I only recently discovered this joke card and hit has me snickering whenever I think of the keyword text.
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It feels like Magic has officially jumped the shark now. The whole Universes Beyond thing is already super-annoying to me. I mean, I can live with Warhammer since that makes sense, but it just becomes more and more bizarre.
However, today WotC really, really screwed the pooch:
Magic is turning 30 years old next year. To commemorate it they are going to reprint cards from what basically amounts to the first real set: Limited Edition Beta (with the exception of a couple of cards that have issues). The cards are not tournament legal because WotC has like 25 years ago promised to never reprint certain cards to entertain collectors (even though the value of cards often rises when they are reprinted, because it creates more interest as well). Nevertheless, it is interesting for players of non-tournament formats who want high quality proxies for formats like Commander and Cube.
However, then we get to the distribution of it. A âdisplayâ of this 30th anniversary edition will only contain four randomized boosters of 15 cards, a total of 60 cards with the cards having the same rarity as in Beta. And it will cost $999. IT WILL COST $999. FOR FUCKING PROXIES!
Just what in the ever-living fuck.
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WTF indeed. Even as someone who hasnât bought any M:tG product since maybe 1994, your description of this 30th anniversary set appealed to me. I was like ooh, I would like to buy an old Limited Beta set to maybe play some old school Magic.
But for $1000 for 60 cards??? Almost $17 per-card? Am I reading this correctly? Are there going to be basic lands in there?
If they want me to buy this, they would have to make a full set. A non-randomized box that contains 4x copies of each card, and maybe 20-40x of each basic land so two people could make decks and play. I would probably pay a high price for that. $250 would probably be the absolute maximum. But $1000!
Preposterous.
I could have even lived with a box for $1,000 for a copy of every card that was in Beta. Because that would contain one of every dual land as a high quality proxy. I have a Cube and currently I only own a single Tundra and the other dual lands are proxies because any four duals alone will already set you back about $1,000.
But this, this is just a ridiculous joke.
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Samâs videos are always impeccable.
This video perfectly illustrates how WotC has managed to push me out as a customer, even beyond natural wax and wane cycles of interest and other hobbies and corporate bullshit like the Pinkerton incident.
Through the last several years Magic has become less of a game and more of a collectible, pushing infinite variations and soulless products that have no inner meaning in a flood of products and treatments for those products. I used to collect Zombie cards with the goal of having each printing of each Zombie once. A set like Innistrad should be a feast for that purpose. Instead it is a nightmare when every rare with the word Zombie on it has 4 to 8 different versions to it. I have given up on that project.
I also used to buy one or two booster boxes of each set as well as a Bundle box for each release. The boxes I would put in the cellar for maybe drafting at some point or them appreciating in value. With the exception of a preconstructed deck, I havenât bought a Magic product in a year and a half because I just can no longer keep up with a new set seemingly every other month. I just canât be bothered anymore.
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My whole geek life I have been complaining about companies doing this kind of behavior. Rather than try to take on a business strategy to get more customers, instead they choose to milk every last cent from existing customers, completely giving up on everyone else.
Itâs understandable from a business perspective. Getting people who donât care about you to start caring is really hard. People only have so much room in their lives for things. Think about how hard it would be to convince a close friend to invest money into a new hobby, and stick with it, assuming they had never heard of it before. Now try to do that at scale.
But if someone already loves you, itâs really easy to squeeze them. Just keep doing what you are doing, only more, and probably with higher prices.
You like Spider-Man comics? You buy it every month? Well, now there are two Spider-Man comics per month. Now there are 4. Now there are 10. Now there are 10, but each one has 3 possible cover artworks. Collect all 30! Maybe youâll buy them out of FOMO. Maybe youâll buy way less than 30, but if you buy more than 1, weâre doing better than before. Maybe you stick to 1. Maybe you give up and buy 0, but that other nerd buys 30. So unless we lose 96% of our readers, weâre doing better with that guy and without you.
We have seen cases of companies doing the opposite. Most notably Nintendo. They have sold 132 million Nintendo Switches. They clearly work harder to get more users than they do to get existing users to buy more games. They could easily lower their standards and release way more games. They could be putting out a new Zelda every other month. It would be a shitty Zelda, but they could.
The thing is, while I could blame other companies for not going that route, I donât know if thatâs really right. Just because it can work for video game consoles doesnât mean it can work for card games. I think there are only so many people on Earth who will ever become a Magic player, no matter what business strategy they have, and no matter what products they make.
As long as capitalism demands growth, milking existing customers for more may be the only feasible optionâŚ
And of course, it goes without saying, the core problem is our current systemâs demand for infinite growth. It would be trivial for them to manage the game in a sustainable, profitable, and non-growing fashion.
Earlier this year I talked in this thread about having pushed out of Magic as a customer due to the sheer attrition of product that I donât have the willpower to follow anymore. This lead me to reevaluate and with considerations of buying a flat (which ultimately didnât work out), I sold off 90% of my rather extensive Magic collection.
Another factor in this has been the complete dilution of the brand which I talked about in this thread when it started, and recent events have magnified. If you donât want to scroll back, let me give you the short version: In late 2020 WotC announced cards featuring characters from The Walking Dead under the banner âUniverses Beyondâ. Beyond the broken taboo of mechanically unique cards in limited availability, this also began an ever-expanding inclusion of ridiculous crossovers with other IPs such as Warhammer 40,000, Street Fighter, Fortnight, Assassins Creed, Transformers, Marvel, etc. etc. etc. This also included an entire 289-card set crossing over with Lord of the Rings which became the best selling Magic set of all time.
