2) I'll grant that the ability to play with old archetypes like Giants and Suspend/Storm sounds awesome. But the money cards in the format are not draft all stars, and considering how much it costs to draft these packs, price will taint every choice a casual player makes. I know it will because it already does, with events that cost half as much. Except now the decision to money draft will come up every other pick instead of once per draft. That's a major hurdle, and not one I can see any draft format overcoming. I'm not making any particular judgments about this set being crap for drafting, I'm just stating the obvious: the set doesn't have it in it to be an amazingly compelling draft format because there's too much else about it that distracts from that.
In all fairness, because the supply of MM online is infinite, there's going to be lots of drafts regardless of the quality of the format. As a result, many of the cards will drop in value after a couple of weeks of the ensuing supply flood. So the effect you describe is essentially a self-correcting phenomenon. Ergo all you need to do is wait about a month and the problem you're describing will greatly diminish if not disappear completely.
2) I'll grant that the ability to play with old archetypes like Giants and Suspend/Storm sounds awesome. But the money cards in the format are not draft all stars, and considering how much it costs to draft these packs, price will taint every choice a casual player makes. I know it will because it already does, with events that cost half as much. Except now the decision to money draft will come up every other pick instead of once per draft. That's a major hurdle, and not one I can see any draft format overcoming. I'm not making any particular judgments about this set being crap for drafting, I'm just stating the obvious: the set doesn't have it in it to be an amazingly compelling draft format because there's too much else about it that distracts from that.
If that's your problem then the phantom queues seem perfect for you.
In all fairness, because the supply of MM online is infinite, there's going to be lots of drafts regardless of the quality of the format. As a result, many of the cards will drop in value after a couple of weeks of the ensuing supply flood. So the effect you describe is essentially a self-correcting phenomenon. Ergo all you need to do is wait about a month and the problem you're describing will greatly diminish if not disappear completely.
If you wait a month the problem will indeed disappear completely, along with the MM draft queues.
In all fairness, because the supply of MM online is infinite, there's going to be lots of drafts regardless of the quality of the format. As a result, many of the cards will drop in value after a couple of weeks of the ensuing supply flood. So the effect you describe is essentially a self-correcting phenomenon. Ergo all you need to do is wait about a month and the problem you're describing will greatly diminish if not disappear completely.
Sure, that's pretty likely to happen to some extent, but then what's the motivation to pay double for the draft in the first place?
If that's your problem then the phantom queues seem perfect for you.
For some definition of "perfect" that means, "might try it once to see if the format is amazing". The fact that all but one of the selling points of the set are null and void when it's phantom hardly seems perfect to me.
Wit's End is the PERFECT answer to your opponent's Monomania however.
Just hold on to your Wit's End when they Monomania, so you can Wit's End them on your next turn!!!
I think this is fairly reminiscent of the "Jace Battles" we have seen in past standards.. My guess is we will soon witness the great Monomania-Wit's End battles.
If my friends want to draft my box when I open it and hand me all the cards after the draft then i'll draft it, I'll even likely buy a set of goyfs when they bottom out MTGO but i'm not paying for a draft.
I hope for GP Vegas they have a draft camera so at some point during the weekend I can see the guy in contention rare drafts an off colour foil bob/goyf for value.
For some definition of "perfect" that means, "might try it once to see if the format is amazing". The fact that all but one of the selling points of the set are null and void when it's phantom hardly seems perfect to me.
What, exactly, are you expecting, then?
If you're expecting to be able to draft a high-power set with lots of Constructed-staple money cards for the same price as a normal set, that's simply unrealistic.
So they give you two options. You can pay extra to draft normally, or pay less for just the pure draft experience (phantom).
Either way, you get (hopefully) an amazing draft experience.
This is the first time they've offered a format designed specifically for serious drafters. This is a good thing.
I hope for GP Vegas they have a draft camera so at some point during the weekend I can see the guy in contention rare drafts an off colour foil bob/goyf for value.
GP Vegas is sealed.
Sure day 2 is draft, but unless someone just lucked out getting there and isn't trying to win I don't see much rare drafting happening.
