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- Thread starter James Stevenson
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All I'm saying is that this is some real Cube BS.
That's a lie. I've got a lot to say, but mostly it's this: I'm not really offended by WotC doing this, I'm offended by the cowardly, exploitative manner in which they've chosen to do this. A literal thousand dollars for sixty cards is absurd, and the fact that they're using secret lairs, universes beyond, and FOMO as a smokescreen to hook more whales into buying this is outright predatory.
That's a lie. I've got a lot to say, but mostly it's this: I'm not really offended by WotC doing this, I'm offended by the cowardly, exploitative manner in which they've chosen to do this. A literal thousand dollars for sixty cards is absurd, and the fact that they're using secret lairs, universes beyond, and FOMO as a smokescreen to hook more whales into buying this is outright predatory.
A mere thousand copies will make them a million dollars. They are going to make a lot of money with this and they are going to make more and more of these sets as time goes on.
For sure. I mean, they're just crappy proxies with cropped art and signatures cut off from what I've seen this morning. Nothing all that new or special here, I can't see where they'd see it a failure unless they just don't sell. But that's impossible; some Magic players have the worst impulse control you'll ever see among collectible owners.
It's going to be speculators, collectors with money to burn, and people who do openings on YouTube that will eat this up. And then Maro will post some WOW IT WAS SUCH A SUCCESS STOP CRYING when he feels like responding to some comment on his blog months from now and they'll just move along. Maybe a South Park BP apology in a year if they're feeling generous.
What an absolute shitshow for a 30th Anniversary celebration of the game.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Wake up babe the new late stage capitalism just dropped!
Being serious for a minute, I'm more bothered by the fact that they have reprinted these cards without making them tournament legal than anything else. If this had come with the benefit of tearing down the reprint list, I wouldn't be bothered.
Like others are saying, this makes everyone involved unhappy.
Like others are saying, this makes everyone involved unhappy.
Hey what the fuck. That's just rude to the artists. Is this some sort of weird RL dodge or just another case of screwing over the artists?
Edit: I know that art rights work differently now and that technically WotC doesn't own the original art to these cards, but you don't have to change that by literally erasing the artist's signature. You can alter them in a myriad of ways without being a massive asshole.
What an abomination. Is Docent of Perfection the only card that makes these? I can't understand the thought process at all.
They've been dodging us for years. WOTC has yet to give RiptideLab even a single preview card.
Coincidentally I logged in to Riptidelab to ask for advice on how best to sell a full set of International Collectors’ Edition. This is for a number of reasons: no longer as excited by power as I used to be; embracing the high quality proxy; and having to pay for expensive building works. But I haven’t sold high value cards before, and I’m not sure of the safest way t do this.
So have WotC tanked the price by announcing what amounts to a new collectors’ edition, or will my old cards still hold value?
So have WotC tanked the price by announcing what amounts to a new collectors’ edition, or will my old cards still hold value?
If history repeats itself they will dip as of this announcement and then slowly climb again leaving them at their current state again in a few months time and climb even higher and higher afterwards.
That being said I don’t know how Wizards will top this year’s sales revenue when they decide to attempt to do so next year. So maybe they’ll do more of this shit and your CED cards will continue to dive for the first time ever.
I feared as much. I’m a bit salty as I’m arranging a new mortgage at a time when my government is driving the economy into the ground.
When I saw this some hours ago my first thought was that it was a bad proxy done by a newbie that does not know what Fastbond is
I kind of feel like the type of person who would spend $1000 on a pack of proxies probably has enough money where getting a Lord of the Pit instead of a Black Lotus isn't a particularly big blow on their financial situation, assuming they even open the packs in the first place. This product doesn't seem aimed at you're average promo-obsessed "whale." I think this product is really for high-end collectible investors/collectors/speculators who are going to buy these and put them sealed in climate-controlled storage for 20 years in order to get a windfall return on investment later.
These cards definitely do not seem like they are meant to be played with. They're more akin to overpriced sports cards.
It's not a matter of who it's intended for, it's a matter of who is going to buy it regardless of merchant intent, unfortunately. Also, when has a company looked at a money printer and thought "hmm, maybe I should only print a little bit of money?" It's obvious that this will happen again now that the suit has been broken.
