11 ms·

The Curse of the Black Lotus – How MtG Avoided Becoming Beanie Babies

107 points by jsnell 12y ago

Magi604 12y ago
I have a friend who was a hardcore wheeler and dealer of Magic cards back in highschool. He would travel around North America, buying and selling cards. He had all the old cards: Alpha, Beta, Arabian Nights, etc. He would also cycle through lots of copies of the "Power 9" (the moxes, lotus, Library of Alexandria, Ancestral recall, Timetwister, Timewalk). We played in type 1 tournaments (it's a format that lets you use all the cards ever printed, with a few banned cards that involved things like coin flips) and he would lend me all these power cards for my decks. It was always a treat to play a mox or lotus on the first turn and watch my opponent's eyes go wide just from seeing an actual card like that in play. When we went to college, he ended up "cashing out" and selling something like $30,000 worth of cards to fund his first apartment. He still had tens of thousands worth of cards, and over the years he was slowly selling them off to fund various things. That was years ago. Prices for the old cards today have massively jumped in price in just a few years. I think if he had held on to those old cards instead of selling them to buy an apartment, he would have made more money just from them going up in value vs. renting out his apartment to pay off its mortgage.
- devindotcom 12y ago
  Dear me. I have binders full of old Revised, Dark, Legends, Ice Age, etc. Maybe I should take them in and get them valued. On the other hand, I'm trying to get my friends to play casually with me using the rather more basic old sets.
  - zachjbart 12y ago
    Post up some pictures! It's always great to check out old binders, the feeling of finding a random old card that's worth a bunch now is awesome.
  - kelukelugames 12y ago
    You can search by set and sort by price to see what your cards are worth. I'm fairly sure the only big money comes from Revised dual lands and Force of Will in Alliance. http://sales.starcitygames.com/buylist/ http://sales.starcitygames.com/buylist/
    - cssmoo 12y ago
      Thanks for posting this. I have about 500 very old MTG cards (pre'95). Had no idea they were worth anything. Going to sort them now :) Probably all shit ones though.
      - kelukelugames 12y ago
        Let me know if you hit a jackpot! People will pay for crappy commons if they are from Beta/Alpha. :)
        cssmoo 12y ago
        I got to $95 in (about 200 cards which was cool) and got bored. Resuming at the weekend as I've made a big spreadsheet of it all.
      - ufo 12y ago
        You might find this site useful to cut down on the sorting: http://mtg.dawnglare.com http://mtg.dawnglare.com
        cssmoo 12y ago
        Thanks - that's really helpful and a lot easier to navigate through. Also prices are a little higher by the looks which is more fun :)
    - tempestn 12y ago
      Yes, thanks. Was fun digging out my old MtG cards. I had to do a bit of Googling to even remember some of the basics of how to play. From a quick skim it looks like I've got a bunch of $5ish cards, but nothing too fancy.
- zantana 12y ago
  I don't know the as much as things like cards and other collectibles are worth, sometimes the high end ones are hard to get anywhere near the "full" value for. I tried to get rid of my copy of X-men #94 a while back and there weren't many options that come close to its theoretical value.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  > with a few banned cards that involved things like coin flips Type 1 actually allows all the coin-flip cards; the banned cards are those that involve ante (because ante turns a MtG game into real-world gambling for objects of value) and one card that causes you to play a sub-game of magic (because it takes too much time, especially if repeated).
devindotcom 12y ago
"You'd pay, like, $3 for pack and get a bunch of random cards. But occasionally there would be a rare and powerful something in there - a dragon, an angel." Heh heh. I think we all know what dragon and what angel he's talking about.
- harvestmoon 12y ago
  I don't. I think the dragon and angel references are there not because of an understanding of the game but rather to make it sound like what a powerful card should be. Obviously, to the reader who doesn't know MtG a rare dragon is more powerful than a rare flower, after all.
  - devindotcom 12y ago
    i meant that he is almost certainly referring to the shivan dragon and serra angel, two of the oldest and, at least back when i played, more sought-after cards in the standard set.
    - dwd 12y ago
      Generally we referred to them by their name, like Sengir rather than vampire; same for dragons or angels. Of course back then you only had a Shivan and the Whelp. Some cards even had nicknames, such as Tim.
- nvader 12y ago
  I started playing at 8th Edition, so my "classic" Dragon and Angel are Shivan and Serra, respectively. Don't know how far back those two go, though.
  - pyre 12y ago
    All the way back to Alpha.
  - ycombobreaker 12y ago
    It was the same in Revised edition, in the early 1990's. My grade-school friends and I would, of course, fawn over the Serra Angel at lunchtime. But nobody ever acquired a Shivan Dragon, we just read about it in the catalog!
columbo 12y ago
