An interesting response. I haven't played a "competitive" game of classic either. What does that look like?
Also What do you mean by "wrong, wrong and wrong"? I am a little confused because that seems contradictory. You probably have a better perspective on what ME4 means for MTGO than almost anyone else so I am hoping you will elucidate.
"Classic is not Vintage – not by a long shot (and 9 other cards.) On the other hand, Library sees little play in Vintage, but it might be useful in a powered down Vintage, which is what Classic is.."
Wrong, wrong and wrong.
But since I've never actually seen you play a competitive game of classic, Pete, it doesn't surprise me that you'd write this.
Twilight mire just won't slow down. One guy raided all of mine at 4.5 each after I unbanned him from my bots for doing it before. You can bet I will not unban him again.
I liked your article. Your main point seems to be that you'd like the most fun format on MTGO (Draft) to be more affordable, even when you lose. And I believe that your solution is to get rid of the Mythic rarity. I don't think this is a realistic expectation.
Let's consider why Draft is the most popular format:
-It gives players the feeling of a level playing field. I play draft because know I won't be playing against a deck like Valakut Ramp or Jace x 4.
-It's gambling (as you mentioned in your article). Every time I crack a pack in draft, I'm hoping for that "money" card. I was lucky enough to open 3 Lotus Cobras during the course of my ZEN drafting (and I don't draft a lot). That's like winning the MTGO lottery. That kind of gambling "win" keeps us coming back.
-It's skill-intensive. If you are good at Draft, you win more. People want to be good at this game, and when you win a draft, you feel like you are a good player.
-It's luck-based. Sometimes, you can win when you have no right to. I won a recent draft with a mediocre WB Metalcraft deck. My finals opponent had a far superior deck, but he flooded, then screwed, giving me the win. That kind of thing keeps the scrubs (like me) coming back.
How does Mythic come into play? In regards to the above, Mythics affect the gambling and luck aspects of Draft. They skew the "level" playing field in your favor when you open one. Mythic feeds the gambling addiction. When I see a guy playing with a Koth AND a foil Masticore in his pile (true story), I see what is possible. Maybe the next time I draft, I'll be THAT guy. The Koth/Masticore guy won that draft. He wasn't a good player; my rating dropped like a rock when I lost to him. Chalk it up to a "luck" win vs a "skill" win.
Bottom line: Mythics give the average to below-average player other reasons (aside from winning) to keep drafting. That is what WotC wants. Mythics aren't going anywhere.
I sympathize with your feelings. I have avoided getting my friends into MTGO because of the cost and gambling aspects of the game. If WotC ever brings back leagues, I may introduce them to my favorite hobby.
As for you, I'd recommend trying different formats that are more budget-conscious. Or you could try the Swiss draft or Swiss sealed queues. They have a negative EV, but less-so than 4-3-2-2 queues.
Really good articles and a realistic explanation of the current economics.
I am quiet a lucky exception though living in a location with a strong currency. The Xrate from my Currency to $ is currently in my favour. It helps a lot to just save 30% when buying MTGO articles compared to some years ago. Additionally the price level in my country actually make the online products quiet cheap. A paper booster pack costed about 10$ in my currency back some years. Now i only pay 4$ online so it's a lot cheaper for me to play magic than it was before. It is intersting that they did not try to exploit certain "rich" local markets yet and offer their product wordlwide for the same price. I mean they already do it in paper magic but it seems to be not working online. :)
If i look at the prices of online products when i first played MTGO and the current prices it is quiet an advantage if you do not want to play official competitive formats. Most cards are so cheap that you can buy and play with thousands of cards in casual or casual formats with a really low budget.
I imagine wizards is pretty deaf to this sort of thing though. In business when people are annoyed at giving you so much money for something (an experience, an item, insurance ect) but continue to do so hand over fist you know you've got a "good" business (Think about that coke-head that doesn't understand why the dealers are so greedy, "Well I'll just take my business to Raul, he's nice to me. He says I'm handsome.").