The problem is that this is being billed as a great drafting format, but there's not enough supply of it for it to be drafted with real cards more than a couple times per player. I am becoming more and more skeptical of their claim to have created a deep and interesting draft environment. Even if it's true, no one will ever know unless people actively save common and uncommon print runs. It seems silly that they would spend the same amount of resources on balancing an extra draft format that's barely going to get played; much more likely is that they're hyping the draft format to make sure people don't just save it as an investment and actually open the product in order to meet their goal of driving the price of the staples down a bit. They probably realized partway through their conception that they needed some incentive for people to open it as opposed to hoarding it due to the fact that it will likely only go up in price, and so have resorted to massively pushing people to discover and explore this amazing draft format - but not for long enough for people to realize it wasn't actually that great.
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Sure day 2 is draft, but unless someone just lucked out getting there and isn't trying to win I don't see much rare drafting happening.
At Pittsburgh, the last Limited GP, if you entered Day 2 with the minimum number of points and went 1-2 (or had one win more than the minimum and went 0-3) in the first draft, you had no chance to make money. All those people had no chance at prizes and were playing only for PWP, yet were basically being given free cards at their second draft. While the numbers might be different for Vegas, I can pretty well imagine that some people will figure they are no longer in contention at the start of Draft 2 and will be rare-drafting the entire time.
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GENERATION 7: The first time you see this, copy and paste it into your sig and add 1 to the generation. social experiment.
I am expecting it to flop. There comes a point where the cost simply doesn't work anymore, and $30 for 3 hours of gameplay falls pretty solidly past that point for a lot of people. Especially when a similarly enjoyable experience can be had for dramatically less money. And especially especially when the cards aren't standard legal and thus are going to do nothing but drop in price.
As an aside: my LGS has a box of several old formats sitting up on a shelf with fairly ridiculous prices attached. RoE, for example, goes for $8 per pack, and Zendikar for $11. People do not buy these packs. Ever. RoE was a legendary draft format, but people simply do not pay that much to play. It isn't that they don't like the format: Zendikar was very popular at my LGS, and there's plenty of money cards in the set. But the option to draft cheaply and get Standard legal cards trumps basically every other consideration.
Additionally, if the format turns out to be successful exclusively as a phantom option, then they've lost a lot of money printing all the cards and it won't be something they ever do again, which is a shame for all the constructed players who could have enjoyed the benefits of this product being successful, if opening packs had been more cost-effective. In that sense, including a viable drafting experience in the set actively damages the entire reason for the set's existence.
This is the first time they've offered a format designed specifically for serious drafters. This is a good thing.
In the sense that they're willing to design a more complicated limited environment, sure, great. Except that they won't do it for the sake of limited players. They're doing it because a set full of constructed staples is necessarily expensive if they don't want the secondary market to hate them, and making it viable for limited allows them to dilute the set to make it cheaper. And also because limited players don't have a ceiling on their demand for a set the way constructed players do, which makes it less of a risky business proposition, as long as those players don't resort to phantom drafting.
This is not a set designed specifically for serious drafters. It's a set designed specifically for serious Modern players. Drafting was included so the product would hopefully still eventually sell out after demand has been sated for Goyfs and Bobs.
Wit's End is the PERFECT answer to your opponent's Monomania however.
Just hold on to your Wit's End when they Monomania, so you can Wit's End them on your next turn!!!
I think this is fairly reminiscent of the "Jace Battles" we have seen in past standards.. My guess is we will soon witness the great Monomania-Wit's End battles.
LP, I'm checking your article out as well. Behind all of your swag is the brain of one of the most intelligent Magic players I've ever known. I guess that's one more thing for you to add to the wall of ego that is your Sally sig.
I can go with that. LK, you are the Mace Windu of red mages...cool, tempered logic in deliberation, but capable of just flat kicking tail when the situation warrants it.
In the sense that they're willing to design a more complicated limited environment, sure, great. Except that they won't do it for the sake of limited players. They're doing it because a set full of constructed staples is necessarily expensive if they don't want the secondary market to hate them, and making it viable for limited allows them to dilute the set to make it cheaper.
Yup, that's my perspective too.
