It's easy to pile on Wizards but to some extend they are victims of their own success. With double digit growth in sales and player base for 5 years they are in a sticky situation. Modern masters was the most expensive (per pack) of any set they have ever printed. And for many the closest analog to that of any set they have made in the past was Chronicles. And that set almost killed magic ( at least in my area). I also lived through the homelands/fallen empires era of over printing and terrible cards so I don't begrudge them being conservative.
Lets recap what they have done just recently:
Reprint
Shocklands
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Taarmagoyf
Vendillion Clique
Thoughtseize
New Mechanisms for fighting goyf:
Deathrite Shaman
Scavenging Ooze
So to say they are not taking player demand is ridiculous. Fetchlands are a matter of if not when, and Rishadan Port and Wasteland are likely to squeeze out when they can find the right venue.
To me having reprinted Goyf once means they are probably more likely to bring it back again. Maybe modern masters 2, maybe a core set, maybe a FTV:Beaters. But trust me they pay enough attention to secondary markets to try and keep everyone happy and cash in themselves. I also not sure what people are asking for. It dropped to ~$90 after Modern Masters came out. Hot mythics in standard regularly get to ~$30 or ~$40. We have dozens of modern cards floating in the ~$30 to $40 range. I would be satisfied if goyf was reprinted enough to drive it to $80 but we don't all get what we want.
Fetchlands are the barrier to entry for modern. There are plenty of decks without goyfs. But $500 man bases for every deck is a non-starter for my friends trying to get in. That said when shocks are out of standard, fetchland reprint possibilities creep close to 100%.
I also lived through the FE era. Back in '95, I saw an endcap display at Hastings (primarily a CD and VHS tape store) with about 80 sealed boxes of Fallen Empires on it. You only have to look through the collection of anybody who played back then to see how massively overprinted FE, Chronicles, Ice Age, and Revised were. Revised was popular enough to be bought up quickly even at increased volume, but the others languished for years. A card store I visited in Memphis in 2010 still had tons of Ice Age boosters for sale at $3/each. Even with the enormous recent growth in player base, those sets still hold almost no value apart from the Revised dual lands.
The best way to maintain value in a collectible card game is by being a bit more conservative -- if you overprint something, you wind up pleasing nobody, because a product that has value only as a collectible is worthless when everybody who wants one can have one.
The MMA reprint was wasted on the people who opened it, in my area they all just foolishly sold any Goyf or Bob that was opened and bought Standard cards that will be worth a total of $5 by next year, at which point they'll still be complaining about the price of Goyf and Bob how they're impossible to get. Chronicles cards, for all their faults, were intended for play by the casual players who actually opened them -- everybody back then had a playset of white bordered City of Brass in their decks on account of that set. If all you are looking for is to increase total supply on the market, and don't care about getting the cards into casual players' hands, putting them in packs is unnecessary. I would say they're done with Goyf in sealed products, at least for several years. A Judge Foil in the old card frame is the sort of thing I'd be expecting next.
River of Tears has at least a shot of being played, if the deck stays UB, because B on your turn and U on theirs is pretty much ideal. Secluded Glen will NOT see any play in Fae, because giving away the information about a Fae in your hand is terrible -- you play all your stuff at instant speed on their turn, at least much of the time, and you don't want to reveal information you don't need to. It was a necessary evil back then, but not now. The guy who got his purchase of Secluded Glen refunded should be happy in the long run, the card is a bust.
Darkslick Shores will be the land to watch.
I think Secluded Glen is fine, you can reveal certain cards that won't matter, considering they won't be able to do anything about it anyway. Revealing BB isn't bad in the slightest. I think Glen will be played over River in the long run, not what you described, I dont think fast lands are what this deck wants either, considering it wants UUU, and doesn't want lands into play tapped.
I've played Fae with Secluded Glen. Yeah, it's fine if you're revealing/playing a Bitterblossom on Turn 2. But it gives away too much information in a substantial number of games, especially in blue mirrors. I would never use Secluded Glen ever again after my experience with the card. People buying up Secluded Glen are taking a pretty big chance, and I would stay the hell out of their way and let them fall on their face. It's just not an optimal choice in a format with 10 years worth of dual lands to choose from.
