7 ms·

If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? As it's written in the article, problems

by antpls 7y ago

If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? As it's written in the article, problems arise for a minority of children. From the article, we know little about the background of these children and about their parents. It is possible that those children would have developed an addiction to something else if it wasn't video games loot boxes. Yes, some of them spend thousands, but what if they are millionaires's kids? They play by different rules. In my opinion, gambling in videos game means your kids will experience the risk of gambling sooner, and if you watch your kid and educate them about it, they can experience it in a safer environment than when they are adults. To me, banning virtual loot boxes is extreme and doesynt solve the actual problem (education programs are misaligned, lack of mental healthcare programs, etc). Addiction might reveal a problem, but it's not necessary the root cause.

crispyporkbites 7y ago
Honestly those boosters are a scummy product and we would all be better off without them.
- dgellow 7y ago
  We even have an alternative system that has been proven: the Living Card Games (LCG) system from Fantasy Flight. Instead of boosters a serie of card is divided in “chapters” that are fixed and have a balanced distribution of cards. Every other month a new chapter is released, at a fixed schedule. All cards are known so you can decide which chapter you care about and want to buy. And a few times each year a big expansion pack is released, dedicated to one faction or group of cards. https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/more/living-card-games/ https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/more/living-card-games...
hanselot 7y ago
Shall we just ban entropy then?
JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
Because magic the gathering cards are an actual item tradeable for actual money to other players and resellers. It's still questionable in many ways, sure. But many of these virtual items are closed economies with the supply entirely owned by the producer of the game. These have no intrinsic value outside of this closed system and there is no ability to exchange them for real money. I'm not saying booster packs are necessarily morally correct either, but want to highlight that there is a qualitative difference between them and most loot box economies.
- seventhtiger 7y ago
  So the reason Magic is different is because you are actually gambling for things with monetary value? That doesn't sound right. I'd think it'd be less like gambling if the rewards had no monetary value, like random candies or skins in a video game. Then even the hope of getting your money back isn't there. You know all you're getting is just candy or toys.
  - JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
    No, it has a monetary value, But you can't resell it. People spend thousands on skins, with some of the items only accessible by repeatedly rolling the dice on a loot box. (Others have price ceilings for direct purchases). The closed nature of the economy just means you can only purchase from the one person who is setting the price and you have no ability to trade it back in for cash. Magic cards you can resell your cards to another player at a later date. You can't in Apex Legends.
    - seventhtiger 7y ago
      It has value sure but it's not monetary if you can't convert it to money. These things have no monetary value. So you should know going in you will never make your money back. You will only get better or worse game items. That's farther than gambling than the trading card model.
      - 7y ago
earenndil 7y ago
Even millionares' kids should not be spending thousands of their parents' dollars indiscriminately. If we don't hear horror stories about it, it is because those parents are able to absorb the cost, but it still doesn't teach the kids good money habits.
bsder 7y ago
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? I don't necessarily disagree. However, if I want card X for Magic/Pokemon, I can look up the card online, find its value, and buy the card. Sure, I can buy booster packs, but they are not the only way to get the card I want. With online games, loot boxes are often the only way to get what you want. That's not good. > In my opinion, gambling in videos game means your kids will experience the risk of gambling sooner, and if you watch your kid and educate them about it, they can experience it in a safer environment than when they are adults. The problem is that you are up against companies that are spending a lot of money to optimize the addictiveness of their product. We already know how the lack of regulation turned out in one sector(smoking)--and we especially penalize them if they try to target children.
- davemp 7y ago
  > However, if I want card X for Magic/Pokemon, I can look up the card online, find its value, and buy the card. Sure, I can buy booster packs, but they are not the only way to get the card I want. If anything, Magic teaches you that gambling is usually the worst way to get the card you want.
  - bsder 7y ago
    Although ... I'm glad I'm not a gambling man... Back a while ago, I remembered my MtG friends complaining that they couldn't get some box (Modern Masters?) because they ran out immediately. I was at my hometown and ran into a dedicated gaming store owner who vastly overestimated the wealth of his rural clients in buying higher end MtG stuff (or maybe he didn't--I did spend a lot of money after all). So, I bought all his stock--something like 10 boxes at almost $3000, IIRC, (there is more than one reason they call it cardboard crack) and brought them back. I kept a couple boxes for gifts and sold the rest to very happy MtG players. Every single box had a card at the time valued at more than the price of the whole box--plus a smattering of other fairly valuable cards. Since then, my MtG friends make me pick out any "lottery" things they buy. My luck is decent, but it has never been that good again.
