The important point is that the cards are just barely available now. Go a couple years down the line, have some people leave the game without selling their collections, grow the overall player base by 20% - and we will have too few cards to let everyone play.
Expensive cards are not the problem. Not having enough cards available to let everyone play.
In the paper world, Wizards will never have a Vintage Grand Prix or a Legacy PTQ season, simply because there are not enough cards in the market to meet that demand. That's sad.
The same thing can happen with MTGO. Wizards needs to make an effort to make sure that the cards are available. Having cards that are really expensive is not fun, not if you can't afford it, but that's life. I would love to have a Formula 1 car. However, if *no one* can afford Fromula 1 cars, and the sport folds, that's worse. That's what I'm trying to avoid.
The biggest problem will be the duals. Those are the cards that anyone opening one will keep, even to play in casual decks. They are also the Classic cards most likely to be stranded in abandoned accounts.
I understand what you're saying, but as a fan of Classic it's a bummer that more people aren't able to play it. From my point of view it's not a zero sum game. The more people playing Classic, the better.
I understand that there are lots of players with different viewpoints, and it's hard to keep everyone happy, but there's mine.
Surely the problem here isn't that people can't get cards to play competitively in a classic tournie but instead that the cards they can get aren't good enough. Perhaps the answer is for wizards to print more accessible and competitive cards for online classic in the newer sets?
I am sure you would not mind but what about those of us who have them and payed well for them. Ok so im not fully part of that group but someone had to say it. As a promo sure, cause i know i would trade up for promos and toss mine into the system. But to take away the aspect of collectablity would destroy the credibility of it being a collectable game.
I am sure hammy has some numbers to back this up but med2 draft seems pretty healthy well as healty as it can be for a classic set. Any idea how many duals are entering the system a week.
I like the idea but another one would be to do PE that offer Duals a price. Ex a Playset of duals or a playset of FoW, Any cards that are in demand. It would not affect the main prices because not enought would be brought into the system but It would give a boost to the sales of Mirage sets and Med 2 sets..
I think its almost necessary to get the duals out to people at a reasonable price. They allow you to make competitive decks that do not necessarily contain FOW or Necropotence. Also, classic formats are played by very few and the only real way to get more players involved is to allow them to build a competitive deck that are reasonable to purchase. Either that or the format remains a fringe format, and calling it fringe is being generous. If that doesn't happen I would assume the exact same thing that happened with FOW happens to the duals, and eventually necropotence and every other playable rare from a set that is unplayable as a limited format. I wouldn't even mind a reprint of FOW and some of the other chase rares, and I own a full playset of all of them.
I have a similar deck as well, and I love it. There is one black card drawing engine that I love: Graveborn Muse. It's not very expensive, and for the price of 1 life per turn, you get 2 cards per turn. Not much synergy with a -1 deck, but playing those plus the Dusk Urchins, you're guaranteed to generate some card advantage.
Also, it's not nearly as good as Thoughtseize, but Raven's Crime isn't too bad, and can make mid to late land draws relevant.
I think most people are forgetting this is a collectable trading card game. Ruining value of cards by reprinting or adding old cards to collection sets (MED) just to keep the price down is tossing out the reason that many people play and keep collections. Why does every person who every plays MTGO need access to every format? Is it some God given right? I would assume that those arguing for reprints are also plaguing Wizards to get rid of the entire Common/Uncommon/Rare printing runs. Why have rares or cards of value at all? If only they would print every booster with 15 random cards from the set. Think about it. A Shards booster could have 3 Planeswalkers. Everyone could have as many Planeswalker cards as they have Tortoise Formation. Everyone would be happy, we could all have a group hug.
I am glad to see that Wizards isn't working towards this as indicated by the newest Rare cycle of Mythics. I hope they pull MED2 sooner than later. I have been drafting it whenever I get a chance just for the duals. I am counting that it will be pulled from stores and never returns or I wouldn't even bother with it since I'm much more interested in Block.
To be fair though I don't play Classic at all and have no interest in it so any reduction in prices for my Classic legal cards I would heavily frown upon.
