned could just be enjoying a brief bump by people who needed them to play in the MOCS. And relative to the REAL decline in FoW price (the promo was settling around 50-55 tix when I checked Wednesday after the downtime, bots just aren't touching them yet so that isn't reflected in MTGOtraders price right now), the increase in other legacy cards has been much smaller. Force being affordable opens up a TON of deckbuilding space for those of us who had decent non-blue legacy collections and only needed FoW to start playing the entire format.
I still don't see how FOW being in the 50-55 range is considered affordable by the same people that were complaining that FOW was 90-100. I always considered price discussions about Eternal formats to be a cop-out. Eternal is not for everyone, and to blame it entirely on price is the easy way to explain why one does not play them. I wish more people would just say that Eternal is not of interest to them, rather than pass around a stereotype of the format(s).
Do you really think that if the major cards prices were in the 20s and 10s no one else would be interested? How narrow a view. The fact is SOME people don't enjoy the power range of classic/legacy but many do not want to put 50-100 out for one card because they are not in the habit of doing so. Even if they can afford it, it is an intimidating thing for some.
There are a number of important cards that hit the high level mark for playing serious Legacy and Classic. Which means you have to be willing to either invest serious money all at once(rent??) or slowly accrue what you need over time. Either way this is not for the casual player who wants to just enjoy the game without worrying about it hurting the pocket too much or getting in trouble with their wife over their online spending.
Also The price of FOW dropping to almost half (that didn't last more than an hour btw as it quickly crept up another 10%) did excite a portion of the player base who didn't have access to it at 100+ for whatever reason. Two days later there are still some buy ads listing below 50 (very unrealistically and or optimistically).
So the interest in them IS there. If the DEs don't expand because of the new influx of fows that may indicate what you are saying in regards to tourney level classic but I'd expect more queues to fire than before as a result of this.
As for stereotypes well people get whatever impression they get from the players of the format. Even if you disagree with their impression it is hard to argue against it since opinions may vary greatly based on experience. You can't really say "You are wrong!" to someone expressing opinions. You can only say "I disagree with your assessment."
Of course if they start spouting their opinions as facts that's another matter.
You may just have to live with the fact that some people have a bad impression of Classic. I hope the price fall of fow does bring in more players because I think it is a fine format if a bit degenerate at times. Increasing FOWs in the system should help a little bit since they stop all the "I Win Now" (turn 1-2) nonsense that people object to and see as the hallmark of the format.
I am willing to live with the fact that people have a bad impression of Classic. I said that much in my post earlier. It's not for everyone, I get it.
That being said, I'd be willing to bet a majority of the people buying FOW now have no intention of ever using it in a game. Speculators are probably 75% of the people that are buying them right now, and keep in mind, most bots aren't touching them yet.
I should have clarified that while Eternal is expensive, it's not FOW's fault. People always seemed to complain about FOW, but never paid much mind to all the other cards. This is more or less my complaint, and is in turn the real problem. Anyone that thought FOW's price was the barrier to entry and went out and purchased them at the new discounted rate is probably a little upset to see how the other prices of cards have shot up.
I also have no sympathy for people complaining about Eternal prices when Standard decks cost so much. I fully understand that these are two different things, but neither cater to the "casual" crowd... most of whom are the perpetrators of the price stereotype.
And all these Turn 1 or 2 wins? I'd like to see them, because most Classic and Legacy decks these days are fair aggro-control decks or Workshops. Really, one only need FOW for a Lodestone Golem. Maybe FOW for Show and Tell or a reanimator spell, too. Hardly anyone is playing Storm in Classic and few are playing it in Legacy.
I've seen a few turn 1-2 wins but yeah they are fairly mythic (in the rarity sense). On the other hand I have lost turn 1 to a FOW on my lodestone golem followed by strip mine, wasteland, strip mine, taking out my only mana sources for the entire game. That was particularly unfun.
That said I agree with your assessment of competitive standard being fairly pricy too. It doesn't quite reach the same ridiculousness as LED or FOW or Wasteland (Usually) but it does add up really quickly. Especially when there are 9-10 of these high priced mythics stacked on top of each other to form "Good Stuff".dec.
