10 ms·

I really miss 2016 MtG. I remember when full art lands and full art promos were RARE and with money for no reason other than their collectability. I really like

I really miss 2016 MtG. I remember when full art lands and full art promos were RARE and with money for no reason other than their collectability. I really liked when cards were rare because of the fact that they were good and uncommon and maybe because they were the same as the regular card but foil, not because they were arbitrarily a different type of shiny, or like when that one card from Kamigawa had a different color neon border that made it spike to 3k for a while, let alone the new serialized cards. I wish we could go back to that, because I was so excited about collecting cards back then. Nowadays I feel like unless I open a pack with a crazy reprint or a REALLY lucky list card, there are essentially no cards worth anything. I remember pulling some shock lands and even when they were only 8 bucks it felt really great, like it was gambling. Now, I only ever get packs of remastered sets, and standard sets are wholly uninteresting. I do a $40 draft and get $3 worth of cards, and it is to be seen if these EVER go up in value. I still love the game, and I play it more than ever. But there are three groups of people: investors, people that realize it is a TCG, and people that think all cards should be worthless. The first is greedy, the middle is realistic, and the latter is idealistic. But I am solidly in the middle, and there is so much pushing on both sides that the middle group is demonized for wanting to play a game and have cards have relative value too.

__turbobrew__ 3y ago
I prefer having cheap cards. You are paying for the experience not the cards when you draft. What I don’t like is wotc printing new powerful cards in non-standard sets. Modern horizons, commander sets, etc print absolutely must play busted cards but the sets are limited print quantity and artificially scarce. If it was up to me all new cards would be printed in standard sets and supplemental sets are reprints only. 2016 magic was nice because you could play reserved list cards without having to sell a kidney…
- Panzer04 3y ago
  Part of the point is that a lot of these cards would be busted in standard though, so printing straight to modern is a way to still get these kinds of cards out without powercreeping the standard of the day.
gymbeaux 3y ago
My theory is that all cards will eventually be under $10, because cards like Mana Crypt are opportunities for WoTC to make money via reprints. I’ve only been playing/buying since March, but I’ve seen so many cards dropping dramatically in price, much more often than seeing a card shoot up in price. Reprints help drive sales and justify the higher prices for booster packs. Cutting staff implies that, perhaps, they anticipate more Universes Beyond and reprints, and fewer original sets with original mechanics. Universes Beyond is great for Wizards because they don’t have to really invent cards, and fans will pay whatever they ask for cards from their favorite shows and movies and games. This month people are losing their minds over the Princess Bride and Dr. Malcolm Secret Lair sets.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > This month people are losing their minds over the Princess Bride and Dr. Malcolm Secret Lair sets. Wonderful art on the Princess Bride set. I can't help but notice that if Inigo Montoya gets into combat with the Man in Black... he'll win.
  - gymbeaux 3y ago
    Purely a consequence of using existing creatures as templates I’m sure
- Yhippa 3y ago
  They're in a tough spot because they have to keep several audiences happy: collectors and players. Players generally want the cheapest set pieces while collectors want the value of their collection to grow. I think WotC has done a decent job trying to satisfy both groups and are at least trying different things. As an investor, you should be happy about that. Whether or not this sea change of releases over the pandemic helps or hurts the long-term health of the game is a worry of mine.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I wish playing with third-party "proxy" cards were more accepted (like https://mtg-print.com/set/fallout https://mtg-print.com/set/fallout or https://proxyking.biz/ https://proxyking.biz/), where you can get any card custom-printed for a dollar or so. Maybe I just have to find a group where nobody cares about collecting. If WotC did that first-party, I'd buy a shit ton from them even if they had zero resale value. But I guess that would eat into their collectibles and gacha pack market.
solardev 3y ago
Why don't you buy singles? (Not trying to be snarky. Just started playing a few months ago and that seems to be the best way to make decks without gambling. What's the point of buying packs?)
- dragontamer 3y ago
  > What's the point of buying packs? Draft is probably the best MtG style of playing. A lot of MtG turns into pay-to-win, since the best cards of the meta inevitably cost more. Drafting on the other hand, ensures that everyone has zero-cards upon the start of the draft and have to make due with the booster-cards that come in the draft. In many ways, drafting is cheaper. You don't have to worry about making the best deck ever... instead you just have to make the best deck given the cards you draft. Then you can sell the expensive singles after the draft.