Smithalicious 7y ago
The difference is that loot boxes can drain an arbitrary amount of money whereas with trading cards you will eventually have enough duplicates that you can sell them and buy all remaining cards at market price. And if you want a specific thing you can just buy it outright.
skocznymroczny 7y ago
The physical boosters are different, because they are set in stone and they're just there, ready to be bought. The odds are set and won't change. With lootboxes, you allow dynamic regulation, which can be abused. For example, a famous streamer is opening your lootboxes live? Give him better droprate so that he constantly opens "Epic" items, so that his followers think it's so easy and want to try it for themselves too. See a whale opening your lootboxes? Starve him when it comes to loot for a bit to make sure he buys more lootboxes.
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  Another aspect is that the physical items take up actual physical space. You have to store them somewhere, and you have to look at them, and you might easier come to the realization that what you are doing is completely ridiculous. And for the sellers of these physical items they also take up space, shelf space, and seeing a large number of extremely similar items for similar games in one retail location, might also clue you in faster on how ridiculous the thing is. The physical items quickly run into physical limitations, which is good. The virtual items on the other hand have zero limitations, zero rules, it's all just pixels and database entries, and the presentation of what you "have" can be managed, hidden, manipulated, so that you still think you have nothing and need to buy more pixels.
- PeterisP 7y ago
  Scratch-off lottery cards also are set in stone and they're just there, ready to be bought. The odds are known to the public (and probably right there on the card), the card has a fixed value but until you've bought it you just don't know if this card will be worth $0.25 or $500. That's 100% gambling. And the concept is soooo very similar to booster packs.
PeterStuer 7y ago
Yeah ... except the whole video game gambling is fine-tuned and relentless in its pursuit to prey upon the vulnerabilities and blind-sights of the very exploitable. It is an addiction machine fishing for kids to enthrall. By all means educate your kids, but also make sure to protect them at their most vulnerable against an 'opponent' in a very uneven playing field. As for your comparison to trading card game boosters: sure, there are some dimensions of the experience that are similar. Varying rarity and desirability of items contained in a purchased container that does not reveal its content until after purchase. There are also things that are vastly different. There are things like the virtualization of the transaction (spending online virtual coins, even though you purchased them with real money has been proven to be psychologically very different from a cash transaction), the sensory stimuli that are build into the opening rituals (real card packs at most can optimize the tearing experience and the smell of the freshly opened pack, which they do btw) which makes it a very different matter. Sometimes there are real grey zones when it comes to the balance of overprotectiveness vs predation. It is not because the delineation can't be made extremely precise that we can't identify that some things are clearly outside of the acceptable middle. IMHO lootboxes do not fall into this grey area, and are clearly a predatory mechanism that the most vulnerable should be prevented from having to be in a perpetual armsrace against.
- faceplanted 7y ago
  It's not just virtual currencies, it's permanence and tradability, kids don't just buy booster packs and take what they can get, they trade cards in complex ways, in some cases gift them to friends who wants to play, and the stack of cards is a visual representation of how much you've spent, whereas in some games, PUBG Mobile for example, your cosmetics literally disappear after a fixed time and if you have many duplicates of a common item, you can trade them, but only for the in game currency that can only buy the cheapest forms of crates. Also, depending on the platform kids can spend their parents money with no oversight if their parents don't understand how in app payments work, whereas most parents would never send their small child to a store with their credit card unsupervised.
  - cmsj 7y ago
wickerman 7y ago
Because the crucial thing about lootboxes is that in-game currency obfuscates the actual value of your purchase. You know when you buy a booster pack how much that booster pack is worth in real life money; you don't when you're buying lootboxes. When I was a kid and bought booster packs I knew how much they were worth because I also knew the value of each card and how much they compared to other physical stuff I could buy (candy).
daemin 7y ago
To me banning virtual loot boxes is the right way to go. There is no real reason for them to be there except to trigger that random reinforcement mechanic that gambling also triggers. They also make the gameplay of the game worse in order to support the economy of loot boxes.
swebs 7y ago
>If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? Yes please! Or at least just the slot machine aspect. It would be great if you could buy a box of cards and know exactly what's inside.
- Horba 7y ago
  You can. These are called Challenger Decks. https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/challenger-decks-2019-03-18 https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/challe...
lawtalkinghuman 7y ago