I can only speak to MtG when it first came out, I've been out of the loop since eh since when 4th edition started or so. MtG exploded because it was (and I hate to use this term): hackable. You could build creative exploits into the game, at our local shop there was a no CoP rule (no circle of protection) because they were considered too unfair; in hindsight this was a ridiculous rule. Very few games embrace the unknown dynamic nature as well as MtG did. They would introduce cards that could be mixed with past-future cards almost on a whim, creating moments of pure frenzy as people managed to build systems that seemed indestructible. It's crazy to think how much some of these cards are worth now: http://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Beta/Savannah http://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Beta/Savannah
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Yeah I tried to get back into it a couple years ago, because it is a cool game. But it was just simply no fun to play; it's obviously a game that mainly relies on being able to spend a lot of money buying power. Even at a tiny little shop, everyone had these insane combos and whatnot. Really impossible to win against without investing a lot.
  - wahnfrieden 12y ago
    Try playing draft, instead.
  - mhomde 12y ago
    I wouldn't say that's true (unless things have changed since I played). There are some decks that are dependent on many rare and expensive cards... but its also possible to build killer decks on common/uncommon cards with perhaps a few rare ones. Deck construction really is one of the more creative aspects of MtG where you can create new kinds decks or twists on old ones
  - defen 12y ago
    Draft! 3 unopened booster packs per person. Everyone opens up a pack, picks a card, and passes to the right. Keep doing that until all the cards are gone. Then everyone opens a new deck, and passes to the left this time. Repeat for the third deck, going right. Minimum deck size is 40. This eliminates any sort of monetary advantage and privileges people who can come up with good deck combinations on the fly.
mhomde 12y ago
ah the dreaded "Power Nine" :) I think the most infuriating thing about MtG was the obsolation of whole sets, I get that's its' smart business from WoT and there are some tournament forms where you can use different sets... but still, felt a little bit like playing a game you never could win :) Must give credit to MtG for introducing me to a world of cutthroat deal-making that would give UN a run for their money. Trying to saw together swaps with other collectors could be very challenging and rewarding. You learned the hard way the times you were "scammed" and someone got the better of you.
- jessaustin 12y ago
  obsolation "Obsolescence", perhaps?
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Axing sets may be part dollars and cents, but it's also important to the field of play. It allows them to recover from unintended power creep ("Crap we accidentally made a combo way too powerful", think Psychatog or Urza's Saga) and it also makes it easier to balance the game. They have so many cards in circulation they could never playtest the whole thing.
  - pyre 12y ago
    Sometimes they revise the rules to break things. I remember creating a deck that could generate an infinite amount of life. Actually way able to play the combo in an Emperor tournament. 6th edition rules about how damage resolved scuttled that though.
zachjbart 12y ago
Funny thing I noticed: they didn't mention the creation of the "Reserved List." For those who don't know, Wizards did everything in the NPR segment in the first couple years of magic. Despite this, and the show's tone doesn't really convey this, the secondary market was still there (for the times) and card scarcity was a big, big problem. Enter Chronicles. Wizards of the Coast reprinted basically everything they could from the first couple years of magic in one set. “Released in July 1995, this 125-card set was created in an effort to satisfy players’ demand for out-of-print cards.” This tanked the secondary market for cards. Investors who had been holding onto certain rare cards and treating them as an investment suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them. Long story short, a few years after this, Wizards created the Reserved List (tm), essentially a promise to NEVER reprint all cards contained within. Intended to create a safe haven for investors and collectors, this list covers the first ~5 years of Magic cards and almost all of its most expensive prints. It's a source of huge contention within the community as many people would like the reserved list to be abolished so they have access to play with cards they wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. Feel free to let me know if I missed something critical, was just an thought I had while listening to the show. The reserved list is a huge reason for the bubble's stability.
- mhomde 12y ago
  But but... only n00bs black with white border cards ;)
- devindotcom 12y ago
  Yeah, Chronicles and 4th edition really took a lot of the fun out of having some of the cool old cards. Of course, it also let you actually play with them, even if people would say "Oh man is that a... oh, it's 4th."
- _raoulcousins 12y ago
  The head designer of mtg (I'm getting this from his Drive to Work podcast) seems to imply that a lot of what was done in the early years was not nearly as planned as the NPR story says. From what I understand, they were printing as much as they could in the early years. Checking whether packs were selling above or below retail may have started after the disaster that was Fallen Empires (late 1994), which was so overprinted and underpowered that it still sells today for below retail. Interesting also that NPR said Wizards was very concerned with the secondary market prices, when Wizards spokespeople never mention secondary prices directly, referring to secondary prices indirectly with the phrase ``card availability''.