I don't like evaluating cards based on their best case scenarios. There are certainly scenarios where the spike is good, I wont argue that. But I think if you're blindly including spike in every deck you're probably making a mistake. I can't think of a single good reason to include it almost any naya or bant deck unless the draft went very badly. I think that saying the spike doesn't commit you to a shard is an overstatement, since almost all the cards and strategies that make the card worth playing are in the Jund shard (or maybe Grixis since a lot of those cards are just black and red).
There is an abundance of removal in this format and investing 6 mana (and possibly 2 turns if you're trying to equip early) is a massive tempo loss that you often can't afford. Spike is at its best in the late game, when its more likely that you have spare mana to spend anyways, however its effect is often drastically decreased late game. An opponent losing half their life at 8 life is not all that exciting.
Look no further than the Tempest PreCon project as proof that he believes (rightly or wrongly) that putting the chase cards in a precon will kill tha draft rate for that set. It's hard to argue against that, especially for classic sets and even MORE especially (never mind, grammar police) for MED sets, since they generally aren't nearly enticing enough in limited play to get people drafting without the promise of hitting a chase card with pick #1.
Too boot, if you don't cover all the bases, because the draft rate would be so low you might cause other problems. For example, if there were 5 precons for MED2, one each with a dual in it, what do you think the price of Necropotence would be?
Finally, the sad fact is that that while duals are very important, this is eternal we are talking about, and no amount of wishing that blue wasn't the best color will make it so. The facts don't lie - Force of Will is used more than any card in classic, and that includes even the duals.
while were at it lets give everyone who plays and signs up for mtgo 4x of every card ever made for mtgo. when a new set comes out just go ahead and give everyone 4x of the new set too. That way every format is available to every player. Drafts? pointless for other than fun. Values of collections? nonexistent. We wouldn't need redemption. But hey everyone could access every format!
Since the original dualies have been released, I have long thought it would be in the best interest of the entire classic community that these rares be available in pre-constructed decks that are for sale by WOTC, not unlike the guarantee of buying 4 sets of Jace vs Chandra will get you 4X Daze, there should be a pre-constructed set similar that gets you the dualies. The reasoning, these cards are an absolute necessity to playing competitive classic formats. Cards like FOW are not absolute necessities, they are definitely important, but many decks do not play FOW. Any classic deck that is 2 colors plus should be playing the appropriate dualies, or the deck is not built optimally. You could view buying the 4X set of cards that has the duals available in it as a sort of investment that is necessary to play competitive classic.
my only point is this. Lets just reprint moxes and dualies in paper to make vintage more accessible for new people that wnat to get into the format. (yeah right)
I'll disagree with your second point, though. You may be happy with playing Standard and draft. Others are not. For that matter, a few people are happy playing base set precons. The problem is that other people want to play other formats - and the card in those other formats are, or are becoming, unavailable at any price. Expensive dards - okay. Not enough - really, really bad.
not ot be nitpicky, but the highest priced pauper card is terminate, which just went to 4.41. The price bugs me because i want a playset, but its hard to justify 17.50 for a common that In the paper world I could pick up a playset of for 1.00. Now on to classic and card prices. I've played paper since just before the release of unlimited.(yes i'm old) and in those days I had a full set of p9 and a whole bunch of dualies.(18 tropical islands at one point.) I sold them all for a huge profit because the tourney scene hit and they were in demand and out of print.(I either cracked them all out of packs, won them in ante, or traded my Mahamotis, shivans and force of natures for them.) I decided at those prices I would be happy with standard and draft. Now if they had rotated them back in.(think chronicles at a much smaller scale) I would of never had that opportunity to sell at a huge profit. Now I'm kinda new to the online scene as I started in planar chaos, and if I want to play classic I have to shell out some serious cash, but you know in paper if I were new I would have to shell out a heck of a lot more cash to get into vintage, but ya know what? I'm perfectly happy with standard, draft and pauper. My point is old cards should hold their value and not be reprinted, and should be rotated out just like the real world. Why build a collection if it just gets reprinted? Why buy a playset before it gets too high priced if it will just keep coming out again? If ya wanna play, you gotta play and thats the way it should be!
