General CBS
- Thread starter James Stevenson
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This is my cube. (not by design)
Didn't wanna hijack the testing thread, but I got a few Likes on this post and thought someone might want to take a look and/or critique.
EXTREMELY bloated rough draft. Ended up adding over 90 cards from Brother vs Brother. Trying to take advantage of the low-MV alternate prototype costs and Powerstone tokens to allow players access to high MV monsters.
Archetypes are roughly WU Blink, UB Control (and ninjas), BR Blood Madness, RG Hate/Lands, GW +1/+1 and Lands, WB Sac, UR Artifact Shit, BG Yard, RW Equip, GU Ramp.
Domain/5C currently encouraged via Wilds/Expanse art singleton mana base. The "hybrid" cards are trying to seduce players to splash. The non-Wilds/Expanse lands are intentionally better in 2-3C decks than they are in 5. They're likely to enter tapped or over-pain a greedy deck.
The prevalence of colorless spells will hopefully enable all decks to do a variety of things.
I'd like to find some cards that can destroy multiple Powerstones without wiping the hell out of every artifact.
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/635d9d0aa9ee2126966ea498?view=table&scale=large
EXTREMELY bloated rough draft. Ended up adding over 90 cards from Brother vs Brother. Trying to take advantage of the low-MV alternate prototype costs and Powerstone tokens to allow players access to high MV monsters.
Archetypes are roughly WU Blink, UB Control (and ninjas), BR Blood Madness, RG Hate/Lands, GW +1/+1 and Lands, WB Sac, UR Artifact Shit, BG Yard, RW Equip, GU Ramp.
Domain/5C currently encouraged via Wilds/Expanse art singleton mana base. The "hybrid" cards are trying to seduce players to splash. The non-Wilds/Expanse lands are intentionally better in 2-3C decks than they are in 5. They're likely to enter tapped or over-pain a greedy deck.
The prevalence of colorless spells will hopefully enable all decks to do a variety of things.
I'd like to find some cards that can destroy multiple Powerstones without wiping the hell out of every artifact.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Well, if you look at P/E ratios and valuation of growth companies, Wall Street is not all about short-term profit maximization!
The case of Hasbro is weird, because the only part of the company with good growth prospects is WotC, so it makes the upside volatile like a growth stock because the upside thesis is that Magic and D&D grow their revenue. The downside is always there though, the brands have to do that while carrying around those other toy product lines in the same balance sheet - which I don't think people expect to grow much because videogames. So we saw a perfect storm in the only exciting part of the company. The earnings were disappointing, The player base is enraged, there is excess sealed inventory, and seeing serious cracks in an LGS ecosystem that is unique and assumed to be fragile. Wizards should be scrambling to save it after the failure in the strategy of doubling down on hailing Arena as "the thing that makes Hasbro a tech company" and ignoring LGSs and judge communities. Will they go into survival mode and do something radical, like reduce their profits, and navigate this space where they have two competing products cannibalizing on each other? I don't think Hasbro management is capable of that.
Does this mean the company is a sell? Who knows. Stock analysts are like weather forecasters that report if it rained last week.
Edit: to be fair to stock analysts, it is useful to know why they believe a stock moved, but the buy/hold/sell recommendation is meaningless to me.
japahn's stock rating for HAS: buy index funds
The case of Hasbro is weird, because the only part of the company with good growth prospects is WotC, so it makes the upside volatile like a growth stock because the upside thesis is that Magic and D&D grow their revenue. The downside is always there though, the brands have to do that while carrying around those other toy product lines in the same balance sheet - which I don't think people expect to grow much because videogames. So we saw a perfect storm in the only exciting part of the company. The earnings were disappointing, The player base is enraged, there is excess sealed inventory, and seeing serious cracks in an LGS ecosystem that is unique and assumed to be fragile. Wizards should be scrambling to save it after the failure in the strategy of doubling down on hailing Arena as "the thing that makes Hasbro a tech company" and ignoring LGSs and judge communities. Will they go into survival mode and do something radical, like reduce their profits, and navigate this space where they have two competing products cannibalizing on each other? I don't think Hasbro management is capable of that.
Does this mean the company is a sell? Who knows. Stock analysts are like weather forecasters that report if it rained last week.
Edit: to be fair to stock analysts, it is useful to know why they believe a stock moved, but the buy/hold/sell recommendation is meaningless to me.
japahn's stock rating for HAS: buy index funds
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While I normally don't pay much attention to people on the internet, there's a reasonably compelling case over at Hipsters of the Coast that the report is literally based on "walking to the two closest Targets and using some tcgplayer prices for sealed product". If nothing else, the fact that Arena is literally not mentioned at all should send up some red flags there.
I mean, stopped clock and all that (although I don't think they're going to get burned by 30th anniversary and I kind of also think they should), but there's some funky reasoning involved.
