Crap is crap is crap, even in real life. You can see the effects Ebay has had on paper magic by searching for completed auctions on any junk rare example.
For kicks, I searched for Endrek Sahrs. Many auctions of 4x premium Endrek Sahr's ended at ~2 USD plus shipping. Normal versions were 1 USD+ shipping.
Properly handled this could be a fun way to pass some time on mtgo and generate some new boosters. I respect what you're trying to do, but I'm not sure gobbling up rares from the system would change the crappiest crap's prices that much.
The point is the crap rares will leave the system, decreasing their supply until they hit equilibrium with when it is no longer worth putting them into the reject rare draft. THe equilibrium point is defintely NOT at 6 for 1.
It seems more to me you started reading the article and skipped right toward the end.
I'm a little confused about the point of your article.
You start by being mildly condescending about Supply and Demand, and then appear to completely ignore this base reference point.
Magic cards are cheap online because that's what they're worth!
IRL magic cards are only valued higher because of market inefficiencies preventing willing buyers from being able to meet up with willing sellers, allowing sellers to inflate card prices over their true value.
Online, bots enable buyers and sellers to much more easily meet, and thanks to the magic of supply and demand, voila the price of crap is cents. Who'd a thunk it?
All the niche strategies you are suggesting will do next to *nothing* to affect the demand for certain cards on a macro level.
About the only thing I can think of that would change the Supply/Demand equation in any significant way is taking the bots away, which will let people start charging IRL prices again. But is that what you really want?
Affinity wasn't banned because of power levels. It was banned because people stopped attending tournaments in the biggest exodus away from tournament magic since Urza's block.
It was banned for the very reason I disagree with you. It was fun to win with, not fun to lose to.
Wizards used your rationale to justify not banning Disciple of the Vault when they should have. Then they had to nerf all the artifact lands as well as Disciple when they reaslised the scope of the disaffection with affinity.
Affinity was banned because it does matter that losing be fun. People will stop attending tournaments if it isn't fun.
What we need is a 'card generating machine' from wotc. Each day, each player would be allowed to click a botton to access that machine (once). In there you're allowed to put 32 crappy cards you have into the machine, and then the machine will regenerate 1 random card back. It could be a foil FOW, but it could also be a new crappy common.
As long as the usage is limited to once a day, I think it won'be abused, and this should do well for both WOTC (lower the storage space usage) and for players (always love getting lucky).
It's a really nice deck if you want to play a 3 hour game, but I don't. It seems that all EDH decks suffer the same problem. They just try not to lose, instead of having a deck that can win. Yes this is safe, but it's also boring, defeating the purpose of casual.
I'd have played a lot of threats and a lot fewer removals, especially when the general is one that actually needs creatures to feed like orzhova. Try some token generators like skeletal vampire and the other white one that gives you 3 tokens in LOR (forget the name). they should help your general.
Interesting idea - but you would have to randomize the packs. If I get to draft with my packs, I would include one good card, 14 bad ones, and be assured of 3 strong cards that could win the draft. Imagine draft packs with 2 Persuassion, 1 Air Elemental, 3 One with Nothing and 33 copies of something like Dryad's Caress.
I think you are right about the bots. We have reached saturation - nearly everyone playing has most of teh cards they need. However, I think v3 may help. If it works, and Wizards can start marketing the program, that should increase the number of players. More players will push demand.
The best way to push demand for bad rares might be to bump the trading limit to 60 cards. That way people could build decks around the bad cards, demo them and offer to sell the whole thing. Sort of dealer-brand precons. Not perfect, but it might help.
The biggest problem downside of v3is the lack of multiplayer, at least at first. The multiplayer room is a good area for players with limited budgets to compete - and those players are more likely to buy Lieges.
Why not offer this format with no rewards .. and only the cost of the cards you submitted, which will be destroyed at the end of the draft. I would gladly get rid of cards to play something like this.
Actually, I've been tracking Vindicate, Chant, Deed, Mage, and Mirari's Wake (for the casual crowd) for a couple of months. I haven't reported anything on them yet as they've been pretty stable for a while (with exception to Chant, which dropped a bit with weatherlight). However, once there's something interesting to report on it, I will definitely show off some numbers. :)
Thanks for the ideas, I'll look into getting some of them charted!
