In general, I agree, but as profit margins shrink, stores might shift to promoting and hosting other games that give them better profit margins. Now, this might not apply to your hole in the wall gaming stores that basically only sell Magic and exist to host Magic nights, but your true gaming stores, the ones who have a variety of products might start promoting other games instead.
Will Magic totally die? Probably not, but if the majority of retailers see their profit margins shrink enough, it could have a big impact on the Magic Scene.
Anecdotally, I think this is true already, and has been for years. Pretty much very game store sells M:tG. But as you look at bigger and more successful stores, M:tG seems to be a smaller percentage of their overall business. As you said, the tiny hold in the wall game stores often seem to just be Magic stores. Good luck even finding an RPG in there. Big stores still have a little corner for Magic, but the rest of the store has all kinds of games going on.
And even in the case of a small Magic only store, if your storeās sales suddenly drop by 10%, just to pick a random number, you still have to pay rent, and utilities, and everything else. If online sales start to eat into your profit, you might not be able to keep your store open. Larger stores can make up for that loss of income by focusing on other games, but either way, the end result is Magic being played less.
It means that cardboard Magic will be played less, or played less in an official tournament capacity. Player base could actually increase if cards are cheaper, sold online, and the digital game picks up.
To some degree, but without the visibility of being in retail stores, without the tournaments, even if cards are cheaper, it would still probably lead to a decline in Magic being played overall.
Little kids who start out playing Magic donāt buy their cards online. They see cards in a store and buy them there. If no cards in stores, no little kids playing Magic. No little kids playing magic, then the player base starts to shrink.
Iād like to point out that the āselling direct and undercutting storesā story was WOTC deciding to let amazon distribute magic. People that didnāt know any better lost their shit over boxes being $80-$90 online. Theyāve been that price on major sites and eBay for 15 years. Somehow having a fiftieth place to get cheap boxes on the internet didnāt kill the game.
Someone else may have already had this idea, or there might be a similar M:tG format already, but I just want to post this anyway. It should be fairly easy to create a game just like DotA AutoChess using M:tG cards.
Create a big stack of basic land.
Create a big stack of random creatures.
Everyone starts with one random land. Everyone draws 5 creatures. To draft a creature into your hand you must discard land equal to its cost. You can discard 1 land to redraw your hand of creatures. Creatures in hand can be also be sold back for some amount of land.
After everyone is done doing their biz, you choose which of your creatures from your hand go into the field to fight. You then get assigned a random opponent and your creatures in the field fight according to some system that is similar to the actual M:tG rules. Repeat fighting until only one side has creatures remaining.
Any card text is going to need to be adjusted on a creature by creature basis, and the card pool adjusted accordingly. Over time the creature pool will be adjusted to only include creatures that make sense for the game.
After combat all creatures, dead or alive, go back to a playerās hand. They donāt die permanently. Players get a number of new land from the land stack according to some formula based on who won and lost. The maximum number of creatures a player may put into battle each turn is also adjusted. Players who lost take damage, maybe use a d100 (or 2d10) to track HP.
Keep repeating this process until only one player has remaining HP.
This includes just about every aspect of AutoChess except for the real time nature and the NPCs mobs that drop items. It also might be fun-ish?
Gates Ablaze isnāt banned in anything. Rampaging Ferocidon is banned in all standard matches and Nexus of Fate is banned specifically in Best of One matches on Arena but I canāt find any record of Gates Ablaze being banned.
Iād been following the story since about Battle for Zendikar. one of the popular, more-likely-than-not ships was RalxJace. Or JacexRal, but thatād require Jace to take initiative in anything.
I played a few 1vs1 WAR sealed matches with a friend and it was a great time. I really enjoyed how the uncommons planeswalkers played. Iām thinking of either building a set cube or doing a custom set cube with the Uncommon planeswalkers along with some of the more fair planeswalkers from earlier sets.