Further to which, I'm pretty sure it actually won't be a good Limited format at all. That dev team doesn't impress me in the slightest. In fact Aaron Forsythe is probably the single individual within R&D whose decisions least agree with what I consider to be healthy for Limited.
Remember the last set where they said they'd made a special effort with the Limited environment? Coldsnap. On the plus side, at least they're bound to do better than that!
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(I'm on on this site much anymore. If you want to get in touch it's probably best to email me: dom@heffalumps.org)
Forum Awards: Best Writer 2005, Best Limited Strategist 2005-2012
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MTGSalvation Articles: 1-20, plus guest appearance on MTGCast #86!
<Limited Clan>
I am really excited for this limited format. I basically play limited for the fun of it and the few cards I can use in modern and legacy. This set is perfect for someone like me. At $30 for a draft and a pack value close to $15 I am actually "making" money doing a draft, even if I just open packs and leave.
I did say earlier that being a limited player I don't like "having" to rare draft, but that pretty much just messes up my first pick maybe 1 out of the 3 packs. If it is pack 1 it might not even be that big of a deal, so I am ok with taking a $15 pact of negation pick 1 pack 3 when I am not in blue.
At $30 for a draft and a pack value close to $15 I am actually "making" money doing a draft, even if I just open packs and leave.
That's pretty optimistic. According to Magiccards.info median prices (which I find to be very generous), the average value of a rare in Modern Masters is currently $8.60 (accounting for the extra rarity of mythics). There will definitely be drafts where you open enough value from the packs to be able to just walk away - the MSRP of a pack is only 7.99, after all - but it's hardly going to be a reliable thing.
And that's not accounting for the large downward pressure that comes onto cards just from the fact that they're in print. The fact that there's a new source for these cards will drive all prices down, but particularly stuff like Sarkhan Vol and Kokusho. They're pretty valuable now, mainly because of scarcity, not because the cards are particularly used, and their price will be driven into the ground by MM's release.
Wit's End is the PERFECT answer to your opponent's Monomania however.
Just hold on to your Wit's End when they Monomania, so you can Wit's End them on your next turn!!!
I think this is fairly reminiscent of the "Jace Battles" we have seen in past standards.. My guess is we will soon witness the great Monomania-Wit's End battles.
That's pretty optimistic. According to Magiccards.info median prices (which I find to be very generous), the average value of a rare in Modern Masters is currently $8.60 (accounting for the extra rarity of mythics).
This doesn't take into account the fact that there are many uncommons in the $1-$2 range and there will be a foil in every pack, which will have another large impact on pack value. Even with value decreasing a regular draft costs me $15 and I am only looking at recovering at most ~$6 in pack value, but for $30 draft I am getting $25.80 even according to magiccards.info. That means it is only costing me $5 for a MM draft and $11 for a regular draft.
Plus I think MM looks like it is going to be a lot of fun to draft. I am planning on going to 3 events this weekend and at least 1 each weekend after till places run out of product.
At $30 for a draft and a pack value close to $15 I am actually "making" money doing a draft, even if I just open packs and leave.
This is a logical fallacy. Opening a pack cannot be a rational net profit activity. It's unsustainable.
Either the prices of the singles have to drop (likely to happen immediately, in advance of release to anticipate the market) or wholesalers will hoard the packs and charge above MSRP.
The whole point of Modern Masters is to lower the prices of out of print Constructed singles by inflating the supply, so that newer / less rich players can get involved.
The value of an opened pack on average must be less than the value of the sealed pack itself, with the difference in value representing the risk premium and/or the value of sealed product as an entry ticket to events offering prizes.
We are seeing wholesalers hoarding and selling far over msrp for this exact reason. There are 3 things any given store is doing. One, Either selling at msrp, with the intent not to upset the customer base, and being sold out. Two, holding product only for drafts, which is why I am drafting as much as i can. three, hoarding product like starcity and charging a huge markup over msrp.
Yes, value of singles will also drop with the set release, but according to WoTC the limited print run is being done with the intent of keeping prices from plummeting. This means that although pack value may become closer to $8 when the set is actually in print, since it is know that many of the cards have playable value it will not be long before they start increasing towards there original price.
First, I want to apologize for starting to derail the original topic and hope to use this post to get back on track. I will stop talking about prices and just focus on limited strategy from now on.