This is my Doran build which is much more budget than the above mentioned decks, but still not quite cheap.
When I first started building it, I tried out most of the high toughness crits mentioned above, just to find out from playtesting that other treefolk tended to do the best job.
I haven't kept track of this decks win Average, but I'd say its 80-90%, both in 1v1 and 2hg. The elder's, harbinger's and shriekmaws keep you well defended in the early game. The story teller basically nullifies any blue control decks, and swings for three with doran on the board. Timber Protectors, Dauntless defenders, and deadwood treefolk gives the deck all the late game it needs, and Doran owns the mid game. If I have Akromas vengence in my starting hand, I usually ramp up to 6 mana and wipe the board before playing any creatures, if not, I try to wait until I have a protector in play, but between that and the shriekmaw, I have all the control I need. And the watchtower is an amazing card with doran in play, it's not uncommon to swing with a harbinger, doran and a watchtower for 13 on turn 4 or 5.
So thats my 2 cents, but I am considering adding glittering wishes to the mix, probably in place of the storytellers, they make an already deep deck able to handle virtually anything.
I liked the Force of Will chart, would be neat to see more of these... Perhaps one for Tarmogoyf since it's release? you could also add other related information like new sets, server stability and sanctioned tourny stats? That sounds like a lot of work though, trends can be fun!
Another cool idea would be to pick like 5 or 10 cards that may be affected by the 08 rotation... And see what happens along the way and when it finially hits. Its prolly to early to think about that, but would be something I'd like to read in the future.
Affinity's power level was not the problem, it was the cause of the problem, which was an un-fun format. If you read the quote, you'd see that it says that.
You're aboslutely right. That was a miscalculation on my part and well caught.
Although I'm not really sure that makes a difference in the final analysis. It's vitally important the rewards are less than both draftig and constructed play, since you don't *want* an excessive amount of Reject Rare Draf, and you want to keep constructed play viable.
But yeah, it might have to be 3 tix.
The actual specifics of the cost vs reward would need to be studied by MTGO people. Unfortunately, the are the only ones with all the measurements.
Even despite the fact that 'reject rare' draft itself is probably too skewed a format to be playable, you also miscounted the returns in your article;
[quote]
An 8 player queue is started when 8 people have joined, each with 3 packs of 15 cards, much like the current drat queue
Each pack is put together by the participants and must contain at least 1 rare and 3 uncommons. For the purposes of the proposal, they could be from any set, but that could easily be changed.[/quote]
VS:
[quote]you could ALWAYS make at least the 2nd round, you would be essentially trading your crap cards in (1 rare, 3 uncommons, 11 commons) and 4 tix for exactly the same number of cards. [/quote]
You would be turning in 45 cards; 3 rares, 9 uncommons and 33 commons. So breaking even on 'card quantity' you would actually need to win the entire draft.
Even if we look at it from a monetary perspective, it is rather steep; the 45 cards you turnin would be worth about 0.5 tix if you really played with the 'trash de trash', add the 4 tix entree fee, and you would be paying 4.5 tix for the draft, in which the packs used have no value afterwards (they are being destroyed). this means you have to actually place 1st or 2nd to break even in terms of value (because the only thing of value to get are the boosters). So at the very least the entry fee should be lower.
Well I guess we have no definition of eternal format. I think of them as formats where nothing rotates and you can play any card -bannings. Thats how paper formats are, thats how Classic is, thats how Singleton&Prismatic are.
I don't know what to say if you think Affinity's power level was not the problem. He is saying it was unfun because you played Affinity or you played 12 maindeck artifact removal spells. Nice metagame.
FYI the 12 main deck artifact removal spells didn't always beat Affinity.
Kaxon and iceage: Forsythe said that affinity wasn't banned because of power level, because the power level was fine. See the block-quote.
I believe I said this; as long as it's possible to win and still have fun, it doesn't matter if losing isn't fun. That implies, however, that it must be possible to win. If it's no longer possible to win, then it can't be possible to have fun while winning.
Where did I say losing should make you miserable? All I said is that it doesn't have to be fun, not that it can't be fun or must be the opposite of fun.
Also, regarding iceage's last sentence, there are a lot of rules people live by that they aren't aware of. I think if WotC was aware of this rule, they'd have said it by now, probably in Forsythe's article that I quoted.