scott_karana 12y ago
Interesting Disqus comment by Jessie King: [1] This story illustrates one of the most important aspects of economics, and one that often seems to get lost in the rush - an economy needs to do something other than move money around. The concepts of money, value, and all that, are all just a means to an end. In this case, the end is an enduring, entertaining game, and they achieved it. All too many real world economists seem to forget the fact that there is no value to an economy unless it is serving some end beyond its own cyclic process of simply shuffling value around. 1 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=392381112#comment-1903437075 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
- dsr_ 12y ago
  More to the point: when money is locked up in vaults, it doesn't contribute to the economy. The value of money is in making it circulate around. Doing that consistently is an unsolved problem. If money leaves your pocket as fast as it flows in, you aren't building any wealth for your future, and there are entire classes of things you can't do with your money: save up for a large purchase, invest, buy anything that isn't in your current means. But when money accumulates in the hands of a person so fast that they cannot spend it, cannot do anything but stick it into long-term investments or play status games, then the money isn't moving as fast as the rest of the economy needs.
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    I find that one can liken money to blood, in that both need to circulate.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  As the bearded German put it, capitalists are in it for the MCM+ rotation, while the rest of us are in it for the CMC.
  - EC1 12y ago
    What's MCM+ and CMC? What bearded German?
UweSchmidt 12y ago
Everyone in this thread seems to play along and never question the basic nature of either Magic or Beanie Babies or any other artificial scarcity that ties real value to a virtual ressource fully controlled by a company. Without invalidating anyone's experience or denying anyone their liberty to do whatever they like, I'd like to encourage looking for something "realer". Maybe collect things that have meaning to you, or do actual investing, or try out challenging and interesting games that are not tied to such a crazy scheme.
cdr 12y ago
This seems like a poor time to claim Wizards has solved speculation. Five years ago you would've been on firmer ground. Thanks in part to Wizards aggressively growing the number of players and former addicted teens now being in their 30s with commensurate disposable income, MtG speculation today is at an all time high - speculators prefer the cute term "MtG finance". There's orders of magnitude more speculators today than there's been in 20 years, and it's driving up card prices incredibly - not great if you want to play the game. Active players going up year after year after year provides fuel for speculators, but if the game ever has a down year the speculators are due for a painful contraction if not a bubble bursting.
jaimebuelta 12y ago
I ran a comic book shop for a couple of years (this was 8 years ago), including a big deal of MtG (selling, organising tournaments, etc) [1] From the point of view of the marketing, it is absolutely BRILLIANT. It was an amazing well oiled machine that was printing money, while developing an impressive game that has been around for 20 years and hasn't grown old. They knew all the ins and outs of the game from the rules to the way to organise tournaments and how to create a community that is absolutely obsessed with it, playing everyday. It's easy enough that I've seen 8 year old kids playing, and complex enough that a match can be determine by a very precise use of the rules. I've never really been a hard core player, but after watching it from the point of view of a business, it's really impressive. [1] In case anyone is interested in a low-tech business experience, I talked about it here: https://wrongsideofmemphis.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/i-was-once-a-non-tech-entrepreneur/ https://wrongsideofmemphis.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/i-was-on...
ap22213 12y ago
My friends and I were at the Origins conference in Ohio. It must have been some time around 1992, or so. We were there to play some AD&D. But, we happened to be roaming the conference area, and some guy, wearing a tshirt and MC Hammer pants, was at a booth selling these cards in a plastic container. It was a new game, he said. Magic. He gave us a bunch of cards for free and some rule books. We ended up playing all night. We liked it so much that the next morning we bought the rest of his plastic containers. They were filled with cards of all types. These ended up being all 'alpha' cards. Little did we know, we were stacked with Moxes, Black Lotuses, etc. As a group, we must have had dozens of them. We had no idea that they'd be worth anything. And, neither did Wizards of the Coast. The original rules stated that you had to ante a card out of your deck, just to play!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
hyperion2010 12y ago
Hrm. Personally my favorite format is limited. I've been drafting with the same group of friends since highschool and even loosing is fun because I'm playing an intellectually challenging game and hanging out with friends. Legacy is incredibly fun to play but competition is completely out of the question so we end up playing on line. The thing that drives me to buy boxes is that I want to play with my friends, the fact that someone might need a card or three for one of their decks later is entirely secondary.