WotC excused this ever expanding brand dilution that it was just fun, brought in new customers, and that you werenât forced to play with those cards if you didnât want to, all while slowly turning the game into an identity-less shell of its former self. Today they broken the last taboo with the announcement that from now on these Universes Beyond sets that would be coming out in the future would be tournament legal in all formats.
I used to love this game. I was in awe with the wide range of different planes it depicted with different settings and conceits that still fit together in a coherent manner. It was in general a masterclass in worldbuilding even if the set-to-set narratives were lackluster. The game still has that in fits and spurts, but with every passing day I am seemingly bolstered in my decision to quit something I spent 20 years with.
And the sad thing is that this is actually working for them because these sets unfortunately sell and sell very well. How I hate capitalism and the lack of taste in modern media.
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The primary customer of Magic appears to be:
- Speculators who think they can make money
- Obsessive collector completionists
- Single-game tournament scene players
I imagine everyone else who doesnât fit into one of those three buckets is a deep afterthought for them.
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The word you are looking for is âwhalesâ, as much as I hate that demonym that the gaming industry is using. They arenât looking for casual fans. They are hardly looking for tournament players who dedicate themselves to mastering the game. They are only looking for people who are willing to pump their entire income into the game for the purpose of bragging rights, as if buying a thing (or winning a thing in a casino after spending much more than the thing is worth) is any sort of accomplishment.
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Iâve idly followed Magic off and on since leaving it behind 10 or so years ago, and I always thought Universes Beyond was just a cash-grab for orbiting fandom types. Try to hook people and bring em into the fold to find the people who want to dig into the game proper. I assumed that like the Unglued sets of yore, theyâd have been standalone products.
Definitely not a fan of incorporating them into their primary tournament formats, but I also stopped caring a long time ago.
Part of me still wishes Iâd kept my old collection and just built a draft cube for casual play.
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I still have a few decks from the Revised days that I plan on selling to a local game store for a few hundred bucks.
A while back, my friend paid my way into a sealed deck tournament at a local game store so that he could go home with twice the number of promo cards. (I came within one win of getting a prize, while he got knocked out in the first round, but thatâs beside the point.)
Playing that, I realized that the power creep that has happened over the past 30 years is so absurd that the cards I have at home are worthless in actual gameplay, even if they were still legal in most formats. I mean look at this guy, it would break my 5th-grade brain if I saw this while playing with my old cards.
(Annihilator is an ability that means âWhenever this creature attacks, the defending player must sacrifice N permanents.â)
The Power Creep is real, but Emrakul is kind of a bad example because it is supposed to be incredibly powerful but it also costs an enormous amount of mana. If a 15-mana spell doesnât win you the game, what are you even doing?
Also, the printing you are showing is from 2018, and it was originally printed in 2010, over 14 years ago.
I think a much better example is Nadu
The card came out this year, is extremely pushed, has a very powerful body even without its ability, and basically means âif you have an effect that targets your creatures for free, draw two cards for every creature you have and play the lands in those draws for free. Do this every turn, including your opponentâs.â, only much more complicated to read.
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Having not played M:tG more than a couple times this millennium, I can confirm that card is insane. Especially in a game where itâs traditionally very difficult to draw. The limit is necessary, but even two feels high. With some modifications they could have changed this card in such a way that it doesnât let you use it too much yourself, but potentially allows your opponent to use it to mill you to death. Add some risk to go with that reward.
I already did the podcast about the rules for designing cards in Magic-like games. Iâll link it below in case anyone missed it. But I donât think I discussed power creep as it was off-topic.
Power creep is inherent in any commercialized living game. As long as you keep trying to continuously sell rules-bearing game pieces to the players for money, power creep will happen.
Letâs say the current baseline is 1/1 that costs 1.
They put out a new card thatâs a 1/1 that cost 2. Obviously nobody buys this card. Itâs just unplayable. The company goes bankrupt as their cash flow ceases. People stop buying after the first set and move on to other games.
They put out a new card thatâs a different 1/1 that also costs 1. Balance! Good company! The problem is the cards in the first set are still competitively viable. Some people buy the new cards because they prefer them, but itâs not mandatory. Everyone only buys the sets and cards that make them happy. People stop buying once they find the cards they like most. People might occasionally buy new cards just to get some variety and spice things up, but only if they appeal to them. Players love this game, but the company still goes under since players only buy a few sets each.
Also, how many 1/1 that cost 1 can you come up with? If you keep adding variety it will eventually become impossible to maintain balance. You will run out of new ideas. A card you make will be better than the ones that came before, and power creep has appeared unintentionally. You will eventually be forced to power creep or stop making new products.
And what of intentional power creep? Time to sell a 1/2 that costs 1 and also a 2/1 that costs 1. Even if you arenât a competitive player you have to buy the new cards unless everyone you play with agrees to just play with the old cards forever. Thatâs not happening. People want variety. People might not mind losing a fist fight, but they wonât even bother playing if they see theyâve brought a fist to a knife fight. If you power creep then every player is compelled to buy every new set, and your company survives to design and sell the next powered up expansion.
I have been working on an idea for a game that solves this problem, but itâs just on my long shit-talk list. The fundamental idea is that you do not print costs on cards. You have to have some system of bidding on cards. That way the cost of a card will depend on how strong players believe it to be within the context of the current game state. This greatly rewards player skill and knowledge, and allows much more powerful and fun cards to be in the game without breaking everything.
New Rhystic Studies, 50 short card stories
âThere are too many fucking words on this card. I am never going to read the entirety of this fucking cardâ is basically how I feel about modern Magic design. Also I think this is the first video by Sam in which he swears.
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