Also, power level is very relevant to this point I'm making, because too high power level is what makes something un-fun to beat.
Good idea and good post Mike. I do though disagree with one part of your assessment, namely that the "destructor" button has no value for WOTC.
The number of players has NOT gone up in recent years, as a matter of fact has gone down (and I do believe that is part of the reason for the price drop). I was seeing more people playing 3 years ago, and MTGO removed the tracking chart to hide this fact. Yet the lag has become worse and the crashes more frequent. Why? I believe the root cause is the exponential increase in the number of cards in people's collections. Each card has its own ID number and MTGO has to keep track each one of them and the server is involved at some point. Think of how significant the lag is every time you open trade with someone who has a lot of tradable cards. So destroying cards via a destructor button or, even better, reject drafts would be a benefit to WOTC.
I have dial-up(sux to be me). Is wotc going to come out with a V3 disc to be purchased in stores? or am i screwed...sentenced to the 72 hour download/update or whatever you want to call it?
or find someone online who want to download if for you, put in on DVD ( dont think cd will fit, the beta was over 1 gig right?) and send it to you in mail?
But I think wizards wil make a dvd box version you can buy in stores wont they?
I dont think the mayor problem is that crap not being worth anything, I think the bots are actaullt good for us here cause we can dump our crappy rares, and even uncs and commons in bulk.
The problem is the good cards not being worth anything.
Look at Time Spiral Block, even the good cards from Time Spiral are hardly worth anything.
The best cards don't even get higher than 3.5. The top Timeshifter is worth around 4.
Even really good cards like Serra Avenger and Spectral Force are worth less than 1 ticket.
The same thing is happening with Lorwyn, sure, some cards are still pretty high, but most are < 0.50
And allready even good cards are near the 1 dollar mark.
Too many packs get opened cause of triple L drafts.
Maybe this block is going to be better with Lorwyn leaving drafts once Shadowmoor hits shelves.
I'd rather see my good cards have some value than my crap.
I also think it should be easier to trade cards for cards. It;s hard to find someone to trade with so often we end up selling our stuff to bots and buying other cards.Maybe a system where we can post a trade, and someones can except it while we are off-line. ( the online tcg Sanctum has this system) That way, you can trade without spending hours in casual room seeing the same 20 people every day.
You might want to reconsider the math in this article.
You say those are 38 cards, but it lists 40, but it includes 4 lands.
that's 36 spells, I dont think he has much space left for more burn or card draw and gelectrodes and rituals as you suggested.
For example, your first seven cards may consist of something like this.
1. Black Lotus 2. Mox Emerald 3. Swamp 4. Dark Ritual 5. Fastbond 6. Yawgmoth's Bargain 7. Zuran Orb
doesnt you hand have to be precisly those cards? You could swamp emerald for jet and swamp for forest, but other than that, not much room for alterations.
I really dont get why such a hand is fun anyway, but that's just me.
one thing I'd like to note before I begin... my latest article on this very site (search Urzishra14 you'll find them) puts to use many of the cards you listed above in the "reject rare" pile.. namely leige of the pit, endrek and others..
The biggest problem with a "reject rare draft" scenerio is that the format is not optimal for draft play and its too too swingy.. take MED drafting for example.. virtually no enchatment removal.. and really random cards.. you'd get what essentially would be "Reject rare" draft.. except worse.. because what if some players choose not to bring any creatures?
I wish there could be an official "bot" if you will that went around taking donations of extra cards.. and then when a new player activates his account he gets to pick 100 or 200 of those cards to start.. so no current player could go into this bot to take cards but only give.. it would at least do something with the majority of the crappy commons and uncommons.. or decent commons that you just can't get rid of any other way.. and new players would love having some more "value" for their money
Crap is crap is crap, even in real life. You can see the effects Ebay has had on paper magic by searching for completed auctions on any junk rare example.
For kicks, I searched for Endrek Sahrs. Many auctions of 4x premium Endrek Sahr's ended at ~2 USD plus shipping. Normal versions were 1 USD+ shipping.
Properly handled this could be a fun way to pass some time on mtgo and generate some new boosters. I respect what you're trying to do, but I'm not sure gobbling up rares from the system would change the crappiest crap's prices that much.
