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Magic: the Gathering |OT11| Amonkhet - Have you ever had decks with a Pharaoh?
- Thread starter SigmasonicX
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What is your reasoning why?
I'm with you. Too many collectors and resellers have amassed large MTG finance portfolios, and they'll be extremely sour to see their investments crash overnight if the RL gets abolished.
I like the idea on the surface, but it's a little too risky for my tastes. Maybe I'm overestimating the number of people who fall into the demographic above, though.
DashReindeer
Lead Community Manager, Outpost Games
Good god, I would be ruined if they abolished the Reserved List. My Legends collection and my dual lands collection would both crash through the floor. Not super excited about that prospect, though people have been speculating about the abolishment of the list for years now and it never seems to happen.
Just speculation. They would want to say "we all chipped in and helped make the Reserved List go away!"
Anyway, worldbuilding on a reprint set seems weird. As if we're doing some Heroes of the Storm shit where somehow all the iconic creatures ended up in an Arena or something.
Wait. There's a plane like that.
I just don't see where removing the reserved list has such a huge upside for them. They get a one off cash flow, but they can only do it once, and they run the risk of pissing off collectors and investors who may well sue them over it - and even if they don't, will generate vast amounts of ill will amongst some of their oldest players.
I mean, I'd love to see some of those cards being printed again. I played a LOT during Urza's and would love to have Gaia's cradle and other cards back. But I just don't see it.
I mean, I'd love to see some of those cards being printed again. I played a LOT during Urza's and would love to have Gaia's cradle and other cards back. But I just don't see it.
honestly my level of care for people who speculate or invest in rare playing cards is basically zero compared to actually being able to play with the cards, i would accept your losses gladly for the betterment of the game
but i guess this is the cyclical nature of the mtg thread talkin bout reserved lists again
but i guess this is the cyclical nature of the mtg thread talkin bout reserved lists again
you see they've supplanted the idea of "ooohhh secret rare cards that no one has but if you get it you're rich" with Masterpieces.
Granted they're not as expensive as the old cards, but they could continue forward with Masterpieces and get that kind of legacy appeal.
Apparently MaRo slipped up and talked about Ixalan on one of his Drive to Work podcasts last week.
Granted they're not as expensive as the old cards, but they could continue forward with Masterpieces and get that kind of legacy appeal.
Apparently MaRo slipped up and talked about Ixalan on one of his Drive to Work podcasts last week.
Giant Panda
Member
I think it would be best to proclaim the reserved list abolished some months in advance before reprinting anything off of it. See if any serious lawsuits over promissory estoppel result from that move.
Infinite Stars
Member
I just don't see how you have a set called Iconic Masters, charge $10 a pack for it, have that many people involved, have the set be drafted 2 months in advance roughly, etc and not have something big in store.
It's either the Reserve List being hit or something equally big imo
It's either the Reserve List being hit or something equally big imo
Joe Molotov
Member
He built the fuck out of that world.
SigmasonicX
Member
It would be amazing if Iconic Masters did break the Reserved List, but it was all shit like Wood Elemental.
Also, remember that one guy during Magic Origins spoilers who was really angry about Day's Undoing supposedly being a Reserved List break? Good times.
Also, remember that one guy during Magic Origins spoilers who was really angry about Day's Undoing supposedly being a Reserved List break? Good times.
Poodlestrike
Banned
I'm imagining a player playing Glorious End to pre-empt their enemy's turn only for the other play to turn around and play it on them.
I don't even know how I'd handle that.
Force of Will is awful in limited though. Consecrated Sphinx though...
Nah the best way to use GE is to hit it when they tap out to play a huge spell or something. LOL JK tap all your lands and give me another turn!
Or a huge alpha strike.
I love this card so much.
platypotamus
Member
This is a problem with pop culture rather than with magic. Hydras and sphinxes are cool af in mythology.
The problem with magic hydras is how few of them have any sort of "chop off one head and two grow back" sort of mechanically represented at all.... or really any sort of mechanical payoff for the multi-headed thing in the first place.
I'd agree if it were unique but it's a set wide mechanic being applied to multiple creature types
charlequin
Banned
No, my theory, which has been consistent for years and I basically spelled out in my previous post, is that Hasbro legal shut them down. We know that they were specifically going to eliminate the Reserved List in 2010 and "something" changed that eliminated their loophole and made them "unable to talk about it."
Promisory estoppel, although the question of how legitimate that case would be is very much up in the air.
Why? It's not like cards that they're allowed to reprint never get expensive. Even at their super-high prices the actual high-value reserved cards make up a minuscule portion of the whole actual secondary market.