Remember Pithing Needle? It wasn't really that good in a draft, right? It seemed like it was printed for the classic community. Sure you'd rare draft it, thinking (correctly) that it would be money, but you wouldn't really play it. Or, at least I didn't. Wizards could easily print a zero mana artifact cantrip that said that people couldn't play blue instants that require pitching a card unless they sac a land. They could even print that at common. They won't, that would actually be too good, but a classic player would stock four of these, and freely counter all FOW's forever. People would still play FOW's, but things would change pretty drastically.
Also, I think that it's a good idea to lower the prices of the older sets. Most of the people who play mtgo are casual players. So someone, like me, who comes in and out of the game depending on life and work and banal stuff, but still has some skills, and still likes to draft, would have options, instead of just automatically going to the current set. I don't have a FOW (online) nor a Figure of Destiny. Mirages griffins are less interesting to me than exalted though, so if I'm dropping $15 to draft once a month, I'm going for AAA, not Mirage. If Mirage was $10 instead? Then I think lots of people would consider that.
Great article, a new reader here, wish i would have found this earlier. Just curious, how do you come up with the digit's to figure out card values and how many of what card are in circulation? Thank you.
I think rotating the on-sale date of the prodcuts is a good long-term solution. The only issue I see is that these formats are not fun to draft.
One solution would be to make some BYO formats available. I think diversity in formats would really help to keep interest in the different sets.
The problem is there isn't enough lifeforce in MTG. A few thousand people cannot support any more formats. They need a marketing effort to get more people playing. All they need to do is introduce the paper players to the online world and I bet they would capture a huge audience.
I'm actually LOL here, because you followed the same thread of thinking I did and arrived at the same place, though I think there are a couple of things that I want to point out.
Firstly, that while MED1 was on sale for a short time, don't forget that fully 10,000 packs were sold as part of a sale in the last week. That's 181 Force of Wills - which is not insignificant. What has (I think) actually occured wasn't that there wasn't enough sold, it's that people underestimate the effects of attrition in MTGO. So many people play, consider their posiblities of turning their 600 card collection into any real money and leave without putting their cards back into the marketplace.
And unfortunately, v3 made a LOT of those people leave - and MVW and MED1 were all pre-v3. That's WoTC for not retaining players, or getting them to come back.
As for packs, you are correct that lowering the price would probably help, but all that would really do is shift draft addicts from choosing a standard draft set to a classic draft set - becasue the kind of people who could drastically pump classic cards into the system via draft (Read: People who draft and don't play classic constructed - people like me and Dragondung above are a small minority) are simply going to shift their habits. Which is a loss for WOTC - same number of drafts, less money. I don't think WoTC wants to cannablize sales to help prop up contructed classic.
I've mentioned this to Worth ("mentioned" is a bit of tame word), but the best thing I can see happening is something akin to lowering the price - but temproraily. They should tell everyone MVW was going off sale in two weeks and just sell MVW draft packs for $10 (so like a $4) discount. Not only would they a) sell 10x more MVW in that time than they EVER will leaving them at the store for all time, but that kind of sale is going to get INCREMENTAL business over simply lowering the price of packs. The off-sale part is important - the addition reason to draft will get people who otherwise WOULDN'T BE DRAFTING AT ALL to go out and do it, for fear of missing out. This will put a final injection of product into the system (much like the MED1 sale did) and hopefully we won't lose all those cards through attrition.
The important point is that the cards are just barely available now. Go a couple years down the line, have some people leave the game without selling their collections, grow the overall player base by 20% - and we will have too few cards to let everyone play.
Expensive cards are not the problem. Not having enough cards available to let everyone play.
In the paper world, Wizards will never have a Vintage Grand Prix or a Legacy PTQ season, simply because there are not enough cards in the market to meet that demand. That's sad.
The same thing can happen with MTGO. Wizards needs to make an effort to make sure that the cards are available. Having cards that are really expensive is not fun, not if you can't afford it, but that's life. I would love to have a Formula 1 car. However, if *no one* can afford Fromula 1 cars, and the sport folds, that's worse. That's what I'm trying to avoid.