edit: while I used the word "literally" twice in two sentences, I want to emphasize that in both cases I did in fact mean the literal truth of the words I had typed, because both sentences are borderline unbelievable.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/14/ban...pany-kills-magic-the-gathering-card-game.html
The Text said:
I'm frankly a bit alarmed by what was said in this article because if Hasbro actually takes this guy's advice, they would actually destroy the game. It's become quite obvious in the past year that Magic is insanely overleveraged. Even though the people making new cards are generally doing a good job, it's clear at this point that the crowded release schedule and deluge of supplemental products is just too much for the majority of players. There will be a grand total of 9 booster set releases this year, 7 of which have new cards, and all but one of which have multiple types of pack available. In addition, several preconstructed products, several digital sets, and over 4 dozen secret lair drops have been released since the beginning of 2022. This has resulted in a very good year for Hasbro, despite the fact that things are slowing down a bit in the second half of the year. While I personally enjoy the increased number of Booster products to draft, I end up ignoring the vast majority of other releases. A lot of other Magic can't keep up with all of the sets and supplemental products. Following the Secret Lair schedule is basically impossible for most players from memory alone. Ignoring everything else going on in the game right now: there are just too many products to keep up with them all. Couple that with general dissatisfaction amongst the player base about the state of certain constructed formats, $1000 proxies, and the all-encompassing presence of Commander, and we've got a bit of a crisis on our hands. To me, the solutions seem pretty simple. WOTC needs to make the game more accessible by reprinting key cards to an affordable price point, investing in growing the community instead of squeezing existing players, and cutting back excess sets from the release schedule to make sure all of the important products are hits. They don't necessarily need to get rid of Secret Lair and similar supplementary products, but they shouldn't be printing nearly as many.
The big problem with this article and the analyst's point of view is the contempt for reprints. Although they correctly identify the 30th Anniversary Edition's price point as "excessively high," they seem to spend more time on the fact that the set contains proxies of reserved list cards. Reprints and big print runs are basically the only things keeping magic afloat at this point. Most people playing paper magic these days are playing eternal formats. Cards availability is the number one hindrance on eternal format play. Once you have certain key staples (usually the mana base and premium removal spells, but also key threats), you can play pretty much any deck you want. These larger print runs have kept the prices on new cards low, making them easier to obtain for people who want to play with them. Likewise, reprints have made some older cards more accessible. $100 Scalding Tarns are now only $25, which is perfect for anyone who wants to actually play the game instead of playing stock market with fancy cards. We like to joke about $80 Ragavans and $50 Solitudes, but the reality is that these cards would be more expensive if new sets weren't printed a lot. I like to think about how all of the New Capenna tri-lands are only about $7 apiece. Back when I started playing, these cards easily would have been $20 or more. There are still expensive frame treatments for these cards, so it's not like there is no value in new sets, but the base versions are inexpensive for people who need them for decks. This is a good thing. Cutting back on reprints and print runs in of themselves doesn't seem like the solution here unless we want $300 new cards and to go back to $100 fetches. That's not the world I want to live in.
I just hope the lesson of "don't print as many cards per product and don't do reprints" is the lesson Hasbro takes away from this article. The big problem with Magic right now seems to be the lack of emphasis on playerbase growth and the breakneck pace of supplemental releases. Cutting out both pace and reprints would put us right back in 2017, a time when every format was insanely expensive, all of the new cards were completely worthless, and the only reprints and cards of value came in the bi-yearly overpriced masters set. I like my $7 Jetmir's Garden, and I don't think we should be sacrificing that just because Wall Street thinks I should have to sell a kidney to afford one.
That's because they are writing that article as an investor, and they are seeing/thinking about the effect it has on the collectors market. "Is that the correct angle to take the analysis from" is a whole discussion, but yeah that's what's happening. I think HotC mentions this in their article, talking about the eternal divide between magic-as-a-game and magic-as-an-investment-currency. I don't personally think the "deep dive" was deep enough to pick apart the real drivers of hasbro's success overall, but I would personally have a hard time believing it's not the millions and millions of players. Of course, the secondary market having value at all has helped greatly with WotCs success, as it provides a backing for peoples gacha neurons.
I also do think that WotC has done an excellent job growing their playerbase. Their issue is in growing a sustainable playerbase. How many of these new players can they keep for more than a year before they just sour to the pace and go nah bye? Leaving aside of course the detrimental effects it's had on their enfranchised base.
It's a known issue, unfortunately.
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The Hipsters of the Coast analysis here is the definitive one, as much as I appreciate the headlines that the Bank of America analysis has brought about. I do think BofA's topline notion of the current printing policies being short-sighted is right but beyond that I think it just leans into the misunderstanding of the business reflected by the typical player (and particularly the typical content creator). In my experience, MtG is much better about having savvy consumers than most other hobbies I enjoy, but that's still at the margins of the playerbase as a whdole.
I've asked about this a few times over the last few months in the Discord and the lead dev said that he'd have time for it in November. I'm still hopeful! A lot of the utility of CubeCobra to me was being able to explore how many people cubed with various cards, and I had been working on some fun infographics / research projects in May before it went down. Trying to stay hopeful it'll be fixed soon for my drafts' sake as well!
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
By default Scryfall searches in the Oracle text. o:"~ deals 3 damage to any target" will find, e.g., Annihilating Fire. The 'o' in front actually is short for oracle
You can also use 'fo' to search in the full oracle text, including reminder text (for cards that have reminder text). What you can't do (as far as I know, anyway), is search for card text as it was originally printed.Yeah... I couldn't find a way. Searching for burn spells since the rewording in DOM seems to be the best option, but that will be lacking some spells that specifically targeted creatures. I probably won't worry about it if there isn't an efficient way to get it done.By default Scryfall searches in the Oracle text. o:"~ deals 3 damage to any target" will find, e.g., Annihilating Fire. The 'o' in front actually is short for oracle
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
I think your best bet is simply looking at when the new wording was introduced (in Dominaria), and then search for burn spells that were printed since then (excluding the Mystery Booster reprints, because those use the old wording). Like so
You can actually use date>=dom to get even more precise. This option's certainly a little lacking, though. Something like Sunlance didn't need a wording update and is still a solid card that sort of falls under the burn category.I think your best bet is simply looking at when the new wording was introduced (in Dominaria), and then search for burn spells that were printed since then (excluding the Mystery Booster reprints, because those use the old wording). Like so