They have a brand monopoly. It's what every business wants to do. To create something that you have copyright to and sell it for a massive profit margin. Market forces come into it but in reality unique properties like MTG are invented specifically to distort normal supply and demand mechanisms. It's why my cable company has a deal with my city that only they get to do business here and service goes out all the time, or why 3 companies in Italy make 100% of the mid-high-end sunglasses in the world. They know you're going to be annoyed about it, they just have to make sure you're not so annoyed about it that you actually do something meaningful. Like actually forming an organization that monitors their behavior and takes action against them to punish them for dissatisfying the customer or circumvent them with a bottom-dollar secondary market based format that cuts them out altogether... =P
Lipstick on the pigs ...odd that your article and Pete Jahn's both use that phrase. I don't think drafting to go infinite is a wise choice ever. I am a fairly decent drafter when I hit a format I like (Alara was awesome for me.) But even winning a lot of packs does not make going infinite a reality. That has always been somewhat of a myth. Speaking of myths I don't blame mythics for killing the rares market. (Though they certainly help when they are as bombish as the Titans and Jace.) I mean WWK was a great ev even if you never opened a mythic and SOM never has been. It is a matter of the quality of the set (strong themes forcing archetypes) as well as card interactions. I expect SOM will rise a bit in value as the next set comes a long. As Zen did when WWK came out. Last note...Da Bears! Nah I kid. I was an Eagles fan for a little while as a teen.
Yup... it's got some great stuff, but also some head-scratchers. And missing those 9 cards makes it that much more disappointing.
White does have a Pacifism effect though - Serra Bestiary.
My formula is to play constructed regularly, sell half of the packs I win from that and draft the other half (with no expectation of pulling money rares or winning at draft - just for the fun of it, but if I do win all the better). When I get a winning streak going, I don't have to put any money into MTGO, and I get to keep playing competitively.
Of course, then there's the start up cost of the constructed deck. Magic is expensive no matter how you look at it.
I'm new here, but a frequent patron of puremtgo. This article caught my attention, as I'm very much the type of player that enjoys deckbuilding as an art form, as you put it. But, for the same reasons you listed, I don't condemn net-deckers. More to the point, I think it's tough to do so in general because, let's face it - as many cards as WotC prints, the number of players (of both electronic and paper versions of the game) is far greater than that number. Even if every MTG player had a full playset of every card ever printed, it would still be impossible to create a totally unique deck for each player.
It's not even _that_ simple either. Just because there are X cards at your disposal doesn't mean that each subset of those X cards shares top-level synergies. The upshot here is that legitimately strong combinations tend to be discovered quickly, particularly when the number of cards in a combination is small. Channel/Fireball is one of the oldest combos around, and it's easy to see why: it is a model of simplicity. Two cards, mana allowing, can win you the game in one fell swoop. As you pointed out, that doesn't mean necessarily that there are no _other_ combinations which are also strong, or are strong because they defeat a large portion of the field. Example in point, for all-in strategies, _like_ Channel/Fireball, a well-timed counterspell can snatch the game right from under your opponent. Granted, a single spell can't be a synergy in and of itself, but in a Buehler-style draw-go permission deck, its synergy lies in its ability to completely stop that particular combo strategy while adding consistency to the deck archetype.
Still...I liken net-decking to going and shelling out cash for a...oh, I don't know...a BMW M3 or something, just because you heard it's fast, or you saw one at the grocery store. You get it, and MAN is it fast. But a week later, you start seeing cars just like yours popping up all over the place. Some have bumper stickers, some have those fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror, but they're all basically the same car. You're still going fast, but now everyone else is driving around just about as fast as you, and you're getting really tired of seeing the same thing every time you hit a stoplight.
Then one day, someone rolls up next to you at a stoplight in some old beater. It's dirty, and kind of ugly, but turns out...it's pretty fast too. And all of a sudden, this old beater seems a lot cooler, and not even all _that_ ugly...but maybe just because it doesn't look like all the other cars. At this point, who's got the most interesting car?
I also realize that it really does take a lot of time to build a strong deck from scratch, and hence net-decking is a very quick option for trying out a synergy that interests you. That said, I think the practice serves to rob a lot of players of the experience of finding and building their own synergies. I've never built a deck that can win consistently before turn 5. But, I've built a couple that come fairly close, and even though I lose with them from time to time, I'm very proud to say they are my very own creation.