imjk 12y ago
If someone today were to identify a consumer products bubble like the Beanie Baby craze or baseball card bubble of the 90s, what would be the best way to capitalize on it. I posited this to my economist friend and he suggested something ancillary like conferences, a publication, or website. I agreed but it'd have to guarantee me a very substantial return for me to go through the work of say putting together a national Beanie Baby convention, on top of the dread of hosting something that I have no interest in. So I'm curious if Hacker Newsers have any other thoughts on how to capitalize on a situation like this for a large return with less work involved.
- JamesSwift 12y ago
  I agree that remaining ancillary is the way to go. It should allow you to profit during the bubble while not assuming the full risk of being directly involved. The example that comes to mind is Samuel Brannan [1] who monopolized the sale of mining equipment and profited handsomely by selling to the miners themselves. Focusing on something that has a tangible value outside of the bubble (physical goods like shovels and picks) can help in cutting your losses if the bubble bursts at an inopportune time. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan
- cdr 12y ago
  The slicker MtG speculators are running things like http://www.quietspeculation.com/ http://www.quietspeculation.com/ . They generally have pretty intense interest in the subject though. Identifying an opportunity seems difficult without some minimal interest to recognize it. Self-styled "MtG Finance Guru"s have also been paid to give talks to players at events like Grand Prix.
noahbradley 12y ago
The original art that goes along with many of these pieces is also seeing an incredible rise in recent years. Lots of collectors with increasingly deep pockets. Both for the old stuff and some of the new stuff. It's begun breaching the low 5 figures and seems to be only going up. As one of the artists, it's a welcome sight to see.
- zachjbart 12y ago
  For those who don't play the game, this guy is one of the great ones. Prolific and well-respected artist contracting for Wizards of the Coast.
  - noahbradley 12y ago
    Why thank you very much. I'm around Magic nerds everywhere I go, I suppose.
bikamonki 12y ago
WoC did not beat speculation, it sustained growth with a powerful dose of American patriotism. Allow me to explain. Their business model is the same as telcos, software, movies, mosanto, etc. It is called artificial scarcity, in other words, find a legal (in the case of MtG a moral) way to control distribution of a product or service that is otherwise naturally abundant. Bare with me. I was there in the 90's and Kinkos would print a very decent set of 6 The Black Lotuses (or Lotusi?) for a buck and change. Go home, cut them nice, dress them with a sleve and go play with your proxy. Artificial scarcity has this big problem (or natural cure): piracy. So proxy playing went well for a few months b/c it did not matter, what mattered was playing such a badass game! But suddenly patriotism kicked in: "dude, I wont duel if you play proxies, that's not right, blah, blah, blah". Proxies died eventually, they where going to be the PopCornTime of MtG, the Napster. Me and a couple of playmates decided otherwise, we thought MtG needed to be open-source. We created a small set and played it along MtG cards. Nothing fancy since we sucked at drawing but fun still. At the time we knew of other players doing something similar (do remember that MtG is rooted on D&D where players make 'everything'). We gave in eventually. (Btw, I am from SA so the theme on my custom cards was Inca mythology). Another proxy attack came online: the first online apps to play MtG where NOT official MtG apps. Those too died eventually b/c, you know, official online digital cards where also collectible and artificially scarce. I sold my first two collections, the third one is sitting there on a closet waiting for my kid to grow up and waiting for a home-use cardboard color printer (or maybe an online service that prints and ships proxies or custom cards). In the open sharing economy, every day there is less space for artificial scarcity business models, MtG will not escape this reality, twice.
- bigger_cheese 12y ago
  As someone who occasionally plays Vintage and pretty regularly plays Legacy (two of the formats which allow use of 'any' cards printed including many of the more expensive cards in mtg's history). I dislike playing against proxies because it warps the metagame. Some cards are so prohibitively expensive that building decks around them (in a non-proxied tournament) is simply not feesible. Even if the expensive cards are objectively better (which is arguable in legacy's case) they are 'priced out of the market' so you rarely see them in tournamnets this is stuff like (Tabernacle, imperial recruiter, candelabra, grim tutor etc. in legacy's case). Sure some people will throw down a small cars worth of cash to play with "the best cards" but they are outliers in any tournament once you allow proxies suddenly everyone has access to "the best cards" and suddenly an entire room of people are all playing the same deck. When I go to a tournament half of my enjoyment comes about because of the diversity of opponents you will face playing the same match round after round is not fun and thats what proxing leads to. A good compromise is to allow for a limited number of proxies typically 5-10 cards maximum this allows you to play with a fewcopies of cards you otherwise wouldn't have access to but stops people going online to find the best deck and proxying 100% of it (decks are typically 60 cards).