They're just expanding their credit listings to be more like videogames instead of focusing purely on design and development. "Worldbuilding" is the full creative team, "Brand" is marketing, "CAPS" is production. Historically none of those get credited in what we think of as the set credits listings, and they probably wanted to start making it clearer just how many people are actually involved in making a set.
Right. That was then, this is now.
GregLombardi
Member
I mean, do you have numerical evidence for this? I know plenty of players that have scrounged across years acquiring their favorite reserved list cards to play legacy / EDH. They've also got the best versions and the shiniest things. All of those players would immediately have value snuffed from their existences, unless it were handled very carefully. Keep in mind too, many magic players attach their identities to their cards. Not a great look if suddenly the identities they built up are ripped from below them.
Just to clarify what you are saying here -- are you saying that reprinting old cards is a zero sum game for Wizards / Hasbro? And if you are saying that, what is your evidence for this? I feel like the infinite future value of underground sea reprints on a profitability level could certainly exceed the value of all lawsuits waged against Wizards, but I have no way to prove this. Also, the problem with any philosophy surrounding this is that when it comes to Finance, which really is what I feel this legal fight would be about, Wizards is up against a pretty vicious wall IMO (see my view of this situation below).
I am curious as to your evidence of this. Not saying you are wrong, I just haven't seen enough data to conclude one way or the other about how many underground seas are sitting out there waiting to lose value, for example.
My Feelings On The Reserve List
I think the reserve list is terrible for magic the gathering as a product / game. I would love a reasonable avenue for the reprinting of old cards, but given WOTC's missteps even in standard, I fail to see how the company will come up with the proper solution. I also wouldn't know what that would mean for the game's various formats, though for new players it would be great. Regardless, I think Wizards has backed themselves into a legal corner that, if mishandled, could torpedo the company and set its legal fees skyrocketing well above absorb-able levels for a decade or more.
I'm a finance guy, and I've seen the wall street sharks come at certain issues like this before. I am not a lawyer, so that part I would have to leave to counsel. However, the intrinsic value of reserve list cards does not only extend to the prices you currently see on the market. As evidenced by the past 25 years of magic card price movement, the value in reserve list cards is also tied to the future.
It is also a value clearly established by the company in charge of the cards reprint cycles. I.e., they said they will never reprint them. In a public manner. In finance terminology, they not only established the future values of an asset but may have made their own market. One could even argue that that market needs regulation, and if a market needs regulation that means the owners of assets in that market have certain rights that can't be taken away. In some ways, you're talking about property that has almost been made equivalent to real estate in terms of future expectation. I know this sounds absurd, but those who are investors in these cards could easily make the argument that a company just came and took their "land" away. Would it fly legally as a class action promissory estoppel suit? I have no idea. But as a finance guy I can tell you the net present value of an Underground Sea with some degree of very clear mathematical certainty. And if another party were to step in and completely destroy that value, you better believe a savvy investor would consider recourse against that party. And this isn't what I would necessarily choose to do personally, although as a full disclosure I have quite a few reserve list cards. But I think this is where the argument would end up in court, from a finance perspective. WOTC just took my real estate and trashed it, after promising never to do so in a public manner and establishing their own market for assets. This market needs regulation, and the court needs to step in and force them to compensate investors in their market for their losses because they violated their contract with said investors.
And if investors attached the value of their collections to net present value instead of present prices and won, WOTC could be very f'ed financially.
Like I said, I think it could be a decade worth of legal battles, one battle of which could be an injunction against printing the cards themselves. It is an absolute potential nightmare. It is still my opinion that they have ways out of this, but just randomly printing the reserve list cards out of nowhere with no warning or discussion is a very very bad choice in my opinion (not only potentially from a finance perspective, but from a player perspective and those that have played the game since the beginning, such as myself).
divisionbyzorro
Member
Like I said: if they ever abolish the reserve list, we will know at least a year before the cards hit shelves. They would never up and do it out of nowhere.
FreedomFrisbee
Member
I thought common theory was that there was a court settlement that made them unable to talk about it.
The thing is, collectors kinda don't have a leg to stand on. If wizards really wanted to destroy the reserve list and not be liable for any damages, they could just ban RL cards from legacy. Or print dual lands that are strictly worse but function correctly in the right deck. Things that would lessen market pressure, lowering the price, then abolish the list after everything gets cheap.
Part of this equation is that someone would have to prove damages at some point. People with power 9 aren't ever going to be able to because even if they're reprinted the original printings will never tank. The things that are most common that could lose value are the original duals, and those could just as easily lose value if they get banned in legacy. Which is a solution that has been thrown around.