The point is the crap rares will leave the system, decreasing their supply until they hit equilibrium with when it is no longer worth putting them into the reject rare draft. THe equilibrium point is defintely NOT at 6 for 1.
It seems more to me you started reading the article and skipped right toward the end.
I'm a little confused about the point of your article.
You start by being mildly condescending about Supply and Demand, and then appear to completely ignore this base reference point.
Magic cards are cheap online because that's what they're worth!
IRL magic cards are only valued higher because of market inefficiencies preventing willing buyers from being able to meet up with willing sellers, allowing sellers to inflate card prices over their true value.
Online, bots enable buyers and sellers to much more easily meet, and thanks to the magic of supply and demand, voila the price of crap is cents. Who'd a thunk it?
All the niche strategies you are suggesting will do next to *nothing* to affect the demand for certain cards on a macro level.
About the only thing I can think of that would change the Supply/Demand equation in any significant way is taking the bots away, which will let people start charging IRL prices again. But is that what you really want?
Affinity wasn't banned because of power levels. It was banned because people stopped attending tournaments in the biggest exodus away from tournament magic since Urza's block.
It was banned for the very reason I disagree with you. It was fun to win with, not fun to lose to.
Wizards used your rationale to justify not banning Disciple of the Vault when they should have. Then they had to nerf all the artifact lands as well as Disciple when they reaslised the scope of the disaffection with affinity.
Affinity was banned because it does matter that losing be fun. People will stop attending tournaments if it isn't fun.
I gotta disagree with the other comment. Playing lots of threats in EDH is the perfect way in my view to loose.
If you want to win and not have 3 hour games you have to make a deck that does some very broken things.
As far as the article I liked it but the top 5 lists seemed to have nothing to do with the bulk of the article.
What we need is a 'card generating machine' from wotc. Each day, each player would be allowed to click a botton to access that machine (once). In there you're allowed to put 32 crappy cards you have into the machine, and then the machine will regenerate 1 random card back. It could be a foil FOW, but it could also be a new crappy common.
As long as the usage is limited to once a day, I think it won'be abused, and this should do well for both WOTC (lower the storage space usage) and for players (always love getting lucky).
It's a really nice deck if you want to play a 3 hour game, but I don't. It seems that all EDH decks suffer the same problem. They just try not to lose, instead of having a deck that can win. Yes this is safe, but it's also boring, defeating the purpose of casual.
I'd have played a lot of threats and a lot fewer removals, especially when the general is one that actually needs creatures to feed like orzhova. Try some token generators like skeletal vampire and the other white one that gives you 3 tokens in LOR (forget the name). they should help your general.
Interesting idea - but you would have to randomize the packs. If I get to draft with my packs, I would include one good card, 14 bad ones, and be assured of 3 strong cards that could win the draft. Imagine draft packs with 2 Persuassion, 1 Air Elemental, 3 One with Nothing and 33 copies of something like Dryad's Caress.
I think you are right about the bots. We have reached saturation - nearly everyone playing has most of teh cards they need. However, I think v3 may help. If it works, and Wizards can start marketing the program, that should increase the number of players. More players will push demand.
The best way to push demand for bad rares might be to bump the trading limit to 60 cards. That way people could build decks around the bad cards, demo them and offer to sell the whole thing. Sort of dealer-brand precons. Not perfect, but it might help.
The biggest problem downside of v3is the lack of multiplayer, at least at first. The multiplayer room is a good area for players with limited budgets to compete - and those players are more likely to buy Lieges.
It's all a matter of viewpoint I suppose. For me, the cheaper, the better. Now if only the chase cards would slide as well.
Why not offer this format with no rewards .. and only the cost of the cards you submitted, which will be destroyed at the end of the draft. I would gladly get rid of cards to play something like this.
Actually, I've been tracking Vindicate, Chant, Deed, Mage, and Mirari's Wake (for the casual crowd) for a couple of months. I haven't reported anything on them yet as they've been pretty stable for a while (with exception to Chant, which dropped a bit with weatherlight). However, once there's something interesting to report on it, I will definitely show off some numbers. :)
Thanks for the ideas, I'll look into getting some of them charted!
~Erik
This is my Doran build which is much more budget than the above mentioned decks, but still not quite cheap.