107 points by jsnell 12y ago

I have a friend who was a hardcore wheeler and dealer of Magic cards back in highschool. He would travel around North America, buying and selling cards. He had all the old cards: Alpha, Beta, Arabian Nights, etc. He would also cycle through lots of copies of the "Power 9" (the moxes, lotus, Library of Alexandria, Ancestral recall, Timetwister, Timewalk). We played in type 1 tournaments (it's a format that lets you use all the cards ever printed, with a few banned cards that involved things like coin flips) and he would lend me all these power cards for my decks. It was always a treat to play a mox or lotus on the first turn and watch my opponent's eyes go wide just from seeing an actual card like that in play. When we went to college, he ended up "cashing out" and selling something like $30,000 worth of cards to fund his first apartment. He still had tens of thousands worth of cards, and over the years he was slowly selling them off to fund various things. That was years ago. Prices for the old cards today have massively jumped in price in just a few years. I think if he had held on to those old cards instead of selling them to buy an apartment, he would have made more money just from them going up in value vs. renting out his apartment to pay off its mortgage.

devindotcom 12y ago
Dear me. I have binders full of old Revised, Dark, Legends, Ice Age, etc. Maybe I should take them in and get them valued. On the other hand, I'm trying to get my friends to play casually with me using the rather more basic old sets.
- zachjbart 12y ago
  Post up some pictures! It's always great to check out old binders, the feeling of finding a random old card that's worth a bunch now is awesome.
- kelukelugames 12y ago
  You can search by set and sort by price to see what your cards are worth. I'm fairly sure the only big money comes from Revised dual lands and Force of Will in Alliance. http://sales.starcitygames.com/buylist/ http://sales.starcitygames.com/buylist/
  - cssmoo 12y ago
    Thanks for posting this. I have about 500 very old MTG cards (pre'95). Had no idea they were worth anything. Going to sort them now :) Probably all shit ones though.
    - kelukelugames 12y ago
      Let me know if you hit a jackpot! People will pay for crappy commons if they are from Beta/Alpha. :)
      - cssmoo 12y ago
        I got to $95 in (about 200 cards which was cool) and got bored. Resuming at the weekend as I've made a big spreadsheet of it all.
    - ufo 12y ago
      You might find this site useful to cut down on the sorting: http://mtg.dawnglare.com http://mtg.dawnglare.com
      - cssmoo 12y ago
        Thanks - that's really helpful and a lot easier to navigate through. Also prices are a little higher by the looks which is more fun :)
  - tempestn 12y ago
    Yes, thanks. Was fun digging out my old MtG cards. I had to do a bit of Googling to even remember some of the basics of how to play. From a quick skim it looks like I've got a bunch of $5ish cards, but nothing too fancy.
zantana 12y ago
I don't know the as much as things like cards and other collectibles are worth, sometimes the high end ones are hard to get anywhere near the "full" value for. I tried to get rid of my copy of X-men #94 a while back and there weren't many options that come close to its theoretical value.
JoshTriplett 12y ago
> with a few banned cards that involved things like coin flips Type 1 actually allows all the coin-flip cards; the banned cards are those that involve ante (because ante turns a MtG game into real-world gambling for objects of value) and one card that causes you to play a sub-game of magic (because it takes too much time, especially if repeated).

devindotcom 12y ago

"You'd pay, like, $3 for pack and get a bunch of random cards. But occasionally there would be a rare and powerful something in there - a dragon, an angel." Heh heh. I think we all know what dragon and what angel he's talking about.

harvestmoon 12y ago
I don't. I think the dragon and angel references are there not because of an understanding of the game but rather to make it sound like what a powerful card should be. Obviously, to the reader who doesn't know MtG a rare dragon is more powerful than a rare flower, after all.
- devindotcom 12y ago
  i meant that he is almost certainly referring to the shivan dragon and serra angel, two of the oldest and, at least back when i played, more sought-after cards in the standard set.
  - dwd 12y ago
    Generally we referred to them by their name, like Sengir rather than vampire; same for dragons or angels. Of course back then you only had a Shivan and the Whelp. Some cards even had nicknames, such as Tim.
nvader 12y ago
I started playing at 8th Edition, so my "classic" Dragon and Angel are Shivan and Serra, respectively. Don't know how far back those two go, though.
- pyre 12y ago
  All the way back to Alpha.
- ycombobreaker 12y ago
  It was the same in Revised edition, in the early 1990's. My grade-school friends and I would, of course, fawn over the Serra Angel at lunchtime. But nobody ever acquired a Shivan Dragon, we just read about it in the catalog!

