I still disagree.
I think you're way underestimating the number of commons coming from drafts. The most recent releases gave us lots of very powerful commons. These commons cards took place in many different decks of many different formats. The best example is delver, which is a house in from standard to legacy and even classic format. Its price is below 0,2. Which is extremly cheap compared to its potential. If there were more standard pauper tournaments, I really dont believe that its price would skyrocket that much, maybe the card value would reach 0,3/0,4 at best. I would be interested to see how this could help drafter in any ways ...
Commander in example does much for drafters than pauper would ever do. Same goes with pretty much all eternal formats.
This whole conversation lacks economics...Packs come from one of two places in MTGO: the store or as prizes from tournaments. More prizes = less sales in the store, that is a fact--meaning that WotC DOES ACTUALLY LOSE MONEY from tournaments that pay out packs at a rate of less than 3.99/pack. Every single pack that is given out as a prize represents less packs that will be bought from the store, costing WotC money in the form of future sales. Cannibalizing your own sales is not a shrewd business move.
As for the average pack value thing, pauper in no significant way effects the value of Std.-legal packs. Look at delver...hes heavily played in pauper and is still .11--Std sets are valued based on Mythics and the odd rare and no amount of Std pauper would significantly raise the average value of a std-legal pack...there is simply too great a supply of commons coming from those sets.
Also, it is quite ridiculous to say that WotC has no overhead in producing virtual products--of course they have overhead. They need to store the data, track the data, maintain the servers, and a million other things that cost real money.
Hmmm I watched some of the double tribal didn't hear about the headaches portion of it. I'm sorry if that is the case. I tried to create an interesting variant and it seemed like it was working from the games I saw.
I agree if the witnessing becomes a big hassle it shouldn't be on Blippy to have to deal with it. I suggest that since Clan Leys is sponsoring it they should be the ones to officiate over the witnessing and leave Blippy out of it.
Also as far as it dragging events on...well that does happen regardless of the reasons, but I dont see a 2minute evaluation to see if someone did indeed make an achievement as a real time hassle.
I'm afraid that the achievement system will, if it is utilized, slow down rounds by needing to get a witness. I'm also afraid, after what I hear of the disastrous double tribal event for which I was not present, that Blippy's patience is being taxed, and I would not want to ask him to do any more work for this tournament. This is a small PRE that gets 12-25 entrants, and has a small community of maybe 30 people who care about it enough to keep up with it. I love these articles, and I love the volume of work done by you and vantar in tracking all the stats and so forth. It adds an extra level of enjoyment for me and other players. But there's a point at which it just becomes needlessly intricate, like a late 1970's Yes record. And if you make a zillion special prizes and events, they cease to "special" at some point. In any case, I would at least want to keep extra headaches during the event to a minimum lest we find Blippy's doesn't want to do this anymore.
I still don't agree with the idea of forbidding changelings in virgin tribes, as it only serves to make those decks worse. I won an event with a virgin tribe, and AJ has moneyed with a few at least that I know of, and it's generally exciting when one of those decks does well. When those tribes are forced to stoop to unsynergystic or outright unplayable cards, or splash an additional color, it really weakens their chance to compete. I'd rather see a rare tribe go 3-1 with some Chameleon Colossi than see it go 0-4 because it had to stretch to include bad cards. At some point it may lose its tribal flavor to some degree, but a successful and synergistic tribal deck is always more interesting than one that just crammed every available member together and made the best of it. If changelings enable weak tribes to contribute reasonable decks to the event, then I vastly prefer that to dull purity.
I don't think they actually lose money (except as profit) but I was trying to make a point that it doesn't cost them $0 for a pack. It doesn't matter that there is no Carta Munde (or some other printer) actually making cards, or a warehouse, or shippers, etc. There ARE costs associated with producing packs be they digital or paper. Servers, coders for the myriad stupid tasks and maintenance scheduals that must take place each week, not to mention whatever else is associated with making and developing sets that aren't just good for offline play and there is redemption at the end of all that. So it isn't all profit. There is overhead OF A SORT. Reading is fun.
only loss could be obtained would be implied... in other words if they use a time slot to run a less popular tournament and it doesnt fire they gained nothing, but if they use that slot for something like std that is very popular people join and they get money hence the recent schedule revamp (really don't want to get between this argument, just wanted to add that thought)
Echuck215 that was pretty much exactly my point thank you.
What i was getting at about tax write off was this.
They retail the online packs at $4 so they could in theory say that each pack given out was "costing them" $4
Which while we all know isn't true (but let's be honest when it comes to taxes businesses use fuzzy math like this all the time)
They could in theory then claim that $1.26 "loss" per pack against their annual income thus being able to make it look like on paper that they would be taking a loss from said events.
When in reality they are making a profit even if its not nearly as much compared to a larger event.