When I first started building it, I tried out most of the high toughness crits mentioned above, just to find out from playtesting that other treefolk tended to do the best job.
Creatures Other Spells Land
4 Doran 4 Akromas Vengence 4 Overgrown Tomb
4 Treefolk Harbinger 4 Temple Garden
4 Timber Protector 1 Godless Shrine
4 Dauntless Defender 4 Krosan Verge
4 Heartwood Stroyteller 4 Forbidding Watchtower
4 Sakura Tribe Elder 1 Swamp
4 Deadwood Treefolk 5 Forest
4 Shriekmaw 1 Plains
I haven't kept track of this decks win Average, but I'd say its 80-90%, both in 1v1 and 2hg. The elder's, harbinger's and shriekmaws keep you well defended in the early game. The story teller basically nullifies any blue control decks, and swings for three with doran on the board. Timber Protectors, Dauntless defenders, and deadwood treefolk gives the deck all the late game it needs, and Doran owns the mid game. If I have Akromas vengence in my starting hand, I usually ramp up to 6 mana and wipe the board before playing any creatures, if not, I try to wait until I have a protector in play, but between that and the shriekmaw, I have all the control I need. And the watchtower is an amazing card with doran in play, it's not uncommon to swing with a harbinger, doran and a watchtower for 13 on turn 4 or 5.
So thats my 2 cents, but I am considering adding glittering wishes to the mix, probably in place of the storytellers, they make an already deep deck able to handle virtually anything.
I liked the Force of Will chart, would be neat to see more of these... Perhaps one for Tarmogoyf since it's release? you could also add other related information like new sets, server stability and sanctioned tourny stats? That sounds like a lot of work though, trends can be fun!
Another cool idea would be to pick like 5 or 10 cards that may be affected by the 08 rotation... And see what happens along the way and when it finially hits. Its prolly to early to think about that, but would be something I'd like to read in the future.
Affinity's power level was not the problem, it was the cause of the problem, which was an un-fun format. If you read the quote, you'd see that it says that.
I truely missed reading your articles AJ. As always, great work and creativity at its finest. Well done.
You're aboslutely right. That was a miscalculation on my part and well caught.
Although I'm not really sure that makes a difference in the final analysis. It's vitally important the rewards are less than both draftig and constructed play, since you don't *want* an excessive amount of Reject Rare Draf, and you want to keep constructed play viable.
But yeah, it might have to be 3 tix.
The actual specifics of the cost vs reward would need to be studied by MTGO people. Unfortunately, the are the only ones with all the measurements.
Even despite the fact that 'reject rare' draft itself is probably too skewed a format to be playable, you also miscounted the returns in your article;
[quote]
An 8 player queue is started when 8 people have joined, each with 3 packs of 15 cards, much like the current drat queue
Each pack is put together by the participants and must contain at least 1 rare and 3 uncommons. For the purposes of the proposal, they could be from any set, but that could easily be changed.[/quote]
VS:
[quote]you could ALWAYS make at least the 2nd round, you would be essentially trading your crap cards in (1 rare, 3 uncommons, 11 commons) and 4 tix for exactly the same number of cards. [/quote]
You would be turning in 45 cards; 3 rares, 9 uncommons and 33 commons. So breaking even on 'card quantity' you would actually need to win the entire draft.
Even if we look at it from a monetary perspective, it is rather steep; the 45 cards you turnin would be worth about 0.5 tix if you really played with the 'trash de trash', add the 4 tix entree fee, and you would be paying 4.5 tix for the draft, in which the packs used have no value afterwards (they are being destroyed). this means you have to actually place 1st or 2nd to break even in terms of value (because the only thing of value to get are the boosters). So at the very least the entry fee should be lower.
Well I guess we have no definition of eternal format. I think of them as formats where nothing rotates and you can play any card -bannings. Thats how paper formats are, thats how Classic is, thats how Singleton&Prismatic are.
I don't know what to say if you think Affinity's power level was not the problem. He is saying it was unfun because you played Affinity or you played 12 maindeck artifact removal spells. Nice metagame.
FYI the 12 main deck artifact removal spells didn't always beat Affinity.
Kaxon and iceage: Forsythe said that affinity wasn't banned because of power level, because the power level was fine. See the block-quote.
