The reason that Snapback is so important is because if you want to jam Narset on T3 and make sure she survives, at least against creatures (say because you get to Day's Undoing next turn), this is the only card that will let you tap out for and protect Narset, since she can't protect herself (though she does help find her protection). The other use this thing has is the ability to cast it for free the turn you cast Day's Undoing, assuming you only have 3 or 4 mana, and not 5. This lets you bounce a threat and wheel it away instead of having to choose if you want to possibly kill it with Tyrant's Scorn (assuming it meets the criteria), pass back to them and bounce it at the end of their turn, or go ahead and wheel and deal with it sticking around and probably killing Narset again. These are all very important reasons why Snapback was chosen. Tyrant's Scorn is what you play out of the board when you need things to die on T2 (aggro matchups), whereas Snapback is more of an anti-midrange card, when you need to tap out to jam your combo piece.
do
Now as for new toys, that's a different discussion to have concerning how many Commandeer (auto win against tron sticking potent noncreature spells), vs Disrupting Shoal (can actually counter creatures) get cut or moved around for Force of Negations.
There's a lot to address here, and a variety of complex decisions being made by WotC with a variety of different reasons all trying to find a way to best appease the greatest number of players. So let's get started.
Commander Products:
Overall I consider the Commander products very well implemented. I think they knew from the start that Sol-Ring was going to be a necessary reprint- tons of players have fond memories of playing with this powerful card on lunchroom players, and being able to bring that power to any commander deck made it an obvious mandatory inclusion, though its legality in EDH is certainly a matter of debate. But WotC is leaving the players to police the format, and it's legal, so as such, I think we can all agree this was a great choice for reprint. The price of Sol Ring was steadily rising and until then only had Judge/FTV reprints. I think the problem with reprinting overly valuable cards in Commander decks is that the decks are designed with an MSRP of affordability in mind, and with that accessibility comes the problem of "what if one commander deck came with Force of Will?" Well, obviously, that deck is going to sell more than any other by vast quantities- any commander product that features an expensive card suddenly becomes much harder and more expensive for the intended audience to obtain. You could see this with the Political Puppets precon, which featured Flusterstorm, or the Devour For Power deck, which introduced Scavenging Ooze. Any product featuring an overly "hot" card causes a run on that specific product- right now we're starting to see the beginnings of that with the new Vampire deck featuring Teferi's Protection, but by and large it's been a while before we've seen the problems Political Puppets and Devour for Power experienced. I think for the most part WoTC has corrected the initial issues these decks had that resulted in them being basically unobtainable. The other issue is that reprinting expensive cards in commander precons is simply not the place to do it. Expensive cards are often extremely powerful, to the point of being format staples. If you do it to one deck, you have to do it to all 4 or 5, or you just won't sell nearly as many of the deck missing the reprint of a $50 bill. Additionally, you have people buying the deck not because they want the deck for commander play, they just want the expensive reprint. If you want to make a card more accessible, you put it in a reprint set like EMA or MMA.
Honestly, with a few exceptions (Flusterstorm, TNN, and I guess we'll see about Teferi's Protection), the commander decks seem pretty well done and well balanced and represent a good value for $35. You start putting $50 cards in them, and I guarantee there will be price gouging and hoarding.
Master Sets:
This is a really tricky one to get right. Masters sets, IMO, are as close as WotC will ever get to breaking the RL, which was created in response to their first Master's set, Chronicles. I'm not going to get into the messy RL debate, but I do need to underline one thing that for the rest of this post is relevant: The RL exists regardless of how you feel about it.
There was some degree of unease in regards to the execution and implementation of the original Modern Masters- its reception would be determining how/if WotC did more of these in the future, and they were very cautious, perhaps overly so, in regards to the print run, wanting to definitely not overprint supply. Given the limited nature of these sets and the high value cards contained within, the pricetag on these serves as a gatekeeper. Firstly, you simply cannot price these packs the same as whatever the current standard set is. You simply wouldn't sell any more standard packs until the MM supply was gone (which it would be, on day 1 at any store that didn't raise its prices). Who wants another pack of AKH when you could be cracking real money cards without having to open an Invo or Mythic? It's the equivalent of a $10 lottery ticket- higher risk, but higher odds and higher rewards. MM1 was a success, but there were some complaints about how hard it was to get packs, and retailers tended to gouge on them, citing the higher demand and limited supply. MM2 would have a higher print run, and the EV wasn't as great. It was much more obtainable for longer. I think the goal is that a customer opening a box of MM product should generally break about even, with some degree of variance above and below EV, but large differences in price vs EV will result in one of two things- retailers raising the price, or the product not selling at all. Ideally, you print the right amount to where everyone who wants some can get some at the MSRP, and it take a while to deplete your supply, and it drops some card prices and provides much needed reprints for cards that are not easily reprintable in standard for power/flavor reasons. $10/pack is fine if the value is there. Make it cheaper and either people won't be able to get a hold of it because it's sold out, or retailers just raise the price on it anyway. I don't need every other card to be Tarmogoyf, but I also don't need every other card to be Crucible of Fire either, so a $10 pricetag is reasonable if the value is there. I feel like MM3 and EMA are sets that were done right, and served their purpose well, with a print run and EV that was appropriate- this product seemed to be more accessible and experience less gouging and served its purpose of delivering some badly needed reprints.
Judge Promos: The reason WotC doesn't want to actually pay judges is that this is making them closer and closer to being actual employees, which would then result in them having to provide all the benefits and protections and minimum wages etc that employers are mandated to have. Paying them actual money creates a legal foothold for a judge to argue that he is a WotC employee- their name is on his paychecks after all.
Whether it's morally right or not for WotC to avoid calling judges employees for the sake of business is another argument, but I honestly think if WotC had to pay their judges actual cash and give them actual benefits.....we'd have a LOT fewer judges.
Your argument that a judge foil means they won't make an actual reprint is completely false however. Let me just list a few Judge cards that also got a reprint:
1998: Lighting Bolt
99: Memory Lapse
2000: Counterspell, Vamp Tutor
2003: Argothian Enchantress, Living Death
2004: 'Geddon, Balance,Phyrexian Negator
2005: Gemstone Mine, Sol Ring, Mishra's Factory
2006-present: Grim Lavamancer, Pernicious Deed, Vindicate, Demonic Tutor, Goblin Piledriver, Dark Ritual, Maze of Ith, Burning Wish, Onslaught Fetchlands, Entomb, Bitterblossom, SoFI, Doubling Season, Goblin Welder, Dark Confidant....
I could keep going honestly, but reviewing all the judge promos, in actuality more judge promos than not have received reprints. Recently, you may note Force of Will, Mana Drain, Karakas, and Flusterstorm as good examples of this. The ones that haven't received reprints are pretty much RL cards that were only made as promos due to the loophole in the RL that got closed off. Nearly every card I've listed has taken a major price hit because with very few exceptions, they ALL have been reprinted en masse.
Let's move on to Inventions/Masterpieces/Invos. We're not going to discuss the hated aesthetics of the Invos, but more to the point- what I like best about Invos is that is gives even the casual standard player who just started a year ago the chance to open something extremely exotic. It gives them a powerful collection boost that can be played or traded for even cards on the RL. But hey, let's look at the argument that the Invos and Masterpieces need more printings anyway. Again, I think there are but a handful of cards that legit actually need higher print numbers. The rest, well, they got their reprints or don't actually need them. Do we really need more Counterspells, another printing of FoW, or even Doomsdays or Lotus Petals for that matter? I mean, I'll give you Crucible of Worlds and Chalice of the Void, and probably a few others, but in reality, just because a card could certainly use another printing on as larger scale doesn't mean they shouldn't be made into Masterpieces or Invos. It just means they need to reprint it. Give it a bit of time and I'm pretty sure most of these cards will end up getting their reprint by the time the next EMA rolls around. It's a good thing that WotC has found another outlet to introduce more of a certain card in a controlled way, not a bad one.
FTV: FTVs are a product you really don't want to make too many of, they lose their appeal and collector's value which is basically what they're being marketed as. There's nothing special about an FTV WalMart edition. I admit they can be hard to obtain, but that's kind of the point, and they drive hard traffic to LGSs and provide guaranteed sales- they're almost made as a tool to boost LGS profits and product allocation given as a reward for having lots of players. It kind of sucks that "good" FTVs get gouged and sold out, but then again, if you made them crappy or overproduced them, there'd be absolutely nothing special about them and stores would just wind up with some really slowly selling box sets on their shelves for entirely too long. I mean, I can STILL go to one of three LGSs and buy an FTV Annihilation for MSRP.
Onto your closing statements:
If your Masters sets of limited print run result in more gains than losses by players, stores are simply going to either open the packs themselves and sell the singles, or they will hike up the MSRP to match demand (see the original Modern Masters). MSRP is just that- SUGGESTED retail pricing.
Availability- the sets lacking it have improved (EMA and MM3 print runs have pretty much met demand, I can't recall anyone locally complaining that they couldn't get the product from these they wanted if they were willing to pay for it. A card being a judge promo does not preclude it from being reprinted en masse and I've provided numerous examples. FTV sets have, IMO, appropriate attainability. A good example of poor attainability would be the Commander Anthology run- that was the product that really struck me as underprinted. No one wants FTV WalMart edition.
The secondary market getting hosed with buyouts is not Wizard's fault-they're not the ones snatching up every copy of every Legends card, and trying to address it by making massive reprints of valuable cards is literally what led to the creation of the reserve list. Really, unless you're a Legacy player, or you just really like North Star in EDH, the buyout pretty much don't affect you much, and newer and better alternatives for commander decks are being printed all the time. So you can't play Hazezon Tamar in your EDH deck cuz you don't want to spend $90 on one and it will never be reprinted- I'm sure you can find plenty of viable alternatives in R/W for token generation. Granted, there are a few cards that are reprintable,but just super awkward to do so. Captain Sisay is a good example- Who is Captain Sisay to newer players? They don't know the Weatherlight cycle, they just know the fab 5 walkers if that. She can't be dropped into the standard storyline, she's not iconic enough to get thrown into a commander product (she spent half the Weatherlight cycle kidnapped after all- something Mirri didn't do), she's not powerful enough to make it into a Modern Masters set as anything besides a bulk rare.....where do you reprint her? An FTV: Iconic Side Characters? As an aside, Captain Sisay is NOT $45. You can get on TCG right now and grab one of many copies for $20ish, so she's hardly the best example of a card needing a reprint.