I am so flabbergasted by this line of reasoning, that I registered just to comment.
That anyone can honestly hold the opinion that wizards loses money by running a tournament is... stunning, to say the least.
For a draft or sealed event, its just quite clear they are making a profit: those events consume more packs than they give out. So, I'll look at constructed tournaments.
Let's say a daily tournament gets exactly 16 players.
Then, barring something strange, that's AT MOST 1 person at 4-0, and 4 folks at 3-1. So let's suppose that's what happens. Then they are paying out 11 packs for the 4-0 guy, and 6 packs each to the 3-1's, for a total of 35 packs.
This tournament collected 96 tix in entry fees, so they just sold 35 packs at a cost of $2.74 per pack. I can tell you with a high degree of confidence, that's a good bit MORE than what Wizards gets per pack from their distributors and retailers for paper packs, and there are actual manufacturing costs involved there!
In MTGO, all the costs associated with packs are sunk costs - coding, support, all are the same whether or not I play in a given tournament. (Unlike paper magic.)
And though a few players now have more packs than they did before, those packs didn't cost wizards anything. And the other 11 players simply saw 66 tix disappear from their accounts. To replace them, they'll need to purchase $66 worth of tix from Wizards.
(You could argue that they're slightly devaluing packs by doing this. But here's the thing: anyone who knows what they are doing, if they want to buy something from the Wizards store, buys tix, since you can then use them to get packs from a bot. Packs are ALWAYS cheaper from a bot. If that weren't the case, people would just buy from the Wizards store until the value dropped.)
Now, that per pack number only gets BETTER for wizards the higher attendance gets. (For example, 17 players gets them 6 more tix worth of entry, but the maximum payout is the same.)
So, am I missing something glaring? How exactly is this process supposed to be losing wizards money?
That would be ideal, for then we could even play pauper block format or other similar concepts. I'm trying to temper my expectations, cause really just adding the standard pauper filter would increase my enjoyment and time spent playing significantly. Anything more would just be gravy.
It seems to me it could be even better. They could develop the client (v4 I guess at this point) to have flexible filters that players could use to create their own unique formats.
There is overhead of a sort. They have to account for what they produce. If they are paying out packs then that balances against what they are taking in. Even if the manufacturing costs are insignificant.
Taking a loss instead of a profit isn't good business. Even if you can justify it, wipe it away with a tax write off.
Yeah, all those zero people using them. They've actually been unbanned for a few weeks, nobody cared to use them. :) I hope they will show up at some point, at least once, just for the kick of it.
Sneak Attack and Painter's Servant unbanned? That's nice for the people who use them I guess. This event is just becoming more and more unplayable for me.
Nice job, lots of work doing 4 events worth of reporting. Your link to the Achievements is flawed in that the list is still locked/hidden from viewers.
re-read what i just said.
Im talking not about what is but what would be:
IF they were to make standard pauper an official format with sanctioned tournaments then it would push up the prices of commons from standard legal packs thus helping out the drafters.
Also as for the tourney prizes, even if wizards takes a "loss" they really don't for two reasons.
A) the packs are digital thus they have no overhead other then an insanely low amount stress on a database.
and B) Even if they take a overall "loss" they can just write that off as a business expense on their taxes thus not actually losing anything in the process.
pauper contributing to increase the average value of recent set packs seems just not correct to me : the only real expansive pauper cards are mostly coming from pre-IPA sets. Pauper doesnt have any impact on newer set, so no, it doesnt help drafters that much, pre-IPA draft aside.
This is a huge difference with other eternal formats, especialy with classic/legacy, because the most relevant cards for these format often are mythics & rare cards which drives sales.
I have no problem with pauper, but the cownose argument about tourney prizes, makes a lot of sense to me.
on the flip side if the popularity of standard pauper shot through the roof, then a fair number of commons would be more then just 200:1 bulk filler. Thus raising the average value of said packs.
Sorry to say Cownose plenty of people gave the exact same argument you are here now when classic pauper was being presented to be a possible format and classic pauper did not hurt classic or legacy at all infact both of those formats seen their primes during that time,while pushing singles prices up to unheard of amounts for commons (ex: crypt rats jumped from 25cent to 4 dollars almost overnight)
It's modern that killed Classic/Legacy,because of card availability, pauper was not to blame.
Same thing would happen here. Standard pauper would just be another outlet to play a fun game in an interesting format rather then kill any sales it would infact help the drafters out because the commons from the packs they were cracking would have a higher overall EV.
Seems clear to me, really sounds as a correct reasonning. It's time to rename you foxnose instead of cownose ;)
I still disagree.
