Actually, my wording allows more than one manacraft ability to be used per turn, where your design seems to imply that you can only use one manacraft ability for each land drop skipped. Hence, you'd have to edit it up to something like;
Manacraft: Reveal a land card from your hand (do whatever the ability is). Activate this ability only if it is your turn, and if you haven't played a land or activated another manacraft ability this turn. You may not play a land card for the rest of the turn.
I think we got our wires crossed here a bit. I get how manacraft will only trigger if you haven't played a land this turn, but the problem is with;
"You can't use manacraft if you can't play a land"
How does the game know whether or not you could have played a land? You would have to reveal your hand, to demonstrate whether or not you could have played a land this turn, surely? Otherwise, what's to stop me using my manacraft abilities while having no land in hand, and just pretending that I could have played a land this turn?
I think for the ability to work, you'd have to put something like;
Manacraft: Reveal a land card from your hand (do whatever the ability is). Activate this ability only if it is your turn, and if you haven't played a land this turn. You may not play a land card for the rest of the turn.
I see your point for sure - I guess at the end of the day it's kind of a hard call because it's either:
1) Keep it to myself, not write about it, and buy my own. The price goes up - perhaps slightly less than it would have otherwise - when it hits in-season, and a bunch of people go "Oh man I wish I knew!"
2) Tell other people about it to give them a chance to get in early. This rewards people who are proactive but might not have learnt about the opportunity on their own. It adjusts the price somewhat but probably not to an appreciable amount (remember how many thousands of copies of each card there are on the server).
With option 2, I think overall, you get more small-time speculators benefiting from it than with option 1. With 1 the cards are still going to dry up, but it's all going into the hands of the dealers who have anywhere from $5-10k invested in MTGO and can easily box out single rares.
Yes, I benefit if the price goes up, certainly. But I think the net effect of this is to enable people who are more casual about speculating to buy in before the large dealers have a monopoly.
The only people who really end up suffering are those who want to play extended season and wait until the last minute to buy their cards in January - but since I've been preaching this stuff since May I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for those folks. =)
Hammy, disappointing man. And you usually have the correct information. The "Missing 9 cards" were discovered and solved within a few hours. Monty made it official on Twitter the next morning. Did you write this whole article at 3am on Friday?
Fork - Fork is currently a 1 ticket. Minor error on your part.
Word of Command - The only reason this guy and Chains of Mephistopheles are "weird" is because people misplay them in paper. (Particularly, multiple Chains.) But what they really do is simple. Since we have a rules engine here to play the cards correctly, they're not a problem.
The duals aren't the barrier to entry. The 30 ticket Wasteland and 70+ ticket Force of Will are. If the duals are such a barrier into entry then why can an uncommon from Tempest be traded for any two of them? (Any two not named Underground Sea.)
Which isn't that much lower than where they are now. The barriers to entry for Legacy are (in order) FoW, Wasteland, Lion's Eye Diamond, the $10 Daze, and JtMS. All of which easily trade for duals except maybe the Daze which is surprisingly worth a crappy dual.
i understand they are real words and you misunderstand when you assume tone of voice to text, there was nothing rude about my comment merely what i saw as an ironic sidebar
(@Paul) Paul made perfect sense and you were rude. A perceived loss is when you know your assets have lost value. But the loss isn't realized until you actually sell it for less and actually report to the IRS that you lost money. He didn't make those words up.
Was not trying to imply impropriety on your part, just making an observation. I agree there is nothing wrong with pulling a little cash in to pay the MTGO bills. My problem with it is when you get ten, twenty, forty, or possibly fifty people doing this. Now you have false rarity of a card that should be only 5 tix in value. Any manipulation with the value is wrong in my opinion. It makes entry in to any format expensive and hurts the game.
Because of the size of the paper world its not an issue but online provides an easy market for this to occur.
The fact you put your actual numbers up says a lot about character, I was just making an observation though.
Hah. I hoarded a bunch of Masters right when SoM was announced. I never speculate, but figured he'd be a sure thing. Then like, I dunno, 2-3 weeks later BAM he's in a pre-con. Crap.