As far as the perpetuators of the legend of Classic, I think that would be the players. Not the casual crowd, not the tourney crowd. Just the crowd. Everyone likes to brag when they get that insane game and so the legend grows. (IE: No one's fault in particular.)
You may be right about the speculators. I hope you aren't because that means bad things for Classic in general.
I picked up my set of FoW last week after the downtime, by cashing in some Standard and Modern stuff. I never would have been able to get to 480 tix that way, but 210 was fairly easy. While I DID play a fair bit of legacy on MTGO before, FoW had always been a barrier preventing me from playing blue decks. I played Zoo, Jund, various GW aggro decks, and so on. Almost every big card in the format aside from FoW and LED has had a window of time where it was significantly more affordable and if you were patient you could slowly build a legacy collection by following those price trends (and these articles helped too!) Since I don't play combo nor care about LED, FoW was the last thing I needed in my collection to be in the sweet spot where I can build almost anything I want to build in legacy with only a little extra investment.
I wouldn't know where to begin for Classic, unfortunately. I know a little about Vintage, but I don't care to play 'Shops or Dredge. From what I know of Vintage these days, I would play some U/G/x Fish deck probably, with Bobs and Goyfs and FoW's and Trygon Predators (Delvers now too?), but the absence of Big Blue definitely hurts those decks. I guess the moxes' absence hurts 'Shops and Blue decks both. It just doesn't seem like the real format until Power comes online.
Don't underestimate the extent to which those Turn 1 kills alienate players. I've grown a thicker skin about it than I used to have, but I've sat there with my non-blue aggro deck and lost many games to Charbelchers and Storm decks that I had no way to interact with, and it's just a risk of playing without blue. You can also play a whole tournament and see only "fair" decks and play interactive magic all day, but if your first impression is losing before you cast a spell, and the one card that would stop that from happening costs 120 tix per copy, that's a bit rough. FoW accessibility should definitely help.
"I picked up my set of FoW last week after the downtime, by cashing in some Standard and Modern stuff. I never would have been able to get to 480 tix that way, but 210 was fairly easy. While I DID play a fair bit of legacy on MTGO before, FoW had always been a barrier preventing me from playing blue decks."
Almost exactly the same. I basically have a Mtgo budget, and add $50 a month to my account. If a card is $120 I'd have to save at least 3 months to get it. If I bought a bunch of $10 cards I'd start using them right away. So having a bunch of cards go from $20 to $25 is not as big a deal to me as having 1 card go from $100+ to $50. Besides I already have everything I need to throw together 5-6 different blue decks now that I have my FoW set.
People focus on Force of Will because Force is warping Legacy. If a list can win with Red Elemental Blast and Jaya Ballard maindeck, you know a format is warped towards blue. People might complain about the price, but I think they're really upset at how prevalent it is.
Well not entirely. I mean it certainly isn't one card that is the barrier but the prices of the format in general. Force of Will's price STILL contributes a lot to that barrier even though other cards prices are rising to meet the slight decrease in price on FOWs. Classic and Legacy are expensive formats to play competitively in regardless of what deck you want to play unless you are content with the RDW special.
I don't think this is a bad thing but to say Force of Will provides no barrier to entry is as ludicrous as saying it is the only barrier to entry.
Though I think the better argument is that while expensive cards in classic create a barrier to entry so do expensive cards in other formats.
A thought on the discussion about how Jace, lands, etc. are all rising in price: this week we do have a bunch of legacy MOCS events. That's four prelims and the finals, all using Legacy. That means several hundred people want to play Legacy this week, people who don't generally play Legacy. Prices are spiking this week - they should drop next week.
I agree, except for Jace, I think people are picking him up speculating on him being unbanned in modern, which won't happen. I think his price climb started a bit before the FoW promo was announced, not sure though.
Jace went on the rise the second that P9 was announced. People have been speculating on Jace because of Vintage, not because of an un-ban in Modern (which if it ever happens, will be years from now).
I have never posted here before, although I have been reading your articles for a couple years. I guess...