The biggest problem will be the duals. Those are the cards that anyone opening one will keep, even to play in casual decks. They are also the Classic cards most likely to be stranded in abandoned accounts.
I'm a huge Graveborn Muse fan - I used to play four copies alongside Korlash, Heir to Blackblade. What a fun deck that was.
I understand what you're saying, but as a fan of Classic it's a bummer that more people aren't able to play it. From my point of view it's not a zero sum game. The more people playing Classic, the better.
I understand that there are lots of players with different viewpoints, and it's hard to keep everyone happy, but there's mine.
Surely the problem here isn't that people can't get cards to play competitively in a classic tournie but instead that the cards they can get aren't good enough. Perhaps the answer is for wizards to print more accessible and competitive cards for online classic in the newer sets?
I am sure you would not mind but what about those of us who have them and payed well for them. Ok so im not fully part of that group but someone had to say it. As a promo sure, cause i know i would trade up for promos and toss mine into the system. But to take away the aspect of collectablity would destroy the credibility of it being a collectable game.
I am sure hammy has some numbers to back this up but med2 draft seems pretty healthy well as healty as it can be for a classic set. Any idea how many duals are entering the system a week.
I like the idea but another one would be to do PE that offer Duals a price. Ex a Playset of duals or a playset of FoW, Any cards that are in demand. It would not affect the main prices because not enought would be brought into the system but It would give a boost to the sales of Mirage sets and Med 2 sets..
I think its almost necessary to get the duals out to people at a reasonable price. They allow you to make competitive decks that do not necessarily contain FOW or Necropotence. Also, classic formats are played by very few and the only real way to get more players involved is to allow them to build a competitive deck that are reasonable to purchase. Either that or the format remains a fringe format, and calling it fringe is being generous. If that doesn't happen I would assume the exact same thing that happened with FOW happens to the duals, and eventually necropotence and every other playable rare from a set that is unplayable as a limited format. I wouldn't even mind a reprint of FOW and some of the other chase rares, and I own a full playset of all of them.
Noknife
I have a similar deck as well, and I love it. There is one black card drawing engine that I love: Graveborn Muse. It's not very expensive, and for the price of 1 life per turn, you get 2 cards per turn. Not much synergy with a -1 deck, but playing those plus the Dusk Urchins, you're guaranteed to generate some card advantage.
Also, it's not nearly as good as Thoughtseize, but Raven's Crime isn't too bad, and can make mid to late land draws relevant.
I think most people are forgetting this is a collectable trading card game. Ruining value of cards by reprinting or adding old cards to collection sets (MED) just to keep the price down is tossing out the reason that many people play and keep collections. Why does every person who every plays MTGO need access to every format? Is it some God given right? I would assume that those arguing for reprints are also plaguing Wizards to get rid of the entire Common/Uncommon/Rare printing runs. Why have rares or cards of value at all? If only they would print every booster with 15 random cards from the set. Think about it. A Shards booster could have 3 Planeswalkers. Everyone could have as many Planeswalker cards as they have Tortoise Formation. Everyone would be happy, we could all have a group hug.
I am glad to see that Wizards isn't working towards this as indicated by the newest Rare cycle of Mythics. I hope they pull MED2 sooner than later. I have been drafting it whenever I get a chance just for the duals. I am counting that it will be pulled from stores and never returns or I wouldn't even bother with it since I'm much more interested in Block.
To be fair though I don't play Classic at all and have no interest in it so any reduction in prices for my Classic legal cards I would heavily frown upon.
Thanks again for all your comments.
I don't like evaluating cards based on their best case scenarios. There are certainly scenarios where the spike is good, I wont argue that. But I think if you're blindly including spike in every deck you're probably making a mistake. I can't think of a single good reason to include it almost any naya or bant deck unless the draft went very badly. I think that saying the spike doesn't commit you to a shard is an overstatement, since almost all the cards and strategies that make the card worth playing are in the Jund shard (or maybe Grixis since a lot of those cards are just black and red).