Wizards can legally undermine investors 20 different ways without ever touching the reserved list. And then after that getting rid of the list wouldn't be an actionable offense because there wouldn't be any sizable damage from it.
You can reprint Action Comics #1 till you're blue in the face, that won't change the value of the original print run.
If I were Wizards and I wanted to deal with this, I would most certainly do it before any kind of movie happened. Any huge advertising boon like that would only make things more valuable and therefor make it harder to get rid of the RL.
Rants! Not proofreading!
GregLombardi
Member
My only question to you about this is the following: why would they ever do this?
Although it wins the legal argument, it does not benefit the game. Nor their profits. All it does is screw old magic players and obsessed investors, unless I am missing something.
No.
They can't ever print a 1WW Flying, First Strike 2/2 creature because Thunder Spirit is on the Reserved list, for example.
FreedomFrisbee
Member
How wouldn't it benefit the game or the players? All of us having access to dual land equivalents at reasonable prices is somehow bad? And Wizards would somehow NOT make money off of doing that?
It opens up Legacy and better EDH for a lot of people.
GregLombardi
Member
The cards cannot be functionally identical. So that means they have to be worse or better. The closest they've come to reprinting dual lands, in my mind, are the fetches. Is there a land you can think of that is better than a fetch but worse than a dual land? Many times fetches are even better than dual lands. And this argument has been made before but...do you think in a million years they'd print a "doesn't come into play tapped" tri land? That would be absurd.
They came pretty close to violating this with reverberate/fork.
FreedomFrisbee
Member
You're just not being imaginative enough here. This image makes a good case for how to handle it: http://i.imgur.com/AuQn3s7.png
And we're not even considering that fakes are readily available right now and pose a much more real threat of undermining the value of the cards than abolishing the reserved list does.
GregLombardi
Member
charlequin
Banned
Nah. They can ride a change like this for years before they're out of juice, especially if they do something like what a lot of people have suggested and do a pre-announcement of the changes. Like: imagine they sent out an announcement that said they'd be rolling back the RL as follows:
- Take a targeted list of cards off the list with the release of a set we're announcing today. (Pull a list of select stuff that's all under fifty bucks on the secondary market -- there's some cool stuff to choose from like Grim Monolith, Survival of the Fittest, Time Spiral, Fork, Sliver Queen, Yawgmoth's Will, Tolarian Academy, Null Rod, Intuition, Vesuvan Doppelganger, Mind Over Matter, and Rofellos. Whatever you don't pick will get distributed amongst the later steps.)
- Remove Urza's Block one year from today. (That gets you Serra's Sanctum and Gaea's Cradle.)
- Remove Tempest block two years from now. (That gets you Mox Diamond and City of Traitors.)
- Remove Mirage block three years from now. (That gets you Lion's Eye Diamond.)
- Remove Revised, Ice Age block and Homelands four years from now. (That gets you the dual lands.)
- Remove Legends, the Dark, and Fallen Empires five years from now. (That gets you twelve cards, from Tabernacle all the way down to Thunder Spirit.)
- Remove Arabian Nights and Antiquities six years from now. (That gets you fifteen cards, from Bazaar of Baghdad down to Old Man of the Sea.)
- Remove the non-power stuff from ABU seven years from now. (That gets you six cards, starting with Time Vault.)
- Remove the power eight years from now, with a reduced promise that it won't be printed with a chance to be opened in a pack above {insert bullshit number here.}
You can basically drive the Masters product line on that for almost a decade.
All their players from when the Reserved List was in place combined make up, what, like maybe 1% of their total playerbase? And that's assuming everyone on that list would be opposed to this move, which I don't think would be borne out.
It really stinks too, since Indian mythology and culture is one of the cultures I know the least about. Was kind of hoping to get some exposure to it, but it ended up being window dressing, in an almost offensively bland attempt to be inoffensive, ironically enough. Indian influence aside, you're right- having the Gatewatch take priority over the world killed its intrigue, making it by far the least interesting artifact oriented world they've ever created. I expected so much more as I was thrilled with the art on reveal.
In retrospect, the block's storyline basically exists as a tease for Bolas and nothing else.
Modern has appeal over legacy and vintage beyond cost. It's probably the single most friendly format to brewers at the moment. You can kind of do whatever you want. It also rewards deck choice and metagaming more than other formats.