WotC isn't getting bigger pieces of the pie, they're making the pie bigger so everyone's pieces are bigger- lots of big name cards have been reprinted in the last 3 years to satiate demand and Iconic Masters looks to be seriously continuing that theme. Yes, there are a few cards left that still need a reprint- Rishadan Port and Chalice of the Void come to mind, but I feel they're holding off on those for the next MMA/EMA. The best tasting pie, though, is still the RL pieces, which is an entirely different can of worms I'm not opening up here.
My Legacy deck only has a single full art foil swamp, though I'd prefer a GURU, but since the rest of the deck is pretty much all foil, I need to have this one shiny too. I have a single GURU Island, but it pretty much just hangs out in my binder looking cool.
Any other decks/lands usually get the beta/alpha treatment, I like playing with Beta cards and it's pretty much the only excuse I have to do so.
Magic does not draw on Judeo-Christian theology except in very rare, very isolated instances- Segovian Leviathan and, in pre-Theros, arguably Wrath of God. Their depictions of gender in the Bible are moot for the purposes of this discussion.
To that end: The discussion this topic is generating as well as its responses is fascinating. While female angels are Magic canon, as per the citation of why Richard Garfield made Serra Angel female, I don't necessarily think it needs to be relegated to that. While there is something to be said for sex appeal, and there's nothing wrong with that, there's also something to be said for aesthetically pleasing art in general and I would have no objection to male angels being printed, even if they were "eye candy" for ladies, even as a straight male. Honestly, the "warrior physique" that women find attractive (my wife will not shut up about Jason Momoa), is the same physique men find to be "badass"- I really don't think you'd get any complaints unless all the male angels were posed like Brian Kibler.
The Magic universe, however, has taken a gender neutral descriptor and associated it primarily with females. While it's possible for male angels to exist in Magic (Malach of the Dawn), Angels in Magic are overall typecast as females in a similar way that the term "witch" is usually associated with females, but can also be associated with males- it's just much less common. The biggest obstacle is probably that it would be a large breaking of tradition, and, while it would be met by a lot of positive feedback, there are too many people who would claim that the game is being ruined to satisfy imaginary quotas and target a demographic that isn't the existing one, and before you know it people in the Bible Belt will claim that Magic makes their kids into gay witches.
Which is fine if true, most of the gay witches I've known were pretty nice dudes. I can't say the same for many of the church-going folk in the Bible Belt.
You know, I think there's a relatively low risk of this happening. If you had a NM beta mox, and trimmed the corners, you'd now have a damaged beta mox, not an Alpha, unless you did it pretty much perfectly, and I don't think that's a risk people with a NM beta mox would be willing to take. Wouldn't you just sell it as a NM beta rather than risk screwing up the trim job and ruining the card altogether? While I've got several alpha and beta cards, I wonder if it's even possible to do this anyway, I think the borders on Alphas are broader and trimming a Beta to match would make the corners run right up against the inner corners of the textbox and illustration.
If we're dealing with a played, or damaged card, I would look at the edge of the corners in addition to seeing how close the card's illustration box is to them- I can see someone doing this more realistically, but still only in cases where the card is pretty much already damaged. Anyway, I would also scope out the edges, a trimmed card should exhibit different coloration and weathering on all four corners where "fresh" edges from trimming are exposed against edges that have been exposed since it was printed.
I didn't mean to foil my Legacy deck....one day I just noticed I had accidentally acquired more foils for it than I originally thought I had...so I might as well finish it.
Foil staples are pimp, but really, I like certain foils for the way they make the art pop, even if they're not rare or even playable. Foil Winterflame. Foil Fleetfeather Cockatrice. Foil Gift of Orzhova. I sometimes trade dollar rares for them here and there if I find the foil is particularly attractive. Foil Mirrorwing Dragons are gorgeous and all of $3.
For the most part I regard foils as a nice aesthetic enhancement to the game and a way to see art in a new way on a card I've drafted 4 times already. Outside of cards that I just find particularly attractive, I only pursue foils for EDH and Legacy.
Would you like to be the standard set that's out or releases after RL:EMA hits the shelves?
For this reason, if they were to ever dissolve the RL and reprint things like duals, I would expect it to be with expedition/masterwork style reprints, and then print the hell out of the Standard set they're in. You can't tank the Standard set sales if the duals are in the Standard set packs!
So if you do it this way, how are you helping people get their hands on duals? Let's use the closest comparison I can to this actually happening- expedition lands. Expedition Scalding Tarns are $200. Zen pack foils used to be $200 and are now $150, with nonfoils having fallen to $45. If we assume that the RL not impacting the value of cards like duals is true, then following a similar trend, Expedition Volcanics would begin retailing at $300ish and original prints would fall, at most, by half, leaving them at $150. Given that one of the major issues with LotV was complaints about her $100 pricetag.....how is this solving the problem? Again, this is a generous estimate to say they'd fall by half because Scalding Tarn's pricedrop was triggered by the larger MM reprint, not by an expedition only reprint. If we're looking at expedition only, then before MM was released, Tarns were $90-$100, foils were $200, and expeditions were $200. Since your example would be an expedition only reprint, we wouldn't see there kinds of drops. Volc might head to $200 at the most, with expeditions probably in a similar range.
Also, between the removal from the reserved list and the reprint of regrowth were 11 years. (9 years in case of demonic tutor). Is there any reason to believe that if the reserved list was changed again, any reprint would be any sooner than that?
But the main problem still stands, there is no incentive for wizards to take away the reserved list. Sure, if they reprinted duals or power 9 boxes would sell like sliced bread. but how would that be any different than modern masters?
Basicly, they would only make money if people were willing to spend more money on magic as if otherwise. but since the income of most people is limited, and with it the budget for hobbies like magic,
its unlikely that they would spend more. They just might spend it on duals rather than modern masters or commander. Where is the gain for wizards?
Well, putting duals or other EMA cards in an EMA-esque set would be huge, product would sell like lightning. Of course, there's a lot of other things that would happen too, but there's no doubt that those packs would be perpetually sold out of any LGS that continued to stock Magic after having had its economy wrecked by the repeal of the RL. I question whether they could keep shelves stocked enough to mitigate that loss, hot merchandise is great as long as you can keep supply.
It really begs the question of "WHY" is Wizards leaving money on the table? This boils down to a couple thoughts:
1) Rereleasing duals and other RL cards really puts a damper on pretty much anything else you do. Would you like to be the standard set that's out or releases after RL:EMA hits the shelves? What standard mechanic can you develop that will make people want to buy it instead of playing the Gaea's Cradle/Volcanic Island/Candelabra of Tawnos lottery? Great! You made a set that sells twice as well as anything else! But you've also reduced sales to 1/4th of what they were with your other product. How much do you even choose to run? If you don't print enough, you're not making the money you were after to compensate for the product you're probably selling less of, and upset stores and some owners as well. Owners be damned, it's the stores that just had a good chunk of their inventory drop that are probably not going to be very happy. Not printing enough means you're rocking the boat, violently, and unnecessarily if you're not actually going to be cashing in on it. The RL is still a controversial thing that not everyone thinks should be broken- the fact this is a 122 page discussion speaks to that. So you need to keep stores well stocked enough to be able to make enough money that they- and you- benefit from it despite the depressed inventory they have that just lost a lot of value, and the fact that they won't be selling nearly as much of anything else Magic related for a while. Isn't that kind of printing what got us into the RL mess to begin with? Repealing the RL would be a really, really painful bandaid to rip off for a lot of stores. You need those stores to sell your product. Players may hate the RL, but guess what? They still play Magic, at greater numbers than ever, who cares if they hate one policy, overall, they like the game, and it's as hot as ever. Don't rock the boat of the stores distributing your product and helping make it so succcesful.
2) If you're literally leaving money on the table as a business you ought to have a pretty damn good reason why. The fact that WotC, a company known for its transparency and generosity is oddly extremely mum on the issue means that this is likely a legal issue, though we can't be sure of who they're afraid of getting sued by, or else it's been ordered by Hasbro, probably for the same reason.
So you have a few KNOWN problems with repealing the RL- don't do it by enough and you don't justify the chaos you'd cause with your stores and, yes, the collectors everyone loves to hate. If some people are to be believed in their arguments, being on the RL does not impact pricing for most cards, like duals- their price is driven exclusively by demand. It primarily impacts pricing of ABU cards. So if this argument is true, and you don't print enough, then you won't even change the value of duals enough for players to get them and the whole reason they wanted the RL broken is still an issue, the prices are still too high and, like I mentioned above, you upset a whole bunch of people for no real reason- you didn't even solve the problem you were trying to solve.
On the other hand, if people who believe the mere announcement of the repeal of the RL would lead to RL cards taking a significant hit in value are right, the problem is even more severe, you're almost directly influencing the secondary market in a way that every single person and store holding dual lands just took a massive hit. Some players will be ok with this, some won't, and some will see what kind of class action lawsuit they can join. It may or may not be without merit, but believe me, there will be at least one. Most stores will be upset about their inventory taking enormous hits, and some will need to stock Chronicles levels of this product (and sell it) in order to make up for it. The RL list in this case, is fundamentally impacting the way stores do business by influencing the prices they buy and sell goods at.
And then you have the unknown issues- the above is just speculation on what we can assume potential issues might be. It seems clear to me that as long as the game continues being popular, this is a demand from many players that will fall on deaf ears. Again, if WotC is really leaving money on the table like people claim, then they would know it and have a good reason for it. There are incentives to remove the RL, but there's also a lot of unknown challenges to doing so, as well as some assumed ones in any given scenario of this happening. Magic is doing well despite a subpar standard, a three deck format in Modern, and a difficult to enter Legacy. Standard will change soon enough, Modern needs time to see if it will change, and Legacy stays the same, being awesome but expensive. And EDH players still gonna EDH. Don't. Rock. The. Boat.