  - solardev 3y ago
    As a beginner, I think the drafts are a really unfriendly format that heavily biases experienced players (who know how different mechanics can combo each other, useful counters, deck balance, etc. by heart). I tried that with friends a few times but it was like trying to learn a new game every time, as fast as possible, so you can out-pick the cards before someone else grabs them. Personally I felt it shifted the gameplay from tactical card playing to race-to-viability in drafting. In non draft games, either self made decks or pre-cons, you can spend time studying your deck and optimizing it before actual play starts. In drafts, much of the actual gameplay IS the drafting and gambling. The actual decks that get built are usually uninteresting, just fast aggressive combos that play like starter decks. Thankfully I discovered Commander pre-cons, easily upgraded with some cheap singles, and have a lot of fun with that. Especially in 2v2 or free for all. It's all the stuff I love about card games (the deck building and tactics) without gambling. I'd much rather spend $50 on a precon and another $20 or so on singles, knowing exactly what I'll get, than buy or draft a bunch of random packs that almost never give me a useful deck in the end. Just a matter of taste, I guess. I wish Magic weren't even collectible, personally, but a limited card game like the Fantasy Flight ones (game of thrones, arkham, etc.)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bart_spoon 3y ago
There’s only two camps, investors and gamers. I think that anyone who wants to “have cards that have relative value” are investors, whether they realize it or not. Its one thing to collect because you like something inherent about the cards themselves (I recall a recent Reddit post where the user was trying to collect every single Magic card that depicted an owl in any way). But if your concern is about the monetary value of the cards in your collection, you are an investor, of some kind. I personally think cards should be for playing, and am pretty opposed to cards being valuable if that means that playing the actual game becomes prohibitively expensive. Standard decks costing hundreds of dollars is not a good thing.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > There’s only two camps, investors and gamers. It's not that black and white. I used to play the game in the mid nineties. The most expensive card I bought back then I paid the equivalent of 5 EUR (the Euro didn't even exist yet) because I needed it for a deck but that card came out before I started playing. I'm not an investor in MtG cards. But my collection went up in value. Nothing crazy (I don't have any of the "power nines") but with 28 dual lands, the most valuable card from Legends (The Tabernacle At Pendrell Vale) and the most valuable card from Arabian Night (Bazaar of Baghdad) and a few others, I'm sitting easily on 20 K EUR atm. I didn't do it on purpose: I simply never got rid of my cards, not paying attention to the price. I just like my old cards and they bring me back memories when I look at them. I'm take it I'm in a third category: nostalgic people who simply like their very own (and very old) cards.
  - gesis 3y ago
    [dead]
  - brightball 3y ago
    This would have been me. My old collection would have been worth $30k+ today…if I hadn’t gotten rid of them 25 years ago.
    - 3y ago
gigaflop 3y ago
I copped this version of the Hidetsugu you're thinking of for $30 at my LGS a few weeks ago: https://scryfall.com/card/neo/432/hidetsugu-devouring-chaos https://scryfall.com/card/neo/432/hidetsugu-devouring-chaos Prices of swaggy stuff is always irrational until the smallest attention spans have moved on. I assume you know about Collector Packs, those are my favorites for splashing a chunk of money on a set. If I can afford to preorder a box, or pick one up on some random sale, they have the highest swag tier. The only card I've sold in the past several years has been a copy of Parallel Lives. It got me enough store credit to cop a Chatterfang, and some other goodies to build a first Commander deck after not touching my cards in years. I had 4 or 5 copies, so it was easy to part with. I also gave one copy away to a friend who had just bought some sort of 'Hobbits and food tokens' precon deck.
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  The Food and Fellowship LoTR precon is insanely boosted for the price (~$60 retail, $100ish on secondary markets).
dontlaugh 3y ago
That seems like a ridiculous attitude. Surely players should want all cards to be as cheap as possible, so everyone can play whatever deck they’d like.
- THENATHE 3y ago
  Yes, we would. That's why most of us are okay with proxies. But the fact of the matter is that when all of the good cards cost a lot of money, and you need to play good cards to win tournaments, and you cannot use proxies in tournaments, spending money to win nothing at all feels really bad. If all the cards were free and we were competing for $500 instead of decks cost $2k and we're playing for a $600 card I wouldn't care. I probably would enjoy it. But we live in a society and as it is, I would rather modern cards have more value than none.

