General Gold Plated Cards
- Thread starter Velrun
- Start date
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
Thank You & Happy Holidays (only to South-East Asians though)
Yeah I'm curious why it's limited to only one specific region
Yeah like someone else on this board said, people paying WotC money for a game we all love is a good thing.
It's not that it's a problem, really — I'm sure that people are going to buy them, and that that's going to make WotC's stockholders happy. It just feels unreal, and it feeds into my general sense of panic and unease due to things in general going off the rails over the past year-and-change. Shoving a million-odd new frame treatments into your card game isn't helping my growing disassociation with reality, WotC. 
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Also, "don't complain about this thing that I, personally, believe isn't worth complaining about" is a little dismissive and somewhat insulting, honestly. I think you can safely assume that I'm complaining about more important stuff in more appropriate places, while saving my ultimately pointless but emotionally satisfying gripes about a dumb card game that I haven't played in almost half a year and which I'm not actually going to spend any money on for the lovely people of these boards.
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Also, "don't complain about this thing that I, personally, believe isn't worth complaining about" is a little dismissive and somewhat insulting, honestly. I think you can safely assume that I'm complaining about more important stuff in more appropriate places, while saving my ultimately pointless but emotionally satisfying gripes about a dumb card game that I haven't played in almost half a year and which I'm not actually going to spend any money on for the lovely people of these boards.
I'm not sure it's a problem either, but I think there are valid reasons to be concerned about the proliferation of variants. First, a similar expansion of weird variants marked an era of desperation and decline in the baseball card market, and even if the purpose of the cardboard is fundamentally different (game pieces vs. not) the comparison has people spooked. I'm not certain that this is a death knell for Magic, as these things have been done in TCGs to a fair amount of success *gestures wildly at Yugioh and Pokemon*.
Second, I think there's the assumption that WotC is putting all this thought into variant cards at the expense of the gameplay experience. This is harder to determine, but generally speaking I think we can all agree that sets play very differently than they did not too long ago. It may be a coincidence with the Arena-fication of the game, but word salad cards have become more and more common over the last few years, as have cards with lesser degrees of resonance (your experience may differ, of course).
Third, and this is the one I'm most concerned about, the pace of variant diversification has been incredibly rapid. We started seeing serious quantities of alt-art/alt-frame cards with Ultimate Masters and GRN Mythic edition, IIRC, and that was in October 2018, just three years ago. Since then, we've recieved a shitload of frames and art. The things that's worrying about this is that WotC has said on numerous occasions that their turnaround time on making changes is year and a half at absolute minimum, so for them to commit to this much this fast implies a significant, blind change in their priorities. This is explicitly driven by how they've said that their goal is to double Magic's profits in five years, which they completed two years early. That's insane. But all this isn't actually a concern on it's own. What's concerning is the implication that WotC may turn to mechanics next once art "power creep" has been maxed out. We already see this with things like Ragavan and the MH* sets as a whole being ridiculously pushed beyond what's healthy for the game. (As cubers this doesn't have to affect us, but it sure will mentally) And sure, WotC is a company and so it's always been chasing profits, but up until recently it's been trying to do that through stability, not rapid expansion. The change in priorities isn't necessarily a bad one, but it is a drastic one, and it's not unreasonable IMO to think it might be too fast.
Fourth, there are so many freaking cards being put out these days. WotC has done a tolerable job of balancing them, but it's felt more precarious than ever. Again, this isnt the fault of the variants, but I think that they come from the same profit motivation and so we conflate the two.
Fifth, there are readability issues. Reading the card still explains the card, but we associate cards with art and frames so strongly that taking this shortcut away causes people to have to re-parse a lot of cards, which is definitely a problem during draft. Again, we can avoid most of this as Q-berts, but to dismiss this as an issue is sticking our heads in the sand.
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You've probably heard this all before and may not have been looking for such a screed (sorry), but I still think it's valuable having this discussion here where we know each other and have the trust built up to have a reasonable conversation unlike the poo-flinging that happens over in a YouTube comments section. I think the variant cards are universally cool, even if I have some reservations. My real complaint is that I can't afford them all and so I refuse to purchase any of them because I know I have little impulse control
Yeah it stinks of desperation to me, or at least a realization on WotCs part that just printing "normal" cards at a "normal" pace doesn't make their investors the ever growing profit margin that is "needed", so we are seeing a new phase of attempting to secure that eternal growth. The incredible pace increase of card releases is another sign of the same thing IMO.
Chris Taylor
Contributor
Honestly the mind just gets its rankles up when literal gold is involved, you end up feeling guilty by what else this could be doing.
Contrapoints goes into this icky feeling here if you have 5 minutes. Once you get to the end of her bit about buzzfeed you'll get my reference here, but the video (and channel) are quite good.
Contrapoints goes into this icky feeling here if you have 5 minutes. Once you get to the end of her bit about buzzfeed you'll get my reference here, but the video (and channel) are quite good.
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
As weird as I find it that this is only available in one part of the world, I'm actually completely okay with cosmetic bling. I could only be truly annoyed with this if they did this shit with unique Magic cards that aren't elsewhere available.
Wizards: “Brazen? Rankle?… Yes, good idea.. We should print a golden Brazen Borrower and Rankle, Master of Pranks in Super Masterpiece Mythic Deluxe Treasure Gold edition!”
Speak for yourself!