I don't really know what the worry is about Modern Masters affecting card prices. However many they print, I'm sure there will be a lot fewer new copies than printing them in an expansion like they did with the shock lands.
Cownose, as we all know, any playset that costs more than a teenager's allowance will be complained about endlessly by that teenager, if nobody else, and so no price is low enough to stop the complaining entirely. I would think that WotC needs to continue being careful not to *directly* reference the secondary-market value of any card as being involved with any reprint decision, so as not to set such a precedent of caving to pressure like that. Unless they started handing out mythics at FNM, they'd never please 100% of the player-base with regard to the price of the hobby.
I can't agree with WotC doing this even with the amount of caution they've shown. This is a limited-run product, but that only helps prevent massive devaluation in paper Magic. Online it's "limited" only by the number of drafts that will occur during however many weeks this is available to draft. If it's available for a month, and is as fun and cube-like as Aaron Forsythe suggested, it will be drafted *heavily* (primarily paper players will draft it online because there purportedly won't be enough paper product to draft) and the value of our collections will plummet overnight.
As for giving us fair warning, I expected the usual sporadic reprints and a shockland reprint based on WotC's remarks. When the forum kids started going on about being gifted with binders full of dirt cheap format staples through reprints, I assumed that was just wishful thinking on their part and not the actual plan.
Keep in mind this is an experiment so their hands are not tied towards saying "well it didnt work as we expected so forget about this in the future." I wouldn't worry too much about them losing control of their options for reprints. In fact I expect the opposite. They will gain more and more control as the years go by and the older sets become less relevant to new players.
Modern is the eternal format they most have control over because they can completely predict and determine how large each card's supply should be.
My only problem is that WotC is basically creating a big problem for themselves in the future. If $400 playets of cards are too much, what about $200...what about $100 playsets? Who gets to determine when a card is so expensive that it will get reprinted? Now every time a card goes over $20 WotC is going to have a hoard of people demanding and EXPECTING a repint (and rightfully so). I think we need some guidance about how they determine what gets reprinted and how often we can expect this sort of thing to happen.
That aside, I think they way they are doing this is great. They are giving people months of advanced notice about what is going to happen, and they basically told us this was coming when they announced Modern as a format--so nobody should have been surprised by this. They are also making it a limited-run product and a product with a higher price tag. Unlike when they dumped a million new duals on the market for MED 4 with no real warning, this probably won't make very many of their collectors angry at them.
Kudos for sticking to a plan. It does suck that Golgari was soooo open that draft though, you could've made an insane one! Taking everything with the word "token" in it will always give you a good deck, selesnya is that strong. Slime molding is actually one of the better ones too.
The number accessible is not the same as the number printed though. Dealers and speculators hoard the good cards in a format when they think they can make a killing later and then have a hard time selling off at lower prices which makes accessibilty an issue. Having more copies opened from draft packs will force those sitting on goyfs to readjust their prices to match a more reasonable price figure. Not to say the dealers/speculators are wrong in doing so and imho there are plenty of people who dont play the format who will consider selling off staples before they crash if they aren't intending to come back. This should make the format far more accessible for those who cant afford $400 playsets of cards.
This article really puts it in perspective how rare the early cards are compared to ANYTHING in Modern legal sets. I hear all this stuff on forums and comments about Modern Masters making the format "accessible", which is silly. Modern is already "accessible", since every key card in Modern (Goyf included) was printed waaaaaaaaaaay more times than Candelabra of Tawnos or Mishra's Workshop. There are indeed few enough of those that the number of High Tide and Workshop decks that could ever be brought to a GP has a real and genuine hard limit. The number of Modern Jund decks that could appear at a Modern GP, OTOH, isn't really capped at any number that would be a relevant limit compared to the size of a GP, since there were easily enough playsets of Goyf printed to fill multiple convention halls every weekend with players who own them.
You can call certain legacy and vintage decks "inaccessible" on account of the extreme rarity, but with regard to any set in Modern "inaccessible" really is just a polite euphemism for "out of my personal price range" whenever anybody says that. I'm going to a SCG Open in St. Louis on Sunday, and even if I left home with $1200 burning a hole in my pocket it's no guarantee I could find 4 Candelabras anybody was willing to part with even if I spent all day asking -- that's truly inaccessible. But I could easily find 4 Goyfs for sale without looking too hard, all I need is the $360 and I'd have them in 5 minutes after showing up at the hall -- that's pretty much the definition of accesible.
