Hall of Famers no longer get appearance fees to cover costs. Grinding GPs to get to platinum status is how they afford to attend multiple events. By competitive Magic, I meant showing up at a lot of events, grinding PT levels and being in contention everywhere, vs. showing up at a GP or PT or so, when they are close or convenient. The summary may not be well worded, but what I wrote in my article is hardly "blatantly untrue."
"Brian Kibler writes an article on why he and LSV may be quitting competitive Magic."
From the front page summary of your article. Having something this blatantly untrue posted so prominately seems bad. Kibler said he and LSV were considering not attending any Grand Prix's in pursuit of Pro Points which while sad is not the same as them quitting high level magic. Hall of Famers have auto invites to Pro Tours without setting foot at Grand Prix which is why Kibler and LSV can consider just giving up on Pro Points and GPs.
It can also be done via enchantments (Opalescence & Enchanted Evening)but I don't think that this is what you're looking for. Hmm, I need to think & find other possibilities.
I intentionally only started monitoring FoW since when the promo came online. What I'll do with the collected data is a mystery: mainly I'll try to scare the FoW players. Just picture me saying: "I'm watching you", with relative hand gesturing. :P
All the cards in the Watch List are calculated since when they were first playable (some of them had never been playable in TribAp before). It's all explained in the notes you can see in the cells.
Populating a Marit Lage token is the supreme commitment to the achievements. The idea is exactly that, in order to unlock the achievement, you have to give up a win. That's the achievement. (Same goes for going for a tie when you are winning).
Mycosynth Lattice & Karn are good engines but there is much budget way; Liquimetal Coating & March of the Machines/ or Karn too. Then with Kraj you can use all the abilities of any Planeswalker in the same turn without any restriction. It's really cool. I have never done this with Gideon so far. My personal choices were Sarkan Vol, Ajani Vengeant or Elspeth. But I have used the Gideon and Kraj combination without the artifact engines before.
Interesting thoughts on set redemption.
As an European, redemption is not that interesting due to taxes and tariffs.
As you have said, MTGO is the tail and Paper is the dog. Thus, I would foresee this move having more of an impact on MTGO than on Paper. If redemption stays high, the extra 20$ for WotC have to come from somewhere. If profit margins are as you assume, it is a possibility the dealers will just eat (part of) the loss.
But as you said, there are so many variables and with incomplete data...
I would really like to hear about the asides you left out when you find time to write about them.
And as as software developer, I have to agree that its about time they hire some people. There are ridiculous bugs persisting for years (like new decks only being shown if you manually leave and reenter the folder). Its a good thing they have the best game in the world...
Mycosynth Lattice and Karn, Silver Golem is the first one that came to mind for me. That combo also lets you do some extremely mean things if you untap with it. You probably won't, but man if you did....
Gideon Jura achievement is one of the first things I have seen when I started to play in the MTGO. And I want to say that it's really cool and I still love to do it time by time. There are several (and most of them are very budget) ways to achieve it. And as an extension, this is the way to the "Kraj, the Ultimate Planeswalker". It will be good to see it again.
According to that list, 2 copies of Baleful Strix is now selling for more than the cost of a preconstructed Ninja deck that is still available and includes 2 copies of him. I know, the TIX to $US relationship is not exactly 1=1 on the market, and you can use discounts and payment methods at Heath's store that you can't on the MTGO official Store. Still I was able to get a full playset of Strix by buying two precons, then selling off to bots the Sakashima's Students for about 5-6 each and about 3 each for Silent-Blade Onis, so that works out to about $5.50 per Strix if you do it that way. I kept the Vela's and Ink-Eyes, or that would have been another few tix discount off the playset.
Sounds like you are using bot prices. I've noticed on foils of the lesser played mythics that prices are all over the place - there simply isn't enough supply to establish a price. Sometimes you'll see the foil version for 2-3 tickets and a different bot is selling it for 12-15.
So I know I had heard some time ago that MTGO was ~50% of their revenue. In a (albeit dated) article Worth claims it as 30-50% of magic revenue. He also gives some incite into the redemption process. Here is the link:
Statistically, most of the "money divide" in this event is in the mana base. The tribal creature base is nearly always affordable, with only 6 creatures in the whole game on the 25 tix and up list this week. Usually, the tribal base for most successful decks comes in under $20. A few tribes like human or wizard can get pricey if played with Modern staples like Bob and Noble Hierarch. Eldrazi is obviously expensive as well. But these are the outliers. We're basically talking mostly about lands as the price difference between most high value decks and low value ones. Nagarjuna's Sliver deck is a typical example, with a $5 tribal base, four 25 cent StPs, one 4 ticket Path to Exile, and $300 worth of dual lands and fetches.