I want you know that they are getting better and better.
Congrats for your great job! Hope you can go on with this for a long time!
About the prices for legacy staples.. I think most of the people who enjoy play legacy (I include vintage here) prefer to play outside modo, because this way they can play with their precious old cards. And more important, show them to others!
Eternal formats are all about nostalgia and proud. That's why IMHO these formats are getting troubles in become more played on MTGO.
I'm not saying these people are this ot that. It's just the nature of the human being.
One last thing..
I am really curious how do you get to the big number? I know what it means, but I'd like to know how do you get there, in deed.
I start with a spreadsheet showing the prices for all the cards on MTGO, (thanks to Heath at MTOGTraders.com.) That spreadsheet has about 17,000 rows.
I then sort by price, and delete all the cards with no price (mainly the new player card sets and the promos in the cube, but not yet for sale.) That deletes 700 or so rows.
Next, I sort by collector number. This brings the booster packs, precons and so forth - the products with a collector number of zero - to the top. I delete them.
Next I sort by name, alphabetically, with a secondary sort by price, highest to lowest. I then write a formula (1-EXACT(A1,A2)) to zero out the prices of any duplicates. That just leaves the lowest price for any duplicates. Finally, summing the results of those numbers gives me the cost of one copy of every card, and multiplying by four, and rounding to the nearest dollar, gives me the big number.
20 Comments
I haven't said this in a while, so I figured that I would again:
Pete, you are the perfect person to write this article. I love the detail that you put in every week. I love the history that you bring to the game. I love your editorials. Thank you so much for writing these.
:)
thanks - you made my day!
I will hitch my wagon to this comment as well.
I always look forward to this article.
So WotC promo's out FoW and drops the price and the result is......everything else that goes in decks with FoW becomes more expensive (Jace, Sea, Wasteland, Show and Tell...). Congrats, Wizards...you accomplished nothing in making Classic/Legacy any less expensive. Thats how Supply and Demand work. This is why attempts to control the market price of things almost never pan out and why using price as a determinant for whats gets promo'd is such a bad idea.
I mostly agree with this. There is a certain demand for Tier One decks in any format, and that tends to set the combined price for the most widely played staples of the format, so that when one goes down others go up because more people are willing to try to buy in. Polluted Deltas and Flooded Strands are way up right now from what they were a couple weeks ago (18 tix for Delta and 15 for Strand). This is what I'm predicting happens to Modern when the MM reprints come, the fetches will skyrocket and keep the price of a Tier One modern deck about where it is -- the cards will be plenty "accessible" to anybody who's played MTG for a few years, but won't necessarily be any more affordable.
That being said, the other cards you mentioned could just be enjoying a brief bump by people who needed them to play in the MOCS. And relative to the REAL decline in FoW price (the promo was settling around 50-55 tix when I checked Wednesday after the downtime, bots just aren't touching them yet so that isn't reflected in MTGOtraders price right now), the increase in other legacy cards has been much smaller. Force being affordable opens up a TON of deckbuilding space for those of us who had decent non-blue legacy collections and only needed FoW to start playing the entire format.
I still don't see how FOW being in the 50-55 range is considered affordable by the same people that were complaining that FOW was 90-100. I always considered price discussions about Eternal formats to be a cop-out. Eternal is not for everyone, and to blame it entirely on price is the easy way to explain why one does not play them. I wish more people would just say that Eternal is not of interest to them, rather than pass around a stereotype of the format(s).
Do you really think that if the major cards prices were in the 20s and 10s no one else would be interested? How narrow a view. The fact is SOME people don't enjoy the power range of classic/legacy but many do not want to put 50-100 out for one card because they are not in the habit of doing so. Even if they can afford it, it is an intimidating thing for some.
There are a number of important cards that hit the high level mark for playing serious Legacy and Classic. Which means you have to be willing to either invest serious money all at once(rent??) or slowly accrue what you need over time. Either way this is not for the casual player who wants to just enjoy the game without worrying about it hurting the pocket too much or getting in trouble with their wife over their online spending.
