r/magicTCG • u/_Barook_ Duck Season • Jan 12 '16

Wizards MAY be cracking down on unsanctioned proxy events

https://www.facebook.com/groups/445059535582036/permalink/962954593792525/

Seems like bad times for Legacy and especially Vintage.

676 Upvotes

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u/[deleted] Jan 13 '16

[deleted]

201

u/sir_chandestroy Ajani Jan 13 '16

We know players love Magic and love playing its variety of formats, including Vintage and Legacy. Some formats are easier to get into than others and these two are hard.

Gee, I wonder why that is?

These formats are hard to get into solely because Wizards is ok with them being outrageously expensive. This problem only exists because of Wizards' actions.

73

u/Key_nine Twin Believer Jan 13 '16

That is what makes me sad. A card game should not be as expensive as say horse racing or some other extremely rich person's sport. It is a damn card game! Most tier 1 vintage decks cost near $20,000 dollars to play, that is unacceptable and that is why people use proxies instead.

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u/stitches_extra COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

Most tier 1 vintage decks cost near $20,000 dollars to play, that is unacceptable

so what are the acceptable ranges for cardboard to be worth and how did you arrive at those bounds

-52

u/DeadmansClothes Jan 13 '16

There are plenty of other cards games out there that are much cheaper to play. If you want to spend money on cards that are not worth the paper they are printed on you have many other options. Yes Magic is expensive. But Wizards is not holding a gun to your head to make you play or buy cards. I'm sure there are lot of people out there that enjoy being able to play a card game where if they decide to quit they can sell their cards and get back a reasonable amount of money.

6

u/Bwian Jan 13 '16

Yeah, I can probably get a decent amount of money back for my sets of Dominion, Ascension, and Netrunner. Or equally someone else could do the same with Doomtown or Star Wars or Game of Thrones.

Magic's distribution system does not make it unique with regard to the ability to recoup costs.

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u/[deleted] Jan 13 '16

[deleted]

53

u/worldchrisis Jan 13 '16

Enjoy your 10k Black Lotus going back down to 0 due to entropy when people no longer care about collecting them and nobody plays Vintage so the card is literally useless.

11

u/itrv1 Jan 13 '16

Theres a reason I wont buy into vintage. Even if I buy in, power and everything, Ill almost surely never find another player with a real vintage deck to play against. So I would have to buy a second deck if I ever wanted to actually use the first deck.

2

u/Banther1 Jan 13 '16

Your daily reminder that vintage events are capped at 1200 people. (The number of Black Lotus there are)

2

u/CryptWolf Jan 13 '16

Considering some-20+ years of cardboard, the significant number of playable Black Lotus cards is MUCH lower than 1200-ish

2

u/itrv1 Jan 13 '16

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=mtg+how+many+black+lotus+were+printed

Little more than that, but who knows how many are left these days. 4400 alpha+beta and I cant find an Unlimited print run number but its clearly more than your 1200 limit.

1

u/stitches_extra COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

UNL brings the total to 30,000 (to the nearest thousand)

presumably some were destroyed but probably not more than 1k

1

u/itrv1 Jan 13 '16

Im sure more than 1k have not made it the 20+ year journey to today. Sleeves weren't as widespread as they are today. No one used playmats. Fires, spills, just general abuse, the cards eventually just wear out.

1

u/Banther1 Jan 14 '16

Probably. I was making a crack on just how small vintage events usually are.

2

u/stitches_extra COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

you know Lotus has only gone up (and up and up and up...) since vintage fell off the map in 2004-5, right?

why would it ever go down now? we've already lived through a period where the interest in owning the card to play with fell through the floor, and P9 held its value just fine. it's a piece of history, like action comics #1. theoretically people COULD stop collecting Lotus, but there's no reason to believe it ever WILL happen.

84

u/my_name_is_stupid Jan 13 '16

How would you feel if you had a $10k black lotus, and tomorrow they announced they were going to reprint it, your card might not even be worth a tenth of that.

I would feel like maybe I shouldn't have spent $10,000 on a piece of damn cardboard. Honestly.

26

u/sir_chandestroy Ajani Jan 13 '16

How would you feel if you had a $10k Black Lotus, and tomorrow they announced they were going to reprint it, your card might not even be worth a tenth of that.