There are actually very few noncreature, nonland spells that see any volume of play and are expensive. In 2012, the most commonly played nonland noncreature cards worth over 5 tix, with a rough approximation of their price in parentheses, were: Sword of Fire and Ice (7), Chrome Mox (5), Entomb (12, but as low as 6 recently), Bitterblossom (10), Lotus Petal (5, but as high as 10 recently). You have to get all the way down to #209 to find Liliana of the Veil at 32 tix and #211 Jace TMS at 60-something tix to find any noncreature spell more expensive than Entomb. The total copies of Lily and Jace TMS that were played was about 40 each. Bonfire of the Damned, a 30-40 ticket card which completely WRECKS FACE in this format, saw only 6 copies played all year.
If there's a big money divide between players, it's mostly a result of the legacy manabase being super expensive, plus a few valuable special lands like Grove of the Burnwillows, Gaea's Cradle, and of course Wasteland. Almost all of my big buy-ins last year were for original dual lands and Onslaught fetches. Once you have these, very few decks are actually totally out of reach for you, but getting to that point is a long and expensive process.
I think the initiatives already taken to develop broader prize support are the best thing to be doing. You've got achievements and special prizes. I'm intending to continue doing special deckbuilding challenges with decent prizes, and will try to make sure the cards involved are reasonably accessible to most players. And those of us who like to play different decks every week can try to keep the matchups interesting for all the players. I really think that's all we can do that would actually help.
P.S. Can we clarify whether FoW is being held to the usual Watch List standards or not? I ask because you stated last week that it was being judged by a separate evaluation process that required it to be warping the metagame in some fashion. If the appearance ratio value actually will matter for FoW, then there appears to be an error by which it's only being counted from event 108 to present, rather than from event 49 to present (its first appearance, in Pete Jahn's Illusions deck). Actually, some of the cards' ratios are calculated from their first appearance, and others are calculated from placement on the watch list.
P.P.S. Populating a Marit Lage token is pretty awful. Ok, the little encyclopedic AJ in my head just said in a charming British accent "well, not if you had Mirror Gallery in play." Now THAT would have been an achievement.
That's why junk mythics are so friggin' expensive?! Ugh! I never could think of an answer to that but this may just be it.
I've been slowly building up a foil collection of every currently available set. I started in September. It's just a personal collection for myself. I couldn't get into Zendikar because the mythic costs online were atrocious, I remember foil Felidar Sovereign was +40tix and I'm pretty sure foil Ioana was something much more absurd.
The newer sets are not AS bad, but take any foil mythic that isn't seeing competitive play and basically triple the cost in tix compared to its physical equivalent. It's very annoying.
I would suggest adding Cloudpost to the list of Pauper prices, I feel like this is a card that is going to start to spike in value....at least for a while....
One correction: The wholesale price that dealers pay is $2.05-$2.10 per pack, depending on their discounts. That doesn't change much, but it gives a better picture of how attractive redemption vs. buying can be. I don't think they can quite get them for "half off".
I've noticed that Slippery Bogle has doubled its value since I got a playset. It's a good card for a lot of formats, and selling for 1 tix or so right now. I expect that to go up. Maybe it'll top out at 2.
Also, hope you feel better soon! I really enjoyed your lengthy discussion about redemption. I don't care how many words there are, so if you're in the mood to live up to your user name, have at it. :)
Redemption in mass quantities was wreaking havoc on both the MTGO and MTG:Pants economies, and had been for a long time. Cards that were $3 mythics offline were over $10 online due 90% to redemption causing the mythic bottleneck. While I don't necessarily think that this was the absolute best way to start addressing the problem, I think something had to be done.
I really wish that WotC would work harder to integrate MTGO with "real" magic, and a unified Planeswalker points system would go a long way to accomplishing that. The ability to play "real" sanctioned magic online would also decrease some of the incentive to redeem your cards because you would need sets on both formats instead of just drafting your heart out on MTGO and then redeeming your way into sets for paper constructed (which is what I think a lot of serious online players do).
And the fact is: with the current client you do NOT have to scroll down at all. There's the INCREMENTAL SEARCH in the list view of the editor: if your mouse cursor is hovering on the list, you can start typing the first letter/s of the card you want and the list will automatically go there instantaneously. In my experience, most players don't even know that. If I already know which cards to use, I can build a deck from scratch in about 60 seconds with the current client. It becomes at least 10 times that with the beta. That's unacceptable, you aren't really upgrading something if this is the performance result of a basic feature.
I feel like I should do a video article explaining the hidden deckbuilding features of the current client, so that people will know what we're going to lose, and start asking for those things to be transfered into the beta.
Hall of Famers no longer get appearance fees to cover costs. Grinding GPs to get to platinum status is how they afford to attend multiple events. By competitive Magic, I meant showing up at a lot of events, grinding PT levels and being in contention everywhere, vs. showing up at a GP or PT or so, when they are close or convenient. The summary may not be well worded, but what I wrote in my article is hardly "blatantly untrue."