I will accept another poster's assertion that net-decking is sort of a dirty word for 'collaborative effort'. In a time of unprecedented sharing of information, it's only natural that MTG deck strategies would begin to pervade the mystical net-tubes, and that people would try them out and infuse them with their own ideas, and in turn share them again. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, and in fact, this scenario actually involves a little bit of deckbuilding, since playtesting/tweaking is as much a part of deckbuilding as making mana base decisions. But a word of caution: to habitually grab a decklist from the web whenever you're looking for a change of pace is to cheat yourself out of a very meaningful, challenging, and ultimately rewarding aspect of the game.
Sounds like we started at the same time!!! and had the same thought process!!! I love it...My first rare: Sengir Vampire. I loved that card and would read it over and over.
Heh...I loved the dual lands. "Wow green OR red?? geez that means I can giant growth or bolt with it." I know, not your typical response to lands as rares. I didn't like City of Brass however. Tap for any color? cool...but ouch! Especially with Twiddle and Icy.
Oh and Rage was seriously broken. Whomever went first won inevitably and we played enough of it to be certain of this. Of course we only played with the first set so maybe further sets improved it.
Jyhad was awesome, Shadowfist: awesome, Battletech, broken but fun, Wasn't thrilled with the change from Jyhad to V:TES. Especially the change in backs. Netrunner was intriguing. Shadowrun terrible, L5R insanely good as two man sealed with just the original set. It was much worse in that format in later sets. But the constructed version was pretty neat. All in all, I have found only one card game that holds my attention though. M:TG is like a vise gripping my central nervous system. Same way aD&D was for me for a long long time.
Supernova seems to do that. In fact if you pick more than 2 of an item it increases the price by a small % for the 2nd and 3rd items.
An interesting response. I haven't played a "competitive" game of classic either. What does that look like?
Also What do you mean by "wrong, wrong and wrong"? I am a little confused because that seems contradictory. You probably have a better perspective on what ME4 means for MTGO than almost anyone else so I am hoping you will elucidate.
"Classic is not Vintage – not by a long shot (and 9 other cards.) On the other hand, Library sees little play in Vintage, but it might be useful in a powered down Vintage, which is what Classic is.."
Wrong, wrong and wrong.
But since I've never actually seen you play a competitive game of classic, Pete, it doesn't surprise me that you'd write this.
That's just insane...You would think once would be warning enough for him. Guess some people only learn after the fact.
The worst part of your good article is that I'm now furiously craving Denny's, even though I know the horrible, horrible, aftermath that will ensue...
couldn't resist to "necro" comment when i saw this ... sorry
I liked your article. Your main point seems to be that you'd like the most fun format on MTGO (Draft) to be more affordable, even when you lose. And I believe that your solution is to get rid of the Mythic rarity. I don't think this is a realistic expectation.
Let's consider why Draft is the most popular format:
-It gives players the feeling of a level playing field. I play draft because know I won't be playing against a deck like Valakut Ramp or Jace x 4.
-It's gambling (as you mentioned in your article). Every time I crack a pack in draft, I'm hoping for that "money" card. I was lucky enough to open 3 Lotus Cobras during the course of my ZEN drafting (and I don't draft a lot). That's like winning the MTGO lottery. That kind of gambling "win" keeps us coming back.
-It's skill-intensive. If you are good at Draft, you win more. People want to be good at this game, and when you win a draft, you feel like you are a good player.
-It's luck-based. Sometimes, you can win when you have no right to. I won a recent draft with a mediocre WB Metalcraft deck. My finals opponent had a far superior deck, but he flooded, then screwed, giving me the win. That kind of thing keeps the scrubs (like me) coming back.
How does Mythic come into play? In regards to the above, Mythics affect the gambling and luck aspects of Draft. They skew the "level" playing field in your favor when you open one. Mythic feeds the gambling addiction. When I see a guy playing with a Koth AND a foil Masticore in his pile (true story), I see what is possible. Maybe the next time I draft, I'll be THAT guy. The Koth/Masticore guy won that draft. He wasn't a good player; my rating dropped like a rock when I lost to him. Chalk it up to a "luck" win vs a "skill" win.
