DirkGently wrote: ↑3 years ago
So I've been thinking a lot about this recently, obviously. I see there being basically two main focuses of contention, which are roughly pts 1 and 2 on the RC's statement. The flavor of the product, and the distribution of the product. (Pt 3 I really couldn't care less about tbh, but I also don't see it being a major focus on the conversation)
So, starting with the problem of non-mtg flavored cards with a black border.
My initial inclination (and my first vote on the poll) was to vote for that option, but if I'm being honest I don't think that's true. Or at least it's not specific enough - because not only am I fine with P3K and arabian, but I actually love those sets. I love old cards that have real-world flavor text on them too, like the TS elliot wasteland. I'm not really a huge fan of the mtg lore - I like that it exists to give aesthetics to the cards, but I don't care to read any of the stories or anything. Yes, I think TWD is a garbage show with a garbage plot being handled badly by a garbage network, but mtg isn't exactly crushing it with incredible pathos or anything, especially not recently. Compared to the tragedy of darth bolas the wise, 3 kingdoms is way more engaging to me, not least because it has some history and truth to it.
My problem with having TWD on the cards is not one of black and white, but one of degrees. TWD has always felt like a heavily marketed show to me, a transparent product trying to sell itself as hard as possible even when it knows it isn't very good. Having it infringe upon my own hobbies feels like an invasion, partly because it is a modern show and all shows are commercial enterprises, but especially because of how I feel about TWD in particular. Flavor-wise, it's also got the too-modern problem, the too-close-to-the-real-world problem (P3K has this problem to an extent, but fantasies it up a bit at least, plus being more historical it's at least got the "swords" of "swords and sorcery"). But reimagine the product except with Game of Thrones instead, and if I'm being honest, it bothers me a lot less - at least in regards this element. Do I think it's tasteless to use TWD to sell magic cards and vice versa? Yes, absolutely, but I can't deny a certain degree of hypocrisy in that opinion. I, personally, dislike TWD, but there's nothing categorically bad about it necessarily. If TWD was a public domain work instead of a currently-marketed show, if the writing was less terrible, if it had fewer guns in it, I doubt I'd see the problem nearly as strongly.
Alright, so that's point one. Point two, the distribution.
Time to go into a bit of a rant. Or perhaps a ramble.
I think early magic was a lot like LEGOs. Here's a thing we created. It exists. Now use your imagination and build whatever you want with it! Some people will build a deck full of dragons, some people will build a deck that synergizes around artifacts, some people will build a deck with nothing but black lotuses, channels, and fireballs. It's an empty canvas, go nuts! And while of course iterations changed the extreme open-endedness of the original product, I think most earlier sets don't have an obvious vibe of pushing certain cards, but rather pushing the game as a whole. "This is a fun game with lots of unique possibilities to explore. Why not buy some random cards and see what you can create?"
I think the first big step downhill started with the introduction of planeswalkers and mythic rares. Because now wotc wasn't just selling the game, but they were marketing specific cards. "Look how powerful this card is. Why not buy some random cards and maybe you'll get one?" But I think it's been a gradual decline since then. At first I think the intent was for these new cards to fit into the model that already existed. But more and more, decks aren't just supplemented by chase mythics, but defined by them. And I think a lot of the fault lies in the popularity of commander as a format.
Commander is casual, so in theory there's no requirement to keep up with the meta by buying new cards. It's also not rotating, so again, no requirement to buy new cards. And unfortunately for WotC, commander has become more and more and MORE popular, to the point that it's swallowed a lot of the customer base - both existing and new - that might otherwise be playing standard. Simply offering a bunch of similarly-powered cards with interesting possibilities might catch some players' attention, but for those entrenched in their decks it's probably not going to get them to start spending much money. And meanwhile, they're constantly being pressured by Hasbro to produce more and more money, because capitalism sucks taints sometimes.