:p
Any time anyone writes a speculation article you're going to encounter a similar issue. As was mentioned in an earlier comment, Quiet Speculation's latest had a lot of overlap with my current article - how come? Because these are all really common-sense picks. I'm not telling folks to get cards that wouldn't spike otherwise - if you were around for the last few extended seasons you know how reliable the price spikes are, and that they happen in the most pronounced fashion within the newly-rotated block.
For transparency - and I'll tell the truth here because I don't really see how it matters - my personal stock is:
Elspeth - 50x
Noble Hierarch/Knight of the Reliquary - 25-30x
Maelstrom Pulse - 20x
All the others - under 20x
Probably not as much as you imagined on most of those - but like I wrote before, I like to be able to liquidate my stock really quickly in case it's just a flash in the pan price-spike. The last thing I want to do is have playsets that I don't need on standby after the rush hits.
The thing is I've been buying this stuff since the summertime (overpaid for many copies - half those pulses were gotten at 6-7), and I posted a lot of my cardpicks for ext season way back then. People tend not to listen until the season is right on top of them anyway. This is what I'm arguing for - preplanning and thus a more consistent purchasing curve instead of a blitzkrieg. The fact that people have mostly not listened since my original article in May is why I released another reminder.
If you know where to find a bot like mine for 10k please let me know. 10k doesn't even begin to touch the cost of a bot like mine.
As for the mtgolibrary group they are a bunch of sketchballs. I don't trust them at all and I know I'm very biased on my opinion of them but they have done some extremely sketchy things in the past and they are very unprofessional. They are also based out of Turkey so if you have any issues good luck getting your money back unless your Turkish.
In my experience, sengir was far less popular than serra as vigilence made serras much better in most case. Dark ritual helped that's true, but often hypnotic specter, junun efreet and especialy the awesome juzam were much better choices with early dark ritual than sengir was.
I appreciate your hard work and good writing, but do you not feel your article encourages hoarding on the small scale and manipulating prices. For instance in the real world as an investor the second I endorse a stock as a writer, I must report my holdings and be held accountable for my research. If I was to say a safe bet was Maelstrom Pulse, and I own 200 copies, then suggest everyone purchase the card for future speculation. Thus the supply of the card slowly gets eaten a way. This would cause the value to be manipulated by my article, all I would have to do is liquidate my 200 cards at a comfortable pace and reap the rewards. I know it seems micro but MTGO has shown in the past it is really easy to manipulate prices. We all know of the Vamp Tutor manipulation that hurt classic play. I am all for free market, but I would suggest for transparency you post your holdings of the cards you are suggesting.
More than magical even. Without dual lands a lot of the versatility of the game would be lost which is why they keep trying to give us rare dual lands that are "fixed".
"Well perceived lost value in people's minds equates the actual lost value." <---what I said. In people's minds is not an empty phrase. It modifies something. As in
"In people's minds this equates the actual lost value."
Find something better to do with your time than miscomprehend what is perfectly clear if you just take the time to parse it.
@Paul: don't you realize how ridiculous that sounds? perceived becomes actual? i believe something to be true therefore it is?
@MMogg: The oddity of the game is that these cards are the same as a house or stocks, they are an investment and prices don't stay stable, they change. There is no such thing as a sure investment. Where this differs from your "joke" about housing is that there is an additional obtained value to the cards because its a game and if you sell them you get monetary value and when you hold them they have play value, which can't really be numerically assigned.
I know, just like all those people whining about their homes losing their value when the housing bubble burst. If they don't plan on moving, who cares if its value tanked. [/sarcasm] Really, though, I think people do have a right to be unhappy, primarily for reasons Paul mentioned above. Take yourself, JustSin, as an example. I'm sure you didn't foresee/expect/want to sell off your collection several months ago, but things change, and the real loss of liquidity in one's collection may be important in the future even for those not planning to sell today.
Well perceived lost value in people's minds equates the actual lost value. Because they used to have those lands smug in the certainty that if they decided to get out or revamp their collection to do something else they could sell off those duals for the premium prices they were at. Now they don't have that confidence and also a free license to gripe about losses (valid though it is) is never wasted.
he's also in elspeth vs tezzeret now, so I think there's a lot of supply, relative to any demand which might be generated.