Darkslick Shores would be my pick if you think UB Fae will be a deck. And FWIW, Sunken Ruins was also used in Fae both during Standard and the short-lived 4-block Extended format, and might also be a better pickup than Glen. Or perhaps none of those lands could make the cut. Modern is the largest format that UB Fae has ever been part of, and expecting the mana base to resemble that of smaller formats is presuming too much.
I feel the same way as you Quacker. Someone probably had insider information. IF this is the case then someone is either leaking or profiting off said knowledge to the detriment of the community.
I checked out the timing of the run on Noble Hierarchs, as that was clearly in response to the DRS ban announcement. On eBay there were about a dozen buy-it-nows that were snapped up in quick succession. It appears to have started at 9:10pm Sunday night. If eBay is showing me Pacific time on the completed listings, then that doesn't indicate any foreknowledge, but I'm in the Central Time Zone and it always shows me Central time for active listings.
I think there was likely no foreknowledge here, just a lot of people who were guessing correctly. It was a pretty easy guess, and each time a b&r announcement was upcoming there were a few people who moved in on BB ahead of the announcement.
BB is probably played as a 4-of, or not at all, which helps support the price. It could be played in 2-3 decks. It saw basically no legacy play, so the $15 price was based on casual play and folks with long-term specs on it being unbanned. $75 seems unsustainably high, as Mutavault wasn't that high before reprints and was more heavily played than I'd expect BB to be. V-Clique was played all over Legacy and Modern, albeit as a 2-3 copy per deck card, and barely approached that level. If the BB Fae deck is competitive at all, it will be widely played because it is fun to pilot, so I could see it staying above $50 in that case. If Fae doesn't pan out, there will be a lot of folks wanting to play BW tokens, as that deck has a reputation as a casual favorite, and that ensures enough demand that it won't even dip back below $30.
River of Tears has at least a shot of being played, if the deck stays UB, because B on your turn and U on theirs is pretty much ideal. Secluded Glen will NOT see any play in Fae, because giving away the information about a Fae in your hand is terrible -- you play all your stuff at instant speed on their turn, at least much of the time, and you don't want to reveal information you don't need to. It was a necessary evil back then, but not now. The guy who got his purchase of Secluded Glen refunded should be happy in the long run, the card is a bust.
You can buy NM copies for $175-185 easily. Why would anyone pay $65-75 more?
I get there is a "you get it from a trusted source" thing, but srsly, that's an INSANE markup.
I wonder if we'll see stores buying out other stores of the cheaper copies to make sure they can get their "Top Dollar" for it...
This is the problem with MTG these days.
I don't think it could be easy to manipulate the market on something like a Revised Underground Sea. There are hundreds of thousands of copies of that card in existence. It's not like a Candelabra or Tabernacle where most copies are already with players, collectors, or vendors. There are likely still tens of thousands of copies of any revised dual land you name that are just sitting in shoeboxes across America steadily being discovered and hitting the market. LGS owners are always having people come into the store who haven't played since 1994, and their longboxes have 2-3 duals in them.
During the 2011 Legacy panic, online vendors including SCG pushed the price of USea over $100, but eBay lagged behind for literally months with $100 copies readily available. It just doesn't seem easy to artificially push the price on a card as widely available as revised dual lands.
I have to agree with Jeff. Goyf is far more ubiquitous than TNN will ever be, and when Goyf rotated out of old Extended and only playable in Legacy, you could have a playset for about $200. Legacy demand alone was only enough to put a $50-ish tag on Goyf -- though admittedly Legacy is bigger now than in 2010.
You can get TNN for $35 shipped pretty easy on eBay right now, and people locally were parting with theirs for $30 cash last week when I got mine. I fully believe it's a $40+ card long-term, because Scavenging Ooze's price history pre-M14 sets the price floor. Ooze was played in lesser numbers due to 1) being bad in multiples, and 2) being often paired with GSZ as a singleton. TNN should outperform Ooze, but $100 is only happening if we saw a really extreme and prolonged imbalance in the metagame towards "fair decks". Anytime the format tilts back towards combo, some copies of TNN are going to be cut for copies of V-Clique in that style of deck.