(I personally think Legacy and Vintage are far more fun formats to play- and Legacy at least certainly has a broad variety of viable decks- but you won't see the sheer number of brews making waves in those formats that you will in Modern)
Now I want Tropical Duckburg.
charlequin
Banned
I have no idea what you're talking about. It is indisputable that R&D proper hates the Reserved List and almost certain that nobody in leadership positions elsewhere in WotC or Hasbro cares except inasmuch as there's a legal entanglement.
Various people have run polls with various types of sample groups over the years and the result has always lopsidedly favored reducing or eliminating the list. Obviously sourcing poll data is difficult, there's a lot of confounding factors, etc. but this is an example of random online polling: http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/.../334833-should-the-reserved-list-be-abolished When WotC themselves polled on this back in 2002, they got 91% of people wanted them to amend the list to remove cards that weren't expensive.
I'm saying that the absolute maximum value of legal action regarding existing reserve cards is a finite and calculable number (even assuming the effect of an announcement is to instantly send all those cards to $0, which it would not be) and given the scope of the game today and the ability to directly market years of products solely on the back of bringing previously inaccessible cards out of the vault, the latter would inevitably overcome the former given enough time.
I think even if handled badly it is relatively unlikely anyone at all would actually sue over it and exceptionally unlikely anyone could maintain a suit to the point that it resulted in a legitimate ruling against WotC.
Almost certainly not. The timing and nature of the response strongly suggest that legal was involved, but almost certainly in a proactive fashion or responding to extremely early rumblings.
Why are we talking about abolishing the reserve list? They would have broken it long ago if they felt they could
Hydras are the only big mana tribe out of the five completely made of unintelligent beasts. The others all get to do all kinds of cool shit. Hydras just eat, shit and rampage until someone throws a doom blade at them
Hydras are the only big mana tribe out of the five completely made of unintelligent beasts. The others all get to do all kinds of cool shit. Hydras just eat, shit and rampage until someone throws a doom blade at them
They should announce killing the reserve list a year in advance and then do a lead up year filled with Legacy/Vintage events- GPs and PTs- so the collectors who want to sell of their cards beforehand can at least ride a smoother downturn in profits as new players buy in on the hype/to play in the tourneys before the first wave of reprints hit the scene.
I can easily see that.
Another thing that doing away with the reserved list would do is allow for products like Tempest Remastered to be released in Paper. Sell packs for 3.99 in 24 pack boxes (made for drafting), with a 250 card set comprising a selected group of cards from an old block, designed for drafting. You can put money cards from the block in to entice people to buy as well.
This would be a great January release, when people are starting to get tired of Triple Fall expansion
This would be a great January release, when people are starting to get tired of Triple Fall expansion
People are speculating the that WotC's new CEO wants to do things differently, and this includes looking at abolishing the RL. I'm not sure what people are seeing in the new CEO to suggest that is the case, though.
charlequin
Banned
I mean their old CEO was a packaged-goods guy who used to make soap and who let their digital platforms be industry-wide laughingstocks because even gaming-industry salaries were too high for him; the new guy actually plays games, actually worked in digital gaming before, and as one of his first big moves cleaned house on the digital division and hired people who had actually run successful MMOs to come in and build out a big, competent new team. I certainly think he's demonstrated enough difference to keep in consideration. Everyone who works for him is gonna be telling him the RL is a disaster and he's demonstrated that his mandate from Hasbro gives him a little more leeway than Leeds had to make unexpected decisions.
Tangentially, when Tempest Remastered was announced, I always thought it'd be cool if, once we've revisited a plane enough times, they started to do [Plane] Remastered sets. Sets made for drafting that mixed and matched cards from the plane (even if not from the sets) to make an interesting draft format. For example, you could do Innistrad Remastered that would include a mix of cards from Innistrad, Shadows Over Innistrad, Innistrad 3: Fiddle Dee Dee, plus Innistrad-themed cards from supplemental sets and core sets.
It could be a decent way to 'revisit' a plane without actually revisiting it for awhile.
Some guy who knows nothing about magic is selling a Beta Lotus on Ebay right now, enjoy the last 30 mins! http://www.ebay.com/itm/Magic-the-G...457465?hash=item1c8260aa79:g:nrgAAOSw7XBY8FqV
GregLombardi
Member
Do my eyes deceive me or is that a complete fake
As someone who spent a good while putting together his legacy deck and bought a Tropical Island last month, I wouldn't mind seeing the reserved list ban. That just mean we'll see more legacy players. Our lgs allows for 15 proxies, but even that isn't enough to see that many players. Abolishing the RL would easily see a spike in players. But I'm speaking more from a player's perspective and not a collector's.
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