Oh and just a little note on a card in pauper that is doing the opposite of all other pauper cards...
Ancestral Mask
Was a $.50 card a couple of weeks ago.
Is now closing in on $3 and has been rising every day over the last 2 weeks.
It's used in a GW Hexproof/Aurua's deck that was fringe playable before RtR, but since the printing of Ethereal Armor has become a very legit classic pauper deck.
Just curious, were you able to sell your Sorin before it started going down again; or are you going to gamble on Gatecrash increasing his price even more? (which is a legit strategy, but still quite the gamble at the price you originally paid for him.)
I feel like the biggest effect of Modern Masters will be on the paper Commons and paper/mtgo Uncommons (Manamorphose, Lava Spike, Kitchen Finks, etc.) That's assuming those cards get reprinted in their old rarities. But who knows? It's a long way's off and Wizards will have plenty of time for crunching numbers in that time.
Great article! I enjoyed your discussion of Modern Masters. As a keen Modern player, I'm looking forward to Modern Masters and I hope that it is a fun limited format. Personally, I've never been much of a collector and would much rather the format be cheap and accessible. However, I can see a reason for trying to keep prices from dropping too far.
Personally, my fear is that Modern Masters might end up being too conservative and not having a massive impact on prices. However, the announcement of the GP and so on has given me hope that this will be a popular product and will help to drop prices in Modern, at least for the rares and uncommons if not so much for the Mythics like Tarmogoyf.
Your Alpha+Beta print run numbers are off (you listed the beta number as alpha and limited edition [alpha+beta] as beta)
alpha=2.6 million=1500 of each rare
beta=7.8 million=4500 of each rare
If you mean only the art, like the ones I used for the Choirs (with a modicum of work in Photoshop), what I did is just googling each card and/or the artist's name. Sometimes the artists have their websites with the hi-res version of the art.
The links thing is indeed an issue (I need the HTML back to properly handle them). Also, the number of the installment and his URL, which is already linked from everywhere else.
Every one of these articles will be updated regularly (as soon as a new member is released), adding to their existing structure. They're a constant work-in-progress where I can link each of them and provide a complete, up-to-date view on the tribe, along with updated numbers and statistics. I don't want to do Dragons (yep, that's the next one!) and awkwardly end it with "and here's some updates about Angels and Demons". And then, when I want to point to them, having to refer to a number of different sections of different articles.
I see tables for odd formats like this pop up on MTGO occasionally, always interesting to see some explanations of them, though the last thing I need is to get involved with yet another fringe format that I can never find matches for.
WotC's choice of formats to recognize does seem odd sometimes. It appears to be a product of push from community in some cases, but often they're just taking a shot on something that trends in recent sets have pushed. IIRC, tribal wars' first official recognition in any capacity started out around Lorwyn time, and K-Scope was in the midst of a run of popular multicolor blocks. FWIW, I put K-Scope tables up occasionally in JFF and almost never get any takers. I was able to join one recently against a WotC spellslinger, (beat him with my mostly-Shards K-Scope-slash-human-tribal deck.) I was hoping K-Scope would get a resurgence with RTR, but not so far.
Standard Pauper seems to be a rather bland entry driven mostly by people with extreme budget limitations, as the format has such a limited card pool -- it's like playing the constructed version of a cool draft deck you had, but without any of the cards that made it, you know, actually memorable and fun to play. You could build anything you want for $1, but why would you want to? I know it has it's champions, but it just seems too shallow a pool to be more than something you might screw around with for an hour every few months. But OTOH because it's so easy to build and simple to comprehend, it makes more sense for WotC to recognize it than something more complicated RS or Prismatic. But I think Std Pauper missed the point of alternative formats. The alternative formats cater largely to Johnny mentalities, so they should at least have enough complexity to allow Johnny type players to sit and brew decks all hours of the day.
I need to practice against Dredge. I made the worst plays when I even drew most of my hate.
I really wish something about leagues was discussed, it continues to feel as though the hope is to ignore it until it goes away...
I'm not sure what you were doing in Zendikar block but i loved drafting it :)
"Now exact rankings will vary, but most lists do include Innistrad, Ravnica, Zendikar, Return to Ravnica, Rise of the Eldrazi, and maybe Invasion."
I don't think Zendikar was ever included in any list that involves good limited formats.