Fine, let me correct that then. Regrowth was banned for a very long time, and then it got unbanned and no one really cared. It's pretty moot as well as the others.
The game is in a radically different place than it was 15 years ago, and the stakes for how much a goven card qpuld devalue are much higher than they are now. IINAL but I assume that given the radically different environment we're in today would mean that the state of things 15 years ago would have a selective inpact at best in a couet case if it came down to it.
We might- MIGHT- get a revision of the RL since there is some precedent for that, but I doubt that it would be enough to actually undermine it, and even then I sincerely doubt it. Removal seems like a hard "no". You think wotc doesnt know how much money they'd make by being able to reprint RL cards? They're not being stupid- there's something else that's preventing the removal of the RL and we will probably never know what that is.
Demonic Tutor in those days was pretty much unplayed outside of casual, and EDH didn't exist yet- editing the RL to omit uncommmons made sense, it's not like the first draft of something is never going to undergo amendments. I'd wager that the feedback from the announcement of the creation of the RL list led to its revisions, but they still wanted to fix the problem they were trying to address in the first place from the people who WERE upset about vast reprinting in Chronicles. Yeah, the original iteration of the RL had some kinks to work out, and I think everyone's pretty happy that at least they didn't keep the original one that would have kept adding to the RL. If you're referring to the loophole used to print Mox Diamond, iirc, lots of people were upset enough about that that they closed the loophole in 2011. It didn't really "break" the policy so much as skirting it- that's why it was called a loophole. So if we don't count the loophole that quickly closed, that makes the one and only real change to the policy in 2002. So really, one major revision, and then pretty much nothing for 15 years. That's not hard, fast and loose. There aren't a whole lot of policies put out that are perfect the first time around, I'd expect, even desire some degree of revisions based on feedback when a policy goes public. And those were obviously made for the better, though I imagine a world without Demonic Tutor and Basalt Monolith and Sinkhole would look a lot like it does today. EDH decks would have one less tutor, 4 horsemen would become even less desirable to play, and there's what, two legacy decks that run sinkhole as a 2 of tops?
If you bought Modern Masters 1 at launch for 200 (it was possible, I did it) and sat on it until this year (I did not do this, and cracked both of my boxes), is that not an investment? 4 years is not a very long time, but I'd still call this an investment, and a profitable one as MM1 is going for 350+ as far as I've seen. Or if you had the forethought to hold on the Zendikar Boxes from back in the day. A store could get them for around 80 bucks. Imagine if you "invested" in a case and sat on them until now, selling the boxes for 500. Is 8 years not long enough? Investing can be done in Magic, but is risky, as it's dependent on the health of the game.
RL investing, and even ABUR investing can be done. It's less volatile than trying to invest in current sets, but carries a higher price, and the same risk of the game failing. The issue with worrying about the game failing is that A. according to Wizards the game has been on a steady growth pattern for years now and B.Every system can fail. "Sure", traditional investment opportunities failed during the financial crash in '08. It doesn't matter what you are investing in, there is always a risk that the system crashes.
You might call investing in magic silly, but there are people who have made quite a lot of money doing it. I have a hard time labeling those people as silly, especially is they have managed to do so for a long time.
But I think the prime time for that type of high return mtg investment is over. Wotc has lately been printing the new sets straight into the ground. The real question is where is the true ceiling of old/RL cards? They can't move up forever. At some point even the most hardcore collectors and players cannot justify the price. Where is the investment at that point?
Depends on how you define investment. If your goal is to make money, then you're right, the options for "investing" in older cards in the sense have few opportunities left. If the goal is to make money, you have better options in modern and underrated standard cards that have a chance to break out. Every now and then wizards will print something that has a neat interaction with some weird old RL card, but making bank on something like this is almost dumb luck.
If, on the other hand, your definition of "investing" is to put large quantities of money that you wouldn't otherwise put into a game under the assurance that you could cash out if you wanted/needed to...anyone who buys into Legacy could argue that they are investing in the format. There are not many games or hobbies where you can get out the money you put into them, and Magic, specifically Legacy, is one of the few that has some reasonable basis for this assumption. A big part of that assumption is the RL. It's what makes dumping $150+ on a card "worth it" to those that choose to.
If my Legacy cards became devalued overnight for some unforeseen reason not relating to the RL, it would suck, but I wouldn't be upset about it. No way anyone could see that coming. But Wizards has told people many years ago "We don't control the secondary market prices, but we will say that you will never have to worry about these select cards losing their value from reprints", and then reiterated that promise again and again and again and etched it in stone and patched loopholes and refused to discuss it beyond that. If Wizards torched the RL, I would say that on the one hand, I welcome being able to have more opponents, but on the other, I would not have spent as much money as I had on game pieces to have a key policy, etched in stone, overturned and left me with how standard players caught holding Boros Reckoners at rotation felt, but on a much higher level of betrayal.
There is a HUGE difference between "It's your fault for sinking that much money into game pieces, who invests in a game?" and "It's your fault for sinking that much money into high demand collectible game pieces that have been guaranteed to never be duplicated and for which there are no replacements."
One of these is a reasonable expectation. I would have been perfectly happy if my Underground Seas had stayed at $80. I didn't buy them trying to make money, some people thought I was a little crazy for dropping that kind of cash on a card game, but I didn't really care about money or that people thought $80 was an expensive. They weren't getting reprinted, I wanted to play this hot format that let me play all my favorite stuff from high school, and if I ever quit, I could cash out for close to as much money as I sunk in.
But I'm one of the lucky ones. People buy duals every day, paying triple what I do so they can play Legacy. I wonder if everyone who spent 3 years slowly buying $200 pieces for their decks would feel if, upon its completion, the RL got revoked and suddenly their cards were worth only 40% or less of what they paid for them. Me? I'd lose a lot of value, but it was value I hadn't really planned on making anyway. Still, many people buy into the format at these prices because whether they like or curse the RL, they place their faith in the RL.
As far as the ceiling? I think we've actually approached it. People simply aren't willing to pay more than the current rates for "game pieces" (the dual lands). They are willing to pay more for collectibles though (ABU rares, etc). And the ceiling for powerful game pieces that are also collectible....well..I honestly think there may be some room to grow there in some instances, people are willing to pay a LOT of money for rare baseball cards, and you can't even sac those for 3 mana. With something truly collectible, the sky is the limit. But as far as the game pieces go? There's an equilibrium that I think we've reached where the sell price of game pieces is enough for a small influx of supply from people leaving the game- it's too high for casual players, or people needing to pay rent to ignore the gains from selling off a game they have found themselves less interested in for whatever reason. But it's not high enough to deter people with disposable income for wanting to pick up again and get back into and enjoy. Even Tabernacle, at over $1g for being both a powerful game piece, as well as a collectible, gets bought and sold. I guess the logic here is "well, it may be crazy expensive, but at least I only need 1". I think if 4 were needed, it would see a lot less movement; not that it sees a whole lot now, but it does see some.
And as far as counterfeiting and its impact? On legacy? Not much. Most people buy counterfeits with the interest of cheating in sanctioned events, but aren't quite scummy enough to pawn them off to unsuspecting players. This is because buyers of a $300+ piece of cardboard tend to scrutinize them at a level that china is simply still a long ways off from being able to replicate. There is no fake that can withstand the tests we have available to us today in combination with a loupe, and cards at this level are examined too closely to try to scum other players. Not to say it hasn't been tried, and it hasn't happened, but it's at a low enough and infrequent enough level that the risk/reward is too high. Most scumbags would rather go with the low risk-medium reward of Modern cards. And while the counterfeits are good enough to make it past opponents and most judges who aren't using a loupe, they're still considered risky enough and the quality erratic enough that most players are not willing to go through the hoops and issues of obtaining them, and this is less likely now that allied fetches and other desirables got their reprints.
Is it just me or do I feel like by T3, someone should have answered/have an answer when there's a Sneak Attack on the board?
I mean, unless you have the stone cold nuts hand (and if you do, I don't blame you for wanting to play it to its fullest potential), the blue players allowed Sneak Attack to resolve, it sat there for an entire circle, the green/white players didn't blow it up, the guy untaps and activates it (like this is a big surprise or something) and now no one has a way to bounce/kill the Collossus or at least soak up 2 damage from it? I mean, no good can come of a Sneak Attack sitting on the table, what did you expect the guy to do, put a fuzzy bunny token into play?
Besides that, how common is such an occurance really. You have the stone cold nuts opener of sol ring/sneak attack how often? Is it really that much of a problem?
The only time I can see such a play as "taboo" might be if it's a brand new playgroup who's power level is obviously beneath this, or if it's a large table where the rest of the game can go on for a long time. But I'd expect another player to get eliminated in 15 minutes or so and then I'll play 1v1 or Legacy or something while the rest of the table grinds out. I mean, kinda sucks to be me for 15 mins, but that's ok, that kind of play doesn't happen all the time and it's my fault for tapping out with an StP in my hand knowing there was a Sneak Attack on the table.
It's just you.
There's only so much playable removal that can hit sneak attack or the indestructible threat it brings out, and players are usually trying to develop their own board early on. You have to build your deck expecting people to try and end the game starting from turn 3 or later and that results in MUCH different decks than people would run in more casual edh. Keep in mind that these kinds of strategies continue to work in faster, stronger formats with more consistent decks. Saying "just have the answer" shows a bad understanding of the game.
If you are playing casual decks but have plays like this, I've found it's reasonably common that one player gets knocked out and then the game goes on for an hour. These types of situations are what cause people to stop playing.
