I also disagree with some of Teia's points and I also feel that most people miss one important point. We are going back to Zendikar. People remember the set for fetch lands, landfall and the frist printing's hidden treasures. Those were even more unfair than mythic foils. Most were sold to USA, and it seemed from the data from prereleases that the propability to open one from European made boosters was about one third of the propability in US.
But consider WotC's personel considering those facts, which their market research backs up. First they bring in Landfall and fetches, but allied fetches were just printed and tehy would loose huge amount of reprint equity if they printed enemy fetches so soon. That leaves hidden treasure gimmick left out of the three big hits. When somebody suggests putting enemy fetchlands as hidden treasures, it just clicks. It's a slam dunk idea and much cheaper than purchasing a new batch of old cards to insert to boosters. Making them foils actually makes inserting them into boosters easier and mythic rarity makes them glamorous, so a win all around.
While the reprint cycle has decreased due to demand, (Lot of vocal people have been asking for reprints, as there are so many new players and WotC has seen what dual prices have been doing to Legacys popularity.) I don't see this round of fetches and Shocks as a reprint round, but more of a sequel to hidden treasures. The amount released will be minuscule compared to normal printing, so it will keep the enemy fetches reprint equity high for future sets.
As for the distribution being elitist, these are not really different from foil mythics. One is bit more likely to get one of these than any random foil mythic. Buying a case to draft with friends, will have 1+ of these. These are about twice as rare as any random Mercadian Masques foil rare. During the early foils there was only 40 % chance to open a foil rare in a box.
So while opening one of these is nice, nobody needs specifically these cards to play the game. Just like nobody needs the SDCC planeswalkers to play this game. Feeling disjointed from wanting something you cannot afford and can replace with functionally similar product isn't injustice or unfair. We have to accept that there are pimp cards that are not meant for us and there will be some players who will get four of each to display beside their GURU lands.
WotC has been very good about never printing any promos we have to have to compete, like some other games have done. There's always a set version availlable and while those are not always cheap they are availlable at significant discount compared to the rare promos, like the Judge Force of Will, or even more extreme, Judge basic lands.
So in brief I think you were bit hasty on analyzing the data. I would compare this to the Hidden Treasures gimmick and feel that this printing will not eat the reprint equity at all. I actually suspect that the normal RTR shocks will go up due to new players finding out about them and the mythic foils will add to the mystique of all the cards reprinted this way. I also don't think these cards are any less fair than the mythic rarity in it's totality. Magic is about collectability and with the huge print runs these days there needs to be something to aim for. Only 1100 people can own an alpha Black Lotus and additional 3300 a beta one (And the number should propably be cut by at least 33 % due to damaged and destroyed cards) so WotC needs to have cards that capture the same feel and I believe that Expeditions is a nice way to do so.
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Sep 1, 2015Default User posted a message on The Magic Street Journal: Glitter, Gimmicks, and Glamours - Wizards' Reprint ShenanigansPosted in: Articles
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Aug 22, 2014Default User posted a message on Off Topic: Gaming the $ystem for ValueOne thing that can alleviate the slow availlability of redeemed sets is that uncracked sets will appreciate in value after the redemption window closes. Sealed sets of older expansions will start going up. Some faster than others.Posted in: Articles
For example I use MCM values:
Journey into Nyx sealed set 99,99 €
Born of the Gods sealed set 94.95 €
Theros sealed set 115 €
Return to Ravnica 119 €
Avacyn Restored Sealed 139 €
Dark Ascension sealed 69.99 €
Innistrad sealed 150 €
New Phyrexia sealed 199 €
Mirrodin Besieged sealed 150 €
Scars of Mirrodin 150+ € (No sealed sets availlable)
Rise of the Eldrazi sealed 316,5 €
Worldwake sealed 199 €
Zendikar 375+ € (no sealed sets availlable)
Shards of Alara-block 99-139 € for sealed sets. Foil sets are also very cheap due to the all-foil boosters. Without a lot of the big cards having seen reprints in MMa, these sets would be somewhat higher.
Eventide, Shadowmoor, Morningtide nor Lorwyn doesn't have any sealed sets on sale currently,
Future Sight sealed 240 €
Planar Chaos doesn't have any sealed sets availlable, but should be around 130 €.