Bottom line: Mythics give the average to below-average player other reasons (aside from winning) to keep drafting. That is what WotC wants. Mythics aren't going anywhere.
I sympathize with your feelings. I have avoided getting my friends into MTGO because of the cost and gambling aspects of the game. If WotC ever brings back leagues, I may introduce them to my favorite hobby.
As for you, I'd recommend trying different formats that are more budget-conscious. Or you could try the Swiss draft or Swiss sealed queues. They have a negative EV, but less-so than 4-3-2-2 queues.
Really good articles and a realistic explanation of the current economics.
I am quiet a lucky exception though living in a location with a strong currency. The Xrate from my Currency to $ is currently in my favour. It helps a lot to just save 30% when buying MTGO articles compared to some years ago. Additionally the price level in my country actually make the online products quiet cheap. A paper booster pack costed about 10$ in my currency back some years. Now i only pay 4$ online so it's a lot cheaper for me to play magic than it was before. It is intersting that they did not try to exploit certain "rich" local markets yet and offer their product wordlwide for the same price. I mean they already do it in paper magic but it seems to be not working online. :)
If i look at the prices of online products when i first played MTGO and the current prices it is quiet an advantage if you do not want to play official competitive formats. Most cards are so cheap that you can buy and play with thousands of cards in casual or casual formats with a really low budget.
Damn it, Pete, you had to put 'No-one has ever had naked singularity, blood moon and conversion in play, ever' in there.
Challenge accepted.
Good article,
I imagine wizards is pretty deaf to this sort of thing though. In business when people are annoyed at giving you so much money for something (an experience, an item, insurance ect) but continue to do so hand over fist you know you've got a "good" business (Think about that coke-head that doesn't understand why the dealers are so greedy, "Well I'll just take my business to Raul, he's nice to me. He says I'm handsome.").
They have a brand monopoly. It's what every business wants to do. To create something that you have copyright to and sell it for a massive profit margin. Market forces come into it but in reality unique properties like MTG are invented specifically to distort normal supply and demand mechanisms. It's why my cable company has a deal with my city that only they get to do business here and service goes out all the time, or why 3 companies in Italy make 100% of the mid-high-end sunglasses in the world. They know you're going to be annoyed about it, they just have to make sure you're not so annoyed about it that you actually do something meaningful. Like actually forming an organization that monitors their behavior and takes action against them to punish them for dissatisfying the customer or circumvent them with a bottom-dollar secondary market based format that cuts them out altogether... =P
X-
Extended Season.
I'm not sure how quick it's gone up in price but Heritage Druid was 0.15 a week or so ago and it's now up to 0.65 a 400% rise, any reasons?
Lipstick on the pigs ...odd that your article and Pete Jahn's both use that phrase. I don't think drafting to go infinite is a wise choice ever. I am a fairly decent drafter when I hit a format I like (Alara was awesome for me.) But even winning a lot of packs does not make going infinite a reality. That has always been somewhat of a myth. Speaking of myths I don't blame mythics for killing the rares market. (Though they certainly help when they are as bombish as the Titans and Jace.) I mean WWK was a great ev even if you never opened a mythic and SOM never has been. It is a matter of the quality of the set (strong themes forcing archetypes) as well as card interactions. I expect SOM will rise a bit in value as the next set comes a long. As Zen did when WWK came out. Last note...Da Bears! Nah I kid. I was an Eagles fan for a little while as a teen.
Ah the perils of living in the north. I guess the eastern seaboard has been lucky so far. No real snow here in nyc.
Any predictions on how far duals will drop before gaining value again?
Yup... it's got some great stuff, but also some head-scratchers. And missing those 9 cards makes it that much more disappointing.
White does have a Pacifism effect though - Serra Bestiary.
My formula is to play constructed regularly, sell half of the packs I win from that and draft the other half (with no expectation of pulling money rares or winning at draft - just for the fun of it, but if I do win all the better). When I get a winning streak going, I don't have to put any money into MTGO, and I get to keep playing competitively.