I don't really know what the worry is about Modern Masters affecting card prices. However many they print, I'm sure there will be a lot fewer new copies than printing them in an expansion like they did with the shock lands.
Does anyone have a link to the statement that FOW will never be printed in a MED again?
Cownose, as we all know, any playset that costs more than a teenager's allowance will be complained about endlessly by that teenager, if nobody else, and so no price is low enough to stop the complaining entirely. I would think that WotC needs to continue being careful not to *directly* reference the secondary-market value of any card as being involved with any reprint decision, so as not to set such a precedent of caving to pressure like that. Unless they started handing out mythics at FNM, they'd never please 100% of the player-base with regard to the price of the hobby.
I can't agree with WotC doing this even with the amount of caution they've shown. This is a limited-run product, but that only helps prevent massive devaluation in paper Magic. Online it's "limited" only by the number of drafts that will occur during however many weeks this is available to draft. If it's available for a month, and is as fun and cube-like as Aaron Forsythe suggested, it will be drafted *heavily* (primarily paper players will draft it online because there purportedly won't be enough paper product to draft) and the value of our collections will plummet overnight.
As for giving us fair warning, I expected the usual sporadic reprints and a shockland reprint based on WotC's remarks. When the forum kids started going on about being gifted with binders full of dirt cheap format staples through reprints, I assumed that was just wishful thinking on their part and not the actual plan.
Keep in mind this is an experiment so their hands are not tied towards saying "well it didnt work as we expected so forget about this in the future." I wouldn't worry too much about them losing control of their options for reprints. In fact I expect the opposite. They will gain more and more control as the years go by and the older sets become less relevant to new players.
Modern is the eternal format they most have control over because they can completely predict and determine how large each card's supply should be.
sounds like you guys could have used a bit more prep, but sounds like a great time vids are pretty cool, but very quiet unfortunately
My only problem is that WotC is basically creating a big problem for themselves in the future. If $400 playets of cards are too much, what about $200...what about $100 playsets? Who gets to determine when a card is so expensive that it will get reprinted? Now every time a card goes over $20 WotC is going to have a hoard of people demanding and EXPECTING a repint (and rightfully so). I think we need some guidance about how they determine what gets reprinted and how often we can expect this sort of thing to happen.
That aside, I think they way they are doing this is great. They are giving people months of advanced notice about what is going to happen, and they basically told us this was coming when they announced Modern as a format--so nobody should have been surprised by this. They are also making it a limited-run product and a product with a higher price tag. Unlike when they dumped a million new duals on the market for MED 4 with no real warning, this probably won't make very many of their collectors angry at them.
Kudos for sticking to a plan. It does suck that Golgari was soooo open that draft though, you could've made an insane one! Taking everything with the word "token" in it will always give you a good deck, selesnya is that strong. Slime molding is actually one of the better ones too.
The number accessible is not the same as the number printed though. Dealers and speculators hoard the good cards in a format when they think they can make a killing later and then have a hard time selling off at lower prices which makes accessibilty an issue. Having more copies opened from draft packs will force those sitting on goyfs to readjust their prices to match a more reasonable price figure. Not to say the dealers/speculators are wrong in doing so and imho there are plenty of people who dont play the format who will consider selling off staples before they crash if they aren't intending to come back. This should make the format far more accessible for those who cant afford $400 playsets of cards.
This article really puts it in perspective how rare the early cards are compared to ANYTHING in Modern legal sets. I hear all this stuff on forums and comments about Modern Masters making the format "accessible", which is silly. Modern is already "accessible", since every key card in Modern (Goyf included) was printed waaaaaaaaaaay more times than Candelabra of Tawnos or Mishra's Workshop. There are indeed few enough of those that the number of High Tide and Workshop decks that could ever be brought to a GP has a real and genuine hard limit. The number of Modern Jund decks that could appear at a Modern GP, OTOH, isn't really capped at any number that would be a relevant limit compared to the size of a GP, since there were easily enough playsets of Goyf printed to fill multiple convention halls every weekend with players who own them.
You can call certain legacy and vintage decks "inaccessible" on account of the extreme rarity, but with regard to any set in Modern "inaccessible" really is just a polite euphemism for "out of my personal price range" whenever anybody says that. I'm going to a SCG Open in St. Louis on Sunday, and even if I left home with $1200 burning a hole in my pocket it's no guarantee I could find 4 Candelabras anybody was willing to part with even if I spent all day asking -- that's truly inaccessible. But I could easily find 4 Goyfs for sale without looking too hard, all I need is the $360 and I'd have them in 5 minutes after showing up at the hall -- that's pretty much the definition of accesible.
