I personally agree with The Mmagic Historian video about this: WotC is becoming more and more controlling, demanding that you never say anything even slightly critical of them on any kind of platform. You pretty much must be a sycophant to work with them.
The censorship on the tournament data is most likely a way to hide the fact that the standard environment is broken and stale.
In the end, wether one likes Secret Lairs or not, it is a long known fact that WotC has become a *****ty company that is employing more and more anti-consumeristic practices to either save money or swindle more money from their addicted playerbase.
From "lower the paper quality, so we might save some money" to "rise the price on the reprints products, they will buy it anyway" to "we in R&D don't playtest cards much, it is not our job" to "we wanted to push even more monetization to Arena, but if we did it people whould be upset, so we will introduct something even more outrageous and dial it back to the point we wanted saying we are 'listening to feedback'" to "we put this card at mythic because 'artificial scarcity'" to "people who play arena will be ok paying more than other games because it is MtG".
Secret Lairs are just the Nth iteration of the player base swindling.
If that is what you want to spend your money on, it's your money, you have the rights to spend them however you want.
On the other hand, it is our right to point out the anti-consumeristic practices the company is employing to push you into spending those money.
So what is to be done? Just kill the whole game? Or maybe we could just kill the profit motive that spurs these inventions. Re-establish the game as a co-operative enterprise whose first responsibility is to the people who play it, rather than the people who own it.
What is to be done?
In this case, either spread out the drops over a greater period (likely making a similar amount of money in the long run) or spoil the contents in advance (making the product seem less predatory). In the long run, maybe hire a single psychologist as a part-time consultant to aid with maintaining a customer engagement while avoiding these problems.
If a company is incapable of turning a profit while maintaining basic ethical standards to avoid the blatant exploitation of compulsive behaviors... then yeah, cancel it.
In most cases, though, there are ways to make profit without such exploitation. I do not question that MTG’s ultimate responsibility is to make its owners money but that does not mean that all means of doing so are equally acceptable.
Another less predatory behaviour would be to not just retire the product after a day, but to leave orders open indefinitely and manufacture the products in order to ship them at set dates throughout the year, like: you can order any secret lair at any time, but it will be shipped to you only every 3 months.
Then make Secret Lairs releases accordingly to those dates, so they can manufacture and ship the new ones together with the backlog of orders for the old ones.
EDIT: it would also make things easier to evaluate how much they impact on the quarterly revenue AND at the same time allow customers to adapt to a set release schedule like every other product they make.
EDIT2: on the other hand, doing things as they are doing now means that any time they see their quarterly revenue is a little lacking, they can ***** out X more Secret Lairs and expect suckers to buy them without question in big numbers.
With the leak about keyword counters from Ikoria, Oubliette could be a decent fit for Ikoria, to be honest.
It comes at 2 devotion to black for Theros synergy, then removes a creature without removing the keyword counters from it in the case the creature returns to the battlefield.
If they put it in a Secret Lair, that's a clear sign they're just completely divorced from reality.
Would it? Isn't it exactly the type of card for secret lair? Quirky and useful, lacking wide appeal but very wanted by a small subset of individuals. That sounds like exactly the kind of thing to be put in secret lair.
What 'should' be put in secret lairs if not this kind of card?
I don't know, may be cards that have actually available counterparts from sets with a wider print-run than one of the first set ever printed that had a print-run smaller than the smallest recent set and never saw a reprint in 26+ years?
True horror from any game publishing company starts when the audience just rolls with the changes.
Its how loot boxes, pay-or-wait, duplicate leveling, and other insidious tactics got started.
The secret lairs is just an evolution of the exclusive buy-a-box promos.
People rationalizing in their heads why its a good purchase, why its not as bad as it appears.
If it proves such a profitable venture, why not extend that to putting never before seen cards in secret lairs?
All the while people ask themselves how we got to this point.
That's exactly the point.
Microtransactions started with the horse armour in Oblivion and now we have $60+ AAA videogames that milk players through microtransactions and lootboxes by design.
WotC has shown that they really want to go down the slippery slope with previous "premium" products like the Masters products:
Fitst Modern Masters was a hit, it costed more than a regular set, but was good value for your money.
Second Modern Masters, WotC saw that customers were willing to pay that extra and rised the price considerably.
Then after the first Eternal masters they started to go down the slope: print them more often, rise the price, put fewer and fewer valuable cards among the draft chaff and see how far can we swindle money from these walking wallets.
When the customers started to notice they just put out the same product FOR A HIGHER PRICE (Ultimate Masters).
Then rebranded the Masters products into the Horizons product by adding CARDS THAT YOU CAN'T GET ANYWHERE ELSE that are legal in an eternal format and will probably not be reprinted for years.