There is an abundance of removal in this format and investing 6 mana (and possibly 2 turns if you're trying to equip early) is a massive tempo loss that you often can't afford. Spike is at its best in the late game, when its more likely that you have spare mana to spend anyways, however its effect is often drastically decreased late game. An opponent losing half their life at 8 life is not all that exciting.
That idea was pitched to Worth.
Look no further than the Tempest PreCon project as proof that he believes (rightly or wrongly) that putting the chase cards in a precon will kill tha draft rate for that set. It's hard to argue against that, especially for classic sets and even MORE especially (never mind, grammar police) for MED sets, since they generally aren't nearly enticing enough in limited play to get people drafting without the promise of hitting a chase card with pick #1.
Too boot, if you don't cover all the bases, because the draft rate would be so low you might cause other problems. For example, if there were 5 precons for MED2, one each with a dual in it, what do you think the price of Necropotence would be?
Finally, the sad fact is that that while duals are very important, this is eternal we are talking about, and no amount of wishing that blue wasn't the best color will make it so. The facts don't lie - Force of Will is used more than any card in classic, and that includes even the duals.
while were at it lets give everyone who plays and signs up for mtgo 4x of every card ever made for mtgo. when a new set comes out just go ahead and give everyone 4x of the new set too. That way every format is available to every player. Drafts? pointless for other than fun. Values of collections? nonexistent. We wouldn't need redemption. But hey everyone could access every format!
First of all, welcome to the article! If you want to go back through the old ones, they're all here; http://puremtgo.com/articles/recent?uid=hamtastic&title=&field_summary_v...
As to the card values, I get them from www.mtgotraders.com (Owned by the guy who owns this site).
Sadly I don't information about how many cards are in circulation, but I get the top selling cards from mtgotraders as well.
Thanks for tuning in and I hope you come back next week!
~Erik
Since the original dualies have been released, I have long thought it would be in the best interest of the entire classic community that these rares be available in pre-constructed decks that are for sale by WOTC, not unlike the guarantee of buying 4 sets of Jace vs Chandra will get you 4X Daze, there should be a pre-constructed set similar that gets you the dualies. The reasoning, these cards are an absolute necessity to playing competitive classic formats. Cards like FOW are not absolute necessities, they are definitely important, but many decks do not play FOW. Any classic deck that is 2 colors plus should be playing the appropriate dualies, or the deck is not built optimally. You could view buying the 4X set of cards that has the duals available in it as a sort of investment that is necessary to play competitive classic.
my only point is this. Lets just reprint moxes and dualies in paper to make vintage more accessible for new people that wnat to get into the format. (yeah right)
I'll see your nitpick and raise you a nitpickle...
the highest priced pauper 'common' is Daze, at 9.50, but that's not really driving any packs sales. :D
Good article, good things to think about...
I missed Terminate. doh.
I'll disagree with your second point, though. You may be happy with playing Standard and draft. Others are not. For that matter, a few people are happy playing base set precons. The problem is that other people want to play other formats - and the card in those other formats are, or are becoming, unavailable at any price. Expensive dards - okay. Not enough - really, really bad.
not ot be nitpicky, but the highest priced pauper card is terminate, which just went to 4.41. The price bugs me because i want a playset, but its hard to justify 17.50 for a common that In the paper world I could pick up a playset of for 1.00. Now on to classic and card prices. I've played paper since just before the release of unlimited.(yes i'm old) and in those days I had a full set of p9 and a whole bunch of dualies.(18 tropical islands at one point.) I sold them all for a huge profit because the tourney scene hit and they were in demand and out of print.(I either cracked them all out of packs, won them in ante, or traded my Mahamotis, shivans and force of natures for them.) I decided at those prices I would be happy with standard and draft. Now if they had rotated them back in.(think chronicles at a much smaller scale) I would of never had that opportunity to sell at a huge profit. Now I'm kinda new to the online scene as I started in planar chaos, and if I want to play classic I have to shell out some serious cash, but you know in paper if I were new I would have to shell out a heck of a lot more cash to get into vintage, but ya know what? I'm perfectly happy with standard, draft and pauper. My point is old cards should hold their value and not be reprinted, and should be rotated out just like the real world. Why build a collection if it just gets reprinted? Why buy a playset before it gets too high priced if it will just keep coming out again? If ya wanna play, you gotta play and thats the way it should be!