Oh and just a little note on a card in pauper that is doing the opposite of all other pauper cards...
Ancestral Mask
Was a $.50 card a couple of weeks ago.
Is now closing in on $3 and has been rising every day over the last 2 weeks.
It's used in a GW Hexproof/Aurua's deck that was fringe playable before RtR, but since the printing of Ethereal Armor has become a very legit classic pauper deck.
Great article Heath. I look forward to watching the videos!
Just curious, were you able to sell your Sorin before it started going down again; or are you going to gamble on Gatecrash increasing his price even more? (which is a legit strategy, but still quite the gamble at the price you originally paid for him.)
I feel like the biggest effect of Modern Masters will be on the paper Commons and paper/mtgo Uncommons (Manamorphose, Lava Spike, Kitchen Finks, etc.) That's assuming those cards get reprinted in their old rarities. But who knows? It's a long way's off and Wizards will have plenty of time for crunching numbers in that time.
Great article! I enjoyed your discussion of Modern Masters. As a keen Modern player, I'm looking forward to Modern Masters and I hope that it is a fun limited format. Personally, I've never been much of a collector and would much rather the format be cheap and accessible. However, I can see a reason for trying to keep prices from dropping too far.
Personally, my fear is that Modern Masters might end up being too conservative and not having a massive impact on prices. However, the announcement of the GP and so on has given me hope that this will be a popular product and will help to drop prices in Modern, at least for the rares and uncommons if not so much for the Mythics like Tarmogoyf.
Your Alpha+Beta print run numbers are off (you listed the beta number as alpha and limited edition [alpha+beta] as beta)
alpha=2.6 million=1500 of each rare
beta=7.8 million=4500 of each rare
I just wanted to point out that I beat planetwalls r1 and lost to Crisp one round 2 which is rather funny that all 3 of us managed to money.
If you mean only the art, like the ones I used for the Choirs (with a modicum of work in Photoshop), what I did is just googling each card and/or the artist's name. Sometimes the artists have their websites with the hi-res version of the art.
Thanks a lot! :)
love the attention to detail, the graphics, the breakdowns, A++++ sir (think the scene in xmas story where the teacher gives out the a+++) :)
Nice article. One question it brought to mind: Is there a source online of card art with large format pictures?
pH
The links thing is indeed an issue (I need the HTML back to properly handle them). Also, the number of the installment and his URL, which is already linked from everywhere else.
Every one of these articles will be updated regularly (as soon as a new member is released), adding to their existing structure. They're a constant work-in-progress where I can link each of them and provide a complete, up-to-date view on the tribe, along with updated numbers and statistics. I don't want to do Dragons (yep, that's the next one!) and awkwardly end it with "and here's some updates about Angels and Demons". And then, when I want to point to them, having to refer to a number of different sections of different articles.
I see tables for odd formats like this pop up on MTGO occasionally, always interesting to see some explanations of them, though the last thing I need is to get involved with yet another fringe format that I can never find matches for.
WotC's choice of formats to recognize does seem odd sometimes. It appears to be a product of push from community in some cases, but often they're just taking a shot on something that trends in recent sets have pushed. IIRC, tribal wars' first official recognition in any capacity started out around Lorwyn time, and K-Scope was in the midst of a run of popular multicolor blocks. FWIW, I put K-Scope tables up occasionally in JFF and almost never get any takers. I was able to join one recently against a WotC spellslinger, (beat him with my mostly-Shards K-Scope-slash-human-tribal deck.) I was hoping K-Scope would get a resurgence with RTR, but not so far.
Standard Pauper seems to be a rather bland entry driven mostly by people with extreme budget limitations, as the format has such a limited card pool -- it's like playing the constructed version of a cool draft deck you had, but without any of the cards that made it, you know, actually memorable and fun to play. You could build anything you want for $1, but why would you want to? I know it has it's champions, but it just seems too shallow a pool to be more than something you might screw around with for an hour every few months. But OTOH because it's so easy to build and simple to comprehend, it makes more sense for WotC to recognize it than something more complicated RS or Prismatic. But I think Std Pauper missed the point of alternative formats. The alternative formats cater largely to Johnny mentalities, so they should at least have enough complexity to allow Johnny type players to sit and brew decks all hours of the day.