__turbobrew__ 3y ago

I prefer having cheap cards. You are paying for the experience not the cards when you draft. What I don’t like is wotc printing new powerful cards in non-standard sets. Modern horizons, commander sets, etc print absolutely must play busted cards but the sets are limited print quantity and artificially scarce. If it was up to me all new cards would be printed in standard sets and supplemental sets are reprints only. 2016 magic was nice because you could play reserved list cards without having to sell a kidney…

Panzer04 3y ago
Part of the point is that a lot of these cards would be busted in standard though, so printing straight to modern is a way to still get these kinds of cards out without powercreeping the standard of the day.

gymbeaux 3y ago

My theory is that all cards will eventually be under $10, because cards like Mana Crypt are opportunities for WoTC to make money via reprints. I’ve only been playing/buying since March, but I’ve seen so many cards dropping dramatically in price, much more often than seeing a card shoot up in price. Reprints help drive sales and justify the higher prices for booster packs. Cutting staff implies that, perhaps, they anticipate more Universes Beyond and reprints, and fewer original sets with original mechanics. Universes Beyond is great for Wizards because they don’t have to really invent cards, and fans will pay whatever they ask for cards from their favorite shows and movies and games. This month people are losing their minds over the Princess Bride and Dr. Malcolm Secret Lair sets.

thaumasiotes 3y ago
> This month people are losing their minds over the Princess Bride and Dr. Malcolm Secret Lair sets. Wonderful art on the Princess Bride set. I can't help but notice that if Inigo Montoya gets into combat with the Man in Black... he'll win.
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  Purely a consequence of using existing creatures as templates I’m sure
Yhippa 3y ago
They're in a tough spot because they have to keep several audiences happy: collectors and players. Players generally want the cheapest set pieces while collectors want the value of their collection to grow. I think WotC has done a decent job trying to satisfy both groups and are at least trying different things. As an investor, you should be happy about that. Whether or not this sea change of releases over the pandemic helps or hurts the long-term health of the game is a worry of mine.
- solardev 3y ago
  I wish playing with third-party "proxy" cards were more accepted (like https://mtg-print.com/set/fallout https://mtg-print.com/set/fallout or https://proxyking.biz/ https://proxyking.biz/), where you can get any card custom-printed for a dollar or so. Maybe I just have to find a group where nobody cares about collecting. If WotC did that first-party, I'd buy a shit ton from them even if they had zero resale value. But I guess that would eat into their collectibles and gacha pack market.

solardev 3y ago

Why don't you buy singles? (Not trying to be snarky. Just started playing a few months ago and that seems to be the best way to make decks without gambling. What's the point of buying packs?)