So they have to create cards to motivate the great unwashed masses of commander players to buy product. At first, commander precons with cards designed to appeal to commander players, and increasingly obvious designed-for-commander cards in standard sets, which are usually expensive and niche enough to avoid rocking the boat in other formats.
But this starts to get tricky because they really need to keep pushing power creep, or commander players - who aren't just looking for a deck with a 1% better winrate like a standard player, but want something big and splashy and new - will stop buying new stuff. Every time you're trying to get the commander player to go out and buy a new product, it's gotta be more pushed every time, or it won't be more exciting than what he's already got. And while some commander players might be considering a whole intricate deck, most commander players are - apologies - morons. They see a card that looks big and splashy - Yarok, Muldrotha, Golos, Chulane, whatever - and that's what gets their attention. That's what gets them to go out and buy more product. And eventually, in order to get the commander players' attention, you've gotta push the cards so hard that they become a problem for other formats even. I think we're starting to see this problem with cards like Korvold, Uro, and Omnath. Maybe wotc will realize how bad this is for their other formats and dial it back a bit, or at least stick to slower, more expensive bombs that are less likely to cause problems in standard, but they can't stop pushing or commander players won't buy.
All of this has created a situation where it's no longer about the game, but about the cards. Because it's the cards that are getting people to get out and buy stuff, which is all that matters. People hate rotation, and I get that, but rotation is a way to keep this sort of thing from happening to the game, because it guarantees that people will keep buying new stuff out of necessity, without needing to constantly flash newer shinier things in people's faces. Look at all the stupid gimmicks wotc is resorting to, in order to get our attention so we'll spend more. Now we've got alternate arts, full borders, godzilla cards - just owning the card isn't enough, you need to get the one-in-a-billion full alternate art foil version so you can show all your friends how cool you are. So keep cracking those %$#%$#% packs, little piggies.
So finally we come to the current nadir, though I fear it will keep going down, and down; how far I cannot say. But make no mistake, this is a huge step down into the stygian pit that this game is destined to be swallowed by. Remember how it started off like LEGOs, just a fun thing that exists that you can build with using your imagination? SLxTWD is the antithesis to that beautiful dream. It's not about the game at all anymore. You get, what, five actual cards? For $50. There's no game to play here, there's no imagination. There's just a desperate hand grabbing at your wallet.
I want to talk about the price a bit because I think it's going overlooked among the other things. Only 2 people have voted for it, but I think it might actually be my #2 choice at this point. The original model of MtG was that they'd sell a bunch of random stuff, some would be good and some bad, and the secondary market could figure that out, wotc didn't really care. So yeah, dual lands are now absurdly expensive. Bummer. But wotc doesn't make money off the duals being expensive. If anything they're losing tons of money by not reprinting them. It's fine to hate the reserved list, I mean I get it, but in a lot of ways I think it represents something I love about magic - sometimes cards are really good and mostly they're not, but wotc doesn't exploit that fact. They just make random stuff. If they accidentally make a $1000 card, then that's just how it goes.
The pricing of these is different. I think the original lairs were definitely a testing ground for this sort of thing. Because yeah, everyone knows that bitterblossom is worth whatever the SL cost if you were buying it on the secondary market, but obviously it doesn't cost anything to wotc to print it. But people accepted the cost because the secondary market had already spoken. 15 cards for $3 a pack or whatever is obviously a bit steep, but y'know it takes a lot of time to make art and design the sets distribution and yadda yadda, and if you squint your eyes you could kind of see how it wasn't toooo outrageous. Sure, you probably only actually cared about the rare most of the time unless you were drafting, but I think the semblance of value from all the junk commons at least made it feel like you were getting something that took effort, even if it likely wasn't useful to you personally.