I'm just saying that if the table is big enough to where I'm gonna be out for an hour, that implies at least 4 players, probably more like 5. And if someone's running a deck that's Sneaking out Blightsteel on T3/4, I would argue that implies a fairly competitive scene- casual decks don't Sneak Attack a Blightsteel on T3/4. Having said that, if I were playing a casual player and they had the opportunity to make that play, I imagine it's a pretty infrequent, rare occurrence- you don't get to make a play that splashy every day, I'd kind of half expect them to make it. On the other hand, if your deck is routinely doing stuff like this, I'd argue you're playing competitively and anything goes and this shouldn't take very long to finish anyway.
Is it just me or do I feel like by T3, someone should have answered/have an answer when there's a Sneak Attack on the board?
I mean, unless you have the stone cold nuts hand (and if you do, I don't blame you for wanting to play it to its fullest potential), the blue players allowed Sneak Attack to resolve, it sat there for an entire circle, the green/white players didn't blow it up, the guy untaps and activates it (like this is a big surprise or something) and now no one has a way to bounce/kill the Collossus or at least soak up 2 damage from it? I mean, no good can come of a Sneak Attack sitting on the table, what did you expect the guy to do, put a fuzzy bunny token into play?
Besides that, how common is such an occurance really. You have the stone cold nuts opener of sol ring/sneak attack how often? Is it really that much of a problem?
The only time I can see such a play as "taboo" might be if it's a brand new playgroup who's power level is obviously beneath this, or if it's a large table where the rest of the game can go on for a long time. But I'd expect another player to get eliminated in 15 minutes or so and then I'll play 1v1 or Legacy or something while the rest of the table grinds out. I mean, kinda sucks to be me for 15 mins, but that's ok, that kind of play doesn't happen all the time and it's my fault for tapping out with an StP in my hand knowing there was a Sneak Attack on the table.
There are a lot of contributing factors to this, some of which have already been covered, but I'll try for a comprehensive post:
1) It's absolutely true that 90's High Fantasy was a male dominated trope that also targeted males. Magic originated here, and back in those days being a nerd was NOT trendy or hip like it is today, it's something decidedly uncool. And girls don't tend to flock to guys that uncool, or their hobbies. It's not to say that you didn't have the occasional girl in a D&D campaign group or something back then, but the odds were she was as much of a societal outcast as the rest of the group. Eventually though, nerd culture started to become more accepted, and this occurred around the time CGI got good enough to realistically render High Fantasy in the Lord of the Rings movies. For the first time, people didn't have to sit back and imagine a giant dragon or orc battle, or see some clumsy costumes. The best we had for portraying fantasy like that was animation and special effects, but CGI....CGI and Lord of the Rings being the first fantasy movie to REALLY use its power....that was able to bring imaginations to realistic life. Game of Thrones would later mark a return to High Fantasy, and we all know how much it's hailed for its special effects as much as the plot. Being able to realistically render fantasy settings and bring them to life makes them more accessible to more people who might otherwise never find themselves attracted to fantasy storytelling, and in turn, it becomes more acceptable. I mean, let's face it, whether you're a football player, stockbroker, drug dealer, or whatever, Dani riding the back of a firebreathing dragon leading a giant army of Dothraki is FRIKKING COOL. So as nerd culture has become more accepted, it's something more females are willing to associate with, and even enjoy themselves, much as many people suddenly picked up the LoTR books for the first time when the movies released. Still, nerd culture has gotten to a point where we've started to go a little overboard in the celebration of it and it starts getting cringy again "nerd blackface" is the term that man have for how The Big Bang Theory's later episodes would devolve. Please note at around the same time, video games started getting genuinely GOOD. By that I mean that computers/video games were starting to break out of the "nerds and kids only" role they'd had for a while. Of course, they'd done that technically for a while, but socially, video games could still be a little on the nerdy side. The original Xbox changed that with the original HALO, and going over to your bro's house and lugging your TV became a new acceptable pastime because, just like dragons going from makeup and special effects to full blown CGI, video games firmly crossed the threshold into "normal guys play video games." We don't even really consider someone who enjoys playing video games to be a "nerd" anymore, it's just another hobby to us.
2) Since the High Fantasy trope was targeted towards males at Magic's inception, the game started out being male dominated. Not intentionally, I'm sure, but again, back then the closest to fantasy/nerds most girls were allowed to get without killing their social status was Lisa Frank unicorns. Which, for the record, I still think are gloriously awesome in an over the top way, but I digress. Sure, some girls were into High Fantasy as well, but they were the outliers, and without the internet really existing, I'm sure they felt very alone as they were pretty uncommon. My school had a small handful of these girls and I consider it an outlier to have had (5?) girls that enjoyed hanging out with the various "nerd" circles. When the internet came around full force and socialization really began to occur, many people began to see they weren't alone, and also tended to be more open about their interests on their Geocities pages and such. This was where nerds were finally beginning to feel some empowerment, they, like other minorities, could finally connect with more than the "other" weird kid at school. And with empowerment comes confidence, the notion that "Yeah....I'm a nerd....and that's OK." And confidence is sexy. Now more people want to be nerds, and now here's the Lord of the Rings and here's the start of the whole "Gamer Girl" trend which I am NOT going to delve into.....but yeah, there you go, we're starting to see more females get into Magic.
3) Aaaaaaand we're running them back out. What happens when there's one girl sticking her toe in the water of a cardstore full of guys? Especially now that Magic has expanded beyond its original niche audience and included all sorts of people from every walk of life? She gets a LOT of attention from every single dude there. TBH, I think that's why some girls try to make themselves get interested in magic, they enjoy the attention. Please note I said "some". And some guys may do the same just because they're lonely and aren't very good at making friends, but don't honestly care enough about the game to be more than passable at it. Anyway, the issue is that if you find a girl who genuinely enjoys playing Magic....that's like jackpot for some people. Wouldn't it be AWESOME to have a GF that plays Magic? We'd just hang out and play Magic and have sex all the time!
Yeah no. That mentality is a pretty huge turn off to most girls, who would like to be valued for more than their Magic playing skills and ability to have sex. The girls serious about playing? They would like to be respected as players, talked to as comrades, and treated with respect. Instead, they can be met with anything from unwanted advances and crude language to sexual harassment to condescension. And those girls usually have enough self respect to say "screw this, I'm out, I don't need this." Just like in real society, it only take a vocal minority of people to create an impression, so even if you don't think your game store isn't like this doesn't mean you see everything happening to every customer. Ask yourselves if every conversation you've heard at your LGS you'd like to have in front of your mother. Probably not. That's not to say it's "locker room talk" in the Trump definition of the phrase, but I know that my vocabulary gets a deal larger when the Pokémon kids aren't around. This also applies to the vocabularies of misogynists, sexists, and worse. So while you might be guilty of dropping an f-bomb casually or having a slightly crass conversation, other conversations from others might be much more vulgar, discriminatory, and representative of the "locker room talk" our president is a fan of. The types of people who find this kind of talk "OK" are also the kinds of people that will gradually expand that locker room talk outside the locker room and a single player with this mentality is enough to run off every female that comes into the store one at a time.
I do find that once a certain threshold is reached, an LGS becomes regarded as much less male dominated. It's hard to break that barrier of what seems to be 3-4 female regulars, but once it is broken, ladies are much more apt to frequent the store in more equal numbers. As long as those 3-4 females get along with each other, they give a counterbalance to the sexist behavior they may experience and make the store more comfortable for new female players. Ladies also tend to have higher standards for hygiene and thus gravitate to whichever store is the cleanest and most professional, all other things being equal. Guys tend to go after whoever has the best prize support and inventory. There are not a lot of places I wouldn't play if I could draft MM17 for a magical price of $15 for example.
All in all, a girl going to an LGS for the first time might encounter a seedy store on the outskirts of the bad part of town. That's not a great start, but that doesn't mean the people are bad. And hopefully they aren't- a good playgroup and a good store will cause me to forgive a LOT. But then you walk in and everyone turns and looks at you like they've never seen a girl before, and then they find out you're there to play Magic. If you're lucky, the worst thing you run into is a little bit of condescension that might even be unintentional, or perhaps one weird guy excitedly trying to initiate conversation over how you can improve your deck. If you're unlucky you'll get hit on until you have to as the new girl, report the guy that was chatting up the store clerk in friendly conversation 20 mins ago, and have it spelled out to his friend that you're not interested. You then get murdered by the T8 players, who are all male and might include the guy who kept hitting on you, as you start wondering why you don't just stick to Duels on PC or Xbox.
Granted, this experience may not happen to every female, but sadly I bet at least ONE of those elements happens FAR more often than we'd like to admit. We also make it worse when we try to white knight female players when they come in for the first time.
"Oh, it's so good to have a FEMALE magic player" is probably one of the worst things you can say but I hear people say it all the time. The girl cringes and spends the night trying to avoid that fellow because if anyone's singling her out for her gender, it's him.
They are girls, not unicorns. You've seen them before. It's not that Magic the GAME is unfamiliar or unfriendly towards females, it's that it's unusual enough to find a female player for these other reasons that it draws even MORE attention to the players that are female, and you get a circular feedback loop of female magic players being unusual, which creates unwanted attention, which drives away female players and makes female magic players more unusual.....
4) Reasons for playing Magic/misconceptions about the game
This is not exclusive to females, but it does seem to represent a larger percentile than with males. The reasons for this may not even be demographic related, but I'll try to explain. Please note that the following statements are generalizations- we can all find exceptions to these, but these are generalizations based on observations with years spent in various gamestores and tournaments and witnessing various interactions.
Men are all about competition, and they enjoy it to the extent that we regularly subject ourselves to the meanest decks imaginable for fun in the same way an MMA fighter subjects himself to tremendous physical punishment, only to have a beer with his opponent later that night and laugh about it. Good Magic players love to get beaten in the most awful of ways because we learn something. We LOVE watching awesome plays get made even if they crush us and we love the challenge of beating the best. As a result, we spend a lot of our free time playtesting, reading, researching, building, posting, and studying the game or sport we want to excel at. There simply are not that many females that, for whatever reason, want to spend that amount of time and dedication and money to get that good at Magic. For that matter, they are a mirror of the male who struggles with the male that struggles with the notion that <"Magic tournaments are too competitive, I just want to have fun with my friends. (WarAngel88 anyone?)"> I think more woman (not all) are attracted to the game for its art and social aspects. For males, they are much more apt to fall into the "spike" persona, though the other players of "Johnny, Timmy, Vorthos etc..." are also represented. There's nothing wrong with ANY of this, no matter why you play Magic. However, only ONE persona tends to consistently win. Spikes.