But that's exactly my point: Who is going to buy these cards other than people trying to speculate with them? The last time WOTC did an insanely overpriced product with a ridiculously low number of cards with the Double Masters VIP edition, they rotted on the shelves until stores started cutting their losses and just opening them to get the promo cards inside. And these packs contained cards people could actually play with in sanctioned events.
I don't think there is any actual value in these cards outside of what collectors and speculators assign to them. So even if these do sell well, I'm not convinced any harm will come to the rest of the game. If anything, this might be a dress rehearsal for abolishing the reserved list, which I can't see being a negative thing for players.
Honestly, that's the galling thing. I'd love to do a paper draft or a sealed pool with the honest-to-god Beta card pool, and I sincerely doubt that I'm the only one. If they had priced these things like normal packs, they'd probably sell like hotcakes.
If this product sells well, it's going to lead to a shift towards more product like it... because it signals to the higher-ups at WotC/Hasbro that they can make a ton of money at minimal cost (because this product was probably cheap as fuck for them to produce).
Let's do a little math, shall we? Let's pretend for a second that it costs WotC $2 to make a pack of magic cards (that's honestly probably a little too high thanks to economies of scale), and that packaging costs are negligible. Let's also say that a booster box (30 packs) sells for $100 (that's roughly the wholesale cost for a box of DMU).
From a consumer's perspective, buying one M30 bundle costs the same amount as buying ten DMU booster boxes. From WotC's perspective, however, those two purchases generated wildly different amounts of profit. WotC makes $40 per booster box they sell, but makes $992 for every M30 bundle they sell. So. from WotC's perspective, a single M30 bundle makes them as big a profit as 24.8 DMU booster boxes, for a tiny fraction of the cost.
Heck, it's probably better than that (from WotC's perspective) — since the vast majority of the set's art isn't new, they didn't have to pay anyone to design or test new cards, and they didn't have to pay anyone to implement the cards in either of their digital products, the set was probably cheaper to produce than a normal Standard set. If this "set" sells well, that signals to the people who make decisions that maybe all of that "extra" stuff isn't necessary — why pay people to design cards when you can make way more money reprinting old ones?
...
The risk isn't that the cards themselves are valuable (they aren't). It's that it might make WotC think that the future is "Magic as a luxury collectible product", not "Magic as a game."
You're definitely correct in saying there is a lot of money to be made in making uber-expensive collector products like this. That's why things like collector boosters exist: they can charge more for a pack that costs about the same amount to produce as a normal draft booster.
The problem is, most of WOTC's customers can't afford $1000 packs. If they decided to cater exclusively to people with money to light on fire, they would be losing a pretty major section of their customers. Those $4 booster packs sell very well. Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty made over $100,000,000 according to a Hasbro investor call from back in April. In order to make that kind of money with $1000 packs, they would need to sell about 1,000,000 units. That just doesn't seem feasible, especially if the entire gimmick behind the $1000 pack is the massive scarcity. Also, note that the $1000 packs have literal Power 9 cards and OG dual lands inside. They might not be tournament legal, but some collector is probably more willing to spend money trying to get a Black Lotus than pretty much any other card. I don't think these would be even remotely close to desirable if it was a reprint of any set since the end of the reserved list era.
I agree that it would be bad if WOTC stopped seeing Magic as a game first, but I think they already see it as a luxury collectible product and are trying to leverage that angle more. In fact, I think they've been doing that for the better part of a decade.
WOTC has made a lot of bad decisions for Magic the game in service of the collector market. The Chronicles disaster showed that collectors do make up a pretty important part of the game's ecosystem and that destroying their interests could have a negative impact on the game. Chronicles tanking the secondary market is the entire reason why we have the Reserved list, something which could have been necessary at the time but has since destroyed access to a lot of cards for the Magic gamers. It has definitely hurt the game in the long run. Since then, WOTC has been trying to keep collectors happy through several other means. In the early years, WOTC vowed not to reprint any card with its original art in Black Border, which spawned the White Border core sets we saw until 10th Edition. They also rarely reprinted anything that they did not specifically want to have again in Standard or Limited. Back when Magic was a smaller entity, this kind of made sense, because it gave cards value for collectors without destroying access for players.