Looking at the full spoilers now I am depressed to see desperate ritual being bumped to uncommon. I feel like this is going to make it much harder to draft storm.
I think that many of the affinity cards won't draft well since the key players to that deck are rares and won't be strong without them.
Does dragonstorm just become a late pick as a search spell for someone who has gotten one of the kamigawa dragons?
I think BU faeries looks like a really strong archetype, since it has good common uncommon and rare support, plus the removal that black give is access too.
I am unsure about drafting giants, is it too slow for this powerful of a set?
My LGS is only selling boxes to people he know won't "flip" the product. The rest he is using for draft. My LGS rules! Makes your LGS look like crap. Yeah I said it.
Maybe you're right. It just doesn't feel right based on my understanding of basic economics. (And I realize this doesn't legitimize my argument, but I do hold a degree in economics.)
It would indeed be an opportunity if stores really are going to hold drafts where they're letting you open the packs for less than the current market value. I imagine some stores will renege on that promise when they realize how valuable the packs are. It's a huge show of goodwill to host an event and give away product at a substantial discount. Most stores I've been to don't make such grand gestures.
The other problem is -- assuming a large percentage of Modern Masters is being hoarded by wholesalers, who is going to want to buy MM singles? Why pay full price today when the supply could increase significantly once wholesalers drop their prices? It's not a smart investment. You'll have a card that is valuable on paper but a hard time finding a buyer at that price.
The issue of hoarding packs won't exist online. People can draft their way through as much of the product as they want there. Of course, cards online are worth less than their paper counterparts, so there's no arbitrage to be done there. If you're playing online MM, then you're already going to be averaging something closer to 5-6 bucks in value per pack.
I paper Magic, the arbitrage opportunity mainly exists for stores, in the form of markups. $60 drafts and $15 packs, as we are seeing now. In the cases where that won't happen, they'll sell out (regardless of whether buyers flip the product or open it or draft it) and the market will stabilize nearly instantly. There's no real surprises here.
The real question is, to what extent do drafters come into it? The ideal situation is for drafters to also be Modern players who want to keep the cards they open. For those players, MM is potentially a great deal, depending on how low the card values fall. For those players who are just drafters, though, the cost of a draft is purely a function of how efficiently they can flip the cards they open.
Let's just hypothesize that a drafter is willing to net -8 bucks on a draft, and be okay with the experience costing him 8 dollars. That's about the same price and time as going to see a new movie, and it's even a little more than the average loss incurred by a player in an MTGO draft (which is $6.60). For a drafter to be able to do that with the price structure of MM, the average price they need to find upon opening a pack needs to be $7.33. That isn't median price; that's the price as a needy seller with lots of competition, in an environment where prices are falling constantly. Given that such players exist and that they can't afford to hold out for higher prices than this, we can call this an expected upper bound for the future average price of a pack's contents.
Okay, so based on past formats, the average price of a packs' contents usually falls to something like 40% of the price of the pack. That suggests a lower bound of $3.20. Naturally, given the set's high power level in the context of Modern, one would not expect it to fall this low. We might make a very rough guess, though, based on relative proportions of constructed-playable cards in a regular set vs. MM: a regular set is usually somewhere near 20% cards that see competitive constructed play somewhere. MM is closer to 35%. If the portion of the set which is constructed-viable is 75% higher, it's not unreasonable to guess that the value of the packs' contents could also be 75% higher than a normal distribution would suggest. $3.20*1.75=$5.60.
Somewhere in between $5.60 and $7.33, you have to account for the fact that this is a limited print run. That won't affect drafters' need to dump their product, but it will mean that the market won't ever be as saturated as a normal set's release would cause, which means we'll never hit that lower bound. So let's take a wild guess and say prices stabilize at $6.50. That amounts to a 24% decrease in prices compared to now, which seems to be pretty close to what WotC was aiming for.
All of which is just a way of illustrating that drafters will be pwned by the sheer price of this product. The demand for singles does not support the prices a drafter needs in order to make the product cost-effective to draft, even if we define "cost-effective" to mean "worth losing the price of a movie." And even if it did, it would mean money drafting your way through every draft, which is no way to enjoy the experience.