If you are a Spike, you are likely going to win over all other personas because that's what's important to you. The storyline is secondary, the card could have a big vomit stain as the artwork, and you could care less about the way you're winning as long as the payoff for all the studying and testing and brewing you've done is that top 8. But most spikes do like the artwork. And they do take some interest in the storyline. And they do enjoy winning in weird ways with tech cards. They get to enjoy all those things too. But for the most part, Timmys and Vorthos don't ever get to enjoy winning, even if they'd like to sometimes. At least not against the spikes. They'll get their victories over their counterparts here and there, but once they get to the high tables, it seems like that barrier cannot be breached without becoming a spike. And that's true, and something a lot of players of both genders just don't get. There's more to being a top competitor than having a bottomless wallet, it takes more work than people realize and some people are just not willing to put that much work into a game they play primarily because they like the artwork and hanging out with friends. At the end of the day, you are probably going to lose against someone who plays 3-4x as often as you do, and puts more time and practice, and yes, devotes more financial resources than you. A lot of people like to blame the last part on why they can't win, when in reality, that's a fairly small piece of the puzzle. It's not nonexistent, but it's a lot smaller than people would like to make it out to be.
So what does all this have to do with female players? It's another reason they don't stick around as long. There are far fewer "spikes", though there is no shortage of people who want to be seen as spikey. Fewer female players= fewer female spikes= top 8 is mainly male dominated= male dominated game. Most people getting into Magic have no IDEA how DEEP the game goes for spikes and how many hours are spent studying not just your deck, but every deck you're likely to face in a meta, let alone actually playing. People getting into Magic simply have no CLUE at the beginning at how much effort it takes to be "good" and quite honestly, most people are not willing to take it seriously enough. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. But until someone does, the T8 will remain unchanging.
I think that kind of covers several points I wanted to make. Again, please note these are generalizations, there are of course exceptions. And there are plenty of clean, well run, professional stores filled with players of every gender. There are female pro players and judges and I think that's great, but that's the point where I stop caring about their gender, and you should too.
Updated: New inclusions are Trophy Mage, Sword of Feast and Famine, and testing Quicksmith Spy.
Trophy Mage is basically Stoneforge Mystic but better in this deck and can tutor a wide swath of artifacts, including the SoFaF. While he doesn't cheat them into play like Stoneforge does, he does provide versatility in what he can fetch. Stoneforge herself has not been included because there's only one piece of equipment in the whole deck; SoFaF and drawing the SoFaF before the mystic feels bad. In order to justify her, I'd need to play at least one other equipment that's as good as SoFaF, ideally another 3 cost one so Trophy Mage can also find it, and that kind of limits me to the Swords, of which the best option is probably SoFi, but the effects just aren't good enough to make me want to make the space for both Stoneforge AND another sword/piece of equipment. Originally the deck was more creature light, which was why SoFaF was excluded, but since its creature count has increased slightly, it's made suiting something up more reliable and turns GA into a quick clock, especially when comboing with any of the various Winter Orb effects the deck features.
Quicksmith Spy is testing. She combos extremely well with Winter Orb, and gives cards like Crucible or Worlds or Thorn of Amethyst something to do besides just sit there, but she does require one of these cards present to actually be worthwhile, though giving Sol Ring the ability to tap to draw a card isn't the worst thing. Still, she isn't as impactful when she hits the board unless you happen to have your Winter Orb out. She's needing more testing time, but so far seems promising.
do
Now as for new toys, that's a different discussion to have concerning how many Commandeer (auto win against tron sticking potent noncreature spells), vs Disrupting Shoal (can actually counter creatures) get cut or moved around for Force of Negations.
There's a lot to address here, and a variety of complex decisions being made by WotC with a variety of different reasons all trying to find a way to best appease the greatest number of players. So let's get started.
Commander Products:
Overall I consider the Commander products very well implemented. I think they knew from the start that Sol-Ring was going to be a necessary reprint- tons of players have fond memories of playing with this powerful card on lunchroom players, and being able to bring that power to any commander deck made it an obvious mandatory inclusion, though its legality in EDH is certainly a matter of debate. But WotC is leaving the players to police the format, and it's legal, so as such, I think we can all agree this was a great choice for reprint. The price of Sol Ring was steadily rising and until then only had Judge/FTV reprints. I think the problem with reprinting overly valuable cards in Commander decks is that the decks are designed with an MSRP of affordability in mind, and with that accessibility comes the problem of "what if one commander deck came with Force of Will?" Well, obviously, that deck is going to sell more than any other by vast quantities- any commander product that features an expensive card suddenly becomes much harder and more expensive for the intended audience to obtain. You could see this with the Political Puppets precon, which featured Flusterstorm, or the Devour For Power deck, which introduced Scavenging Ooze. Any product featuring an overly "hot" card causes a run on that specific product- right now we're starting to see the beginnings of that with the new Vampire deck featuring Teferi's Protection, but by and large it's been a while before we've seen the problems Political Puppets and Devour for Power experienced. I think for the most part WoTC has corrected the initial issues these decks had that resulted in them being basically unobtainable. The other issue is that reprinting expensive cards in commander precons is simply not the place to do it. Expensive cards are often extremely powerful, to the point of being format staples. If you do it to one deck, you have to do it to all 4 or 5, or you just won't sell nearly as many of the deck missing the reprint of a $50 bill. Additionally, you have people buying the deck not because they want the deck for commander play, they just want the expensive reprint. If you want to make a card more accessible, you put it in a reprint set like EMA or MMA.
Honestly, with a few exceptions (Flusterstorm, TNN, and I guess we'll see about Teferi's Protection), the commander decks seem pretty well done and well balanced and represent a good value for $35. You start putting $50 cards in them, and I guarantee there will be price gouging and hoarding.
Master Sets:
This is a really tricky one to get right. Masters sets, IMO, are as close as WotC will ever get to breaking the RL, which was created in response to their first Master's set, Chronicles. I'm not going to get into the messy RL debate, but I do need to underline one thing that for the rest of this post is relevant: The RL exists regardless of how you feel about it.
There was some degree of unease in regards to the execution and implementation of the original Modern Masters- its reception would be determining how/if WotC did more of these in the future, and they were very cautious, perhaps overly so, in regards to the print run, wanting to definitely not overprint supply. Given the limited nature of these sets and the high value cards contained within, the pricetag on these serves as a gatekeeper. Firstly, you simply cannot price these packs the same as whatever the current standard set is. You simply wouldn't sell any more standard packs until the MM supply was gone (which it would be, on day 1 at any store that didn't raise its prices). Who wants another pack of AKH when you could be cracking real money cards without having to open an Invo or Mythic? It's the equivalent of a $10 lottery ticket- higher risk, but higher odds and higher rewards. MM1 was a success, but there were some complaints about how hard it was to get packs, and retailers tended to gouge on them, citing the higher demand and limited supply. MM2 would have a higher print run, and the EV wasn't as great. It was much more obtainable for longer. I think the goal is that a customer opening a box of MM product should generally break about even, with some degree of variance above and below EV, but large differences in price vs EV will result in one of two things- retailers raising the price, or the product not selling at all. Ideally, you print the right amount to where everyone who wants some can get some at the MSRP, and it take a while to deplete your supply, and it drops some card prices and provides much needed reprints for cards that are not easily reprintable in standard for power/flavor reasons. $10/pack is fine if the value is there. Make it cheaper and either people won't be able to get a hold of it because it's sold out, or retailers just raise the price on it anyway. I don't need every other card to be Tarmogoyf, but I also don't need every other card to be Crucible of Fire either, so a $10 pricetag is reasonable if the value is there. I feel like MM3 and EMA are sets that were done right, and served their purpose well, with a print run and EV that was appropriate- this product seemed to be more accessible and experience less gouging and served its purpose of delivering some badly needed reprints.
Judge Promos: The reason WotC doesn't want to actually pay judges is that this is making them closer and closer to being actual employees, which would then result in them having to provide all the benefits and protections and minimum wages etc that employers are mandated to have. Paying them actual money creates a legal foothold for a judge to argue that he is a WotC employee- their name is on his paychecks after all.
Whether it's morally right or not for WotC to avoid calling judges employees for the sake of business is another argument, but I honestly think if WotC had to pay their judges actual cash and give them actual benefits.....we'd have a LOT fewer judges.
Your argument that a judge foil means they won't make an actual reprint is completely false however. Let me just list a few Judge cards that also got a reprint:
1998: Lighting Bolt
99: Memory Lapse
2000: Counterspell, Vamp Tutor
2003: Argothian Enchantress, Living Death
2004: 'Geddon, Balance,Phyrexian Negator
2005: Gemstone Mine, Sol Ring, Mishra's Factory
2006-present: Grim Lavamancer, Pernicious Deed, Vindicate, Demonic Tutor, Goblin Piledriver, Dark Ritual, Maze of Ith, Burning Wish, Onslaught Fetchlands, Entomb, Bitterblossom, SoFI, Doubling Season, Goblin Welder, Dark Confidant....
I could keep going honestly, but reviewing all the judge promos, in actuality more judge promos than not have received reprints. Recently, you may note Force of Will, Mana Drain, Karakas, and Flusterstorm as good examples of this. The ones that haven't received reprints are pretty much RL cards that were only made as promos due to the loophole in the RL that got closed off. Nearly every card I've listed has taken a major price hit because with very few exceptions, they ALL have been reprinted en masse.