It would appear that foil stoneforge mystics are continuing to rise in value. I looked around a bit before listing the 3 playsets of foils I had accumulated from back when the set was still standard legal from box opening or otherwise. $150 each seemed a decent price when I listed them given the general lack of them available, and, well, all three $600 playsets sold within 2 hours all to another card business. Looks like $180 is about the bottom of the range at the moment barring a couple of single copies, and $200 probably isn't too far off. Crazy stuff.
Anyhow, figured I would give a heads up, something to keep an eye on for sure.
Holy cow, foil SFM has more than doubled in price since the end of November when they were selling for $70-ish. The foil was at $5 in fall of 2010, pre-CawBlade. I think that puts it at #2 behind Seward's Folly as the best investment in the history of mankind.
Some really nice tulips we've all got in our binders right now, guys. Really nice.
The one of the issues the format has is the hate does not really hate. It would be more apposite to rename it "dislike". Stony silence and perhaps rest in peace are the exceptions to the rule-it ruins decks- but how often do you see blood moon beat a scapeshift or tron deck? Never. They just deal with it and go off. Ditto leyline. Hatebears can do a job for sure- thalia is genuine class- but how many grand abolishers get played? And how many hatebears meet pyroclasm? Slaughter games is strong from the board, but only against very narrow combo- and most of the combo decks benefit from similar versions of the same effect- like kiki/twin.
Most of the hate is permanent based, and its pretty difficult to hate those all court BG-x decks that can remove every type of permanent easily.
I wrote about hate-card philosophy in my column for mtgoacademy last month, and one of the things I suggested was that wotc print more hate cards that have shroud if they want hate to be effective. I also pointed out that other ccg's routinely made their hate cards hard to remove to really clamp down on disfavored strategies. If they printed some with shroud, opponents could still remove hate cards, but it wouldn't be as easy and there'd be no one-size-fits-all answer, so you could mix up the hate in your board to better effect. RIP is the best hate card printed in years, because it nukes the yard on the way down and therefore helped you even if it is removed/bounced later.
Standard IS shockingly cheap right now. Back as recently as Summer 2010, every competitive Standard deck but one was filled to the brim will full playsets of multiple mythic rares all selling at $30 and up. There hasn't been a deck at the expense level of Mythic Conscription in quite awhile.
When the player base finally stops growing and actually shrinks for a year, which WILL happen at some point soon, we're going to find that the sets from the past few years were massively overprinted relative to Magic's core base of players and collectors. The resulting market fallout will make Theros look like Fallen Empires.
I play Legacy mostly. But I'm interested in the strategic aspect of the game. I don't want a cheesy win because some schmuck got ripped off buying cards! I want to win (or lose) by strategy and fortune.
If somebody sits across from me with counterfeit cards, he has already cheated, because he skipped the part where you are required to obtain the cards. It would be the same as playing with cards you outright physically stole from somebody, if you could somehow tell a card was stolen you would certainly cry foul if you saw it in your opponent's deck. Counterfeiters basically are stealing from me and you right now, because they are undermining the legitimacy of valuable collectibles that we both own. I don't care how well a thief plays the game, I care that he's a damn thief.
I really don't want Legacy events to be filled with kids who printed off decks for $50 from a Chinese website. If you appreciate the Legacy community, its level of competition, its level of maturity, and its rabid devotion to the format, I don't think you would want that either.
So selling them at MSRP means you can't stay open?
Weird...
I'd be perfectly fine with limiting quantities and being first come first serve. Early bird gets the worm.
Yeah, it'd be great to give them to regulars. Maybe start a list and go that route.
The LGS owner in our area really does need to sell those supplemental products above MSRP to help make that business profitable, and he's not alone. FTV sets are basically a subsidy payment to LGS owners from WotC, and a well-deserved one on the whole, as the game's current level of participation relies heavily on those LGS owners to run all the low-level tournaments that attract players. I'm not saying they'd have to shutter their doors if they were somehow forced to sell everything at or below MSRP, but anything that encourages LGS owners to keep at it despite all the pitfalls and frustrations is good for the game in the long run.
