i think the restoration of zhalfir will be the culmination of the dominaria story. i think originally that might have been intended to be the settup for the second set of dominaria but i don't think it will end up being the setting for the core set. i think the core set could show chandra & jaya on regatha. i don't think regatha is necessarily deep for a full expansion. core19 could also depict other characters soul seeking. (nissa on zendikar? tezzeret on alara? elspeth in the underworld? ajani giving himself a bath? garruk killing people?)
we know that core19 is going to have 5 planeswalker decks. we have seen new art for tezzeret and ajani that hasn't yet been placed.
In Elder Dragons to name only the chronologically first place. Also, all the characters from Legends were Dominarian.
what does it say in the comics? do you have like a picture or something? also dakkon blackblade was a planeswalker and i've never seen anything to imply he was from dominaria originally either.
Return to Theros could have Dack Fayden (blue/red) and Gideon Blackblade (white/black). Xenagos is also an option. if the characters are going to the underworld to rescue Elspeth they might encounter another dead planeswalker on the way. Ashiok is also fond of the plane.
with the dominaria set fully spoiled we can reflect on the creature types that were seeded for it.
Knights - a big tribal payoff for these in DOM. while the creature type functioned largely as a means of enhancing flavor in IXN/RIX all of those white and black vampire knights now have a lot of good synnergies with knights in DOM.
Wizards - another big winner. great synergies introduced that make cheap merfolk wizards have a lot more utility with newly printed cards from DOM.
Goblin - a characteristic tribe, so never really a surprise, but they got more tools in DOM. perhaps we'll see even more in M19 to solidify the tribe as a standard deck option.
Saprolings - i didn't include these in my original post because they don't appear as actual cards. it was a very astute observation which many other people made though. saprolings and the fungus who make them are back in good numbers with DOM. their presence in IXN/RIX was certainly strange enough to raise some red flags.
looking at dominaria we don't really have that many odd creature types cropping up. the plane has so many races throughout it's history that wotc seems to have had little room to spare for seeding odd things. we have an ooze, a cat, a unicorn, an ape, but all of them are represented in past sets from dominaria. frog spirit is a bit weird, sure, but it's also a weird card. perhaps with core set 2019 following so soon we will see more seeding there.
yep. all of the cards from now on are women. there are no men portrayed in cards at all. thanks for adding your intelligent observation to this discussion.
i think it return to theros will come before ravnica at war. the confrontation with bolas was only a block ago, and rescuing elspeth really fits with the theme of building a team.
I probably have a 0% chance on my pre-order as well. That was my point; I might just as well have bought a boardgame instead; Just as much return on investment. Thanks for proving my point.
[...]
I didn't want a Jace. I wanted a decent return on my investment.
[...]
I'm not an investor
your first statement is patently untrue. you can take all of the cards you get from your A25 box and resell them to recoup a percentage of what you paid. if you buy settlers of catan (which is a great boardgame) there is no way you can be sure to resell it. in order to resell a boardgame you need to list it on craigslist or ebay or have a garage sale...and there is no guarantee you will have a buyer. with magic cards there are established stores and online retailers which will 100% buy any cards you don't want. that means that no matter what cards you get a fraction of the cost is certain to be recoupable. you are upset because you think that the percentage you will be able to recoup isn't as high as you would like, which again, means that you are viewing this as an investment. in your post you say that you aren't an investor but then repeatedly talk about the cards as an investment. at this point i'm hardly arguing with you, i'm just pointing out the words you are saying. if you want magic cards you should buy them. if you want an investment you should buy real estate, or hire a money manager to set up an ira/cd/portfolio for you.
also you mention the cards being easily mapped, which was almost certainly a hoax or hasty assumption based on subsequent reports.
So you wouldn't be adverse to me packing up some commons crap uncommons and bulk rares, sticking them into a pack and selling them to you for 10 bucks a pop? How many of these boosters would you like? You will get variety and they will be playable and in NM condition. How many would you like to buy from me? If money is no issue right?
if the magic cards contained within the pack are worth almost 10 dollars, sure, i will buy a pack of magic cards for 10 dollars. i like to draft. i will buy three packs and draft with them. afterwards i can resell the cards i got for ~75% of the cost. i might have even pulled a card i will keep. will i have made back my money 100% or made a profit? probably not...but when i buy an xbox game i don't make a profit either. when i don't want the xbox game anymore i can resell it for basically nothing. the depreciation that most gaming products have is pretty steep compared to magic cards.
to be clear, i'm not just talking about hypotheticals. i am actually going to draft this set. the value is close to msrp which is great compared to most standard sets which i also draft. additionally the set has some expensive cards which i legitimately want and if i open one in a draft that is a nice bonus. if you think the msrp is a disaster i would like to again suggest that you refer to the mtggoldfish evaluation.
lastly referring to the cards in A25 as crap commons/uncommons is pretty narrow minded. many of the cards are great in edh, pauper, and limited. there are even a few good legacy cards. and a lot of the cards were powerhouses in the standard environments they were legal in, which plays into the anniversary theme.