Let's move on to Inventions/Masterpieces/Invos. We're not going to discuss the hated aesthetics of the Invos, but more to the point- what I like best about Invos is that is gives even the casual standard player who just started a year ago the chance to open something extremely exotic. It gives them a powerful collection boost that can be played or traded for even cards on the RL. But hey, let's look at the argument that the Invos and Masterpieces need more printings anyway. Again, I think there are but a handful of cards that legit actually need higher print numbers. The rest, well, they got their reprints or don't actually need them. Do we really need more Counterspells, another printing of FoW, or even Doomsdays or Lotus Petals for that matter? I mean, I'll give you Crucible of Worlds and Chalice of the Void, and probably a few others, but in reality, just because a card could certainly use another printing on as larger scale doesn't mean they shouldn't be made into Masterpieces or Invos. It just means they need to reprint it. Give it a bit of time and I'm pretty sure most of these cards will end up getting their reprint by the time the next EMA rolls around. It's a good thing that WotC has found another outlet to introduce more of a certain card in a controlled way, not a bad one.
FTV: FTVs are a product you really don't want to make too many of, they lose their appeal and collector's value which is basically what they're being marketed as. There's nothing special about an FTV WalMart edition. I admit they can be hard to obtain, but that's kind of the point, and they drive hard traffic to LGSs and provide guaranteed sales- they're almost made as a tool to boost LGS profits and product allocation given as a reward for having lots of players. It kind of sucks that "good" FTVs get gouged and sold out, but then again, if you made them crappy or overproduced them, there'd be absolutely nothing special about them and stores would just wind up with some really slowly selling box sets on their shelves for entirely too long. I mean, I can STILL go to one of three LGSs and buy an FTV Annihilation for MSRP.
Onto your closing statements:
If your Masters sets of limited print run result in more gains than losses by players, stores are simply going to either open the packs themselves and sell the singles, or they will hike up the MSRP to match demand (see the original Modern Masters). MSRP is just that- SUGGESTED retail pricing.
Availability- the sets lacking it have improved (EMA and MM3 print runs have pretty much met demand, I can't recall anyone locally complaining that they couldn't get the product from these they wanted if they were willing to pay for it. A card being a judge promo does not preclude it from being reprinted en masse and I've provided numerous examples. FTV sets have, IMO, appropriate attainability. A good example of poor attainability would be the Commander Anthology run- that was the product that really struck me as underprinted. No one wants FTV WalMart edition.
The secondary market getting hosed with buyouts is not Wizard's fault-they're not the ones snatching up every copy of every Legends card, and trying to address it by making massive reprints of valuable cards is literally what led to the creation of the reserve list. Really, unless you're a Legacy player, or you just really like North Star in EDH, the buyout pretty much don't affect you much, and newer and better alternatives for commander decks are being printed all the time. So you can't play Hazezon Tamar in your EDH deck cuz you don't want to spend $90 on one and it will never be reprinted- I'm sure you can find plenty of viable alternatives in R/W for token generation. Granted, there are a few cards that are reprintable,but just super awkward to do so. Captain Sisay is a good example- Who is Captain Sisay to newer players? They don't know the Weatherlight cycle, they just know the fab 5 walkers if that. She can't be dropped into the standard storyline, she's not iconic enough to get thrown into a commander product (she spent half the Weatherlight cycle kidnapped after all- something Mirri didn't do), she's not powerful enough to make it into a Modern Masters set as anything besides a bulk rare.....where do you reprint her? An FTV: Iconic Side Characters? As an aside, Captain Sisay is NOT $45. You can get on TCG right now and grab one of many copies for $20ish, so she's hardly the best example of a card needing a reprint.
WotC isn't getting bigger pieces of the pie, they're making the pie bigger so everyone's pieces are bigger- lots of big name cards have been reprinted in the last 3 years to satiate demand and Iconic Masters looks to be seriously continuing that theme. Yes, there are a few cards left that still need a reprint- Rishadan Port and Chalice of the Void come to mind, but I feel they're holding off on those for the next MMA/EMA. The best tasting pie, though, is still the RL pieces, which is an entirely different can of worms I'm not opening up here.
http://magiccards.info/arena/en/39.html
For Plains I use the Scottish Highland Euro Lands:
http://magiccards.info/euro/en/4.html
My Legacy deck only has a single full art foil swamp, though I'd prefer a GURU, but since the rest of the deck is pretty much all foil, I need to have this one shiny too. I have a single GURU Island, but it pretty much just hangs out in my binder looking cool.
Any other decks/lands usually get the beta/alpha treatment, I like playing with Beta cards and it's pretty much the only excuse I have to do so.
To that end: The discussion this topic is generating as well as its responses is fascinating. While female angels are Magic canon, as per the citation of why Richard Garfield made Serra Angel female, I don't necessarily think it needs to be relegated to that. While there is something to be said for sex appeal, and there's nothing wrong with that, there's also something to be said for aesthetically pleasing art in general and I would have no objection to male angels being printed, even if they were "eye candy" for ladies, even as a straight male. Honestly, the "warrior physique" that women find attractive (my wife will not shut up about Jason Momoa), is the same physique men find to be "badass"- I really don't think you'd get any complaints unless all the male angels were posed like Brian Kibler.
The Magic universe, however, has taken a gender neutral descriptor and associated it primarily with females. While it's possible for male angels to exist in Magic (Malach of the Dawn), Angels in Magic are overall typecast as females in a similar way that the term "witch" is usually associated with females, but can also be associated with males- it's just much less common. The biggest obstacle is probably that it would be a large breaking of tradition, and, while it would be met by a lot of positive feedback, there are too many people who would claim that the game is being ruined to satisfy imaginary quotas and target a demographic that isn't the existing one, and before you know it people in the Bible Belt will claim that Magic makes their kids into gay witches.
Which is fine if true, most of the gay witches I've known were pretty nice dudes. I can't say the same for many of the church-going folk in the Bible Belt.
If we're dealing with a played, or damaged card, I would look at the edge of the corners in addition to seeing how close the card's illustration box is to them- I can see someone doing this more realistically, but still only in cases where the card is pretty much already damaged. Anyway, I would also scope out the edges, a trimmed card should exhibit different coloration and weathering on all four corners where "fresh" edges from trimming are exposed against edges that have been exposed since it was printed.
Foil staples are pimp, but really, I like certain foils for the way they make the art pop, even if they're not rare or even playable. Foil Winterflame. Foil Fleetfeather Cockatrice. Foil Gift of Orzhova. I sometimes trade dollar rares for them here and there if I find the foil is particularly attractive. Foil Mirrorwing Dragons are gorgeous and all of $3.
For the most part I regard foils as a nice aesthetic enhancement to the game and a way to see art in a new way on a card I've drafted 4 times already. Outside of cards that I just find particularly attractive, I only pursue foils for EDH and Legacy.
So if you do it this way, how are you helping people get their hands on duals? Let's use the closest comparison I can to this actually happening- expedition lands. Expedition Scalding Tarns are $200. Zen pack foils used to be $200 and are now $150, with nonfoils having fallen to $45. If we assume that the RL not impacting the value of cards like duals is true, then following a similar trend, Expedition Volcanics would begin retailing at $300ish and original prints would fall, at most, by half, leaving them at $150. Given that one of the major issues with LotV was complaints about her $100 pricetag.....how is this solving the problem? Again, this is a generous estimate to say they'd fall by half because Scalding Tarn's pricedrop was triggered by the larger MM reprint, not by an expedition only reprint. If we're looking at expedition only, then before MM was released, Tarns were $90-$100, foils were $200, and expeditions were $200. Since your example would be an expedition only reprint, we wouldn't see there kinds of drops. Volc might head to $200 at the most, with expeditions probably in a similar range.
Well, putting duals or other EMA cards in an EMA-esque set would be huge, product would sell like lightning. Of course, there's a lot of other things that would happen too, but there's no doubt that those packs would be perpetually sold out of any LGS that continued to stock Magic after having had its economy wrecked by the repeal of the RL. I question whether they could keep shelves stocked enough to mitigate that loss, hot merchandise is great as long as you can keep supply.
It really begs the question of "WHY" is Wizards leaving money on the table? This boils down to a couple thoughts:
1) Rereleasing duals and other RL cards really puts a damper on pretty much anything else you do. Would you like to be the standard set that's out or releases after RL:EMA hits the shelves? What standard mechanic can you develop that will make people want to buy it instead of playing the Gaea's Cradle/Volcanic Island/Candelabra of Tawnos lottery? Great! You made a set that sells twice as well as anything else! But you've also reduced sales to 1/4th of what they were with your other product. How much do you even choose to run? If you don't print enough, you're not making the money you were after to compensate for the product you're probably selling less of, and upset stores and some owners as well. Owners be damned, it's the stores that just had a good chunk of their inventory drop that are probably not going to be very happy. Not printing enough means you're rocking the boat, violently, and unnecessarily if you're not actually going to be cashing in on it. The RL is still a controversial thing that not everyone thinks should be broken- the fact this is a 122 page discussion speaks to that. So you need to keep stores well stocked enough to be able to make enough money that they- and you- benefit from it despite the depressed inventory they have that just lost a lot of value, and the fact that they won't be selling nearly as much of anything else Magic related for a while. Isn't that kind of printing what got us into the RL mess to begin with? Repealing the RL would be a really, really painful bandaid to rip off for a lot of stores. You need those stores to sell your product. Players may hate the RL, but guess what? They still play Magic, at greater numbers than ever, who cares if they hate one policy, overall, they like the game, and it's as hot as ever. Don't rock the boat of the stores distributing your product and helping make it so succcesful.
2) If you're literally leaving money on the table as a business you ought to have a pretty damn good reason why. The fact that WotC, a company known for its transparency and generosity is oddly extremely mum on the issue means that this is likely a legal issue, though we can't be sure of who they're afraid of getting sued by, or else it's been ordered by Hasbro, probably for the same reason.
So you have a few KNOWN problems with repealing the RL- don't do it by enough and you don't justify the chaos you'd cause with your stores and, yes, the collectors everyone loves to hate. If some people are to be believed in their arguments, being on the RL does not impact pricing for most cards, like duals- their price is driven exclusively by demand. It primarily impacts pricing of ABU cards. So if this argument is true, and you don't print enough, then you won't even change the value of duals enough for players to get them and the whole reason they wanted the RL broken is still an issue, the prices are still too high and, like I mentioned above, you upset a whole bunch of people for no real reason- you didn't even solve the problem you were trying to solve.