[Sorry if this is super-rambling. I'm writing it at work between classes and probably went off the rails somewhere with my point. I totally didn't realize it was 7 paragraphs long. tl;dr - being in print drives card prices down to the point where drafting this product will be prohibitively expensive.]
Wit's End is the PERFECT answer to your opponent's Monomania however.
Just hold on to your Wit's End when they Monomania, so you can Wit's End them on your next turn!!!
I think this is fairly reminiscent of the "Jace Battles" we have seen in past standards.. My guess is we will soon witness the great Monomania-Wit's End battles.
@PuddleJumper: I really liked your reasoning behind how these packs will effect the market. I even agree that this has a high probability of effecting the market the way you are predicting. I think this set might be better for people like me who plan on keeping most of the cards they open. My major formats are limited, legacy, and a little modern. I think of cards more in there long term value will eventually rebound and makes it worth it for players like me.
From playing this as a limited format I am curious to see if you can build a deck as effectively in a sealed event as you can in a draft. I am drafting this weekend and doing sealed next.
Question: if we draft a full set of MM online, can we exchange it for paper MM?
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-Terror is an emotion which, when experienced, results in death.
-The pox was a disease notorious for having killed one-third, rounded up, of Europeβs population. Smallpox, on the other hand, killed only a single person.
-A person riding a horse cannot be stopped by foot soldiers, large animals, walls, archers, or even catapults.
In all fairness, because the supply of MM online is infinite, there's going to be lots of drafts regardless of the quality of the format. As a result, many of the cards will drop in value after a couple of weeks of the ensuing supply flood. So the effect you describe is essentially a self-correcting phenomenon. Ergo all you need to do is wait about a month and the problem you're describing will greatly diminish if not disappear completely.
If that's your problem then the phantom queues seem perfect for you.
If you wait a month the problem will indeed disappear completely, along with the MM draft queues.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
Sure, that's pretty likely to happen to some extent, but then what's the motivation to pay double for the draft in the first place?
For some definition of "perfect" that means, "might try it once to see if the format is amazing". The fact that all but one of the selling points of the set are null and void when it's phantom hardly seems perfect to me.
I hope for GP Vegas they have a draft camera so at some point during the weekend I can see the guy in contention rare drafts an off colour foil bob/goyf for value.
What, exactly, are you expecting, then?
If you're expecting to be able to draft a high-power set with lots of Constructed-staple money cards for the same price as a normal set, that's simply unrealistic.
So they give you two options. You can pay extra to draft normally, or pay less for just the pure draft experience (phantom).
Either way, you get (hopefully) an amazing draft experience.
This is the first time they've offered a format designed specifically for serious drafters. This is a good thing.
Practice for Khans of Tarkir Limited:
Draft: (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) (#5)
GP Vegas is sealed.
Sure day 2 is draft, but unless someone just lucked out getting there and isn't trying to win I don't see much rare drafting happening.
At Pittsburgh, the last Limited GP, if you entered Day 2 with the minimum number of points and went 1-2 (or had one win more than the minimum and went 0-3) in the first draft, you had no chance to make money. All those people had no chance at prizes and were playing only for PWP, yet were basically being given free cards at their second draft. While the numbers might be different for Vegas, I can pretty well imagine that some people will figure they are no longer in contention at the start of Draft 2 and will be rare-drafting the entire time.
I am expecting it to flop. There comes a point where the cost simply doesn't work anymore, and $30 for 3 hours of gameplay falls pretty solidly past that point for a lot of people. Especially when a similarly enjoyable experience can be had for dramatically less money. And especially especially when the cards aren't standard legal and thus are going to do nothing but drop in price.
As an aside: my LGS has a box of several old formats sitting up on a shelf with fairly ridiculous prices attached. RoE, for example, goes for $8 per pack, and Zendikar for $11. People do not buy these packs. Ever. RoE was a legendary draft format, but people simply do not pay that much to play. It isn't that they don't like the format: Zendikar was very popular at my LGS, and there's plenty of money cards in the set. But the option to draft cheaply and get Standard legal cards trumps basically every other consideration.