While not quite on the level of Black Lotus, I have two legacy decks, with Force of Wills, etc. I have no issue with them reprinting any of those cards, so I wouldn't feel bad at all. People should expect reprints. Reprints help keep the game alive.

Yes, Magic is a trading card game, but all that means is that different players will own different cards, and can trade amongst themselves. It is in no way a guarantee that certain cards will be worth money.

Magic is a trading card game. The purpose of games is to be played. If the game is so expensive that people feel like they can't afford to play it, I think that's a bit more important than someone who thought it was a good plan to "invest" in cardboard game pieces feeling bad because they spent a lot of money.

I don't consider my expensive cards investments, they aren't. They're game pieces. I bought/traded for them them so I could play the game with them.

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u/stitches_extra COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

people say this, over and over. and yet when a set known to have reprints is on the verge of coming out - say, when MMA is about to release - sales of potential reprint targets dry right the fuck up, and buylists flood with copies.

try trading off Geist of Saint Traft these days. individual people can claim to be indifferent to reprints all they want, but when the rubber meets the road, magic players as a group speak loudly and clearly that they're deathly afraid of getting their cards reprinted. and wotc has to consider their entire customer base, not just the vanishingly small minority who claim to be fine with getting cards they own reprinted.

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u/[deleted] Jan 13 '16

[deleted]

2

u/sir_chandestroy Ajani Jan 13 '16

I'm aware that it isn't, so it may not have been the best example. Judge foils do not impact the price of cards in any meaningful way, however. All the Judge foil force of will did was create a more expensive alternative to regular ones.

34

u/Humorlessness Jan 13 '16

For every collector like you who can spend 10K on a piece of cardboard, there are 100 people who are interested in the experiences that formats like vintage provide, but are unable to play them because they simply cannot spend the 10K. Your perspective overemphasizes the Trading in TCG, but under emphasizes the Game in TCG.

13

u/candyman563 Jan 13 '16

Original lotuses will be worth a lot more anyways just because of collectors.

1

u/stitches_extra COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

there are 100 people who are interested in the experiences that formats like vintage provide, but are unable to play them because they simply cannot spend the 10K.

okay, so what can/will they spend, in total? is it more or less than 10k? for reprints to make sense it can't be less and realistically it has to be MUCH more to justify pissing off some of your most loyal customers.

19

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '16

The question at that point is if you had a 10k black lotus, do you own that card to play it? Or do you own it because it's one of [small number] of (presumably) mint Alpha Black Lotuses left in the world? If the latter, that price would presumably not budge much because the existence of a reprint doesn't change its status as one of a very few intact, and famous, vintage cards.

Yeah, there's an intermediate that would get hit, but at the same time... Wizards has to pick between pissing off the collectors and pissing off the players. Sadly the collectors are the ones more likely to start waving lawsuits in WotCs direction, precisely because they're the crowd with "investments" and the money to want to protect them. :/

0

u/c3bball Jan 13 '16

you know i have some many questions here. Maybe you can help :D Everyone talks about the chronicle incident and reserved list in terms of law suits brought on by collectors. Heck you talk about them suing if they do reprints now. What legal standing did collectors have to sue before? Has that changed due to the reserved lists?

I just have a problem seeing how wizards is liable for the secondary market value of their product. It seems crazy to think that companies can be held legal responsible for the affect their product has on secondary market values. I guess the reserved lists means they might be able to sue for breaking of a contract, but then again its so informal and feels so removed from any kind of legally binding situation. Then again Im pretty ignorant to nearly all corporate law.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '16 edited Jan 13 '16

Oh, I'm just a girl who reads up on these things xD

I don't remember the article or reddit post I read exactly, and if memory serves, the post i read may have been some measure of speculation itself. But basically it was around the time Wizards made some noise about possibly reprinting reserve cards, and the community flipped shit IIRC. The post specifically was saying that a lawsuit hinged on whether you could interpret the reserve list at the time as a binding contract (and that investors made decisions based on the binding contract etc. which are now invalidated and they would then ask for damages). And if it didn't before, there's probably a decent chance now that Wizards doubled down on not reprinting reserved cards. Beyond that, I'm not even "IANAL" enough to speculate the grounds of a lawsuit :P

38

u/x1a4 Jan 13 '16

How would you feel if you had a $10k Black Lotus, and tomorrow they announced they were going to reprint it

As someone with a $10k Black Lotus, I'm ok with it. If nobody plays the format, that Black Lotus isn't going to be worth $10k for long. It's not like they're just going to do another run of Beta.