On the other hand, if people who believe the mere announcement of the repeal of the RL would lead to RL cards taking a significant hit in value are right, the problem is even more severe, you're almost directly influencing the secondary market in a way that every single person and store holding dual lands just took a massive hit. Some players will be ok with this, some won't, and some will see what kind of class action lawsuit they can join. It may or may not be without merit, but believe me, there will be at least one. Most stores will be upset about their inventory taking enormous hits, and some will need to stock Chronicles levels of this product (and sell it) in order to make up for it. The RL list in this case, is fundamentally impacting the way stores do business by influencing the prices they buy and sell goods at.
And then you have the unknown issues- the above is just speculation on what we can assume potential issues might be. It seems clear to me that as long as the game continues being popular, this is a demand from many players that will fall on deaf ears. Again, if WotC is really leaving money on the table like people claim, then they would know it and have a good reason for it. There are incentives to remove the RL, but there's also a lot of unknown challenges to doing so, as well as some assumed ones in any given scenario of this happening. Magic is doing well despite a subpar standard, a three deck format in Modern, and a difficult to enter Legacy. Standard will change soon enough, Modern needs time to see if it will change, and Legacy stays the same, being awesome but expensive. And EDH players still gonna EDH. Don't. Rock. The. Boat.
The game is in a radically different place than it was 15 years ago, and the stakes for how much a goven card qpuld devalue are much higher than they are now. IINAL but I assume that given the radically different environment we're in today would mean that the state of things 15 years ago would have a selective inpact at best in a couet case if it came down to it.
We might- MIGHT- get a revision of the RL since there is some precedent for that, but I doubt that it would be enough to actually undermine it, and even then I sincerely doubt it. Removal seems like a hard "no". You think wotc doesnt know how much money they'd make by being able to reprint RL cards? They're not being stupid- there's something else that's preventing the removal of the RL and we will probably never know what that is.
Depends on how you define investment. If your goal is to make money, then you're right, the options for "investing" in older cards in the sense have few opportunities left. If the goal is to make money, you have better options in modern and underrated standard cards that have a chance to break out. Every now and then wizards will print something that has a neat interaction with some weird old RL card, but making bank on something like this is almost dumb luck.
If, on the other hand, your definition of "investing" is to put large quantities of money that you wouldn't otherwise put into a game under the assurance that you could cash out if you wanted/needed to...anyone who buys into Legacy could argue that they are investing in the format. There are not many games or hobbies where you can get out the money you put into them, and Magic, specifically Legacy, is one of the few that has some reasonable basis for this assumption. A big part of that assumption is the RL. It's what makes dumping $150+ on a card "worth it" to those that choose to.
If my Legacy cards became devalued overnight for some unforeseen reason not relating to the RL, it would suck, but I wouldn't be upset about it. No way anyone could see that coming. But Wizards has told people many years ago "We don't control the secondary market prices, but we will say that you will never have to worry about these select cards losing their value from reprints", and then reiterated that promise again and again and again and etched it in stone and patched loopholes and refused to discuss it beyond that. If Wizards torched the RL, I would say that on the one hand, I welcome being able to have more opponents, but on the other, I would not have spent as much money as I had on game pieces to have a key policy, etched in stone, overturned and left me with how standard players caught holding Boros Reckoners at rotation felt, but on a much higher level of betrayal.
There is a HUGE difference between "It's your fault for sinking that much money into game pieces, who invests in a game?" and "It's your fault for sinking that much money into high demand collectible game pieces that have been guaranteed to never be duplicated and for which there are no replacements."
One of these is a reasonable expectation. I would have been perfectly happy if my Underground Seas had stayed at $80. I didn't buy them trying to make money, some people thought I was a little crazy for dropping that kind of cash on a card game, but I didn't really care about money or that people thought $80 was an expensive. They weren't getting reprinted, I wanted to play this hot format that let me play all my favorite stuff from high school, and if I ever quit, I could cash out for close to as much money as I sunk in.
But I'm one of the lucky ones. People buy duals every day, paying triple what I do so they can play Legacy. I wonder if everyone who spent 3 years slowly buying $200 pieces for their decks would feel if, upon its completion, the RL got revoked and suddenly their cards were worth only 40% or less of what they paid for them. Me? I'd lose a lot of value, but it was value I hadn't really planned on making anyway. Still, many people buy into the format at these prices because whether they like or curse the RL, they place their faith in the RL.
As far as the ceiling? I think we've actually approached it. People simply aren't willing to pay more than the current rates for "game pieces" (the dual lands). They are willing to pay more for collectibles though (ABU rares, etc). And the ceiling for powerful game pieces that are also collectible....well..I honestly think there may be some room to grow there in some instances, people are willing to pay a LOT of money for rare baseball cards, and you can't even sac those for 3 mana. With something truly collectible, the sky is the limit. But as far as the game pieces go? There's an equilibrium that I think we've reached where the sell price of game pieces is enough for a small influx of supply from people leaving the game- it's too high for casual players, or people needing to pay rent to ignore the gains from selling off a game they have found themselves less interested in for whatever reason. But it's not high enough to deter people with disposable income for wanting to pick up again and get back into and enjoy. Even Tabernacle, at over $1g for being both a powerful game piece, as well as a collectible, gets bought and sold. I guess the logic here is "well, it may be crazy expensive, but at least I only need 1". I think if 4 were needed, it would see a lot less movement; not that it sees a whole lot now, but it does see some.
And as far as counterfeiting and its impact? On legacy? Not much. Most people buy counterfeits with the interest of cheating in sanctioned events, but aren't quite scummy enough to pawn them off to unsuspecting players. This is because buyers of a $300+ piece of cardboard tend to scrutinize them at a level that china is simply still a long ways off from being able to replicate. There is no fake that can withstand the tests we have available to us today in combination with a loupe, and cards at this level are examined too closely to try to scum other players. Not to say it hasn't been tried, and it hasn't happened, but it's at a low enough and infrequent enough level that the risk/reward is too high. Most scumbags would rather go with the low risk-medium reward of Modern cards. And while the counterfeits are good enough to make it past opponents and most judges who aren't using a loupe, they're still considered risky enough and the quality erratic enough that most players are not willing to go through the hoops and issues of obtaining them, and this is less likely now that allied fetches and other desirables got their reprints.
I'm just saying that if the table is big enough to where I'm gonna be out for an hour, that implies at least 4 players, probably more like 5. And if someone's running a deck that's Sneaking out Blightsteel on T3/4, I would argue that implies a fairly competitive scene- casual decks don't Sneak Attack a Blightsteel on T3/4. Having said that, if I were playing a casual player and they had the opportunity to make that play, I imagine it's a pretty infrequent, rare occurrence- you don't get to make a play that splashy every day, I'd kind of half expect them to make it. On the other hand, if your deck is routinely doing stuff like this, I'd argue you're playing competitively and anything goes and this shouldn't take very long to finish anyway.
I mean, unless you have the stone cold nuts hand (and if you do, I don't blame you for wanting to play it to its fullest potential), the blue players allowed Sneak Attack to resolve, it sat there for an entire circle, the green/white players didn't blow it up, the guy untaps and activates it (like this is a big surprise or something) and now no one has a way to bounce/kill the Collossus or at least soak up 2 damage from it? I mean, no good can come of a Sneak Attack sitting on the table, what did you expect the guy to do, put a fuzzy bunny token into play?
Besides that, how common is such an occurance really. You have the stone cold nuts opener of sol ring/sneak attack how often? Is it really that much of a problem?
The only time I can see such a play as "taboo" might be if it's a brand new playgroup who's power level is obviously beneath this, or if it's a large table where the rest of the game can go on for a long time. But I'd expect another player to get eliminated in 15 minutes or so and then I'll play 1v1 or Legacy or something while the rest of the table grinds out. I mean, kinda sucks to be me for 15 mins, but that's ok, that kind of play doesn't happen all the time and it's my fault for tapping out with an StP in my hand knowing there was a Sneak Attack on the table.
1) It's absolutely true that 90's High Fantasy was a male dominated trope that also targeted males. Magic originated here, and back in those days being a nerd was NOT trendy or hip like it is today, it's something decidedly uncool. And girls don't tend to flock to guys that uncool, or their hobbies. It's not to say that you didn't have the occasional girl in a D&D campaign group or something back then, but the odds were she was as much of a societal outcast as the rest of the group. Eventually though, nerd culture started to become more accepted, and this occurred around the time CGI got good enough to realistically render High Fantasy in the Lord of the Rings movies. For the first time, people didn't have to sit back and imagine a giant dragon or orc battle, or see some clumsy costumes. The best we had for portraying fantasy like that was animation and special effects, but CGI....CGI and Lord of the Rings being the first fantasy movie to REALLY use its power....that was able to bring imaginations to realistic life. Game of Thrones would later mark a return to High Fantasy, and we all know how much it's hailed for its special effects as much as the plot. Being able to realistically render fantasy settings and bring them to life makes them more accessible to more people who might otherwise never find themselves attracted to fantasy storytelling, and in turn, it becomes more acceptable. I mean, let's face it, whether you're a football player, stockbroker, drug dealer, or whatever, Dani riding the back of a firebreathing dragon leading a giant army of Dothraki is FRIKKING COOL. So as nerd culture has become more accepted, it's something more females are willing to associate with, and even enjoy themselves, much as many people suddenly picked up the LoTR books for the first time when the movies released. Still, nerd culture has gotten to a point where we've started to go a little overboard in the celebration of it and it starts getting cringy again "nerd blackface" is the term that man have for how The Big Bang Theory's later episodes would devolve. Please note at around the same time, video games started getting genuinely GOOD. By that I mean that computers/video games were starting to break out of the "nerds and kids only" role they'd had for a while. Of course, they'd done that technically for a while, but socially, video games could still be a little on the nerdy side. The original Xbox changed that with the original HALO, and going over to your bro's house and lugging your TV became a new acceptable pastime because, just like dragons going from makeup and special effects to full blown CGI, video games firmly crossed the threshold into "normal guys play video games." We don't even really consider someone who enjoys playing video games to be a "nerd" anymore, it's just another hobby to us.