columbo 12y ago

I can only speak to MtG when it first came out, I've been out of the loop since eh since when 4th edition started or so. MtG exploded because it was (and I hate to use this term): hackable. You could build creative exploits into the game, at our local shop there was a no CoP rule (no circle of protection) because they were considered too unfair; in hindsight this was a ridiculous rule. Very few games embrace the unknown dynamic nature as well as MtG did. They would introduce cards that could be mixed with past-future cards almost on a whim, creating moments of pure frenzy as people managed to build systems that seemed indestructible. It's crazy to think how much some of these cards are worth now: http://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Beta/Savannah http://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Beta/Savannah

MichaelGG 12y ago
Yeah I tried to get back into it a couple years ago, because it is a cool game. But it was just simply no fun to play; it's obviously a game that mainly relies on being able to spend a lot of money buying power. Even at a tiny little shop, everyone had these insane combos and whatnot. Really impossible to win against without investing a lot.
- wahnfrieden 12y ago
  Try playing draft, instead.
- mhomde 12y ago
  I wouldn't say that's true (unless things have changed since I played). There are some decks that are dependent on many rare and expensive cards... but its also possible to build killer decks on common/uncommon cards with perhaps a few rare ones. Deck construction really is one of the more creative aspects of MtG where you can create new kinds decks or twists on old ones
- defen 12y ago
  Draft! 3 unopened booster packs per person. Everyone opens up a pack, picks a card, and passes to the right. Keep doing that until all the cards are gone. Then everyone opens a new deck, and passes to the left this time. Repeat for the third deck, going right. Minimum deck size is 40. This eliminates any sort of monetary advantage and privileges people who can come up with good deck combinations on the fly.

mhomde 12y ago

ah the dreaded "Power Nine" :) I think the most infuriating thing about MtG was the obsolation of whole sets, I get that's its' smart business from WoT and there are some tournament forms where you can use different sets... but still, felt a little bit like playing a game you never could win :) Must give credit to MtG for introducing me to a world of cutthroat deal-making that would give UN a run for their money. Trying to saw together swaps with other collectors could be very challenging and rewarding. You learned the hard way the times you were "scammed" and someone got the better of you.

jessaustin 12y ago
obsolation "Obsolescence", perhaps?
sliverstorm 12y ago
Axing sets may be part dollars and cents, but it's also important to the field of play. It allows them to recover from unintended power creep ("Crap we accidentally made a combo way too powerful", think Psychatog or Urza's Saga) and it also makes it easier to balance the game. They have so many cards in circulation they could never playtest the whole thing.
- pyre 12y ago
  Sometimes they revise the rules to break things. I remember creating a deck that could generate an infinite amount of life. Actually way able to play the combo in an Emperor tournament. 6th edition rules about how damage resolved scuttled that though.

zachjbart 12y ago

Funny thing I noticed: they didn't mention the creation of the "Reserved List." For those who don't know, Wizards did everything in the NPR segment in the first couple years of magic. Despite this, and the show's tone doesn't really convey this, the secondary market was still there (for the times) and card scarcity was a big, big problem. Enter Chronicles. Wizards of the Coast reprinted basically everything they could from the first couple years of magic in one set. “Released in July 1995, this 125-card set was created in an effort to satisfy players’ demand for out-of-print cards.” This tanked the secondary market for cards. Investors who had been holding onto certain rare cards and treating them as an investment suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them. Long story short, a few years after this, Wizards created the Reserved List (tm), essentially a promise to NEVER reprint all cards contained within. Intended to create a safe haven for investors and collectors, this list covers the first ~5 years of Magic cards and almost all of its most expensive prints. It's a source of huge contention within the community as many people would like the reserved list to be abolished so they have access to play with cards they wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. Feel free to let me know if I missed something critical, was just an thought I had while listening to the show. The reserved list is a huge reason for the bubble's stability.

mhomde 12y ago
But but... only n00bs black with white border cards ;)
devindotcom 12y ago
Yeah, Chronicles and 4th edition really took a lot of the fun out of having some of the cool old cards. Of course, it also let you actually play with them, even if people would say "Oh man is that a... oh, it's 4th."
_raoulcousins 12y ago
The head designer of mtg (I'm getting this from his Drive to Work podcast) seems to imply that a lot of what was done in the early years was not nearly as planned as the NPR story says. From what I understand, they were printing as much as they could in the early years. Checking whether packs were selling above or below retail may have started after the disaster that was Fallen Empires (late 1994), which was so overprinted and underpowered that it still sells today for below retail. Interesting also that NPR said Wizards was very concerned with the secondary market prices, when Wizards spokespeople never mention secondary prices directly, referring to secondary prices indirectly with the phrase ``card availability''.