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? Video games are always available. You can purchase lootboxes 24/7 without any real effort. They use the same techniques to manipulate people as various casino gambling games. There have been players, especially some with learning difficulties, who haven't really been able to tell the difference between virtual currencies and real currencies and have ended up spending quite staggering amounts of money on lootboxes or virtual crap. Pokemon cards, Panini football stickers and so on generally have to be purchased in a real world shop - either a newsagent or a comic book or games shop. There is a physical limit there, and a limit imposed by social reality. I'd like to think that if a twelve-year old walked into my local supermarket and wanted to buy £1,000 worth of Pokemon cards, the shop owner would probably query whether that's a good idea. (There's also the issue that, strictly, by common law in England, any contract entered into by a minor for all but the most essential goods is voidable on the grounds of capacity.) Lootboxes and gambling-like mechanics now exist in all sorts of games. The latest FIFA game has lootboxes and has been determined by PEGI to be rated '3+' and by the ESRB to be suitable for 'E' (Everyone). Up until they were patched out in response to critique, NBA 2K20's lootbox functionality took the form of literal slot reels, in a $60 premium game. If a parent goes and buys children Pokemon cards or Panini stickers, they kind of know what's going on. If a parent goes and buys a game with zombies and chainsaws on the cover, and a Mature or Adults-Only rating from the ESRB/PEGI, they know their kids might see a fair amount of blood and guts. No ordinary person who isn't familiar with the details of the video game industry thinks a FIFA or NBA game contains gambling. When faced with Doom, Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, something like FIFA or NBA 2K seems a relatively 'safe' option - except 3+/Suitable for Everyone rated games now have gambling in them. For some real examples of how this is affecting people: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48925623 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48925623
beatgammit 7y ago
I buy booster packs for MTG because I like drafting and sealed deck events. Randomness here is a good thing because it makes gameplay more skill based than money based when compared to constructed decks (build from your collection). If I want a specific card, I'm not going to gamble with boosters, I'll just buy the card outright at the store. And that's the primary reason I stopped playing online games like MTGA and Eternal: playing draft was too expensive and not as fun as playing in person. A lot of people online would "rare draft" instead of drafting to win, and the social aspect is completely missing compared to FNM. I think that's because you can't trade cards online, so your options are: pull the cards you want or use craft them, and rare drafting improves your ability to do both. I'm not very happy about the direction online gaming is going, so I'll have to be very careful about how I introduce my children to the concept to help them see it for what it is.
- fnord123 7y ago
  >And that's the primary reason I stopped playing online games like MTGA and Eternal: playing draft was too expensive and not as fun as playing in person. I've never played them online and just assumed you would get access to all the cards so you could build your deck as you wished. You have to pay for the different cards?
  - Liquid_Fire 7y ago
    Yes, generally you acquire in-game currency which you can buy for real money or earn through playing the game. You use this to buy a digital booster pack which contains a random collection of cards, similar to the paper game. Most collectible card games nowadays work like this, because it makes the publisher a lot more money than the model you describe.
dragontamer 7y ago
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? Because I can buy the actual cards I want on the secondary market and avoid the bullcrap that is booster-packs. Secondly: Drafting and "Sealed" decks are extremely fun. Being stuck with only 6-booster packs worth of cards (no trading allowed) is great. You have enough cards to probably make a good deck. MTG is well balanced that some of the best cards are common (Lightning Bolt, Doom Blade, etc. etc. are "power" commons that would be a first-pick in drafts). So the drafting / sealed format ensures that most decks have the important, powerful, cards needed to make a decent deck. -------- You can't sell skins on a secondary market. Heck, you don't even own the skins in a video game. In effect, MTG is fine because the company who makes MTG cards aren't predatory assholes. MTG could very well become predatory in the future, but they're actually very well balanced in my experience.
decoyworker 7y ago
They probably should be. If you are buying a chance then it is gambling. If it is gambling then laws should treat it as gambling.
zumu 7y ago
> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? We really should. Generally, buying and opening a $4 magic booster pack gives you a shot at a card worth $30+ (sometimes 10x more) on the secondary market, but it's a lot more likely you get card worth $1. This is clearly gambling. AFAIK, Wizards only gets away with this by pleading ignorance to the secondary market value of the cards and claiming the contents of each pack is worth the same amount. To this end, they can't discuss prices internally, even though they definitely know if a card is very powerful, it is likely to be sought after and expensive. Now a lot of you will say, "No one opens packs for cards, people just buy the cards they need." Well, that is easy to say when you have $500 dollars of disposable income to put towards a single Magic deck (which will be obsolete within the year due to rotating sets). As a child, I couldn't afford all the cards I needed for my decks, so I bought packs and cracked them. Specifically, I would buy a box of booster packs and hope to get lucky. This is what all my friends did, and AFAIK continues to be extremely common among kids. Moreover, despite feigned ignorance, they do know the relative desirability of each card in a given set. They test very heavily internally. Therefore, they can know how many copies the market will demand, and adjust the rarities accordingly to boost sales of booster packs to the secondary market (the card sellers are also buying bulk booster packs and cracking them to get their stock).