I believe I said this; as long as it's possible to win and still have fun, it doesn't matter if losing isn't fun. That implies, however, that it must be possible to win. If it's no longer possible to win, then it can't be possible to have fun while winning.
Where did I say losing should make you miserable? All I said is that it doesn't have to be fun, not that it can't be fun or must be the opposite of fun.
Also, regarding iceage's last sentence, there are a lot of rules people live by that they aren't aware of. I think if WotC was aware of this rule, they'd have said it by now, probably in Forsythe's article that I quoted.
Also, power level is very relevant to this point I'm making, because too high power level is what makes something un-fun to beat.
Good idea and good post Mike. I do though disagree with one part of your assessment, namely that the "destructor" button has no value for WOTC.
The number of players has NOT gone up in recent years, as a matter of fact has gone down (and I do believe that is part of the reason for the price drop). I was seeing more people playing 3 years ago, and MTGO removed the tracking chart to hide this fact. Yet the lag has become worse and the crashes more frequent. Why? I believe the root cause is the exponential increase in the number of cards in people's collections. Each card has its own ID number and MTGO has to keep track each one of them and the server is involved at some point. Think of how significant the lag is every time you open trade with someone who has a lot of tradable cards. So destroying cards via a destructor button or, even better, reject drafts would be a benefit to WOTC.
I have dial-up(sux to be me). Is wotc going to come out with a V3 disc to be purchased in stores? or am i screwed...sentenced to the 72 hour download/update or whatever you want to call it?
my email is pablo_69@juno.com
or find someone online who want to download if for you, put in on DVD ( dont think cd will fit, the beta was over 1 gig right?) and send it to you in mail?
But I think wizards wil make a dvd box version you can buy in stores wont they?
I dont think the mayor problem is that crap not being worth anything, I think the bots are actaullt good for us here cause we can dump our crappy rares, and even uncs and commons in bulk.
The problem is the good cards not being worth anything.
Look at Time Spiral Block, even the good cards from Time Spiral are hardly worth anything.
The best cards don't even get higher than 3.5. The top Timeshifter is worth around 4.
Even really good cards like Serra Avenger and Spectral Force are worth less than 1 ticket.
The same thing is happening with Lorwyn, sure, some cards are still pretty high, but most are < 0.50
And allready even good cards are near the 1 dollar mark.
Too many packs get opened cause of triple L drafts.
Maybe this block is going to be better with Lorwyn leaving drafts once Shadowmoor hits shelves.
I'd rather see my good cards have some value than my crap.
I also think it should be easier to trade cards for cards. It;s hard to find someone to trade with so often we end up selling our stuff to bots and buying other cards.Maybe a system where we can post a trade, and someones can except it while we are off-line. ( the online tcg Sanctum has this system) That way, you can trade without spending hours in casual room seeing the same 20 people every day.
Greets
You might want to reconsider the math in this article.
You say those are 38 cards, but it lists 40, but it includes 4 lands.
that's 36 spells, I dont think he has much space left for more burn or card draw and gelectrodes and rituals as you suggested.
For example, your first seven cards may consist of something like this.
1. Black Lotus
2. Mox Emerald
3. Swamp
4. Dark Ritual
5. Fastbond
6. Yawgmoth's Bargain
7. Zuran Orb
doesnt you hand have to be precisly those cards? You could swamp emerald for jet and swamp for forest, but other than that, not much room for alterations.
I really dont get why such a hand is fun anyway, but that's just me.
Thanks for the Article
one thing I'd like to note before I begin... my latest article on this very site (search Urzishra14 you'll find them) puts to use many of the cards you listed above in the "reject rare" pile.. namely leige of the pit, endrek and others..
The biggest problem with a "reject rare draft" scenerio is that the format is not optimal for draft play and its too too swingy.. take MED drafting for example.. virtually no enchatment removal.. and really random cards.. you'd get what essentially would be "Reject rare" draft.. except worse.. because what if some players choose not to bring any creatures?
I wish there could be an official "bot" if you will that went around taking donations of extra cards.. and then when a new player activates his account he gets to pick 100 or 200 of those cards to start.. so no current player could go into this bot to take cards but only give.. it would at least do something with the majority of the crappy commons and uncommons.. or decent commons that you just can't get rid of any other way.. and new players would love having some more "value" for their money