JTMS was $100 because it was the best card in the set by a lot. That price was so high because of all the other cards that "took the hit" financially. The EV of a pack is never going to go too high, or else they'll just get cracked and cracked until the supply reaches a reasonable equilibrium, at least while it's in print. So while people were digging for JTMS, all the other cards got opened a ton too, but without JTMS's demand, and were worth nothing. When card is worth a lot, it's because other cards are worth less. I can forgive a card getting super expensive because in the end, WotC doesn't necessarily profit. They're only selling booster packs of random cards, and the random cards are only as valuable as the average value of those random cards. So sure, Ashaya is a $10 card, but that's because nearly every other card that wotc also spent a bunch of time designing in ZNR is worth less, and mostly worth much less. WotC makes a couple hundred cards, sells them in boosters, some of those cards are Ashayas that make the boosters worth buying, and some are the nahiri's lithomancys that do not, even though wotc spent a bunch of time on that card too. And that's even within the paradigm of designing pushed cards like Ashaya explicitly to sell more packs. In a more beautiful, naïve world, where wotc just makes random stuff without trying to push (mostly towards commander players), it takes even more effort creating cards to end up with just a couple that become expensive.
With SLxTWD, WotC isn't playing that game anymore. They don't need to make a bunch of random cards and watch a few of them push packs while most of them are "wasted" effort. Instead they'll just ONLY print the Ashayas, except instead of hoping they catch on and become popular, which is too risky even when they're deliberately pushing, they'll instead just set the price where they want it. $10 for a card. No effort to create a whole set from which the wheat can emerge from the chaff. Just 5 cards for $50. There's no justifying that kind of price for how little effort it takes to create. But they don't have to, because they've already trained us to accept those kinds of prices from the secondary market. And because of nightmares like JTMS and tarmo that have driven the price of cards outrageously high, they know they can count on our FOMO to drive us to buy this pig slop even if we don't even really WANT it. Because we might wish we'd bought it in the future.
Because of this requirement of endless growth (magic is on track to double its revenue from 2017-2023 or something, I believe I've heard - and that's not a "neat fact", that's a target they're being set by their higher-ups...and once that's achieved they'll have to keep doing even BETTER), they can't ever back down on this stuff. They can try to get new customers - and obviously they are, I'm sure that's a big part of their goal with this dumpster fire - but at the same time they're going to keep flogging their customers harder and harder and HARDER. And it's never going to lighten up. It might stay the same, at least for a while. But it'll never, never go back to what it was like before, because they can never let their revenue go down or even stagnate. It's gotta keep going up, or the game is dead and buried. So more products, all the time. Until you literally cannot spend more money on this game, they will keep increasing the pressure.
One last note, vis a vis selling via the internet, which is my actual vote for #1 worst thing. This is yet another way that they're no longer selling the game, but just the cards. Selling via an LGS keeps people coming into stores and playing. But if they were selling through stores, the product would have to sit on shelves, and the price might have to shift if people weren't buying enough of it. This distribution model is pure, unadulterated evil because they can set the price for exactly what they want and it doesn't have to hold up whatsoever. If the product sucks, if people hate it, they don't have to worry about warehouses full of garbage. They don't have to make a game that's good anymore. They just say "hey, we're printing fake $50 bills, how many can I put you down for?" Then they print that many, and they make their money, and they don't have to give a %$#% about what anybody thinks because it couldn't lose money if it tried. I can't imagine a product that more perfectly encapsulates late-stage capitalism.
If SLxTWD cost $10 (realistically it would be overpriced at $2 for just 5 cards, but I'm feeling generous) and I could buy it from my LGS, and if it wasn't an IP I find personally obnoxious, I might grumble but I'd probably pick it up. But between all the different factors, this is unforgivable. I'm soft-boycotting wotc, and unless it becomes completely untenable I intend to refuse to play against any of these cards. But I doubt any of it will make a difference. I doubt anything CAN make a difference. Their distribution model is too good. Until the game finally dies, they're never going to stop, because they'd be fools to stop. It's the perfect product for everyone except the people actually playing the game. The game isn't dead, not yet. But it's probably never going to be more alive. It's going to keep moving while it slowly rots from the inside out. It truly is the walking dead (TM).
Ba-dum...sad tssh.