My reaction to Cash spent on this fluke could be spent on boardgames instead. For example, my M25 is gonna cost me 180€. I could have spent that on GloomHaven or videogames instead. I probably won't even get a Jace. So why did I buy a box? To get crap rares, apparently. Thanks WOTC! I hope you go broke asap.
this has got to be satire, right? if you buy a boardgame you have 0 chance of getting any return on that investment. boardgames also have limited replayability, player constraints, and are hard to transport. if you don't want to play magic that's fine but compared to boardgaming it is a dream. if you wanted a jace you should have just bought a jace, instead of buying a box. don't be mad at wotc for your own stupid decisions.
to all of the amateur financiers complaining about the value of A25, i suggest you look at the mtggoldfish breakdown. it comes to the same conclusion i have: A25 is basically worth around what it is sold for. and while the idea of not exceeding msrp might disgust you, i would implore you to find any other game or product that you can buy and then resell for anywhere close to msrp.
magic isn't an investment, it's a game. opening packs isn't a prospect, it's a gamble. wotc simply makes magic cards, they don't actually owe you anything more than that.
i agree that all the primevals will be rare, akin to the elder dinos in rix, because wotc realizes that those splashy timmy cards are good at selling packs but not actually highly sought after. i don't think gruun will be mythic either, as it is basically just a 10/10 with double strike for 9 mana. it's splashy but simple. no evasion and no resilience. lastly i would bet that haphazard bombardment is rare because it is clunky and random.
It could be a 1/100000 chance or it could be a 1/10, but until Wizards comment on how randomised the boxes are it hurts consumer confidence.
the problem is that 1/10 can look just like 1/1,000,000 if you only have a sample size of 1.
and for the sake of discussion i'm pretty sure the randomization is based on the order of printing sheets rather than the cards being randomized after being cut. so each print run has something like 1000 different sheet arrangements and those arrangements are what create the randomization. it would be neat for wotc to talk more about their printing process and given the recent hiccups it would probably make people more sympathetic to the challenges they face.
first of all: the problem with things like printing errors and manufacture mistakes is that people think they are much more common than they really are. nobody makes a youtube video or a reddit post when they open a completely normal pack of magic cards, so looking online will give you the impression that these occurrences are much more frequent than they really are.
that having been said this specific occurrence is very strange. it could be random chance. the only way to find out is to open more boxes in this manner. it's kind of strange to me that after opening two identical boxes he didn't decide to open a third. that seems like the natural thing to do, especially considering rudy isn't the sort of person who is likely to be drafting with these cards.
the reality is that magic cards aren't truly randomized. true randomization in a production process is hard to create. the order of cards in packs and boxes has some amount of predetermination. in addition to being sorted by rarity, packs have a measured mix of creatures and spells as well. the amount of each color which appears in a pack is also probably somewhat moderated. (i've certainly never seen somebody open a pack that only contained cards of a single color and with true randomization that unlikely occurrence would eventually happen) this degree of predetermination doesn't completely account for opening 24 packs with the same rares but it does give some insight in to how this could have happened. perhaps there are only ~10,000 possible rare combinations per box? that would be enough combinations that you could safely assume nobody would ever buy two boxes and get the same set but still make it statistically possible.
if each box contained 21 rares (mythics are about 1/8) and they were 100% randomized the number of possible combinations would be ~300,000,000,000,000.
we know that core19 is going to have 5 planeswalker decks. we have seen new art for tezzeret and ajani that hasn't yet been placed.
what does it say in the comics? do you have like a picture or something? also dakkon blackblade was a planeswalker and i've never seen anything to imply he was from dominaria originally either.
but is it actually written anywhere or are you just assuming?...
Knights - a big tribal payoff for these in DOM. while the creature type functioned largely as a means of enhancing flavor in IXN/RIX all of those white and black vampire knights now have a lot of good synnergies with knights in DOM.
Wizards - another big winner. great synergies introduced that make cheap merfolk wizards have a lot more utility with newly printed cards from DOM.
Goblin - a characteristic tribe, so never really a surprise, but they got more tools in DOM. perhaps we'll see even more in M19 to solidify the tribe as a standard deck option.