So after Zendikar the availlability becomes an issue, but even the sets that were lowest of the low to redeem (and didn't need the extra 25 $ ticket) sells for over 100$ mark now. Well poor old Dark Ascension, where foil sets sell nicely, but the value of regular sets is really low.
But if WotC will not reprint double sided-cards in MMa2 or 3 and some of the cards keep seeing play, I really doubt that the value will stay that low for long.
So in short, altough online redemptions are not the optimal way to get cards for playing standard, it is a good way to get your modern cards and a great way for dealers to get stock after the initial set of singles they open from (mountains of) packs starts drying out. Also getting few extra sets redeemed can lead to nice gains in value, if you just sit on popular sets for some time. Also big sets are better than small sets, unless the power levels say otherwise.
Sealed foil sets are another interesting avenua for nice gains. I certainly regret I didn't pick foil sets of new Phyrexia up at 240 €, when they were at thei lowest. (And yes I chose the biggest winner set out of the bunch, or maybe Roe ties the title. Full foil set of RoE was 230 € at MCM when the set was 'old news'.)
There was some good info on this going around when SCG bought a pretty unique collection of redeemed foil sets few years back. It had all the redeemable foils sets of the early MTGO, starting from 7th edition into IPA and onward. As those were enough to get SCG buyers really stoked up, one should be able to guess how rare those old sealed foil sets can be. -
Feb 5, 2014Default User posted a message on Launch Giveaway!I love some old cards, but my undying love for Shahrazad is only dampened by the fact that card that is banned in every format can still be worth 40$. Luckily I also like Camel a lot and those are much more affordable so I own 7 Shahrazads and 150+ Camels. But my favourite card is Shahrazad.Posted in: Announcements
Long time ago I tried to break the card in Vintage. Before every monthly Vintage-tournament I would email then Rules rep Rune Horvik and ask him how the rules would work that month. I then mailed his reply to the HJ to get his OK for the conclusions. Last time I tried this Runes reply was: "Let Pasi (The HJ) decide, the card is so strange that we will not rework the rules for making it work."
That was while one could Burning Wish for a Shshrazad which was still resolving in the main game during subgames and Wishing for SB cards got both the Wish and the SB card shuffled into the main game deck after a subgame. I lost 78 points of my Vintage rating due to the card, 1518 rating for the win. I did win a few matches. Or at least two... I even got to a situation where losing matches to decent players didn't lower my rating anymore. For some reason I dropped the deck after half a year of trying and some rules changes made the deck much less robust. - To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
The wear is pretty much realistic and looks like normal wear real cardstock gets. So most likely real.
If the cards feel slick or plasticy, they are definately fakes.
My gut reaction is that those are pretty bad fakes, but I'm only 95 % certain.
One thing that I didn't see anybody pointing out yet is what we all should expect these spikes to cause as secondary effects...
All duals and P9 cards should see a significant uptick. Some are already doing this, but I foresee all of them following. This is basically the same thing that happened when revised duals jumped in 2009, modern staples jumped, Zen Fetches jumped etc. And everytime when stores finally upped their buy-prices, people flooded them with the newly more expensive cards and bought duals and low-end power (Twister, cheaper Moxes, unlimited duals etc.) and when those prices needed to be corrected the expensive p9 started to feel underpriced and allowed people to trade in few Moxen to get an Ancestral Recall or trade their unlimited duals for few betas etc. (And this increase in price will lead some people who were very close to buying Unl P9 pieces to choose CE or ICE versions, leading to incresed demand on those, which is already happening...)
Another effect of these buy-outs is that collectors of old sets, who normally take their time, have accelerated their rate of acquisition, which is mostly why we see the alpha and beta spikes on random cards like Camouflage, which aren't on the reserved list. The market only has limited amount of the 93/94-period cards, so any additional interest will increase the price at this point. There are also some collectors (myself included) who collect some alpha cards just for fun and will gladly sell some formerly bulk Lg rares to finance a new burst of activity.
And last, there's now a major financial redistribution going on. Group of people have pumped propably few hundred thousand bucks to the MtG-market buying reserved-list cards in a few short months, and knowing Magic players, lot of that money will go towards other cards. I know I have sold a lot of high end commnder foils to people, who have sold a stack of cards they had got when first starting playing in the mid 90s. I will naturally put some of the money towards some of my less important collection goals (like set of alpha Kudzu, I would have loved to own twenty years ago for my GR-LD-deck) which can sometimes lead to additional effects on the market...