by antpls 7y ago

crispyporkbites 7y ago

Honestly those boosters are a scummy product and we would all be better off without them.

dgellow 7y ago
We even have an alternative system that has been proven: the Living Card Games (LCG) system from Fantasy Flight. Instead of boosters a serie of card is divided in “chapters” that are fixed and have a balanced distribution of cards. Every other month a new chapter is released, at a fixed schedule. All cards are known so you can decide which chapter you care about and want to buy. And a few times each year a big expansion pack is released, dedicated to one faction or group of cards. https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/more/living-card-games/ https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/more/living-card-games...

hanselot 7y ago

Shall we just ban entropy then?

JauntyHatAngle 7y ago

Because magic the gathering cards are an actual item tradeable for actual money to other players and resellers. It's still questionable in many ways, sure. But many of these virtual items are closed economies with the supply entirely owned by the producer of the game. These have no intrinsic value outside of this closed system and there is no ability to exchange them for real money. I'm not saying booster packs are necessarily morally correct either, but want to highlight that there is a qualitative difference between them and most loot box economies.

seventhtiger 7y ago
So the reason Magic is different is because you are actually gambling for things with monetary value? That doesn't sound right. I'd think it'd be less like gambling if the rewards had no monetary value, like random candies or skins in a video game. Then even the hope of getting your money back isn't there. You know all you're getting is just candy or toys.
- JauntyHatAngle 7y ago
  No, it has a monetary value, But you can't resell it. People spend thousands on skins, with some of the items only accessible by repeatedly rolling the dice on a loot box. (Others have price ceilings for direct purchases). The closed nature of the economy just means you can only purchase from the one person who is setting the price and you have no ability to trade it back in for cash. Magic cards you can resell your cards to another player at a later date. You can't in Apex Legends.
  - seventhtiger 7y ago
    It has value sure but it's not monetary if you can't convert it to money. These things have no monetary value. So you should know going in you will never make your money back. You will only get better or worse game items. That's farther than gambling than the trading card model.
    - 7y ago

earenndil 7y ago

Even millionares' kids should not be spending thousands of their parents' dollars indiscriminately. If we don't hear horror stories about it, it is because those parents are able to absorb the cost, but it still doesn't teach the kids good money habits.