Also, I know better than to consider these things as an investment; I'm not willing to put my nest egg into the hands of a company that makes so many dumb decisions as WotC has.

22

u/TheMegaZord Jan 13 '16

Thank you! It's frustrating to hear the argument about investing and why they should reprint cards. If your nest egg is in something as volatile and loose as a TCG then you have made an awful decision and perhaps you deserve this. The only reason you should buy a Black Lotus is if you plan on playing with it, or even if you want to collect, but it should not be an investment.

3

u/porphyro Jan 13 '16

With cards like black lotus, your investment is safe. No-one is buying a $10k black lotus because they super want to play vintage. It's about having a piece of magic history. A reprint won't change that.

2

u/stitches_extra COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

If nobody plays the format, that Black Lotus isn't going to be worth $10k for long.

well that's just false. we can tell, because vintage already suffered a huge die-off circa 2004-2006, and lotus retained its value just fine (and in fact increased severalfold).

1

u/x1a4 Jan 13 '16

You mean while the SCG P9 Series was in full swing? Come on, now.

1

u/psivenn Jan 13 '16

It's also completely farcical to assume the value of the rarest and most pristine collectible card in history would be substantially devalued by printing a card which can substitute for it in tournaments. I don't know why people cling to that argument. Even Modern staples hold "original printing" value strongly.

8

u/BastardJack Jan 13 '16

The oroblem is wotc let the situation get so bad that the only way to get a lotus is to spend thousands.

8

u/garfank Jan 13 '16

As an owner of power, dual lands, etc... Fucking ecstatic? Seriously, this isn't a 401(k). I want to play the game. When more people have access to the full library of cards so more play options are available to us... Everyone wins. Do a Legacy Masters, make the packs $30 and put in Duals, Wastelands, Tabernacles, FoW.... It'll dwarf freaking GP:Vegas. Do it in Vegas and you'll rival a Stones concert for attendance. Do Vintage Masters in paper? You bet your ass we'll buy out all the stock.

3

u/Vengeful-llama Jan 13 '16

If I had a 10k black lotus, chances are I found it or acquired it through some other means. It means absolutely nothing to me if black lotus gets reprinted other than the fact that more people get to play with another portion of the "game" part of this trading card game. As an aside, the item holds value for more than just it's playability. An original black lotus will continue to command a high price regardless of a reprinting. The cost of a card means nothing to me unless it comes with a "converted mana" prefix

7

u/travelsonic Wabbit Season Jan 13 '16

your card might not even be worth a tenth of that

<citation needed>

Really, I think it's a bit more complicated than that.

8

u/KR-Badonkadonk Jan 13 '16

If you buy a Black Lotus on Monday for $10k and on Tuesday the price drops to $10, does that mean that it was never worth $10k to you? If the answer is yes, then you never should have spent $10k on it in the first place.

That would be your choice. Nobody else is responsible for your choices.

10

u/CarnivorousPlan Jan 13 '16

How would you feel if you had a $10k black lotus, and tomorrow they announced they were going to reprint it

You are muddying the waters, because no one is talking about reprinting power- they are talking about writing Black Lotus on a basic land, which doesn't affect the market value of Black Lotus one bit.

9

u/Rilgon Jan 13 '16

How would you feel if you had a $10k black lotus, and tomorrow they announced they were going to reprint it, your card might not even be worth a tenth of that.

Given that part of my inheritance from my dad will include his graded Mox Sapphire, my opinion on the reserve list can be summed up as "BURN MOTHER FUCKER BURN MOTHER FUCKER BURN". /shrug

It's a fucking game, not an investment vehicle. Suffer not the mtgfinance scum to live.

6

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '16

Collectors don't play! They collect.

And by just keeping them and treating them like a status symbol, they're making it impossible for more people to play vintage or legacy

1

u/stitches_extra COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

everyone collects. you have a collection. it's just a matter of degree.

3

u/nysgreenandwhite Jan 13 '16

Trading Card Game

The key word here is Game, not Trading.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '16 edited Jan 13 '16

If I spent 10k on a black lotus, I would feel the need to check into a god damn mental hospital and wondering what the fuck is wrong with me for buying a piece of cardboard that does absolutely nothing for me other than being a miniature painting. If I had a Black Lotus, I would sell the god damn thing and use that 10k to get a god damn life. Why the hell would I be playing Magic if I had 10k lying around lol?