I think you're way underestimating the number of commons coming from drafts. The most recent releases gave us lots of very powerful commons. These commons cards took place in many different decks of many different formats. The best example is delver, which is a house in from standard to legacy and even classic format. Its price is below 0,2. Which is extremly cheap compared to its potential. If there were more standard pauper tournaments, I really dont believe that its price would skyrocket that much, maybe the card value would reach 0,3/0,4 at best. I would be interested to see how this could help drafter in any ways ...
Commander in example does much for drafters than pauper would ever do. Same goes with pretty much all eternal formats.
This whole conversation lacks economics...Packs come from one of two places in MTGO: the store or as prizes from tournaments. More prizes = less sales in the store, that is a fact--meaning that WotC DOES ACTUALLY LOSE MONEY from tournaments that pay out packs at a rate of less than 3.99/pack. Every single pack that is given out as a prize represents less packs that will be bought from the store, costing WotC money in the form of future sales. Cannibalizing your own sales is not a shrewd business move.
As for the average pack value thing, pauper in no significant way effects the value of Std.-legal packs. Look at delver...hes heavily played in pauper and is still .11--Std sets are valued based on Mythics and the odd rare and no amount of Std pauper would significantly raise the average value of a std-legal pack...there is simply too great a supply of commons coming from those sets.
Also, it is quite ridiculous to say that WotC has no overhead in producing virtual products--of course they have overhead. They need to store the data, track the data, maintain the servers, and a million other things that cost real money.
Hmmm I watched some of the double tribal didn't hear about the headaches portion of it. I'm sorry if that is the case. I tried to create an interesting variant and it seemed like it was working from the games I saw.
I agree if the witnessing becomes a big hassle it shouldn't be on Blippy to have to deal with it. I suggest that since Clan Leys is sponsoring it they should be the ones to officiate over the witnessing and leave Blippy out of it.
Also as far as it dragging events on...well that does happen regardless of the reasons, but I dont see a 2minute evaluation to see if someone did indeed make an achievement as a real time hassle.
You have no idea how close your scenario came to being reality.
I'm afraid that the achievement system will, if it is utilized, slow down rounds by needing to get a witness. I'm also afraid, after what I hear of the disastrous double tribal event for which I was not present, that Blippy's patience is being taxed, and I would not want to ask him to do any more work for this tournament. This is a small PRE that gets 12-25 entrants, and has a small community of maybe 30 people who care about it enough to keep up with it. I love these articles, and I love the volume of work done by you and vantar in tracking all the stats and so forth. It adds an extra level of enjoyment for me and other players. But there's a point at which it just becomes needlessly intricate, like a late 1970's Yes record. And if you make a zillion special prizes and events, they cease to "special" at some point. In any case, I would at least want to keep extra headaches during the event to a minimum lest we find Blippy's doesn't want to do this anymore.
I still don't agree with the idea of forbidding changelings in virgin tribes, as it only serves to make those decks worse. I won an event with a virgin tribe, and AJ has moneyed with a few at least that I know of, and it's generally exciting when one of those decks does well. When those tribes are forced to stoop to unsynergystic or outright unplayable cards, or splash an additional color, it really weakens their chance to compete. I'd rather see a rare tribe go 3-1 with some Chameleon Colossi than see it go 0-4 because it had to stretch to include bad cards. At some point it may lose its tribal flavor to some degree, but a successful and synergistic tribal deck is always more interesting than one that just crammed every available member together and made the best of it. If changelings enable weak tribes to contribute reasonable decks to the event, then I vastly prefer that to dull purity.
I don't think they actually lose money (except as profit) but I was trying to make a point that it doesn't cost them $0 for a pack. It doesn't matter that there is no Carta Munde (or some other printer) actually making cards, or a warehouse, or shippers, etc. There ARE costs associated with producing packs be they digital or paper. Servers, coders for the myriad stupid tasks and maintenance scheduals that must take place each week, not to mention whatever else is associated with making and developing sets that aren't just good for offline play and there is redemption at the end of all that. So it isn't all profit. There is overhead OF A SORT. Reading is fun.
Troll much? lol.
Lord Erman is so 2000-Late
get with the program oldman
only loss could be obtained would be implied... in other words if they use a time slot to run a less popular tournament and it doesnt fire they gained nothing, but if they use that slot for something like std that is very popular people join and they get money hence the recent schedule revamp (really don't want to get between this argument, just wanted to add that thought)
And tribal could have sideboards, but honestly I do not expect to see either ever happen.
At the very least standard pauper has a ever so slight prayer of happening because it could in-fact add to WotC's bottom line.
Echuck215 that was pretty much exactly my point thank you.
What i was getting at about tax write off was this.
They retail the online packs at $4 so they could in theory say that each pack given out was "costing them" $4
Which while we all know isn't true (but let's be honest when it comes to taxes businesses use fuzzy math like this all the time)
They could in theory then claim that $1.26 "loss" per pack against their annual income thus being able to make it look like on paper that they would be taking a loss from said events.