Lot of the people who have sold their reserved list cards are entrentched players, who already have large collections, so they will put their gains into cards they want, which often are legacy and vintage staples and reserved list cards. This means that I believe strongly that while the reserve buy-outs will most likely calm down in a while, there will be a notable increase across the board in dual lands, power and high end old cards, which will keep going for at least few months after these buy-outs slow down, before the inevitable downtick in value, which usually happens after a price increase, when the market tries to find the new balance betwen supply and demand and the less patient speculators try to unload their copies.
There's also the 'organic' dual value increase caused by legacy GPs, which had already caused some upward pressure towards other legacy staples, so it's hard to say exactly how strong the RL-buy-out effect actually is, but at least we finally will see how many copies of the old cards will find their ways out of the closets and attics of retired players when the market finds the new price equilibrium and those cards start selling again.
If you can get a 600 dpi scans of both sides of the card, we can be more certain. But if you compare this to a real card you should notice how the pixelation should look like and this is anything but.
The early fakes used uncorrected scans as their data and used rich black instead of solid balck on the black borders.
Fake beta and sometimes alpha commons and basic lands were the usual practise materials when people tested rebacking. The description fits the usual rebacked card.
In 1998 a friend of mine decided that he wanted to test rebacking cards, after another friend had bought a rebacked dual land. He was pretty open about telling everybody he knew what he was doing and allowing people to examione the results, so they could in turn better spot fakes. In our part of the world we never got many fakes, and the few we got were all rebacks (or maybe nobody knew how to spot dark beta...).
The first few rebacks were pretty terrible, but the later ones became somewhat harder to spot without close examination. The corners were the easiest places to spot problems and while we agreed that with better tools he possibly could have made fakes with only minimal thickness difference, the corners would always be the problem and nowadays most people know to do a light test to expensive cards would make selling these not feasible.
I'm not telling any tips, but there are plenty of ways to increase the quality if you know your crafts. Luckily the CE and ICE cards are relatively scarce (and duals and P9 are pretty expensive too) these days and there's no real point in making beta fakes (and as alpha they won't pass muster.) With current printer technology printing proxies is also much easier.
I would guess that there are still some rebacked cards floating around, but as they are really easy to spot and most glues used 20 years back have started degrading and/or hardening, they should become less common all the time.
I for one can heartily agree that anything helping people trade their cards for ones they need is great and as long as the system is both relatively transparent (how card prices are set, grading problems and possibly even stuff like do the people who have access to the sites data have bots or even trade on the site etc) and the site has financial stability. With those issues taken care of hopefully the site grows and prospers.
On MCM I have bought 1532 shipments and sent out 1401. In the last few years I haven't had to invest money into building my collection, altough I'm several hundred euros down from buying stamps. But that's a small price for being able to play whatever I want in all formats (Well I actually would have to buy few cards for 93/94 for the wackier decks, I kind of have regrets selling my Unl BoPs...)
Until fakers start next-leveling, I feel that misprinted cards are more likely to be real, as fakers really don't want to draw attention to the details and start getting people to checking the rosette patterns.
Old cards do have different colored backs, so much so that when sleeves were not allowed at high level tournaments people could identify from which set the card backs were from and know if they had a land on top of their deck at all times. Luckily for the game integrity won and better print quality control also helped.
Revised has both normal and darker back cards and some that are in betwen. The set was rushed out at incredible rate and quality control didn't have a chance to catch more than the most glaringly misprinted sheets.
But without seeing the backside scans I can suggest you do the light test with a known real card and feel the card. Lot of the fakes have slightly more plasticy feel than real cards and reflect light more than real cards. If your biggest frar is the darker back, then that is normal and is not a major red flag for the authenticity.
Also in my opinion offset cards are more likely to be real than ones that are nearly perfect, due to people not looking too carefully if there are no obvious imperfections, as the OP demonstrated started checking his card much more carefully after noting the irregularity.
I would only caution trusting the aging, as if the card has been clipped back n the day, the edges will be weathered very similarly to the real edges.