bsder 7y ago

> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? I don't necessarily disagree. However, if I want card X for Magic/Pokemon, I can look up the card online, find its value, and buy the card. Sure, I can buy booster packs, but they are not the only way to get the card I want. With online games, loot boxes are often the only way to get what you want. That's not good. > In my opinion, gambling in videos game means your kids will experience the risk of gambling sooner, and if you watch your kid and educate them about it, they can experience it in a safer environment than when they are adults. The problem is that you are up against companies that are spending a lot of money to optimize the addictiveness of their product. We already know how the lack of regulation turned out in one sector(smoking)--and we especially penalize them if they try to target children.

davemp 7y ago
> However, if I want card X for Magic/Pokemon, I can look up the card online, find its value, and buy the card. Sure, I can buy booster packs, but they are not the only way to get the card I want. If anything, Magic teaches you that gambling is usually the worst way to get the card you want.
- bsder 7y ago
  Although ... I'm glad I'm not a gambling man... Back a while ago, I remembered my MtG friends complaining that they couldn't get some box (Modern Masters?) because they ran out immediately. I was at my hometown and ran into a dedicated gaming store owner who vastly overestimated the wealth of his rural clients in buying higher end MtG stuff (or maybe he didn't--I did spend a lot of money after all). So, I bought all his stock--something like 10 boxes at almost $3000, IIRC, (there is more than one reason they call it cardboard crack) and brought them back. I kept a couple boxes for gifts and sold the rest to very happy MtG players. Every single box had a card at the time valued at more than the price of the whole box--plus a smattering of other fairly valuable cards. Since then, my MtG friends make me pick out any "lottery" things they buy. My luck is decent, but it has never been that good again.

Smithalicious 7y ago

The difference is that loot boxes can drain an arbitrary amount of money whereas with trading cards you will eventually have enough duplicates that you can sell them and buy all remaining cards at market price. And if you want a specific thing you can just buy it outright.

skocznymroczny 7y ago

The physical boosters are different, because they are set in stone and they're just there, ready to be bought. The odds are set and won't change. With lootboxes, you allow dynamic regulation, which can be abused. For example, a famous streamer is opening your lootboxes live? Give him better droprate so that he constantly opens "Epic" items, so that his followers think it's so easy and want to try it for themselves too. See a whale opening your lootboxes? Starve him when it comes to loot for a bit to make sure he buys more lootboxes.

henrikschroder 7y ago
Another aspect is that the physical items take up actual physical space. You have to store them somewhere, and you have to look at them, and you might easier come to the realization that what you are doing is completely ridiculous. And for the sellers of these physical items they also take up space, shelf space, and seeing a large number of extremely similar items for similar games in one retail location, might also clue you in faster on how ridiculous the thing is. The physical items quickly run into physical limitations, which is good. The virtual items on the other hand have zero limitations, zero rules, it's all just pixels and database entries, and the presentation of what you "have" can be managed, hidden, manipulated, so that you still think you have nothing and need to buy more pixels.
PeterisP 7y ago
Scratch-off lottery cards also are set in stone and they're just there, ready to be bought. The odds are known to the public (and probably right there on the card), the card has a fixed value but until you've bought it you just don't know if this card will be worth $0.25 or $500. That's 100% gambling. And the concept is soooo very similar to booster packs.