Saprolings - i didn't include these in my original post because they don't appear as actual cards. it was a very astute observation which many other people made though. saprolings and the fungus who make them are back in good numbers with DOM. their presence in IXN/RIX was certainly strange enough to raise some red flags.
looking at dominaria we don't really have that many odd creature types cropping up. the plane has so many races throughout it's history that wotc seems to have had little room to spare for seeding odd things. we have an ooze, a cat, a unicorn, an ape, but all of them are represented in past sets from dominaria. frog spirit is a bit weird, sure, but it's also a weird card. perhaps with core set 2019 following so soon we will see more seeding there.
yep. all of the cards from now on are women. there are no men portrayed in cards at all. thanks for adding your intelligent observation to this discussion.
your first statement is patently untrue. you can take all of the cards you get from your A25 box and resell them to recoup a percentage of what you paid. if you buy settlers of catan (which is a great boardgame) there is no way you can be sure to resell it. in order to resell a boardgame you need to list it on craigslist or ebay or have a garage sale...and there is no guarantee you will have a buyer. with magic cards there are established stores and online retailers which will 100% buy any cards you don't want. that means that no matter what cards you get a fraction of the cost is certain to be recoupable. you are upset because you think that the percentage you will be able to recoup isn't as high as you would like, which again, means that you are viewing this as an investment. in your post you say that you aren't an investor but then repeatedly talk about the cards as an investment. at this point i'm hardly arguing with you, i'm just pointing out the words you are saying. if you want magic cards you should buy them. if you want an investment you should buy real estate, or hire a money manager to set up an ira/cd/portfolio for you.
also you mention the cards being easily mapped, which was almost certainly a hoax or hasty assumption based on subsequent reports.
if the magic cards contained within the pack are worth almost 10 dollars, sure, i will buy a pack of magic cards for 10 dollars. i like to draft. i will buy three packs and draft with them. afterwards i can resell the cards i got for ~75% of the cost. i might have even pulled a card i will keep. will i have made back my money 100% or made a profit? probably not...but when i buy an xbox game i don't make a profit either. when i don't want the xbox game anymore i can resell it for basically nothing. the depreciation that most gaming products have is pretty steep compared to magic cards.
to be clear, i'm not just talking about hypotheticals. i am actually going to draft this set. the value is close to msrp which is great compared to most standard sets which i also draft. additionally the set has some expensive cards which i legitimately want and if i open one in a draft that is a nice bonus. if you think the msrp is a disaster i would like to again suggest that you refer to the mtggoldfish evaluation.
lastly referring to the cards in A25 as crap commons/uncommons is pretty narrow minded. many of the cards are great in edh, pauper, and limited. there are even a few good legacy cards. and a lot of the cards were powerhouses in the standard environments they were legal in, which plays into the anniversary theme.
this has got to be satire, right? if you buy a boardgame you have 0 chance of getting any return on that investment. boardgames also have limited replayability, player constraints, and are hard to transport. if you don't want to play magic that's fine but compared to boardgaming it is a dream. if you wanted a jace you should have just bought a jace, instead of buying a box. don't be mad at wotc for your own stupid decisions.
to all of the amateur financiers complaining about the value of A25, i suggest you look at the mtggoldfish breakdown. it comes to the same conclusion i have: A25 is basically worth around what it is sold for. and while the idea of not exceeding msrp might disgust you, i would implore you to find any other game or product that you can buy and then resell for anywhere close to msrp.
magic isn't an investment, it's a game. opening packs isn't a prospect, it's a gamble. wotc simply makes magic cards, they don't actually owe you anything more than that.
the problem is that 1/10 can look just like 1/1,000,000 if you only have a sample size of 1.
and for the sake of discussion i'm pretty sure the randomization is based on the order of printing sheets rather than the cards being randomized after being cut. so each print run has something like 1000 different sheet arrangements and those arrangements are what create the randomization. it would be neat for wotc to talk more about their printing process and given the recent hiccups it would probably make people more sympathetic to the challenges they face.
that having been said this specific occurrence is very strange. it could be random chance. the only way to find out is to open more boxes in this manner. it's kind of strange to me that after opening two identical boxes he didn't decide to open a third. that seems like the natural thing to do, especially considering rudy isn't the sort of person who is likely to be drafting with these cards.
the reality is that magic cards aren't truly randomized. true randomization in a production process is hard to create. the order of cards in packs and boxes has some amount of predetermination. in addition to being sorted by rarity, packs have a measured mix of creatures and spells as well. the amount of each color which appears in a pack is also probably somewhat moderated. (i've certainly never seen somebody open a pack that only contained cards of a single color and with true randomization that unlikely occurrence would eventually happen) this degree of predetermination doesn't completely account for opening 24 packs with the same rares but it does give some insight in to how this could have happened. perhaps there are only ~10,000 possible rare combinations per box? that would be enough combinations that you could safely assume nobody would ever buy two boxes and get the same set but still make it statistically possible.
if each box contained 21 rares (mythics are about 1/8) and they were 100% randomized the number of possible combinations would be ~300,000,000,000,000.
there are only 3 planeswalkers in the set and they are jaya, karn, and teferi.