2) Since the High Fantasy trope was targeted towards males at Magic's inception, the game started out being male dominated. Not intentionally, I'm sure, but again, back then the closest to fantasy/nerds most girls were allowed to get without killing their social status was Lisa Frank unicorns. Which, for the record, I still think are gloriously awesome in an over the top way, but I digress. Sure, some girls were into High Fantasy as well, but they were the outliers, and without the internet really existing, I'm sure they felt very alone as they were pretty uncommon. My school had a small handful of these girls and I consider it an outlier to have had (5?) girls that enjoyed hanging out with the various "nerd" circles. When the internet came around full force and socialization really began to occur, many people began to see they weren't alone, and also tended to be more open about their interests on their Geocities pages and such. This was where nerds were finally beginning to feel some empowerment, they, like other minorities, could finally connect with more than the "other" weird kid at school. And with empowerment comes confidence, the notion that "Yeah....I'm a nerd....and that's OK." And confidence is sexy. Now more people want to be nerds, and now here's the Lord of the Rings and here's the start of the whole "Gamer Girl" trend which I am NOT going to delve into.....but yeah, there you go, we're starting to see more females get into Magic.
3) Aaaaaaand we're running them back out. What happens when there's one girl sticking her toe in the water of a cardstore full of guys? Especially now that Magic has expanded beyond its original niche audience and included all sorts of people from every walk of life? She gets a LOT of attention from every single dude there. TBH, I think that's why some girls try to make themselves get interested in magic, they enjoy the attention. Please note I said "some". And some guys may do the same just because they're lonely and aren't very good at making friends, but don't honestly care enough about the game to be more than passable at it. Anyway, the issue is that if you find a girl who genuinely enjoys playing Magic....that's like jackpot for some people. Wouldn't it be AWESOME to have a GF that plays Magic? We'd just hang out and play Magic and have sex all the time!
Yeah no. That mentality is a pretty huge turn off to most girls, who would like to be valued for more than their Magic playing skills and ability to have sex. The girls serious about playing? They would like to be respected as players, talked to as comrades, and treated with respect. Instead, they can be met with anything from unwanted advances and crude language to sexual harassment to condescension. And those girls usually have enough self respect to say "screw this, I'm out, I don't need this." Just like in real society, it only take a vocal minority of people to create an impression, so even if you don't think your game store isn't like this doesn't mean you see everything happening to every customer. Ask yourselves if every conversation you've heard at your LGS you'd like to have in front of your mother. Probably not. That's not to say it's "locker room talk" in the Trump definition of the phrase, but I know that my vocabulary gets a deal larger when the Pokémon kids aren't around. This also applies to the vocabularies of misogynists, sexists, and worse. So while you might be guilty of dropping an f-bomb casually or having a slightly crass conversation, other conversations from others might be much more vulgar, discriminatory, and representative of the "locker room talk" our president is a fan of. The types of people who find this kind of talk "OK" are also the kinds of people that will gradually expand that locker room talk outside the locker room and a single player with this mentality is enough to run off every female that comes into the store one at a time.
I do find that once a certain threshold is reached, an LGS becomes regarded as much less male dominated. It's hard to break that barrier of what seems to be 3-4 female regulars, but once it is broken, ladies are much more apt to frequent the store in more equal numbers. As long as those 3-4 females get along with each other, they give a counterbalance to the sexist behavior they may experience and make the store more comfortable for new female players. Ladies also tend to have higher standards for hygiene and thus gravitate to whichever store is the cleanest and most professional, all other things being equal. Guys tend to go after whoever has the best prize support and inventory. There are not a lot of places I wouldn't play if I could draft MM17 for a magical price of $15 for example.
All in all, a girl going to an LGS for the first time might encounter a seedy store on the outskirts of the bad part of town. That's not a great start, but that doesn't mean the people are bad. And hopefully they aren't- a good playgroup and a good store will cause me to forgive a LOT. But then you walk in and everyone turns and looks at you like they've never seen a girl before, and then they find out you're there to play Magic. If you're lucky, the worst thing you run into is a little bit of condescension that might even be unintentional, or perhaps one weird guy excitedly trying to initiate conversation over how you can improve your deck. If you're unlucky you'll get hit on until you have to as the new girl, report the guy that was chatting up the store clerk in friendly conversation 20 mins ago, and have it spelled out to his friend that you're not interested. You then get murdered by the T8 players, who are all male and might include the guy who kept hitting on you, as you start wondering why you don't just stick to Duels on PC or Xbox.
Granted, this experience may not happen to every female, but sadly I bet at least ONE of those elements happens FAR more often than we'd like to admit. We also make it worse when we try to white knight female players when they come in for the first time.
"Oh, it's so good to have a FEMALE magic player" is probably one of the worst things you can say but I hear people say it all the time. The girl cringes and spends the night trying to avoid that fellow because if anyone's singling her out for her gender, it's him.
They are girls, not unicorns. You've seen them before. It's not that Magic the GAME is unfamiliar or unfriendly towards females, it's that it's unusual enough to find a female player for these other reasons that it draws even MORE attention to the players that are female, and you get a circular feedback loop of female magic players being unusual, which creates unwanted attention, which drives away female players and makes female magic players more unusual.....
4) Reasons for playing Magic/misconceptions about the game
This is not exclusive to females, but it does seem to represent a larger percentile than with males. The reasons for this may not even be demographic related, but I'll try to explain. Please note that the following statements are generalizations- we can all find exceptions to these, but these are generalizations based on observations with years spent in various gamestores and tournaments and witnessing various interactions.
Men are all about competition, and they enjoy it to the extent that we regularly subject ourselves to the meanest decks imaginable for fun in the same way an MMA fighter subjects himself to tremendous physical punishment, only to have a beer with his opponent later that night and laugh about it. Good Magic players love to get beaten in the most awful of ways because we learn something. We LOVE watching awesome plays get made even if they crush us and we love the challenge of beating the best. As a result, we spend a lot of our free time playtesting, reading, researching, building, posting, and studying the game or sport we want to excel at. There simply are not that many females that, for whatever reason, want to spend that amount of time and dedication and money to get that good at Magic. For that matter, they are a mirror of the male who struggles with the male that struggles with the notion that <"Magic tournaments are too competitive, I just want to have fun with my friends. (WarAngel88 anyone?)"> I think more woman (not all) are attracted to the game for its art and social aspects. For males, they are much more apt to fall into the "spike" persona, though the other players of "Johnny, Timmy, Vorthos etc..." are also represented. There's nothing wrong with ANY of this, no matter why you play Magic. However, only ONE persona tends to consistently win. Spikes.
If you are a Spike, you are likely going to win over all other personas because that's what's important to you. The storyline is secondary, the card could have a big vomit stain as the artwork, and you could care less about the way you're winning as long as the payoff for all the studying and testing and brewing you've done is that top 8. But most spikes do like the artwork. And they do take some interest in the storyline. And they do enjoy winning in weird ways with tech cards. They get to enjoy all those things too. But for the most part, Timmys and Vorthos don't ever get to enjoy winning, even if they'd like to sometimes. At least not against the spikes. They'll get their victories over their counterparts here and there, but once they get to the high tables, it seems like that barrier cannot be breached without becoming a spike. And that's true, and something a lot of players of both genders just don't get. There's more to being a top competitor than having a bottomless wallet, it takes more work than people realize and some people are just not willing to put that much work into a game they play primarily because they like the artwork and hanging out with friends. At the end of the day, you are probably going to lose against someone who plays 3-4x as often as you do, and puts more time and practice, and yes, devotes more financial resources than you. A lot of people like to blame the last part on why they can't win, when in reality, that's a fairly small piece of the puzzle. It's not nonexistent, but it's a lot smaller than people would like to make it out to be.
So what does all this have to do with female players? It's another reason they don't stick around as long. There are far fewer "spikes", though there is no shortage of people who want to be seen as spikey. Fewer female players= fewer female spikes= top 8 is mainly male dominated= male dominated game. Most people getting into Magic have no IDEA how DEEP the game goes for spikes and how many hours are spent studying not just your deck, but every deck you're likely to face in a meta, let alone actually playing. People getting into Magic simply have no CLUE at the beginning at how much effort it takes to be "good" and quite honestly, most people are not willing to take it seriously enough. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. But until someone does, the T8 will remain unchanging.
I think that kind of covers several points I wanted to make. Again, please note these are generalizations, there are of course exceptions. And there are plenty of clean, well run, professional stores filled with players of every gender. There are female pro players and judges and I think that's great, but that's the point where I stop caring about their gender, and you should too.
Trophy Mage is basically Stoneforge Mystic but better in this deck and can tutor a wide swath of artifacts, including the SoFaF. While he doesn't cheat them into play like Stoneforge does, he does provide versatility in what he can fetch. Stoneforge herself has not been included because there's only one piece of equipment in the whole deck; SoFaF and drawing the SoFaF before the mystic feels bad. In order to justify her, I'd need to play at least one other equipment that's as good as SoFaF, ideally another 3 cost one so Trophy Mage can also find it, and that kind of limits me to the Swords, of which the best option is probably SoFi, but the effects just aren't good enough to make me want to make the space for both Stoneforge AND another sword/piece of equipment. Originally the deck was more creature light, which was why SoFaF was excluded, but since its creature count has increased slightly, it's made suiting something up more reliable and turns GA into a quick clock, especially when comboing with any of the various Winter Orb effects the deck features.
Quicksmith Spy is testing. She combos extremely well with Winter Orb, and gives cards like Crucible or Worlds or Thorn of Amethyst something to do besides just sit there, but she does require one of these cards present to actually be worthwhile, though giving Sol Ring the ability to tap to draw a card isn't the worst thing. Still, she isn't as impactful when she hits the board unless you happen to have your Winter Orb out. She's needing more testing time, but so far seems promising.