When in reality they are making a profit even if its not nearly as much compared to a larger event.
I am so flabbergasted by this line of reasoning, that I registered just to comment.
That anyone can honestly hold the opinion that wizards loses money by running a tournament is... stunning, to say the least.
For a draft or sealed event, its just quite clear they are making a profit: those events consume more packs than they give out. So, I'll look at constructed tournaments.
Let's say a daily tournament gets exactly 16 players.
Then, barring something strange, that's AT MOST 1 person at 4-0, and 4 folks at 3-1. So let's suppose that's what happens. Then they are paying out 11 packs for the 4-0 guy, and 6 packs each to the 3-1's, for a total of 35 packs.
This tournament collected 96 tix in entry fees, so they just sold 35 packs at a cost of $2.74 per pack. I can tell you with a high degree of confidence, that's a good bit MORE than what Wizards gets per pack from their distributors and retailers for paper packs, and there are actual manufacturing costs involved there!
In MTGO, all the costs associated with packs are sunk costs - coding, support, all are the same whether or not I play in a given tournament. (Unlike paper magic.)
And though a few players now have more packs than they did before, those packs didn't cost wizards anything. And the other 11 players simply saw 66 tix disappear from their accounts. To replace them, they'll need to purchase $66 worth of tix from Wizards.
(You could argue that they're slightly devaluing packs by doing this. But here's the thing: anyone who knows what they are doing, if they want to buy something from the Wizards store, buys tix, since you can then use them to get packs from a bot. Packs are ALWAYS cheaper from a bot. If that weren't the case, people would just buy from the Wizards store until the value dropped.)
Now, that per pack number only gets BETTER for wizards the higher attendance gets. (For example, 17 players gets them 6 more tix worth of entry, but the maximum payout is the same.)
So, am I missing something glaring? How exactly is this process supposed to be losing wizards money?
That would be ideal, for then we could even play pauper block format or other similar concepts. I'm trying to temper my expectations, cause really just adding the standard pauper filter would increase my enjoyment and time spent playing significantly. Anything more would just be gravy.
It seems to me it could be even better. They could develop the client (v4 I guess at this point) to have flexible filters that players could use to create their own unique formats.
There is overhead of a sort. They have to account for what they produce. If they are paying out packs then that balances against what they are taking in. Even if the manufacturing costs are insignificant.
Taking a loss instead of a profit isn't good business. Even if you can justify it, wipe it away with a tax write off.
Yeah, all those zero people using them. They've actually been unbanned for a few weeks, nobody cared to use them. :) I hope they will show up at some point, at least once, just for the kick of it.
Fixed! Thanks.
Sneak Attack and Painter's Servant unbanned? That's nice for the people who use them I guess. This event is just becoming more and more unplayable for me.
Nice job, lots of work doing 4 events worth of reporting. Your link to the Achievements is flawed in that the list is still locked/hidden from viewers.
re-read what i just said.
Im talking not about what is but what would be:
IF they were to make standard pauper an official format with sanctioned tournaments then it would push up the prices of commons from standard legal packs thus helping out the drafters.
Also as for the tourney prizes, even if wizards takes a "loss" they really don't for two reasons.
A) the packs are digital thus they have no overhead other then an insanely low amount stress on a database.
and B) Even if they take a overall "loss" they can just write that off as a business expense on their taxes thus not actually losing anything in the process.
pauper contributing to increase the average value of recent set packs seems just not correct to me : the only real expansive pauper cards are mostly coming from pre-IPA sets. Pauper doesnt have any impact on newer set, so no, it doesnt help drafters that much, pre-IPA draft aside.
This is a huge difference with other eternal formats, especialy with classic/legacy, because the most relevant cards for these format often are mythics & rare cards which drives sales.
I have no problem with pauper, but the cownose argument about tourney prizes, makes a lot of sense to me.
agreed if nothing else getting a standard pauper filter would allow us to show just how much demand there is for this format.
on the flip side if the popularity of standard pauper shot through the roof, then a fair number of commons would be more then just 200:1 bulk filler. Thus raising the average value of said packs.
Sorry to say Cownose plenty of people gave the exact same argument you are here now when classic pauper was being presented to be a possible format and classic pauper did not hurt classic or legacy at all infact both of those formats seen their primes during that time,while pushing singles prices up to unheard of amounts for commons (ex: crypt rats jumped from 25cent to 4 dollars almost overnight)
It's modern that killed Classic/Legacy,because of card availability, pauper was not to blame.
Same thing would happen here. Standard pauper would just be another outlet to play a fun game in an interesting format rather then kill any sales it would infact help the drafters out because the commons from the packs they were cracking would have a higher overall EV.