Also The price of FOW dropping to almost half (that didn't last more than an hour btw as it quickly crept up another 10%) did excite a portion of the player base who didn't have access to it at 100+ for whatever reason. Two days later there are still some buy ads listing below 50 (very unrealistically and or optimistically).
So the interest in them IS there. If the DEs don't expand because of the new influx of fows that may indicate what you are saying in regards to tourney level classic but I'd expect more queues to fire than before as a result of this.
As for stereotypes well people get whatever impression they get from the players of the format. Even if you disagree with their impression it is hard to argue against it since opinions may vary greatly based on experience. You can't really say "You are wrong!" to someone expressing opinions. You can only say "I disagree with your assessment."
Of course if they start spouting their opinions as facts that's another matter.
You may just have to live with the fact that some people have a bad impression of Classic. I hope the price fall of fow does bring in more players because I think it is a fine format if a bit degenerate at times. Increasing FOWs in the system should help a little bit since they stop all the "I Win Now" (turn 1-2) nonsense that people object to and see as the hallmark of the format.
I am willing to live with the fact that people have a bad impression of Classic. I said that much in my post earlier. It's not for everyone, I get it.
That being said, I'd be willing to bet a majority of the people buying FOW now have no intention of ever using it in a game. Speculators are probably 75% of the people that are buying them right now, and keep in mind, most bots aren't touching them yet.
I should have clarified that while Eternal is expensive, it's not FOW's fault. People always seemed to complain about FOW, but never paid much mind to all the other cards. This is more or less my complaint, and is in turn the real problem. Anyone that thought FOW's price was the barrier to entry and went out and purchased them at the new discounted rate is probably a little upset to see how the other prices of cards have shot up.
I also have no sympathy for people complaining about Eternal prices when Standard decks cost so much. I fully understand that these are two different things, but neither cater to the "casual" crowd... most of whom are the perpetrators of the price stereotype.
And all these Turn 1 or 2 wins? I'd like to see them, because most Classic and Legacy decks these days are fair aggro-control decks or Workshops. Really, one only need FOW for a Lodestone Golem. Maybe FOW for Show and Tell or a reanimator spell, too. Hardly anyone is playing Storm in Classic and few are playing it in Legacy.
I've seen a few turn 1-2 wins but yeah they are fairly mythic (in the rarity sense). On the other hand I have lost turn 1 to a FOW on my lodestone golem followed by strip mine, wasteland, strip mine, taking out my only mana sources for the entire game. That was particularly unfun.
That said I agree with your assessment of competitive standard being fairly pricy too. It doesn't quite reach the same ridiculousness as LED or FOW or Wasteland (Usually) but it does add up really quickly. Especially when there are 9-10 of these high priced mythics stacked on top of each other to form "Good Stuff".dec.
As far as the perpetuators of the legend of Classic, I think that would be the players. Not the casual crowd, not the tourney crowd. Just the crowd. Everyone likes to brag when they get that insane game and so the legend grows. (IE: No one's fault in particular.)
You may be right about the speculators. I hope you aren't because that means bad things for Classic in general.
I picked up my set of FoW last week after the downtime, by cashing in some Standard and Modern stuff. I never would have been able to get to 480 tix that way, but 210 was fairly easy. While I DID play a fair bit of legacy on MTGO before, FoW had always been a barrier preventing me from playing blue decks. I played Zoo, Jund, various GW aggro decks, and so on. Almost every big card in the format aside from FoW and LED has had a window of time where it was significantly more affordable and if you were patient you could slowly build a legacy collection by following those price trends (and these articles helped too!) Since I don't play combo nor care about LED, FoW was the last thing I needed in my collection to be in the sweet spot where I can build almost anything I want to build in legacy with only a little extra investment.
I wouldn't know where to begin for Classic, unfortunately. I know a little about Vintage, but I don't care to play 'Shops or Dredge. From what I know of Vintage these days, I would play some U/G/x Fish deck probably, with Bobs and Goyfs and FoW's and Trygon Predators (Delvers now too?), but the absence of Big Blue definitely hurts those decks. I guess the moxes' absence hurts 'Shops and Blue decks both. It just doesn't seem like the real format until Power comes online.
