MTG Salvation

Quote from FoodChainGoblins »

It does seem like a decent spec, but I want to point out that there is also a PR version. Both are pretty rare to find though. The card was $1 for years. I always wondered why, especially during Primeval Titan Standard.

As a person who is generally not fond of foils and promos, I think the promo Valakut is stunning. I grabbed one a while back because it was going for about the same price and the other was sold out, and boy howdy was I impressed. Promos are a more select market, so I'm not sure it matters, but if I buy extras it will be those as long as the multiplier remains low.

I think the fact that it has historically only been a 2 of in Scapeshift and that Scapeshifft has been never been a predominant deck in tier 1 is what keeps it lower. Don't get me wrong. It's been a constant presence in the meta to one extent or another for a long time, and Sultai or BTL Scapeshift have been my favorite modern decks for almost as long, but it never saturated the way Grixis "Control" did.

Like all playable land cards that magpies chase they will go up inevitably but slowly until they hit their ceiling, then they will stop. Their are zero reasons to expect them to go down unless they are overvalued and need a downward correction. I don't think that will happen, even though I look at the price and shake my head.

Then again I am not a magpie, so it all looks crazy to me. The very notion that someone would pay $90 for a card when $14 will get you the same card in the same condition that is not prone to curling is just baffiling. Sure, expeditions look Nestor, and foils can be even more Nestor, but it's not like either of the other two printings are ugly. Heck, if you just need shiny cards the gatecrash foil will only set you back thirty bones.

That said, I'm not complaining. I get to profit off that drive, so keep on keepin on.

If that's the way you see it then everything Wizards makes is somehow involved in the secondary market. Printing Nahiri in SoI impacts the secondary market- both because how long they print the product impacts the price, and due to the way the meta game shifts to adapt. If you want to define it that broadly then it sort of loses meaning.

Quote from itachiitachi »

It's also Wotc being involved in the secondary market.

The secondary market is just that- secondary. It is when product that is no longer factory sealed is sold- often in a piecemeal fashion. Wizards selling factory sealed product is the primary market by definition.

Quote from Magicman657 »

This case is awesome. It holds 1 EDH deck per small container and 3 Dragonshield boxes in the 2 larger containers. You can find it for 17$ at the Home Depot (and no, I am not sponsored / affiliated with them in any way :p)

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Stanley-10-Compartment-Professional-Deep-Organizer-014710R/100375900

While I have not used them for magic decks, I can attest to the the greatness of these cases. I use them and the shallower version for other games that have a lot of pieces and need to be organized. The ones I bought were from Harbor Freight, and were not under the Stanley label, but they are otherwise identical. The latches are never going to come undone, and opening and closing them scores of times has not put any wear on the plastic parts. Personally it is way over the top for me to bring to a shop- I am fine with 1-3 decks, but if I played more at friends houses I could see using something like this.

Personally I hold on to all reasonably playable dual lands for Modern. They rarely sit unused for too long.

Quote from Piotr »

Funny you should say this. iMtG was the first app on any mobile platform to get the scanner of MTG cards back in 2011.

I still never got the scanner to reliably scan the card correctly. I read the tutorial and it has really done me no good. my only thought is that if I had some kind of fixed rig to hold the phone and card in place, but at that point it is no longer worth doing for me.

Quote from enigma_b »

It'll dip a little, it's such a big player in modern though that it'll climb right back up.. especially once they stop printing the set. You may just want to pull the trigger as it will always be a player in modern.

I think this is spot on. I can see it getting down to $15 that seems like the absolute floor. The things that are going make that likely are

1. It is part of a Modern deck that has been pretty archetypal for some time. This also means that a lot of Standard players might just hold on to them for profit later or thinking they might try Modern.
2. It is the kind of card that EDH and casual like.

That said, if you want them and are fine waiting until rotation that drop is significant enough in my book to wait. It is certainly not going to get more expensive.

Nahiri- I don't know if I could buy in now even if I really wanted to play her. I had one on my Puca list, and I am just about to get a big point pool, but I think I will move it to 'watch'. Almost $39 is just over my limit. Jace is proof that Nahiri could very well get to $50+, especially if Modern Jeskai Control keeps being a player, but I haven't found a card yet that I am willing to pay $40+ for. Future profit does not sway me unless I am buying into a really cheap card that I think will go somewhere.

Quote from LG_ »

In other news I so hope spoilers start coming tomorrow...I need to know if I could be bothered ordering a box or not >_<

MaRo did say at the end of his last article:

join me next week, when I explain how we mastered the Eternal.

So it would me a mean troll if he didn't spoil something.

Quote from signofzeta »

All I ask for is for 5 choices per set. As a side effect of the change to planewalker deck, we will be seeing the same planeswalker mug every 2 or 3 sets instead of having a variety of cool creatures as the cover card.

I understand what appeals to you, but I have no doubt that this is as much of a reaction to sales as it is a creative decision. I guarantee that if intro packs sold well they would not have been dropped. I know that LGS could not care less about them, and I see leftover intro decks from previous sets on the racks at big box stores long after the next set has come out.

Imagine that people get to play with cool planewalkers. Imagine that they had 5 to choose from, instead of 2.

imagine that WotC runs out of PW design space twice as quickly (if you are talking about per set). Wizards doesn't want 5 for them to choose from, they want to two that will get bought. The other three are just waste. Having 2/set means that people are much more likely to buy 100% of this product each set, and they don't have to put money into producing a product that so many players ignore and let gather dust on shelves.