dragontamer 3y ago
> What's the point of buying packs? Draft is probably the best MtG style of playing. A lot of MtG turns into pay-to-win, since the best cards of the meta inevitably cost more. Drafting on the other hand, ensures that everyone has zero-cards upon the start of the draft and have to make due with the booster-cards that come in the draft. In many ways, drafting is cheaper. You don't have to worry about making the best deck ever... instead you just have to make the best deck given the cards you draft. Then you can sell the expensive singles after the draft.
- solardev 3y ago
  As a beginner, I think the drafts are a really unfriendly format that heavily biases experienced players (who know how different mechanics can combo each other, useful counters, deck balance, etc. by heart). I tried that with friends a few times but it was like trying to learn a new game every time, as fast as possible, so you can out-pick the cards before someone else grabs them. Personally I felt it shifted the gameplay from tactical card playing to race-to-viability in drafting. In non draft games, either self made decks or pre-cons, you can spend time studying your deck and optimizing it before actual play starts. In drafts, much of the actual gameplay IS the drafting and gambling. The actual decks that get built are usually uninteresting, just fast aggressive combos that play like starter decks. Thankfully I discovered Commander pre-cons, easily upgraded with some cheap singles, and have a lot of fun with that. Especially in 2v2 or free for all. It's all the stuff I love about card games (the deck building and tactics) without gambling. I'd much rather spend $50 on a precon and another $20 or so on singles, knowing exactly what I'll get, than buy or draft a bunch of random packs that almost never give me a useful deck in the end. Just a matter of taste, I guess. I wish Magic weren't even collectible, personally, but a limited card game like the Fantasy Flight ones (game of thrones, arkham, etc.)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bart_spoon 3y ago

There’s only two camps, investors and gamers. I think that anyone who wants to “have cards that have relative value” are investors, whether they realize it or not. Its one thing to collect because you like something inherent about the cards themselves (I recall a recent Reddit post where the user was trying to collect every single Magic card that depicted an owl in any way). But if your concern is about the monetary value of the cards in your collection, you are an investor, of some kind. I personally think cards should be for playing, and am pretty opposed to cards being valuable if that means that playing the actual game becomes prohibitively expensive. Standard decks costing hundreds of dollars is not a good thing.

TacticalCoder 3y ago
> There’s only two camps, investors and gamers. It's not that black and white. I used to play the game in the mid nineties. The most expensive card I bought back then I paid the equivalent of 5 EUR (the Euro didn't even exist yet) because I needed it for a deck but that card came out before I started playing. I'm not an investor in MtG cards. But my collection went up in value. Nothing crazy (I don't have any of the "power nines") but with 28 dual lands, the most valuable card from Legends (The Tabernacle At Pendrell Vale) and the most valuable card from Arabian Night (Bazaar of Baghdad) and a few others, I'm sitting easily on 20 K EUR atm. I didn't do it on purpose: I simply never got rid of my cards, not paying attention to the price. I just like my old cards and they bring me back memories when I look at them. I'm take it I'm in a third category: nostalgic people who simply like their very own (and very old) cards.
- gesis 3y ago
  [dead]
- brightball 3y ago
  This would have been me. My old collection would have been worth $30k+ today…if I hadn’t gotten rid of them 25 years ago.
  - 3y ago

gigaflop 3y ago

I copped this version of the Hidetsugu you're thinking of for $30 at my LGS a few weeks ago: https://scryfall.com/card/neo/432/hidetsugu-devouring-chaos https://scryfall.com/card/neo/432/hidetsugu-devouring-chaos Prices of swaggy stuff is always irrational until the smallest attention spans have moved on. I assume you know about Collector Packs, those are my favorites for splashing a chunk of money on a set. If I can afford to preorder a box, or pick one up on some random sale, they have the highest swag tier. The only card I've sold in the past several years has been a copy of Parallel Lives. It got me enough store credit to cop a Chatterfang, and some other goodies to build a first Commander deck after not touching my cards in years. I had 4 or 5 copies, so it was easy to part with. I also gave one copy away to a friend who had just bought some sort of 'Hobbits and food tokens' precon deck.

gymbeaux 3y ago
The Food and Fellowship LoTR precon is insanely boosted for the price (~$60 retail, $100ish on secondary markets).

dontlaugh 3y ago

That seems like a ridiculous attitude. Surely players should want all cards to be as cheap as possible, so everyone can play whatever deck they’d like.

THENATHE 3y ago
Yes, we would. That's why most of us are okay with proxies. But the fact of the matter is that when all of the good cards cost a lot of money, and you need to play good cards to win tournaments, and you cannot use proxies in tournaments, spending money to win nothing at all feels really bad. If all the cards were free and we were competing for $500 instead of decks cost $2k and we're playing for a $600 card I wouldn't care. I probably would enjoy it. But we live in a society and as it is, I would rather modern cards have more value than none.