In my experience, in years when I was regularly buying heavy amounts of product from an LGS, they were usually inclined to make FTV available to me at a reasonable (but still marked up) price.
Really, other than customer loyalty considerations, there's no good reason to sell those things at MSRP if you know you could make more elsewhere. Selling at MSRP to the first person through the door sounds like something a college kid would love, since they can get to a gaming store in the middle of the day a lot easier than they can scrounge up extra money, but it doesn't benefit the business.
This is a large/small/small block, so I would expect that a deck that was viable in the single-set block format has a good chance to remain strong. Gruul Midrange/Ramp was an obvious deck, and has been heavily played in block, at one point taking up about half the metagame. So there's a good chance Xenagos would continue to see play throughout block, and possibly in Standard next fall. You could basically take the block ramp deck and toss in Garruk from M15 and have a reasonable-looking deck in an archetype that usually has some presence. And the best card against ramp is Thoughtseize, which I expect WotC to print a punisher for at some point this year.
There is always the chance that the printing of even a couple seemingly-insignificant cards could shake up the whole environment. Single-set block is heavily influenced by the precise parameters of available removal spells, and certain decks are held back by mana-fixing or gaps in their mana-curve. But I would bet on Xenagos strategies being a fixture of Block and at least marginally-playable in Standard at some point, and he's the type of walker that if you want him in your deck, you want 3-4.
If you don't play modern, I would agree that speculating on a format that was created solely so WotC could reprint cards in it at will is not the best place to be.
This old canard being trotted out again, eh? "Solely" so they could reprint cards? Hardly. They could have done Masques to present in that case. The format in their mind was about having a quasi-eternal format unlike Legacy, one that reflected more of their current design philosophy and preferred deck characteristics. Their management of the banned list indicates that Modern is, to them, about making a sort of "Standard-plus", a relatively safe place for people to continue playing their cards after they rotate. That they have the ability to reprint anything in Modern is nice for them, but it wasn't anywhere close to being their "sole" reason for creating the format.
And I don't buy your argument about increased demand turning things back around. So far, Modern Masters was just a giant wealth transfer away from my binder and into WotC's coffers.
As for the specifics of the event deck, a $75 event deck is beyond the price range of most of those budget players who whine incessantly for cheap mythics, etc. A few of them might save up and snare a copy, but I expect that if WotC puts much value in the deck, most will just be bought by dealers and parted out, so the cards will end up on the singles market and not in the decks of new Modern players. It will depress prices without growing the format at all.
As far as speculation goes: As far as I can tell Standard dropping more than older cards, which might partly be due to the higher number of panicking people in standard (just look at what happens after each GP. After mono B did awesome how many people dropped their decks since "they're so much worse than mono B!!!!" and bought into that deck?), but I'm just speculating here^^
Legacy dailies didn't start firing with any level of success until this year, and they still depend largely on upcoming big events (paper GP, the legacy MOCS, etc) to make them fire regularly. Legacy isn't the format for the DE grinders, it requires too much money tied up in cards that are hard to move for full value. The people holding those cards are holding them for other reasons than to earn packs with them.
There may be a price dip in Legacy after GP DC this weekend, but it won't have anything to do with WotC pulling the DE's.
I also lived through the FE era. Back in '95, I saw an endcap display at Hastings (primarily a CD and VHS tape store) with about 80 sealed boxes of Fallen Empires on it. You only have to look through the collection of anybody who played back then to see how massively overprinted FE, Chronicles, Ice Age, and Revised were. Revised was popular enough to be bought up quickly even at increased volume, but the others languished for years. A card store I visited in Memphis in 2010 still had tons of Ice Age boosters for sale at $3/each. Even with the enormous recent growth in player base, those sets still hold almost no value apart from the Revised dual lands.
The best way to maintain value in a collectible card game is by being a bit more conservative -- if you overprint something, you wind up pleasing nobody, because a product that has value only as a collectible is worthless when everybody who wants one can have one.