As I said, one person would more likely buy the entire set of 5, but now 3 sales are lost because they already completed the set at 2..

No, because most people (who look at this kind of product) will still only buy two no matter how many choices they have. The others would just sit on shelves. I will grant you that 5 PW decks would draw more people to buy for a bit, but as soon as WotC proved that these walkers were not going anywhere near competitive play the sales would drop off again. Very few people are going to spend the $45 extra dollars to get 3 more decks that are aimed at players who are transitioning from Duels or the free decks regardless if they have Timmy walkers in them or not. The threshold for how much the target audience is willing to spend on low level product is finite, and printing 5 choices just makes for more waste.

Besides, psychology has shown that as much as people think they want more choices, they are actually more satisfied with the choice they make if they are given fewer options to choose from.

Quote from jackad7 »

What do they even do?

Troll Vorthoses

Quote from DementedKirby »

I straight up want a lot of shard-colored spells and 4-colored spells to warrant the use of a 4-colored commander at the helm. Some of the nephilims' powers are so broken (Yore-Tiller Nephilim and Ink-Treader Nephilim) that I hope they get functionally reprinted onto a legendary creature as well as being included in their respected deck. I want these decks to have functional cards in those color combinations and not good stuff. I don't want it to be some halfassed attempt at doing something that's been asked for for so many years. I just hope to get a legendary creature - really hope - that has Yore-Tiller's and Ink-Treader's ability so that I can legit have them as commander for my deck instead of having to ask the pod's permission to use them.

They should also balance out the land availability. I want shard-color lair lands like the dragons (Rith, Treva, Darigaaz, etc.) had. I want shard panoramas. I want enemy tango lands. WotC always misses opportunities to do these things (didn't make shard lairs with the first commander product which, coincidentally, included those dragons (Intet and the others) when they could've made mana fixing easier.

You genuinely want 5 of their 56 new card slots to be common shard lands? Why? I want them to make things I haven't seen before. There is so little room for innovation in these products that I don't want them using that room to complete a common cycle of lands

Quote from comamonkey »

I have no idea what exactly their printing process is, but I believe the problem is it takes multiple sheets of different fronts to print any given product. If all the sheets have the same back then that's easy, no need to make sure Front A gets back A and so on. All sheets get the same back. For dual-faced cards they have to print a sheet that has to match both sides every time, one mismatch and then pretty much everything after would be wrong. If they all have the same exact back there aren't any misses. If tokens miss, doesn't matter if they match. The problem isn't so much that they can't match every sheet every time. The problem is the extra time and cost to do so. If they were to do something like that consistently we would have to pay even more than we already do for product for Wizards to keep the same profit margin or whatever.

The reason is that in order to make the set as cost effective as possible you want as few plate changes as you can have and as few sheets as possible since you generally are paying by the sheet. You also want as few passes though the die cutters as possible, which means as few printed sheets as you can manage. When you do dual faced cards what you want to happen is that you make as many as it takes for a full sheet of stock (or a half sheet they can do twice). That is a more delicate equation that you might think because cards appear on a sheet dependent on their rarity in order to minimize sheet count.

With tokens, since the the back and fronts don't really pertain to each other and the rarity of them is the same, you can just fill up a sheet (both sides) as needed. For example let's say that there were a 100 cards per sheet (I know it is more than that) but design wants to include 6 different tokens. That is not an issue since the math need not evenly distribute and they are all the same rarity. You want to reduce the number of plate changes on the press because whenever you do that it is more time and more proofing because color and position can vary after each can change. You want to dial it in and be done with it. The math does not fit cleanly but all they have to do with tokens is put as many on one side as will fit and continue from that point on the other until you fill the sheet. You will end up with a remainder of 4 spots so you just put 4 more divided however you want. With DFC you need to have the exact right amount so that the sheet is full without any remainders.

Quote from Equinox2793 »

Don't get me wrong, contraptions is my guess to have in the next set, it's just Boss isn't a good card.

Oh, I don't even think that. I think that contraptions will be a long time coming.

Quote from Downdala »

The free sample packs to learn how to play were a fine addition in my opinion but I don't get who wants or who buys intro packs. I get beginners need preconstructed well-balanced decks, but aren't the duel decks exactly that?

Did you read MaRo's article? He spent half of it explaining why these came about and what hole they aim to fill. These are an intermediate step between the sample decks/Magic Duels and getting to the "make a deck from scratch" point. These are a more focused intro deck with one more booster pack for deck tweaking. The next step in the creation of a Magic addict is the deck builders toolkit. They want the PW deck to add to the new player pool of Standard legal cards.

Unless I have missed an announcement the Duel Decks have never been restricted to Standard legal cards and do not promote deck customization very well.

Quote from ktkenshinx »

It's particularly silly because they would probably reprint Boss in the new set, if they were really going with the mechanic. What better way to remind people how clever they were and create a tie-in to an old set? That said, if this is a super-sneaky "buy for the hype" speculation, where you get copies just to trick people into buying your copies, it makes more sense.

I thought that contraptions were like an 8 on the storm scale. MaRo vowed last year to solve them before he retires, but in the same answer was quick to say that he had no intention of retiring anytime soon. To me that means- "Yea, I will keep it in mind and set it as a challenge, but there are no immediate solutions at hand."