Additionally, if the format turns out to be successful exclusively as a phantom option, then they've lost a lot of money printing all the cards and it won't be something they ever do again, which is a shame for all the constructed players who could have enjoyed the benefits of this product being successful, if opening packs had been more cost-effective. In that sense, including a viable drafting experience in the set actively damages the entire reason for the set's existence.
In the sense that they're willing to design a more complicated limited environment, sure, great. Except that they won't do it for the sake of limited players. They're doing it because a set full of constructed staples is necessarily expensive if they don't want the secondary market to hate them, and making it viable for limited allows them to dilute the set to make it cheaper. And also because limited players don't have a ceiling on their demand for a set the way constructed players do, which makes it less of a risky business proposition, as long as those players don't resort to phantom drafting.
This is not a set designed specifically for serious drafters. It's a set designed specifically for serious Modern players. Drafting was included so the product would hopefully still eventually sell out after demand has been sated for Goyfs and Bobs.
Set definitely looks like it was designed for serious drafting with the bonus benefit of money cards.
Yup, that's my perspective too.
Further to which, I'm pretty sure it actually won't be a good Limited format at all. That dev team doesn't impress me in the slightest. In fact Aaron Forsythe is probably the single individual within R&D whose decisions least agree with what I consider to be healthy for Limited.
Remember the last set where they said they'd made a special effort with the Limited environment? Coldsnap. On the plus side, at least they're bound to do better than that!
(I'm on on this site much anymore. If you want to get in touch it's probably best to email me: dom@heffalumps.org)
Forum Awards: Best Writer 2005, Best Limited Strategist 2005-2012
5CB PotM - June 2005, November 2005, February 2006, April 2008, May 2008, Feb 2009
MTGSalvation Articles: 1-20, plus guest appearance on MTGCast #86!
<Limited Clan>
I did say earlier that being a limited player I don't like "having" to rare draft, but that pretty much just messes up my first pick maybe 1 out of the 3 packs. If it is pack 1 it might not even be that big of a deal, so I am ok with taking a $15 pact of negation pick 1 pack 3 when I am not in blue.
That's pretty optimistic. According to Magiccards.info median prices (which I find to be very generous), the average value of a rare in Modern Masters is currently $8.60 (accounting for the extra rarity of mythics). There will definitely be drafts where you open enough value from the packs to be able to just walk away - the MSRP of a pack is only 7.99, after all - but it's hardly going to be a reliable thing.
And that's not accounting for the large downward pressure that comes onto cards just from the fact that they're in print. The fact that there's a new source for these cards will drive all prices down, but particularly stuff like Sarkhan Vol and Kokusho. They're pretty valuable now, mainly because of scarcity, not because the cards are particularly used, and their price will be driven into the ground by MM's release.
This doesn't take into account the fact that there are many uncommons in the $1-$2 range and there will be a foil in every pack, which will have another large impact on pack value. Even with value decreasing a regular draft costs me $15 and I am only looking at recovering at most ~$6 in pack value, but for $30 draft I am getting $25.80 even according to magiccards.info. That means it is only costing me $5 for a MM draft and $11 for a regular draft.
Plus I think MM looks like it is going to be a lot of fun to draft. I am planning on going to 3 events this weekend and at least 1 each weekend after till places run out of product.
This is a logical fallacy. Opening a pack cannot be a rational net profit activity. It's unsustainable.
Either the prices of the singles have to drop (likely to happen immediately, in advance of release to anticipate the market) or wholesalers will hoard the packs and charge above MSRP.
The whole point of Modern Masters is to lower the prices of out of print Constructed singles by inflating the supply, so that newer / less rich players can get involved.
The value of an opened pack on average must be less than the value of the sealed pack itself, with the difference in value representing the risk premium and/or the value of sealed product as an entry ticket to events offering prizes.
Yes, value of singles will also drop with the set release, but according to WoTC the limited print run is being done with the intent of keeping prices from plummeting. This means that although pack value may become closer to $8 when the set is actually in print, since it is know that many of the cards have playable value it will not be long before they start increasing towards there original price.
Looking at the full spoilers now I am depressed to see desperate ritual being bumped to uncommon. I feel like this is going to make it much harder to draft storm.