Actually, my wording allows more than one manacraft ability to be used per turn, where your design seems to imply that you can only use one manacraft ability for each land drop skipped. Hence, you'd have to edit it up to something like;
Manacraft: Reveal a land card from your hand (do whatever the ability is). Activate this ability only if it is your turn, and if you haven't played a land or activated another manacraft ability this turn. You may not play a land card for the rest of the turn.
That's true actually. Good point.
I think we got our wires crossed here a bit. I get how manacraft will only trigger if you haven't played a land this turn, but the problem is with;
"You can't use manacraft if you can't play a land"
How does the game know whether or not you could have played a land? You would have to reveal your hand, to demonstrate whether or not you could have played a land this turn, surely? Otherwise, what's to stop me using my manacraft abilities while having no land in hand, and just pretending that I could have played a land this turn?
I think for the ability to work, you'd have to put something like;
Manacraft: Reveal a land card from your hand (do whatever the ability is). Activate this ability only if it is your turn, and if you haven't played a land this turn. You may not play a land card for the rest of the turn.
and that seems a bit wordy?
and still, the dual "only" provides one mana.
if you had no duress in hand, it would be no better than a simple island.
don't get me wrong, dual lands are powerful, but in an indirect fashion.
I see your point for sure - I guess at the end of the day it's kind of a hard call because it's either:
1) Keep it to myself, not write about it, and buy my own. The price goes up - perhaps slightly less than it would have otherwise - when it hits in-season, and a bunch of people go "Oh man I wish I knew!"
2) Tell other people about it to give them a chance to get in early. This rewards people who are proactive but might not have learnt about the opportunity on their own. It adjusts the price somewhat but probably not to an appreciable amount (remember how many thousands of copies of each card there are on the server).
With option 2, I think overall, you get more small-time speculators benefiting from it than with option 1. With 1 the cards are still going to dry up, but it's all going into the hands of the dealers who have anywhere from $5-10k invested in MTGO and can easily box out single rares.
Yes, I benefit if the price goes up, certainly. But I think the net effect of this is to enable people who are more casual about speculating to buy in before the large dealers have a monopoly.
The only people who really end up suffering are those who want to play extended season and wait until the last minute to buy their cards in January - but since I've been preaching this stuff since May I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for those folks. =)
Hammy, disappointing man. And you usually have the correct information. The "Missing 9 cards" were discovered and solved within a few hours. Monty made it official on Twitter the next morning. Did you write this whole article at 3am on Friday?
Fork - Fork is currently a 1 ticket. Minor error on your part.
Word of Command - The only reason this guy and Chains of Mephistopheles are "weird" is because people misplay them in paper. (Particularly, multiple Chains.) But what they really do is simple. Since we have a rules engine here to play the cards correctly, they're not a problem.
The duals aren't the barrier to entry. The 30 ticket Wasteland and 70+ ticket Force of Will are. If the duals are such a barrier into entry then why can an uncommon from Tempest be traded for any two of them? (Any two not named Underground Sea.)
My predictions for final prices:
Underground Sea: 20 tix
Tundra / Taiga / Savannah / Volcanic Island / Tropical Island : 14 tix
Scrubland / Plateau / Bayou : 10 tix
Which isn't that much lower than where they are now. The barriers to entry for Legacy are (in order) FoW, Wasteland, Lion's Eye Diamond, the $10 Daze, and JtMS. All of which easily trade for duals except maybe the Daze which is surprisingly worth a crappy dual.
i understand they are real words and you misunderstand when you assume tone of voice to text, there was nothing rude about my comment merely what i saw as an ironic sidebar
(@Paul) Paul made perfect sense and you were rude. A perceived loss is when you know your assets have lost value. But the loss isn't realized until you actually sell it for less and actually report to the IRS that you lost money. He didn't make those words up.
I still like your articles. :)
Was not trying to imply impropriety on your part, just making an observation. I agree there is nothing wrong with pulling a little cash in to pay the MTGO bills. My problem with it is when you get ten, twenty, forty, or possibly fifty people doing this. Now you have false rarity of a card that should be only 5 tix in value. Any manipulation with the value is wrong in my opinion. It makes entry in to any format expensive and hurts the game.
Because of the size of the paper world its not an issue but online provides an easy market for this to occur.
The fact you put your actual numbers up says a lot about character, I was just making an observation though.