PeterStuer 7y ago

Yeah ... except the whole video game gambling is fine-tuned and relentless in its pursuit to prey upon the vulnerabilities and blind-sights of the very exploitable. It is an addiction machine fishing for kids to enthrall. By all means educate your kids, but also make sure to protect them at their most vulnerable against an 'opponent' in a very uneven playing field. As for your comparison to trading card game boosters: sure, there are some dimensions of the experience that are similar. Varying rarity and desirability of items contained in a purchased container that does not reveal its content until after purchase. There are also things that are vastly different. There are things like the virtualization of the transaction (spending online virtual coins, even though you purchased them with real money has been proven to be psychologically very different from a cash transaction), the sensory stimuli that are build into the opening rituals (real card packs at most can optimize the tearing experience and the smell of the freshly opened pack, which they do btw) which makes it a very different matter. Sometimes there are real grey zones when it comes to the balance of overprotectiveness vs predation. It is not because the delineation can't be made extremely precise that we can't identify that some things are clearly outside of the acceptable middle. IMHO lootboxes do not fall into this grey area, and are clearly a predatory mechanism that the most vulnerable should be prevented from having to be in a perpetual armsrace against.

faceplanted 7y ago
It's not just virtual currencies, it's permanence and tradability, kids don't just buy booster packs and take what they can get, they trade cards in complex ways, in some cases gift them to friends who wants to play, and the stack of cards is a visual representation of how much you've spent, whereas in some games, PUBG Mobile for example, your cosmetics literally disappear after a fixed time and if you have many duplicates of a common item, you can trade them, but only for the in game currency that can only buy the cheapest forms of crates. Also, depending on the platform kids can spend their parents money with no oversight if their parents don't understand how in app payments work, whereas most parents would never send their small child to a store with their credit card unsupervised.
- cmsj 7y ago

wickerman 7y ago

Because the crucial thing about lootboxes is that in-game currency obfuscates the actual value of your purchase. You know when you buy a booster pack how much that booster pack is worth in real life money; you don't when you're buying lootboxes. When I was a kid and bought booster packs I knew how much they were worth because I also knew the value of each card and how much they compared to other physical stuff I could buy (candy).

daemin 7y ago

To me banning virtual loot boxes is the right way to go. There is no real reason for them to be there except to trigger that random reinforcement mechanic that gambling also triggers. They also make the gameplay of the game worse in order to support the economy of loot boxes.

swebs 7y ago

>If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? Yes please! Or at least just the slot machine aspect. It would be great if you could buy a box of cards and know exactly what's inside.

Horba 7y ago
You can. These are called Challenger Decks. https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/challenger-decks-2019-03-18 https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/challe...

lawtalkinghuman 7y ago

> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? Video games are always available. You can purchase lootboxes 24/7 without any real effort. They use the same techniques to manipulate people as various casino gambling games. There have been players, especially some with learning difficulties, who haven't really been able to tell the difference between virtual currencies and real currencies and have ended up spending quite staggering amounts of money on lootboxes or virtual crap. Pokemon cards, Panini football stickers and so on generally have to be purchased in a real world shop - either a newsagent or a comic book or games shop. There is a physical limit there, and a limit imposed by social reality. I'd like to think that if a twelve-year old walked into my local supermarket and wanted to buy £1,000 worth of Pokemon cards, the shop owner would probably query whether that's a good idea. (There's also the issue that, strictly, by common law in England, any contract entered into by a minor for all but the most essential goods is voidable on the grounds of capacity.) Lootboxes and gambling-like mechanics now exist in all sorts of games. The latest FIFA game has lootboxes and has been determined by PEGI to be rated '3+' and by the ESRB to be suitable for 'E' (Everyone). Up until they were patched out in response to critique, NBA 2K20's lootbox functionality took the form of literal slot reels, in a $60 premium game. If a parent goes and buys children Pokemon cards or Panini stickers, they kind of know what's going on. If a parent goes and buys a game with zombies and chainsaws on the cover, and a Mature or Adults-Only rating from the ESRB/PEGI, they know their kids might see a fair amount of blood and guts. No ordinary person who isn't familiar with the details of the video game industry thinks a FIFA or NBA game contains gambling. When faced with Doom, Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty, something like FIFA or NBA 2K seems a relatively 'safe' option - except 3+/Suitable for Everyone rated games now have gambling in them. For some real examples of how this is affecting people: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48925623 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48925623