Of course, then there's the start up cost of the constructed deck. Magic is expensive no matter how you look at it.
not to self-promote my own article, but I wrote this for people that write for puremtgo...it may help ya with the above:
http://puremtgo.com/articles/playwright
Wiffy, this may help ya: http://puremtgo.com/articles/playwright
I'm new here, but a frequent patron of puremtgo. This article caught my attention, as I'm very much the type of player that enjoys deckbuilding as an art form, as you put it. But, for the same reasons you listed, I don't condemn net-deckers. More to the point, I think it's tough to do so in general because, let's face it - as many cards as WotC prints, the number of players (of both electronic and paper versions of the game) is far greater than that number. Even if every MTG player had a full playset of every card ever printed, it would still be impossible to create a totally unique deck for each player.
It's not even _that_ simple either. Just because there are X cards at your disposal doesn't mean that each subset of those X cards shares top-level synergies. The upshot here is that legitimately strong combinations tend to be discovered quickly, particularly when the number of cards in a combination is small. Channel/Fireball is one of the oldest combos around, and it's easy to see why: it is a model of simplicity. Two cards, mana allowing, can win you the game in one fell swoop. As you pointed out, that doesn't mean necessarily that there are no _other_ combinations which are also strong, or are strong because they defeat a large portion of the field. Example in point, for all-in strategies, _like_ Channel/Fireball, a well-timed counterspell can snatch the game right from under your opponent. Granted, a single spell can't be a synergy in and of itself, but in a Buehler-style draw-go permission deck, its synergy lies in its ability to completely stop that particular combo strategy while adding consistency to the deck archetype.
Still...I liken net-decking to going and shelling out cash for a...oh, I don't know...a BMW M3 or something, just because you heard it's fast, or you saw one at the grocery store. You get it, and MAN is it fast. But a week later, you start seeing cars just like yours popping up all over the place. Some have bumper stickers, some have those fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror, but they're all basically the same car. You're still going fast, but now everyone else is driving around just about as fast as you, and you're getting really tired of seeing the same thing every time you hit a stoplight.
Then one day, someone rolls up next to you at a stoplight in some old beater. It's dirty, and kind of ugly, but turns out...it's pretty fast too. And all of a sudden, this old beater seems a lot cooler, and not even all _that_ ugly...but maybe just because it doesn't look like all the other cars. At this point, who's got the most interesting car?
I also realize that it really does take a lot of time to build a strong deck from scratch, and hence net-decking is a very quick option for trying out a synergy that interests you. That said, I think the practice serves to rob a lot of players of the experience of finding and building their own synergies. I've never built a deck that can win consistently before turn 5. But, I've built a couple that come fairly close, and even though I lose with them from time to time, I'm very proud to say they are my very own creation.
I will accept another poster's assertion that net-decking is sort of a dirty word for 'collaborative effort'. In a time of unprecedented sharing of information, it's only natural that MTG deck strategies would begin to pervade the mystical net-tubes, and that people would try them out and infuse them with their own ideas, and in turn share them again. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, and in fact, this scenario actually involves a little bit of deckbuilding, since playtesting/tweaking is as much a part of deckbuilding as making mana base decisions. But a word of caution: to habitually grab a decklist from the web whenever you're looking for a change of pace is to cheat yourself out of a very meaningful, challenging, and ultimately rewarding aspect of the game.
...End wall of text...
six pick trigon is just ridicilous. are u sure this was an 8-4 ? :)
Sounds like we started at the same time!!! and had the same thought process!!! I love it...My first rare: Sengir Vampire. I loved that card and would read it over and over.
Heh...I loved the dual lands. "Wow green OR red?? geez that means I can giant growth or bolt with it." I know, not your typical response to lands as rares. I didn't like City of Brass however. Tap for any color? cool...but ouch! Especially with Twiddle and Icy.
Oh and Rage was seriously broken. Whomever went first won inevitably and we played enough of it to be certain of this. Of course we only played with the first set so maybe further sets improved it.
Jyhad was awesome, Shadowfist: awesome, Battletech, broken but fun, Wasn't thrilled with the change from Jyhad to V:TES. Especially the change in backs. Netrunner was intriguing. Shadowrun terrible, L5R insanely good as two man sealed with just the original set. It was much worse in that format in later sets. But the constructed version was pretty neat. All in all, I have found only one card game that holds my attention though. M:TG is like a vise gripping my central nervous system. Same way aD&D was for me for a long long time.