I was just making an observation is all, no harm or accusations of wrong doing intended.
Hah. I hoarded a bunch of Masters right when SoM was announced. I never speculate, but figured he'd be a sure thing. Then like, I dunno, 2-3 weeks later BAM he's in a pre-con. Crap.
:p
Any time anyone writes a speculation article you're going to encounter a similar issue. As was mentioned in an earlier comment, Quiet Speculation's latest had a lot of overlap with my current article - how come? Because these are all really common-sense picks. I'm not telling folks to get cards that wouldn't spike otherwise - if you were around for the last few extended seasons you know how reliable the price spikes are, and that they happen in the most pronounced fashion within the newly-rotated block.
For transparency - and I'll tell the truth here because I don't really see how it matters - my personal stock is:
Elspeth - 50x
Noble Hierarch/Knight of the Reliquary - 25-30x
Maelstrom Pulse - 20x
All the others - under 20x
Probably not as much as you imagined on most of those - but like I wrote before, I like to be able to liquidate my stock really quickly in case it's just a flash in the pan price-spike. The last thing I want to do is have playsets that I don't need on standby after the rush hits.
The thing is I've been buying this stuff since the summertime (overpaid for many copies - half those pulses were gotten at 6-7), and I posted a lot of my cardpicks for ext season way back then. People tend not to listen until the season is right on top of them anyway. This is what I'm arguing for - preplanning and thus a more consistent purchasing curve instead of a blitzkrieg. The fact that people have mostly not listened since my original article in May is why I released another reminder.
If he was trying to manipulate the market through his articles don't you think he would just lie about his holdings to help further his cause?
In my experience, sengir was far less popular than serra as vigilence made serras much better in most case. Dark ritual helped that's true, but often hypnotic specter, junun efreet and especialy the awesome juzam were much better choices with early dark ritual than sengir was.
I appreciate your hard work and good writing, but do you not feel your article encourages hoarding on the small scale and manipulating prices. For instance in the real world as an investor the second I endorse a stock as a writer, I must report my holdings and be held accountable for my research. If I was to say a safe bet was Maelstrom Pulse, and I own 200 copies, then suggest everyone purchase the card for future speculation. Thus the supply of the card slowly gets eaten a way. This would cause the value to be manipulated by my article, all I would have to do is liquidate my 200 cards at a comfortable pace and reap the rewards. I know it seems micro but MTGO has shown in the past it is really easy to manipulate prices. We all know of the Vamp Tutor manipulation that hurt classic play. I am all for free market, but I would suggest for transparency you post your holdings of the cards you are suggesting.
defensive much?
I had a blast today, see you all next week!
Good Game.
Lets put the claws away :P
More than magical even. Without dual lands a lot of the versatility of the game would be lost which is why they keep trying to give us rare dual lands that are "fixed".
"Well perceived lost value in people's minds equates the actual lost value." <---what I said. In people's minds is not an empty phrase. It modifies something. As in
"In people's minds this equates the actual lost value."
Find something better to do with your time than miscomprehend what is perfectly clear if you just take the time to parse it.
@Paul: don't you realize how ridiculous that sounds? perceived becomes actual? i believe something to be true therefore it is?
@MMogg: The oddity of the game is that these cards are the same as a house or stocks, they are an investment and prices don't stay stable, they change. There is no such thing as a sure investment. Where this differs from your "joke" about housing is that there is an additional obtained value to the cards because its a game and if you sell them you get monetary value and when you hold them they have play value, which can't really be numerically assigned.
I know, just like all those people whining about their homes losing their value when the housing bubble burst. If they don't plan on moving, who cares if its value tanked. [/sarcasm] Really, though, I think people do have a right to be unhappy, primarily for reasons Paul mentioned above. Take yourself, JustSin, as an example. I'm sure you didn't foresee/expect/want to sell off your collection several months ago, but things change, and the real loss of liquidity in one's collection may be important in the future even for those not planning to sell today.
Well perceived lost value in people's minds equates the actual lost value. Because they used to have those lands smug in the certainty that if they decided to get out or revamp their collection to do something else they could sell off those duals for the premium prices they were at. Now they don't have that confidence and also a free license to gripe about losses (valid though it is) is never wasted.