I think that many of the affinity cards won't draft well since the key players to that deck are rares and won't be strong without them.
Does dragonstorm just become a late pick as a search spell for someone who has gotten one of the kamigawa dragons?
I think BU faeries looks like a really strong archetype, since it has good common uncommon and rare support, plus the removal that black give is access too.
I am unsure about drafting giants, is it too slow for this powerful of a set?
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It would indeed be an opportunity if stores really are going to hold drafts where they're letting you open the packs for less than the current market value. I imagine some stores will renege on that promise when they realize how valuable the packs are. It's a huge show of goodwill to host an event and give away product at a substantial discount. Most stores I've been to don't make such grand gestures.
The other problem is -- assuming a large percentage of Modern Masters is being hoarded by wholesalers, who is going to want to buy MM singles? Why pay full price today when the supply could increase significantly once wholesalers drop their prices? It's not a smart investment. You'll have a card that is valuable on paper but a hard time finding a buyer at that price.
I paper Magic, the arbitrage opportunity mainly exists for stores, in the form of markups. $60 drafts and $15 packs, as we are seeing now. In the cases where that won't happen, they'll sell out (regardless of whether buyers flip the product or open it or draft it) and the market will stabilize nearly instantly. There's no real surprises here.
The real question is, to what extent do drafters come into it? The ideal situation is for drafters to also be Modern players who want to keep the cards they open. For those players, MM is potentially a great deal, depending on how low the card values fall. For those players who are just drafters, though, the cost of a draft is purely a function of how efficiently they can flip the cards they open.
Let's just hypothesize that a drafter is willing to net -8 bucks on a draft, and be okay with the experience costing him 8 dollars. That's about the same price and time as going to see a new movie, and it's even a little more than the average loss incurred by a player in an MTGO draft (which is $6.60). For a drafter to be able to do that with the price structure of MM, the average price they need to find upon opening a pack needs to be $7.33. That isn't median price; that's the price as a needy seller with lots of competition, in an environment where prices are falling constantly. Given that such players exist and that they can't afford to hold out for higher prices than this, we can call this an expected upper bound for the future average price of a pack's contents.
Okay, so based on past formats, the average price of a packs' contents usually falls to something like 40% of the price of the pack. That suggests a lower bound of $3.20. Naturally, given the set's high power level in the context of Modern, one would not expect it to fall this low. We might make a very rough guess, though, based on relative proportions of constructed-playable cards in a regular set vs. MM: a regular set is usually somewhere near 20% cards that see competitive constructed play somewhere. MM is closer to 35%. If the portion of the set which is constructed-viable is 75% higher, it's not unreasonable to guess that the value of the packs' contents could also be 75% higher than a normal distribution would suggest. $3.20*1.75=$5.60.
Somewhere in between $5.60 and $7.33, you have to account for the fact that this is a limited print run. That won't affect drafters' need to dump their product, but it will mean that the market won't ever be as saturated as a normal set's release would cause, which means we'll never hit that lower bound. So let's take a wild guess and say prices stabilize at $6.50. That amounts to a 24% decrease in prices compared to now, which seems to be pretty close to what WotC was aiming for.
All of which is just a way of illustrating that drafters will be pwned by the sheer price of this product. The demand for singles does not support the prices a drafter needs in order to make the product cost-effective to draft, even if we define "cost-effective" to mean "worth losing the price of a movie." And even if it did, it would mean money drafting your way through every draft, which is no way to enjoy the experience.
[Sorry if this is super-rambling. I'm writing it at work between classes and probably went off the rails somewhere with my point. I totally didn't realize it was 7 paragraphs long. tl;dr - being in print drives card prices down to the point where drafting this product will be prohibitively expensive.]
From playing this as a limited format I am curious to see if you can build a deck as effectively in a sealed event as you can in a draft. I am drafting this weekend and doing sealed next.
-Terror is an emotion which, when experienced, results in death.
-The pox was a disease notorious for having killed one-third, rounded up, of Europeβs population. Smallpox, on the other hand, killed only a single person.
-A person riding a horse cannot be stopped by foot soldiers, large animals, walls, archers, or even catapults.
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