scott_karana 12y ago

Interesting Disqus comment by Jessie King: [1] This story illustrates one of the most important aspects of economics, and one that often seems to get lost in the rush - an economy needs to do something other than move money around. The concepts of money, value, and all that, are all just a means to an end. In this case, the end is an enduring, entertaining game, and they achieved it. All too many real world economists seem to forget the fact that there is no value to an economy unless it is serving some end beyond its own cyclic process of simply shuffling value around. 1 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=392381112#comment-1903437075 http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

dsr_ 12y ago
More to the point: when money is locked up in vaults, it doesn't contribute to the economy. The value of money is in making it circulate around. Doing that consistently is an unsolved problem. If money leaves your pocket as fast as it flows in, you aren't building any wealth for your future, and there are entire classes of things you can't do with your money: save up for a large purchase, invest, buy anything that isn't in your current means. But when money accumulates in the hands of a person so fast that they cannot spend it, cannot do anything but stick it into long-term investments or play status games, then the money isn't moving as fast as the rest of the economy needs.
- digi_owl 12y ago
  I find that one can liken money to blood, in that both need to circulate.
digi_owl 12y ago
As the bearded German put it, capitalists are in it for the MCM+ rotation, while the rest of us are in it for the CMC.
- EC1 12y ago
  What's MCM+ and CMC? What bearded German?

UweSchmidt 12y ago

Everyone in this thread seems to play along and never question the basic nature of either Magic or Beanie Babies or any other artificial scarcity that ties real value to a virtual ressource fully controlled by a company. Without invalidating anyone's experience or denying anyone their liberty to do whatever they like, I'd like to encourage looking for something "realer". Maybe collect things that have meaning to you, or do actual investing, or try out challenging and interesting games that are not tied to such a crazy scheme.

cdr 12y ago

This seems like a poor time to claim Wizards has solved speculation. Five years ago you would've been on firmer ground. Thanks in part to Wizards aggressively growing the number of players and former addicted teens now being in their 30s with commensurate disposable income, MtG speculation today is at an all time high - speculators prefer the cute term "MtG finance". There's orders of magnitude more speculators today than there's been in 20 years, and it's driving up card prices incredibly - not great if you want to play the game. Active players going up year after year after year provides fuel for speculators, but if the game ever has a down year the speculators are due for a painful contraction if not a bubble bursting.

jaimebuelta 12y ago

I ran a comic book shop for a couple of years (this was 8 years ago), including a big deal of MtG (selling, organising tournaments, etc) [1] From the point of view of the marketing, it is absolutely BRILLIANT. It was an amazing well oiled machine that was printing money, while developing an impressive game that has been around for 20 years and hasn't grown old. They knew all the ins and outs of the game from the rules to the way to organise tournaments and how to create a community that is absolutely obsessed with it, playing everyday. It's easy enough that I've seen 8 year old kids playing, and complex enough that a match can be determine by a very precise use of the rules. I've never really been a hard core player, but after watching it from the point of view of a business, it's really impressive. [1] In case anyone is interested in a low-tech business experience, I talked about it here: https://wrongsideofmemphis.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/i-was-once-a-non-tech-entrepreneur/ https://wrongsideofmemphis.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/i-was-on...

ap22213 12y ago

My friends and I were at the Origins conference in Ohio. It must have been some time around 1992, or so. We were there to play some AD&D. But, we happened to be roaming the conference area, and some guy, wearing a tshirt and MC Hammer pants, was at a booth selling these cards in a plastic container. It was a new game, he said. Magic. He gave us a bunch of cards for free and some rule books. We ended up playing all night. We liked it so much that the next morning we bought the rest of his plastic containers. They were filled with cards of all types. These ended up being all 'alpha' cards. Little did we know, we were stacked with Moxes, Black Lotuses, etc. As a group, we must have had dozens of them. We had no idea that they'd be worth anything. And, neither did Wizards of the Coast. The original rules stated that you had to ante a card out of your deck, just to play!

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

hyperion2010 12y ago

Hrm. Personally my favorite format is limited. I've been drafting with the same group of friends since highschool and even loosing is fun because I'm playing an intellectually challenging game and hanging out with friends. Legacy is incredibly fun to play but competition is completely out of the question so we end up playing on line. The thing that drives me to buy boxes is that I want to play with my friends, the fact that someone might need a card or three for one of their decks later is entirely secondary.

imjk 12y ago

If someone today were to identify a consumer products bubble like the Beanie Baby craze or baseball card bubble of the 90s, what would be the best way to capitalize on it. I posited this to my economist friend and he suggested something ancillary like conferences, a publication, or website. I agreed but it'd have to guarantee me a very substantial return for me to go through the work of say putting together a national Beanie Baby convention, on top of the dread of hosting something that I have no interest in. So I'm curious if Hacker Newsers have any other thoughts on how to capitalize on a situation like this for a large return with less work involved.