The MMA reprint was wasted on the people who opened it, in my area they all just foolishly sold any Goyf or Bob that was opened and bought Standard cards that will be worth a total of $5 by next year, at which point they'll still be complaining about the price of Goyf and Bob how they're impossible to get. Chronicles cards, for all their faults, were intended for play by the casual players who actually opened them -- everybody back then had a playset of white bordered City of Brass in their decks on account of that set. If all you are looking for is to increase total supply on the market, and don't care about getting the cards into casual players' hands, putting them in packs is unnecessary. I would say they're done with Goyf in sealed products, at least for several years. A Judge Foil in the old card frame is the sort of thing I'd be expecting next.
I've played Fae with Secluded Glen. Yeah, it's fine if you're revealing/playing a Bitterblossom on Turn 2. But it gives away too much information in a substantial number of games, especially in blue mirrors. I would never use Secluded Glen ever again after my experience with the card. People buying up Secluded Glen are taking a pretty big chance, and I would stay the hell out of their way and let them fall on their face. It's just not an optimal choice in a format with 10 years worth of dual lands to choose from.
Darkslick Shores would be my pick if you think UB Fae will be a deck. And FWIW, Sunken Ruins was also used in Fae both during Standard and the short-lived 4-block Extended format, and might also be a better pickup than Glen. Or perhaps none of those lands could make the cut. Modern is the largest format that UB Fae has ever been part of, and expecting the mana base to resemble that of smaller formats is presuming too much.
I checked out the timing of the run on Noble Hierarchs, as that was clearly in response to the DRS ban announcement. On eBay there were about a dozen buy-it-nows that were snapped up in quick succession. It appears to have started at 9:10pm Sunday night. If eBay is showing me Pacific time on the completed listings, then that doesn't indicate any foreknowledge, but I'm in the Central Time Zone and it always shows me Central time for active listings.
I think there was likely no foreknowledge here, just a lot of people who were guessing correctly. It was a pretty easy guess, and each time a b&r announcement was upcoming there were a few people who moved in on BB ahead of the announcement.
BB is probably played as a 4-of, or not at all, which helps support the price. It could be played in 2-3 decks. It saw basically no legacy play, so the $15 price was based on casual play and folks with long-term specs on it being unbanned. $75 seems unsustainably high, as Mutavault wasn't that high before reprints and was more heavily played than I'd expect BB to be. V-Clique was played all over Legacy and Modern, albeit as a 2-3 copy per deck card, and barely approached that level. If the BB Fae deck is competitive at all, it will be widely played because it is fun to pilot, so I could see it staying above $50 in that case. If Fae doesn't pan out, there will be a lot of folks wanting to play BW tokens, as that deck has a reputation as a casual favorite, and that ensures enough demand that it won't even dip back below $30.
Darkslick Shores will be the land to watch.
I don't think it could be easy to manipulate the market on something like a Revised Underground Sea. There are hundreds of thousands of copies of that card in existence. It's not like a Candelabra or Tabernacle where most copies are already with players, collectors, or vendors. There are likely still tens of thousands of copies of any revised dual land you name that are just sitting in shoeboxes across America steadily being discovered and hitting the market. LGS owners are always having people come into the store who haven't played since 1994, and their longboxes have 2-3 duals in them.
During the 2011 Legacy panic, online vendors including SCG pushed the price of USea over $100, but eBay lagged behind for literally months with $100 copies readily available. It just doesn't seem easy to artificially push the price on a card as widely available as revised dual lands.
You can get TNN for $35 shipped pretty easy on eBay right now, and people locally were parting with theirs for $30 cash last week when I got mine. I fully believe it's a $40+ card long-term, because Scavenging Ooze's price history pre-M14 sets the price floor. Ooze was played in lesser numbers due to 1) being bad in multiples, and 2) being often paired with GSZ as a singleton. TNN should outperform Ooze, but $100 is only happening if we saw a really extreme and prolonged imbalance in the metagame towards "fair decks". Anytime the format tilts back towards combo, some copies of TNN are going to be cut for copies of V-Clique in that style of deck.
Holy cow, foil SFM has more than doubled in price since the end of November when they were selling for $70-ish. The foil was at $5 in fall of 2010, pre-CawBlade. I think that puts it at #2 behind Seward's Folly as the best investment in the history of mankind.
Some really nice tulips we've all got in our binders right now, guys. Really nice.