I wouldn't be surprised if WotC started rising the price on this line of products then started to add either "hard to obtain anywhere else" cards or "brand new cards" to it.
For example, dishing out a 5 ally fetchlands and a 5 enemy fetchlands SL for $80 each and never reprint them again in any other widely available product for another 3 years.
Or putting Oubliette in those products, so if you need/want a x4 you either have to pay an outrageous amount of money to have them new or a little less to get some in poor conditions from the secondary market, all the while the card itself will never see another wide print-run.
Then the next step is to put SL exclusive cards in there.
If the product is a monetary success and no one voices any gripes with how it is handled because "you don't need to buy it" or "it is meant for collectors, bro/sis", then you can be 100% sure they will roll it down the slippery slope because there is no negative feedback to stop them.
At the end of the day it's just another interesting product people will buy until they don't, and WotC is always changing their Magic products, so does it really matter? They like to keep things fresh.
if by "interesting product" and "keeping things fresh" you mean:
- product designed to be outrageously overpriced
and
- marketing that employs all of the worst freemium mobile game microtransaction tactics to make people spend without thinking
then more power to you.
They don’t care about ‘buyer fatigue’ because it’s print to demand. 5 people could order it and they’ll keep making these. It’s got to be their safest product for that reason.
Print on demand only cuts a little of the costs, but let's say literally 5 people get to buy the product, that would be a net loss for them. They need to pay for a list of things that can be seen as a fixed cost, for example art commission, design and commercials for the product.
Which means that they NEED to sell at least a fixed amount of product to make it profitable or even break even.
In turn, this means that if they start to get a lowering number of purchases and their revenue start to dwindle on this product, they will discontinue it, no matter if it is "printed on demand".
EDIT: admittedly, the margin on these products is probably so high that just a few thousand sells will make them break even.
Whether this product dies off or not, one thing is pretty sure: WotC will become greedier and greedier with this kind of product and will push constantly decreasing product quality at constantly increasing prices and increasing frequency exactly like they did with the masters products.
Sadly, this kind of product is less likely to fail because people seem to be all too eager to pay an absurd premium price to buy alternate art of cards they never spent more than half a minute thinking about.
I'm assuming that the main reason why Rath was on the list is that it was referring to the plane as it was presented in the Tempest block.
Same reason why there are both Mirrodin and New Phyrexia.
Yet I'm surprised there wasn't the distinction between Dragons Tarkir and Khans Tarkir. They are different enough to warrant the Mirrodin / New Phyrexia split.
Whelp... Looks like we are back to the short story snippets in the articles.
They were bad enough, but it seems they were also leagues better than the dumpster fire that was the War of the Spark novel, if nothing else, because they were a short thing you have to suffer through, like ripping off a patch from an old scratch, instead of wearing a cast for a broken leg.
Can't say I'm thrilled at the idea, but at least people won't have the plot paywalled.
EDIT: I still missed the times when they put relatively decent novels in the fat-packs. They clearly weren't masterpieces of literature, but still...
Never had a card -
- 4th Sister of the Innistrad Archangels
- Asha, the ruler of Bant
- Atraxa before becoming Atraxa
- ... A 5 color identity angel so I can use Maelstrom Archangel in an angel tribal deck...
Had a card, but really need a new version -
- Gabriel Angelfire
- Selenia, Dark Angel
- Radiant, Archangel
This is most probably what will happen a few months from now:
"Pioneer Horizons"
Crappy reprints with a few poorly tested new cards and even less chase cards at mythic all for triple or quadruple the price of regular boosters and half the card quality coming in early-mid 2020!
If we are "lucky" they will also add a collector's version that costs 10 times the regular price and is still choke full of draft garbage, but will have cards with a slightly different border or with art that is actually original.
The censorship on the tournament data is most likely a way to hide the fact that the standard environment is broken and stale.
From "lower the paper quality, so we might save some money" to "rise the price on the reprints products, they will buy it anyway" to "we in R&D don't playtest cards much, it is not our job" to "we wanted to push even more monetization to Arena, but if we did it people whould be upset, so we will introduct something even more outrageous and dial it back to the point we wanted saying we are 'listening to feedback'" to "we put this card at mythic because 'artificial scarcity'" to "people who play arena will be ok paying more than other games because it is MtG".
Secret Lairs are just the Nth iteration of the player base swindling.
If that is what you want to spend your money on, it's your money, you have the rights to spend them however you want.
On the other hand, it is our right to point out the anti-consumeristic practices the company is employing to push you into spending those money.
Then make Secret Lairs releases accordingly to those dates, so they can manufacture and ship the new ones together with the backlog of orders for the old ones.