Don't underestimate the extent to which those Turn 1 kills alienate players. I've grown a thicker skin about it than I used to have, but I've sat there with my non-blue aggro deck and lost many games to Charbelchers and Storm decks that I had no way to interact with, and it's just a risk of playing without blue. You can also play a whole tournament and see only "fair" decks and play interactive magic all day, but if your first impression is losing before you cast a spell, and the one card that would stop that from happening costs 120 tix per copy, that's a bit rough. FoW accessibility should definitely help.
"I picked up my set of FoW last week after the downtime, by cashing in some Standard and Modern stuff. I never would have been able to get to 480 tix that way, but 210 was fairly easy. While I DID play a fair bit of legacy on MTGO before, FoW had always been a barrier preventing me from playing blue decks."
Almost exactly the same. I basically have a Mtgo budget, and add $50 a month to my account. If a card is $120 I'd have to save at least 3 months to get it. If I bought a bunch of $10 cards I'd start using them right away. So having a bunch of cards go from $20 to $25 is not as big a deal to me as having 1 card go from $100+ to $50. Besides I already have everything I need to throw together 5-6 different blue decks now that I have my FoW set.
People focus on Force of Will because Force is warping Legacy. If a list can win with Red Elemental Blast and Jaya Ballard maindeck, you know a format is warped towards blue. People might complain about the price, but I think they're really upset at how prevalent it is.
Which is why the argument that Force of Will's price was a barrier for Classic entry was always ludicrous.
Well not entirely. I mean it certainly isn't one card that is the barrier but the prices of the format in general. Force of Will's price STILL contributes a lot to that barrier even though other cards prices are rising to meet the slight decrease in price on FOWs. Classic and Legacy are expensive formats to play competitively in regardless of what deck you want to play unless you are content with the RDW special.
I don't think this is a bad thing but to say Force of Will provides no barrier to entry is as ludicrous as saying it is the only barrier to entry.
Though I think the better argument is that while expensive cards in classic create a barrier to entry so do expensive cards in other formats.
any predictions how many new fows could have been given?
A thought on the discussion about how Jace, lands, etc. are all rising in price: this week we do have a bunch of legacy MOCS events. That's four prelims and the finals, all using Legacy. That means several hundred people want to play Legacy this week, people who don't generally play Legacy. Prices are spiking this week - they should drop next week.
I agree, except for Jace, I think people are picking him up speculating on him being unbanned in modern, which won't happen. I think his price climb started a bit before the FoW promo was announced, not sure though.
Jace went on the rise the second that P9 was announced. People have been speculating on Jace because of Vintage, not because of an un-ban in Modern (which if it ever happens, will be years from now).
Hello Pete.
I have never posted here before, although I have been reading your articles for a couple years. I guess...
I want you know that they are getting better and better.
Congrats for your great job! Hope you can go on with this for a long time!
About the prices for legacy staples.. I think most of the people who enjoy play legacy (I include vintage here) prefer to play outside modo, because this way they can play with their precious old cards. And more important, show them to others!
Eternal formats are all about nostalgia and proud. That's why IMHO these formats are getting troubles in become more played on MTGO.
I'm not saying these people are this ot that. It's just the nature of the human being.
One last thing..
I am really curious how do you get to the big number? I know what it means, but I'd like to know how do you get there, in deed.
I start with a spreadsheet showing the prices for all the cards on MTGO, (thanks to Heath at MTOGTraders.com.) That spreadsheet has about 17,000 rows.
I then sort by price, and delete all the cards with no price (mainly the new player card sets and the promos in the cube, but not yet for sale.) That deletes 700 or so rows.
Next, I sort by collector number. This brings the booster packs, precons and so forth - the products with a collector number of zero - to the top. I delete them.
Next I sort by name, alphabetically, with a secondary sort by price, highest to lowest. I then write a formula (1-EXACT(A1,A2)) to zero out the prices of any duplicates. That just leaves the lowest price for any duplicates. Finally, summing the results of those numbers gives me the cost of one copy of every card, and multiplying by four, and rounding to the nearest dollar, gives me the big number.