I wrote about hate-card philosophy in my column for mtgoacademy last month, and one of the things I suggested was that wotc print more hate cards that have shroud if they want hate to be effective. I also pointed out that other ccg's routinely made their hate cards hard to remove to really clamp down on disfavored strategies. If they printed some with shroud, opponents could still remove hate cards, but it wouldn't be as easy and there'd be no one-size-fits-all answer, so you could mix up the hate in your board to better effect. RIP is the best hate card printed in years, because it nukes the yard on the way down and therefore helped you even if it is removed/bounced later.
When the player base finally stops growing and actually shrinks for a year, which WILL happen at some point soon, we're going to find that the sets from the past few years were massively overprinted relative to Magic's core base of players and collectors. The resulting market fallout will make Theros look like Fallen Empires.
If somebody sits across from me with counterfeit cards, he has already cheated, because he skipped the part where you are required to obtain the cards. It would be the same as playing with cards you outright physically stole from somebody, if you could somehow tell a card was stolen you would certainly cry foul if you saw it in your opponent's deck. Counterfeiters basically are stealing from me and you right now, because they are undermining the legitimacy of valuable collectibles that we both own. I don't care how well a thief plays the game, I care that he's a damn thief.
I really don't want Legacy events to be filled with kids who printed off decks for $50 from a Chinese website. If you appreciate the Legacy community, its level of competition, its level of maturity, and its rabid devotion to the format, I don't think you would want that either.
The LGS owner in our area really does need to sell those supplemental products above MSRP to help make that business profitable, and he's not alone. FTV sets are basically a subsidy payment to LGS owners from WotC, and a well-deserved one on the whole, as the game's current level of participation relies heavily on those LGS owners to run all the low-level tournaments that attract players. I'm not saying they'd have to shutter their doors if they were somehow forced to sell everything at or below MSRP, but anything that encourages LGS owners to keep at it despite all the pitfalls and frustrations is good for the game in the long run.
In my experience, in years when I was regularly buying heavy amounts of product from an LGS, they were usually inclined to make FTV available to me at a reasonable (but still marked up) price.
Really, other than customer loyalty considerations, there's no good reason to sell those things at MSRP if you know you could make more elsewhere. Selling at MSRP to the first person through the door sounds like something a college kid would love, since they can get to a gaming store in the middle of the day a lot easier than they can scrounge up extra money, but it doesn't benefit the business.
There is always the chance that the printing of even a couple seemingly-insignificant cards could shake up the whole environment. Single-set block is heavily influenced by the precise parameters of available removal spells, and certain decks are held back by mana-fixing or gaps in their mana-curve. But I would bet on Xenagos strategies being a fixture of Block and at least marginally-playable in Standard at some point, and he's the type of walker that if you want him in your deck, you want 3-4.
This old canard being trotted out again, eh? "Solely" so they could reprint cards? Hardly. They could have done Masques to present in that case. The format in their mind was about having a quasi-eternal format unlike Legacy, one that reflected more of their current design philosophy and preferred deck characteristics. Their management of the banned list indicates that Modern is, to them, about making a sort of "Standard-plus", a relatively safe place for people to continue playing their cards after they rotate. That they have the ability to reprint anything in Modern is nice for them, but it wasn't anywhere close to being their "sole" reason for creating the format.
And I don't buy your argument about increased demand turning things back around. So far, Modern Masters was just a giant wealth transfer away from my binder and into WotC's coffers.
As for the specifics of the event deck, a $75 event deck is beyond the price range of most of those budget players who whine incessantly for cheap mythics, etc. A few of them might save up and snare a copy, but I expect that if WotC puts much value in the deck, most will just be bought by dealers and parted out, so the cards will end up on the singles market and not in the decks of new Modern players. It will depress prices without growing the format at all.
Legacy dailies didn't start firing with any level of success until this year, and they still depend largely on upcoming big events (paper GP, the legacy MOCS, etc) to make them fire regularly. Legacy isn't the format for the DE grinders, it requires too much money tied up in cards that are hard to move for full value. The people holding those cards are holding them for other reasons than to earn packs with them.
There may be a price dip in Legacy after GP DC this weekend, but it won't have anything to do with WotC pulling the DE's.