EDIT: it would also make things easier to evaluate how much they impact on the quarterly revenue AND at the same time allow customers to adapt to a set release schedule like every other product they make.
EDIT2: on the other hand, doing things as they are doing now means that any time they see their quarterly revenue is a little lacking, they can ***** out X more Secret Lairs and expect suckers to buy them without question in big numbers.
It comes at 2 devotion to black for Theros synergy, then removes a creature without removing the keyword counters from it in the case the creature returns to the battlefield.
I don't know, may be cards that have actually available counterparts from sets with a wider print-run than one of the first set ever printed that had a print-run smaller than the smallest recent set and never saw a reprint in 26+ years?
Microtransactions started with the horse armour in Oblivion and now we have $60+ AAA videogames that milk players through microtransactions and lootboxes by design.
WotC has shown that they really want to go down the slippery slope with previous "premium" products like the Masters products:
Fitst Modern Masters was a hit, it costed more than a regular set, but was good value for your money.
Second Modern Masters, WotC saw that customers were willing to pay that extra and rised the price considerably.
Then after the first Eternal masters they started to go down the slope: print them more often, rise the price, put fewer and fewer valuable cards among the draft chaff and see how far can we swindle money from these walking wallets.
When the customers started to notice they just put out the same product FOR A HIGHER PRICE (Ultimate Masters).
Then rebranded the Masters products into the Horizons product by adding CARDS THAT YOU CAN'T GET ANYWHERE ELSE that are legal in an eternal format and will probably not be reprinted for years.
I wouldn't be surprised if WotC started rising the price on this line of products then started to add either "hard to obtain anywhere else" cards or "brand new cards" to it.
For example, dishing out a 5 ally fetchlands and a 5 enemy fetchlands SL for $80 each and never reprint them again in any other widely available product for another 3 years.
Or putting Oubliette in those products, so if you need/want a x4 you either have to pay an outrageous amount of money to have them new or a little less to get some in poor conditions from the secondary market, all the while the card itself will never see another wide print-run.
Then the next step is to put SL exclusive cards in there.
If the product is a monetary success and no one voices any gripes with how it is handled because "you don't need to buy it" or "it is meant for collectors, bro/sis", then you can be 100% sure they will roll it down the slippery slope because there is no negative feedback to stop them.
- product designed to be outrageously overpriced
and
- marketing that employs all of the worst freemium mobile game microtransaction tactics to make people spend without thinking
then more power to you.
Print on demand only cuts a little of the costs, but let's say literally 5 people get to buy the product, that would be a net loss for them. They need to pay for a list of things that can be seen as a fixed cost, for example art commission, design and commercials for the product.
Which means that they NEED to sell at least a fixed amount of product to make it profitable or even break even.
In turn, this means that if they start to get a lowering number of purchases and their revenue start to dwindle on this product, they will discontinue it, no matter if it is "printed on demand".
EDIT: admittedly, the margin on these products is probably so high that just a few thousand sells will make them break even.
Sadly, this kind of product is less likely to fail because people seem to be all too eager to pay an absurd premium price to buy alternate art of cards they never spent more than half a minute thinking about.
Same reason why there are both Mirrodin and New Phyrexia.
Yet I'm surprised there wasn't the distinction between Dragons Tarkir and Khans Tarkir. They are different enough to warrant the Mirrodin / New Phyrexia split.
Rath was a separate, artificial plane made to fuse with Dominaria during the phyrexian invasion.
They were bad enough, but it seems they were also leagues better than the dumpster fire that was the War of the Spark novel, if nothing else, because they were a short thing you have to suffer through, like ripping off a patch from an old scratch, instead of wearing a cast for a broken leg.
Can't say I'm thrilled at the idea, but at least people won't have the plot paywalled.
EDIT: I still missed the times when they put relatively decent novels in the fat-packs. They clearly weren't masterpieces of literature, but still...
Never had a card -
- 4th Sister of the Innistrad Archangels
- Asha, the ruler of Bant
- Atraxa before becoming Atraxa
- ... A 5 color identity angel so I can use Maelstrom Archangel in an angel tribal deck...
Had a card, but really need a new version -
- Gabriel Angelfire
- Selenia, Dark Angel
- Radiant, Archangel
Really hoping we will get at least 1 of those.
"Pioneer Horizons"
Crappy reprints with a few poorly tested new cards and even less chase cards at mythic all for triple or quadruple the price of regular boosters and half the card quality coming in early-mid 2020!
If we are "lucky" they will also add a collector's version that costs 10 times the regular price and is still choke full of draft garbage, but will have cards with a slightly different border or with art that is actually original.
EDIT: at least Feather is not alternate-art, so I can just ignore them completely.