beatgammit 7y ago

I buy booster packs for MTG because I like drafting and sealed deck events. Randomness here is a good thing because it makes gameplay more skill based than money based when compared to constructed decks (build from your collection). If I want a specific card, I'm not going to gamble with boosters, I'll just buy the card outright at the store. And that's the primary reason I stopped playing online games like MTGA and Eternal: playing draft was too expensive and not as fun as playing in person. A lot of people online would "rare draft" instead of drafting to win, and the social aspect is completely missing compared to FNM. I think that's because you can't trade cards online, so your options are: pull the cards you want or use craft them, and rare drafting improves your ability to do both. I'm not very happy about the direction online gaming is going, so I'll have to be very careful about how I introduce my children to the concept to help them see it for what it is.

fnord123 7y ago
>And that's the primary reason I stopped playing online games like MTGA and Eternal: playing draft was too expensive and not as fun as playing in person. I've never played them online and just assumed you would get access to all the cards so you could build your deck as you wished. You have to pay for the different cards?
- Liquid_Fire 7y ago
  Yes, generally you acquire in-game currency which you can buy for real money or earn through playing the game. You use this to buy a digital booster pack which contains a random collection of cards, similar to the paper game. Most collectible card games nowadays work like this, because it makes the publisher a lot more money than the model you describe.

dragontamer 7y ago

> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? Because I can buy the actual cards I want on the secondary market and avoid the bullcrap that is booster-packs. Secondly: Drafting and "Sealed" decks are extremely fun. Being stuck with only 6-booster packs worth of cards (no trading allowed) is great. You have enough cards to probably make a good deck. MTG is well balanced that some of the best cards are common (Lightning Bolt, Doom Blade, etc. etc. are "power" commons that would be a first-pick in drafts). So the drafting / sealed format ensures that most decks have the important, powerful, cards needed to make a decent deck. -------- You can't sell skins on a secondary market. Heck, you don't even own the skins in a video game. In effect, MTG is fine because the company who makes MTG cards aren't predatory assholes. MTG could very well become predatory in the future, but they're actually very well balanced in my experience.

decoyworker 7y ago

They probably should be. If you are buying a chance then it is gambling. If it is gambling then laws should treat it as gambling.

zumu 7y ago

> If we ban loot boxes in video games, why dont we ban Magic/Pokemon card boosters that you can buy from physical shops? We really should. Generally, buying and opening a $4 magic booster pack gives you a shot at a card worth $30+ (sometimes 10x more) on the secondary market, but it's a lot more likely you get card worth $1. This is clearly gambling. AFAIK, Wizards only gets away with this by pleading ignorance to the secondary market value of the cards and claiming the contents of each pack is worth the same amount. To this end, they can't discuss prices internally, even though they definitely know if a card is very powerful, it is likely to be sought after and expensive. Now a lot of you will say, "No one opens packs for cards, people just buy the cards they need." Well, that is easy to say when you have $500 dollars of disposable income to put towards a single Magic deck (which will be obsolete within the year due to rotating sets). As a child, I couldn't afford all the cards I needed for my decks, so I bought packs and cracked them. Specifically, I would buy a box of booster packs and hope to get lucky. This is what all my friends did, and AFAIK continues to be extremely common among kids. Moreover, despite feigned ignorance, they do know the relative desirability of each card in a given set. They test very heavily internally. Therefore, they can know how many copies the market will demand, and adjust the rarities accordingly to boost sales of booster packs to the secondary market (the card sellers are also buying bulk booster packs and cracking them to get their stock).