Remember Pithing Needle? It wasn't really that good in a draft, right? It seemed like it was printed for the classic community. Sure you'd rare draft it, thinking (correctly) that it would be money, but you wouldn't really play it. Or, at least I didn't. Wizards could easily print a zero mana artifact cantrip that said that people couldn't play blue instants that require pitching a card unless they sac a land. They could even print that at common. They won't, that would actually be too good, but a classic player would stock four of these, and freely counter all FOW's forever. People would still play FOW's, but things would change pretty drastically.
Also, I think that it's a good idea to lower the prices of the older sets. Most of the people who play mtgo are casual players. So someone, like me, who comes in and out of the game depending on life and work and banal stuff, but still has some skills, and still likes to draft, would have options, instead of just automatically going to the current set. I don't have a FOW (online) nor a Figure of Destiny. Mirages griffins are less interesting to me than exalted though, so if I'm dropping $15 to draft once a month, I'm going for AAA, not Mirage. If Mirage was $10 instead? Then I think lots of people would consider that.
Interesting idea; I like it.
No prob! I like me some dragon food tokens, so I think I got excited thinking that there was some sweet way to keep them alive.
Keep on keeping on!
Thanks! Now my combat damage step works great! I can't believe how long I played the wrong way.
I must hang around at the wrong times. :(
Still, even assuming Mirage drafts fire twice a day, drafters are opening at best one playset of Lion's Eye Diamonds per month. That's not much.
Great article, a new reader here, wish i would have found this earlier. Just curious, how do you come up with the digit's to figure out card values and how many of what card are in circulation? Thank you.
I think rotating the on-sale date of the prodcuts is a good long-term solution. The only issue I see is that these formats are not fun to draft.
One solution would be to make some BYO formats available. I think diversity in formats would really help to keep interest in the different sets.
The problem is there isn't enough lifeforce in MTG. A few thousand people cannot support any more formats. They need a marketing effort to get more people playing. All they need to do is introduce the paper players to the online world and I bet they would capture a huge audience.
First off, great article PRJ.
I'm actually LOL here, because you followed the same thread of thinking I did and arrived at the same place, though I think there are a couple of things that I want to point out.
Firstly, that while MED1 was on sale for a short time, don't forget that fully 10,000 packs were sold as part of a sale in the last week. That's 181 Force of Wills - which is not insignificant. What has (I think) actually occured wasn't that there wasn't enough sold, it's that people underestimate the effects of attrition in MTGO. So many people play, consider their posiblities of turning their 600 card collection into any real money and leave without putting their cards back into the marketplace.
And unfortunately, v3 made a LOT of those people leave - and MVW and MED1 were all pre-v3. That's WoTC for not retaining players, or getting them to come back.
As for packs, you are correct that lowering the price would probably help, but all that would really do is shift draft addicts from choosing a standard draft set to a classic draft set - becasue the kind of people who could drastically pump classic cards into the system via draft (Read: People who draft and don't play classic constructed - people like me and Dragondung above are a small minority) are simply going to shift their habits. Which is a loss for WOTC - same number of drafts, less money. I don't think WoTC wants to cannablize sales to help prop up contructed classic.
I've mentioned this to Worth ("mentioned" is a bit of tame word), but the best thing I can see happening is something akin to lowering the price - but temproraily. They should tell everyone MVW was going off sale in two weeks and just sell MVW draft packs for $10 (so like a $4) discount. Not only would they a) sell 10x more MVW in that time than they EVER will leaving them at the store for all time, but that kind of sale is going to get INCREMENTAL business over simply lowering the price of packs. The off-sale part is important - the addition reason to draft will get people who otherwise WOULDN'T BE DRAFTING AT ALL to go out and do it, for fear of missing out. This will put a final injection of product into the system (much like the MED1 sale did) and hopefully we won't lose all those cards through attrition.