JamesSwift 12y ago
I agree that remaining ancillary is the way to go. It should allow you to profit during the bubble while not assuming the full risk of being directly involved. The example that comes to mind is Samuel Brannan [1] who monopolized the sale of mining equipment and profited handsomely by selling to the miners themselves. Focusing on something that has a tangible value outside of the bubble (physical goods like shovels and picks) can help in cutting your losses if the bubble bursts at an inopportune time. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan
cdr 12y ago
The slicker MtG speculators are running things like http://www.quietspeculation.com/ http://www.quietspeculation.com/ . They generally have pretty intense interest in the subject though. Identifying an opportunity seems difficult without some minimal interest to recognize it. Self-styled "MtG Finance Guru"s have also been paid to give talks to players at events like Grand Prix.

noahbradley 12y ago

The original art that goes along with many of these pieces is also seeing an incredible rise in recent years. Lots of collectors with increasingly deep pockets. Both for the old stuff and some of the new stuff. It's begun breaching the low 5 figures and seems to be only going up. As one of the artists, it's a welcome sight to see.

zachjbart 12y ago
For those who don't play the game, this guy is one of the great ones. Prolific and well-respected artist contracting for Wizards of the Coast.
- noahbradley 12y ago
  Why thank you very much. I'm around Magic nerds everywhere I go, I suppose.

bikamonki 12y ago

WoC did not beat speculation, it sustained growth with a powerful dose of American patriotism. Allow me to explain. Their business model is the same as telcos, software, movies, mosanto, etc. It is called artificial scarcity, in other words, find a legal (in the case of MtG a moral) way to control distribution of a product or service that is otherwise naturally abundant. Bare with me. I was there in the 90's and Kinkos would print a very decent set of 6 The Black Lotuses (or Lotusi?) for a buck and change. Go home, cut them nice, dress them with a sleve and go play with your proxy. Artificial scarcity has this big problem (or natural cure): piracy. So proxy playing went well for a few months b/c it did not matter, what mattered was playing such a badass game! But suddenly patriotism kicked in: "dude, I wont duel if you play proxies, that's not right, blah, blah, blah". Proxies died eventually, they where going to be the PopCornTime of MtG, the Napster. Me and a couple of playmates decided otherwise, we thought MtG needed to be open-source. We created a small set and played it along MtG cards. Nothing fancy since we sucked at drawing but fun still. At the time we knew of other players doing something similar (do remember that MtG is rooted on D&D where players make 'everything'). We gave in eventually. (Btw, I am from SA so the theme on my custom cards was Inca mythology). Another proxy attack came online: the first online apps to play MtG where NOT official MtG apps. Those too died eventually b/c, you know, official online digital cards where also collectible and artificially scarce. I sold my first two collections, the third one is sitting there on a closet waiting for my kid to grow up and waiting for a home-use cardboard color printer (or maybe an online service that prints and ships proxies or custom cards). In the open sharing economy, every day there is less space for artificial scarcity business models, MtG will not escape this reality, twice.

bigger_cheese 12y ago
As someone who occasionally plays Vintage and pretty regularly plays Legacy (two of the formats which allow use of 'any' cards printed including many of the more expensive cards in mtg's history). I dislike playing against proxies because it warps the metagame. Some cards are so prohibitively expensive that building decks around them (in a non-proxied tournament) is simply not feesible. Even if the expensive cards are objectively better (which is arguable in legacy's case) they are 'priced out of the market' so you rarely see them in tournamnets this is stuff like (Tabernacle, imperial recruiter, candelabra, grim tutor etc. in legacy's case). Sure some people will throw down a small cars worth of cash to play with "the best cards" but they are outliers in any tournament once you allow proxies suddenly everyone has access to "the best cards" and suddenly an entire room of people are all playing the same deck. When I go to a tournament half of my enjoyment comes about because of the diversity of opponents you will face playing the same match round after round is not fun and thats what proxing leads to. A good compromise is to allow for a limited number of proxies typically 5-10 cards maximum this allows you to play with a fewcopies of cards you otherwise wouldn't have access to but stops people going online to find the best deck and proxying 100% of it (decks are typically 60 cards).