One last idea to catch clipped betas is to see how the wear is on the card. If the straight edges are show more wear than edges, there's usually something wonky about the card. And if you want to know more what to look for try making your own alpha cut cards. Take few recent commons or lands and nailclippers and try to make them look like alpha cut. Seeing how they look (and then destroying them, you don't want somebody accidentally getting hold of them and not knowing that they are not factory cut) helps one to recogniseother attempts much easier. I learned by having a friend who loved handicrafts, so he rebacked a handful of Collector's edition commons and lands for local traders to practise fake detecting with, making both alpha and beta cards (but without the white triangles...)
As a background I decided in 1999 to start collecting promo basic lands and other oddities, like chinese alternate art Portal 1 lands, AN Mountains and Un-set basics. I currently have two three-ring binders full of just basic lands and one smaller binder with 102 misprint german Drudge Skeletons with Swamp art. I also had about 500 foil basic lands, but have sold half of them away since I didn't try to collect lot of copies of the same art, but tried to have one of each. So I kept the old frame ones and started selling the rest slowly to people who actually used them.
I really enjoy the different arts over the years, but quite often end up playing with the same few lands.
Forests: Chinese Portal 1. The Bamboo forests look really nice and most people have never seen those lands.
Islands: Bob Eggleton APAC-promo from the blue booster.
Plains: GURU or Sunflower Plains (Ron Spears) from APAC
Mountains: Arabian Nights, Unglued or any of the APAC Mountains
Swamps: GURU or Edward P. Beard Jr. APAC promo.
Wastes: I like the full art one with the Kozilek affected Mountains in it (number 184). I'm still looking for few more foils, in case some Modern-deck actually uses more than three.
I also love using the original Arena basic land Promos from 1996 and the 2003 Rob Alexander set, as both of those create a larger panoramas when the lands are in correct order. I would also never turn my nose up from somebody using the Mirage lands and I have several times thought about using Mirage Plains on some deck, I even got enough signed 17 years ago that I could play them, but haven't yet.
And as others have stated there's no way spending 10 minutes per pack to peek inside would be profitable if you calculate any cost for your work. It's much easier to open packs until you open a Masterpiece and then sell the rest of the packs as loose boosters and even that isn't profitable, unless you use some other method like laboratory scale to spot packs with foils in (and even that doesn't really work too well.)
Resealed packs are usually pretty easy to spot when you handle the packs, as the cards are somewhat looser inside the packs and one end opens pretty easily or is a glued mess. But excess air inside boosters does not mean they are resealed either as there are some puffed up normal boosters floating around even now with Kaladesh. These packs can even be opened by placing them on the table and slapping the pack, so the air trapped inside the pack pops it open. I've seen similar few other times also. It's usually from the packing machines settings being slightly off.
So most likely not resealed packs.
When allowed, he loves to sign in pink felt tip pen. Almost all his earlier arts contain something pink or has pink shading and he loved to try to match the color in signatures.
This might have changed, since I had a nice long chat with him in 2004, but he was really fun guy to talk with.
Tom Wärnerstrand was signing few cards about five years back over mail, but after that I haven't heard that anybody had managed to catch him. There's luckily lot of his sigs floating around Finland and Sweden, as he attended few GP's here in 2000. I'll propably need to scan few of them here.
The back indeed has some glaring issues, which are not common for ravised backs, but...
Before going further there's one question; does the real land really has those greenish areas on it or is this just a artefact from the scanner software, and is the back of the Volc rich black (has tiny dots of other colors mixed in among the black) or is that also from the scan.
I suspect that at least the greenish areas on the land borders come from the scanner trying to represent glare or some other glitch in the data and if it has decided that the land edges are solid black while they actually are lighter than the black borders on Volc, the scanner will show the darker tones as rich black.
I won't go further into how the optimization softwares can cause scares, but please check the real card and compare it to the scan, as this would not be the first time people get scared of scanner issues. But if the card really has rich black borders and very 'fat' TM mark there's another check you can make on the backside. The green dot in the logo has few pixels of magenta (or pink) in there, which do miss from lot of fakes.
The rosette pattern on the back of the Volc is bit peculiar, but lot of those variations happen if one or two colors are misplaced by a pixel or two and Revised had lot of issues with the back print quality. Again the quality of the Volc back is atrocious and the color separations seem to be badly off if that is the natural color scheme of the card. Also the different structures on the inner beveled edge are completely off and the definition betwen letters in 'the Gathering'. I would instantly flag a card like that as suspect and try to find if some colors were off-shifted and if not, deem it as most likely fake.