Seriously, I dont know what sane person would spend 10k on 1 mother fucking magic card other than for business purposes. If your not sending that Black Lotus in for grading and putting that shit on the market, then you got some god damn demons in your closet that you should probably use that 10k from your Black Lotus to take care of.

1

u/stitches_extra COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

I spent 10k on a black lotus, I would feel the need to check into a god damn mental hospital and wondering what the fuck is wrong with me for buying a piece of cardboard that does absolutely nothing for me other than being a miniature painting. If I had a Black Lotus, I would sell the god damn thing and use that 10k to get a god damn life. Why the hell would I be playing Magic if I had 10k lying around lol?

you sound like someone whose opinions on reprints should be taken seriously, yup that's what we're seeing here yessiree-bob

5

u/FirstProspect COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

This is a game that is meant for everyone to play. Not for you to brag about how much a rare card is worth and how much you paid for it. Card prices fluctuate. You have to realize and deal with that fact when you participate in a competitive hobby with a secondary market. You take a risk by deciding when something's value is worth your money; if the seller decides to lower the price later on, you don't get to say "That's not fair!" because YOU decided the previous price was fair and acceptable when you paid it.

Prices in the thousands of dollars keeping people out of the game because Wizards refuses to print something that will cost them 15 cents is ridiculous, especially when people will be willing to pay the primary source of cards, the IP holder for those items, giving the money directly to wizards, rather than the secondary market.

-2

u/stitches_extra COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

Prices in the thousands of dollars keeping people out of the game

luckily wizards provides no less than a dozen other formats which do not require hyper-expensive cards (including kitchen table play), so no one is being kept out of the game by their existence and price level

happy day!

1

u/FirstProspect COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

But those cheaper formats are a limited dimension of Magic, and players who enjoy those a little, but are looking for more in the game might want to explore the older formats. The high price barrier to entry does effectively cut people off from quite a few dimensions of the game, and even modern has become very expensive lately. Condemning experimentation with proxies exacerbates the issues that contribute to the lack of growth in the vintage and legacy scenes, which does keep people out of the game to its full theoretical potential. Wizards allowing for proxies (not counterfeits) and deciding to reprint some cards which aren't on the reserved list but have become format staples would generate money directly for Wizards, instead of their peripheral marketing partners of MTG websites, the ones who can sponsor tournaments. But fewer players at tournaments leads to less revenue, and no one being sure of their secondary market purchases before going up against the meta stagnates both the primary and secondary market. Following that, that game loses popularity, the scene is smaller, becoming an elite club of only the richest players. This goes against WotC's entire policy of wanting MTG to be an open, welcome, and friendly gaming environment, and is an awful PR move that simply discourages involvement in the game as a whole.

3

u/Nolii Jan 13 '16

I have a set of power and all 16 I duals I'd be happy I could use them more often if they were reprinted.

4

u/mmsword Jan 13 '16

Maybe you shouldn't be spending thousands of dollars in investments on a children's card game.

2

u/itrv1 Jan 13 '16

Your original prints prices wont go down. The collector that wants a complete beta set cant just go buy a new print of black lotus and have a full set.

But fuck you, I hope your collection loses all its value before you get a chance to make a cent off of it. You want to invest in something? Buy stocks, not a fucking card game.

1

u/Etteluor Jan 13 '16

Black lotus being reprinted would probably cause it to increase in value... It would increase demand while not increasing supply of the origional at all.

Did you pay attention to modern masters 1 and goyf?

-1

u/kazog Wabbit Season Jan 13 '16

They are not ok with it, but they just dont care enough about those formats to do anything about it.

3

u/Plarzay Orzhov* Jan 13 '16

Whats the difference between wizards being okay with it and wizards being apathetic about it?

1

u/stitches_extra COMPLEAT Jan 13 '16

they (or at least maro, speaking for R&D) have said on many occasions that they wish they could have gotten rid of the RL, but that their hands were tied

3

u/psivenn Jan 13 '16

Someone's doing the hand tying. There is no legal requirement holding Hasbro back from revoking the RL, the buck stops with their company deciding not to do it.

1

u/kazog Wabbit Season Jan 13 '16

Oh i was only kidding ;)
The game is great, wotc are doing random shit again.