Well, I said "without involving artifacts", nothing more than that. :)
These tournaments look super cool, i'd love to join them some time! :D
Better get brewing :)
Enchanted Evening + Opalescence works nicely too.
"Brian Kibler writes an article on why he and LSV may be quitting competitive Magic."
From the front page summary of your article. Having something this blatantly untrue posted so prominately seems bad. Kibler said he and LSV were considering not attending any Grand Prix's in pursuit of Pro Points which while sad is not the same as them quitting high level magic. Hall of Famers have auto invites to Pro Tours without setting foot at Grand Prix which is why Kibler and LSV can consider just giving up on Pro Points and GPs.
It can also be done via enchantments (Opalescence & Enchanted Evening)but I don't think that this is what you're looking for. Hmm, I need to think & find other possibilities.
I intentionally only started monitoring FoW since when the promo came online. What I'll do with the collected data is a mystery: mainly I'll try to scare the FoW players. Just picture me saying: "I'm watching you", with relative hand gesturing. :P
All the cards in the Watch List are calculated since when they were first playable (some of them had never been playable in TribAp before). It's all explained in the notes you can see in the cells.
Populating a Marit Lage token is the supreme commitment to the achievements. The idea is exactly that, in order to unlock the achievement, you have to give up a win. That's the achievement. (Same goes for going for a tie when you are winning).
Hint: if you solve the Gideon riddle without involving artifacts, maybe something "secret" will happen somewhere else in the list...
Mycosynth Lattice & Karn are good engines but there is much budget way; Liquimetal Coating & March of the Machines/ or Karn too. Then with Kraj you can use all the abilities of any Planeswalker in the same turn without any restriction. It's really cool. I have never done this with Gideon so far. My personal choices were Sarkan Vol, Ajani Vengeant or Elspeth. But I have used the Gideon and Kraj combination without the artifact engines before.
Excellent article as always!
Interesting thoughts on set redemption.
As an European, redemption is not that interesting due to taxes and tariffs.
As you have said, MTGO is the tail and Paper is the dog. Thus, I would foresee this move having more of an impact on MTGO than on Paper. If redemption stays high, the extra 20$ for WotC have to come from somewhere. If profit margins are as you assume, it is a possibility the dealers will just eat (part of) the loss.
But as you said, there are so many variables and with incomplete data...
I would really like to hear about the asides you left out when you find time to write about them.
And as as software developer, I have to agree that its about time they hire some people. There are ridiculous bugs persisting for years (like new decks only being shown if you manually leave and reenter the folder). Its a good thing they have the best game in the world...
Mycosynth Lattice and Karn, Silver Golem is the first one that came to mind for me. That combo also lets you do some extremely mean things if you untap with it. You probably won't, but man if you did....
Gideon Jura achievement is one of the first things I have seen when I started to play in the MTGO. And I want to say that it's really cool and I still love to do it time by time. There are several (and most of them are very budget) ways to achieve it. And as an extension, this is the way to the "Kraj, the Ultimate Planeswalker". It will be good to see it again.
According to that list, 2 copies of Baleful Strix is now selling for more than the cost of a preconstructed Ninja deck that is still available and includes 2 copies of him. I know, the TIX to $US relationship is not exactly 1=1 on the market, and you can use discounts and payment methods at Heath's store that you can't on the MTGO official Store. Still I was able to get a full playset of Strix by buying two precons, then selling off to bots the Sakashima's Students for about 5-6 each and about 3 each for Silent-Blade Onis, so that works out to about $5.50 per Strix if you do it that way. I kept the Vela's and Ink-Eyes, or that would have been another few tix discount off the playset.
Sounds like you are using bot prices. I've noticed on foils of the lesser played mythics that prices are all over the place - there simply isn't enough supply to establish a price. Sometimes you'll see the foil version for 2-3 tickets and a different bot is selling it for 12-15.
So I know I had heard some time ago that MTGO was ~50% of their revenue. In a (albeit dated) article Worth claims it as 30-50% of magic revenue. He also gives some incite into the redemption process. Here is the link:
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/818/818114p1.html
They are hiring people that they should have hired 3 years ago. And Worth can comfortably says MTGO is a success when every single PTQ crashes.
Statistically, most of the "money divide" in this event is in the mana base. The tribal creature base is nearly always affordable, with only 6 creatures in the whole game on the 25 tix and up list this week. Usually, the tribal base for most successful decks comes in under $20. A few tribes like human or wizard can get pricey if played with Modern staples like Bob and Noble Hierarch. Eldrazi is obviously expensive as well. But these are the outliers. We're basically talking mostly about lands as the price difference between most high value decks and low value ones. Nagarjuna's Sliver deck is a typical example, with a $5 tribal base, four 25 cent StPs, one 4 ticket Path to Exile, and $300 worth of dual lands and fetches.