However, as the game got bigger and eternal format cards became increasingly scarce, something had to change. WOTC still didn't want to destroy the value of collector's collections, but they also needed to actually reprint things so that their core audience, the players, could have the game pieces they needed. Wizards had noticed that when they reprinted a bunch of cards with their original art in the black border as part of the Timme Sprial Bonus Sheet that no one had cared (or even noticed) that the White Border Reprint policy had been broken. So they started testing the waters with more reprints. They started making Dual Decks, the Commander Products, and other supplemental things like Planechase. They added cards that people wanted but couldn't necessarily fit into a standard set to these supplemental lines. This allowed for cards like Demonic Tutor and Phyrexian Arena to be reprinted. These reprints didn't destroy the value of the original cards, and it let players get the game pieces they needed to play the game. WOTC even tried skirting the reserved list with this rule by reprinting some reserved cards in foil, but collectors did care about that so WOTC closed the loophole.
The next big changes happened in 2013 and 2015, respectively. In 2013, WOTC released Modern Masters, the first all-reprint (non-core) booster set. They did a highly limited print run and charged $6.99 instead of $3.99 for packs in order to avoid ruining collection values. The set was a huge success, but something weird happened. Instead of card prices tanking, the most desirable cards actually rose in value after the reprint. Modern Masters introduced new players from the successful Innistrad and Return to Ravnica blocks to eternal formats and older cards, driving demand through the roof. Then, in 2015, WOTC did "Zendikar Expedition," which printed a bunch of desirable land cards into Battle for Zendikar packs with special art and a new frame. These cards were super rare and highly collectible. They demanded a high price from collectors and didn't impact the price of the old printings at all.
WOTC basically kept this cycle going for a couple of years until they realized that limited print run sets of old cards were not getting enough copies of needed game pieces into the world. They couldn't sustainably release Master's sets at the rate they wanted to, and Expedition-type cards (renamed masterpieces) were way too rare to function as real reprints of game pieces. However, they now realized that they could actually make things tailored to the nebulous "collector" class without having a tangible impact on players. So, they discontinued the Masters line in 2018 and started ramping up the collectible portion of the game with Showcase Frames, Collector Boosters, and Secret Lair the next year. This ended up actually working really well. Most people liked the showcase frames, Collector Boosters helped to decrease the cost of most standard-legal game pieces, and Secret Lairs were cool ways to sell stylized cards in small print runs. As it turned out, all of these things were very popular with collectors without making the game less accessible to players.
Since 2019, WOTC has started ramping up the number of reprints intensely with the Double Masters and Remastered lines, better reprints in Commander products, more reprints in both the Modern Horizons line as well as Standard sets, and bonus sheets like that of Strixhaven and now Brother's War. Collectors got new stuff thanks to more frame treatments, and players got cheaper normal cards thanks to the influx of products being opened to find the expensive collectibles. Now, instead of players having to shell out more for cards in order to create scarcity for collectors, WOTC is seeding sets with special items that aren't required to play the game but are still desirable to people who collect.
The point of this (admittedly long) story is to showcase that WOTC has never fully understood how to balance "Magic as a game" and "Magic as a luxury collectible." We are still dealing with the fallout of decisions made trying to balance this scale 30 years ago. Collectors have always been secondary to players (even though many decisions have been made to appease to them) simply because WOTC didn't see that they had different interests. I think this product, as worthless as it may be to players, is another attempt to see what exactly WOTC can sell to collectors. WOTC has done a few other things like this before, such as the Mythic Editions, the Throne of Eldraine Deluxe Edition, and the Double Masters VIP Edition. All of these products exist to see what collectors are willing to buy to leverage that market better. I see no reason why the Magic 30 bundle would be any different from this rogue's gallery of one-off experiments. These highly exclusive limited products have very limited appeal, and while they do make WOTC a lot of money, they can't carry the game in the same way normal sets do. Instead, I think this product is just another attempt to collect data on what collectors actually want. If we see more, they are unlikely to come at the expense of the game, but rather, in addition to the game.