There are actually very few noncreature, nonland spells that see any volume of play and are expensive. In 2012, the most commonly played nonland noncreature cards worth over 5 tix, with a rough approximation of their price in parentheses, were: Sword of Fire and Ice (7), Chrome Mox (5), Entomb (12, but as low as 6 recently), Bitterblossom (10), Lotus Petal (5, but as high as 10 recently). You have to get all the way down to #209 to find Liliana of the Veil at 32 tix and #211 Jace TMS at 60-something tix to find any noncreature spell more expensive than Entomb. The total copies of Lily and Jace TMS that were played was about 40 each. Bonfire of the Damned, a 30-40 ticket card which completely WRECKS FACE in this format, saw only 6 copies played all year.
If there's a big money divide between players, it's mostly a result of the legacy manabase being super expensive, plus a few valuable special lands like Grove of the Burnwillows, Gaea's Cradle, and of course Wasteland. Almost all of my big buy-ins last year were for original dual lands and Onslaught fetches. Once you have these, very few decks are actually totally out of reach for you, but getting to that point is a long and expensive process.
I think the initiatives already taken to develop broader prize support are the best thing to be doing. You've got achievements and special prizes. I'm intending to continue doing special deckbuilding challenges with decent prizes, and will try to make sure the cards involved are reasonably accessible to most players. And those of us who like to play different decks every week can try to keep the matchups interesting for all the players. I really think that's all we can do that would actually help.
P.S. Can we clarify whether FoW is being held to the usual Watch List standards or not? I ask because you stated last week that it was being judged by a separate evaluation process that required it to be warping the metagame in some fashion. If the appearance ratio value actually will matter for FoW, then there appears to be an error by which it's only being counted from event 108 to present, rather than from event 49 to present (its first appearance, in Pete Jahn's Illusions deck). Actually, some of the cards' ratios are calculated from their first appearance, and others are calculated from placement on the watch list.
P.P.S. Populating a Marit Lage token is pretty awful. Ok, the little encyclopedic AJ in my head just said in a charming British accent "well, not if you had Mirror Gallery in play." Now THAT would have been an achievement.
That's why junk mythics are so friggin' expensive?! Ugh! I never could think of an answer to that but this may just be it.
I've been slowly building up a foil collection of every currently available set. I started in September. It's just a personal collection for myself. I couldn't get into Zendikar because the mythic costs online were atrocious, I remember foil Felidar Sovereign was +40tix and I'm pretty sure foil Ioana was something much more absurd.
The newer sets are not AS bad, but take any foil mythic that isn't seeing competitive play and basically triple the cost in tix compared to its physical equivalent. It's very annoying.
/rant
I would suggest adding Cloudpost to the list of Pauper prices, I feel like this is a card that is going to start to spike in value....at least for a while....
Good analysis, Pete.
One correction: The wholesale price that dealers pay is $2.05-$2.10 per pack, depending on their discounts. That doesn't change much, but it gives a better picture of how attractive redemption vs. buying can be. I don't think they can quite get them for "half off".
I've noticed that Slippery Bogle has doubled its value since I got a playset. It's a good card for a lot of formats, and selling for 1 tix or so right now. I expect that to go up. Maybe it'll top out at 2.
Also, hope you feel better soon! I really enjoyed your lengthy discussion about redemption. I don't care how many words there are, so if you're in the mood to live up to your user name, have at it. :)
Redemption in mass quantities was wreaking havoc on both the MTGO and MTG:Pants economies, and had been for a long time. Cards that were $3 mythics offline were over $10 online due 90% to redemption causing the mythic bottleneck. While I don't necessarily think that this was the absolute best way to start addressing the problem, I think something had to be done.
I really wish that WotC would work harder to integrate MTGO with "real" magic, and a unified Planeswalker points system would go a long way to accomplishing that. The ability to play "real" sanctioned magic online would also decrease some of the incentive to redeem your cards because you would need sets on both formats instead of just drafting your heart out on MTGO and then redeeming your way into sets for paper constructed (which is what I think a lot of serious online players do).
And the fact is: with the current client you do NOT have to scroll down at all. There's the INCREMENTAL SEARCH in the list view of the editor: if your mouse cursor is hovering on the list, you can start typing the first letter/s of the card you want and the list will automatically go there instantaneously. In my experience, most players don't even know that. If I already know which cards to use, I can build a deck from scratch in about 60 seconds with the current client. It becomes at least 10 times that with the beta. That's unacceptable, you aren't really upgrading something if this is the performance result of a basic feature.
I feel like I should do a video article explaining the hidden deckbuilding features of the current client, so that people will know what we're going to lose, and start asking for those things to be transfered into the beta.
After the offline Prerelease I didn't plan to play the online one. But after reading your great article I feel this itch...