The Magical World of Illusory Value · 6:13pm Jun 27th, 2018
I have a dilemma.
My most unpopular blog posts by far are my Magic: The Gathering related content, which relatively few of my followers read and which is not as widely recirculated by passing around links. This is usually fine with me even if they're some of my favorite posts to write - I'm on a pony site not a TCG-nerd site. This is the price I pay.
My dilemma is that for a long time I've been keeping tabs on a trend in Magic that has more to do with the way cards are bought and sold than the actual game, and I want to talk about it because I think it's interesting and also a little worrying. This is also an expansive enough subject that I feel like even my readers who normally tune out my Magic articles really should at least take a cursory look at it. I've been trying to figure out what my hook for this post is, and ultimately I just arrived at the conclusion of "fuck it, post it and maybe people will come."
For serious. Please read this. It's... well, if not important, I think informative.
This is the story of how a children's trading card game picks the pockets of countless adults, and how rebellion is almost futile.
0. Prologue: A Man, a Plan, and a Failure to Communicate
We could start this story anywhere, but the beginning seems like a good enough place for now.
Every long-time Magic player has heard the history of the game at some point. Back in the early '90s then grad-student Richard Garfield wanted to design a game where no two players used exactly the same pieces. His inspirations included baseball cards and other collectible cards, and eventually the flavor of the game began to revolve around wizards having spellcasting fights. Richard pitched the concept to Wizards of the Coast, and the first Magic set was printed.
One detail that still gets thrown around by Wizards employees to this day, almost as a joke, is that the game was successful on a scale Garfield failed to plan for. When developing Magic, he assumed people would only invest as much money in it as they typically would other games. As a result, a lot of early Magic rares were absurdly powerful simply because he assumed a typical playgroup wouldn't have more than one or two of those cards between them.
These assumptions were proved almost comically wrong days into Magic's initial release. Not only was it the most successful game Wizards had ever released, it was addictive. Players tore into packs chasing powerful rare cards, and the game became a full-blown phenomenon. As a bonus, right around this time the early internet began to take off, meaning it was now much easier for people to share information across a wide area. Garfield had initially planned Magic to be released without lists of cards or their rarities to preserve some level of mystery, but it was clear that with the internet as a resource that information could no longer reasonably be kept secret.
In hindsight, it's easy to see where Garfield misjudged Magic. His benchmark for evaluating it was probably based on competitive board games and collaborative storytelling games like Dungeons and Dragons. He assumed Magic would exist more in the space that Living Card Games or Dn'D modules do today - players would buy a starter set and a few packs, and then only buy cards when it came time to expand.
Modeling the game around a collectible product, though, meant inviting collectors into the mix. Bear in mind this is the '90s we're talking about. Beanie babies are blowing up in a big way, Pokemon is just about to launch a massively successful campaign based on the slogan "gotta catch 'em all!", and pogs are still happening/in recent memory during all of this. The age of the collectible Thing is at an almost fever pitch.
It's important to remember that this is how Magic started - a popular game made attractive to collectors. This tension has existed from the start.
It's about to get worse.
1. Chapter One: WotC and the No-Good Very-Bad Reprint Set
Another piece of Magic lore handed down through the ages concerns Chronicles. Unique in Magic's history, Chronicles was an expansion made up entirely of new printings of cards stretching all the way back to the beginning of the game. Its purpose was simple: by this point, Magic had been around for a few years and seen several successful expansions. During this time, the playerbase had begun to grow steadily, but the supply of cards from those earlier sets wasn't growing to match them. It was starting to become difficult for new players to get their hands on the cards they needed to play Magic at a competitive level.
(As an important side note, it's around this time that competitive Magic is really starting to become a Thing. This is the era where a lot of famous early articles on Magic game theory begin poking up online, people begin codifying concepts like Card Advantage and asking Who's the Beatdown, etc. In other words, the bar for building a successful Magic deck is gradually being raised.)
Chronicles almost killed Magic financially.
Wizards was completely unprepared for the backlash created by Chronicles. Rather than endearing the company to new players and giving old players a chance to get their hands on much-needed competitive staples more easily, Chronicles was declared a "betrayal of trust" on WotC's part. Not only was the set itself a financial failure, it forced WotC to completely rethink how the company would handle reprints going forward.
The problem with Chronicles, aside from WotC overestimating how badly the reprints it provided were actually needed, was that many Magic players were (and still are) collectors. A massive, unannounced reprint on the scale of Chronicles, which downshifted the rarity of many cards contained within it, meant that existing collections lost a lot of their artificial scarcity value. Bear in mind that for a collector, the monetary value of their collection is a big deal. Your collection is in some ways a status symbol meant to show off the (stupid) ways you have used your money.1
Chronicles is important to understand as part of the backdrop of this story because it fundamentally shifted the way Wizards of the Coast approaches reprints. All reprints of value in Magic are made very carefully in highly controlled releases to this day in part to avoid the kind of backlash engendered by Chronicles. Chronicles is also the reason behind the existence of the Reserved List, a massive number of cards printed before Eighth Edition that Wizards has sworn it will never, ever reprint (outside of very specific, limited circumstances). This list unfortunately includes many cards that are staples of the Legacy and Vintage formats, which, well....
I think it's best I move on and come back to this, or we'll be here all day. Here's where we start to get into the present.
2. Chapter 2: How Do Cards Money, Anyway?
Here's where we turn away from obscure bits of trading card game history to talk about the economic costs of playing a children's card game.
I want to preface this by saying that Magic is not uniformly expensive at all levels. It's very possible to play the game the way Richard Garfield originally intended: buy a sealed starter deck, pick up a few boosters, and have fun. The problems I'm about to describe occur at the level of organized play, and when a more casual player makes the leap into learning how to play in an established format.
That said: The cost of tournament Magic is absurd, even on the level of events held by your local game store.
I touched on this a couple of years ago in an unrelated post, but enfranchised Magic players who want to play officially-sanctioned formats have to spend an absolute shit-ton of money to acquire the cards needed for a competitive deck. Back then I used Standard as an example. The average competitive deck in Standard currently costs between $150.00-450.00 dollars to build, including sideboard. These decks remain playable for anywhere between three to eighteen months before they're rendered obsolete either by new cards entering the format or because Standard eventually rotates out cards. Once that occurs, the deck loses a large part of its value, and the owner is left with nothing.
Understandably, experienced players who have larger collections are often drawn away from standard into the big non-rotating formats. Since Modern and Legacy never rotate out old cards, your decks are less likely to lose all of their value. This means that if you want to trade in your deck for a new one or get out of the game entirely, it's much more likely that your cards are going to retain their monetary value. All in all it's a pretty good bargain.
The buy-in for the average Modern deck is somewhere around $800.00, and that's for the lower end. Competitive decks often cost as much as $1200-1500. The ultra-budget decks in Legacy are around the $700.00 range. The format-defining archetypes can cost anywhere from $1500.00-2500.00 to assemble. Somehow this is still true in a world where one of the primary competitors Magic has to worry about is digital TCGs like Hearthstone, where the monetary cost of assembling a tier 1 competitive deck can be as little as absolutely goddamn nothing.
That's nuts. Why the heck is everything so damn expensive?
Short answer, a combination of people's desire to pay absurd amounts of money to show their dominance at trading card games. Long answer? Rest of this post.
2.5. Why Money People Pay What How.
When looking at the absurd price tags on Magic decks, it's important to remember why the supply and demand are as out of sync as they are.
First, Magic is an old game by now. Like, celebrating-its-25th-anniversary old. This game is older than my siblings. There are well over 2000+ unique Magic cards in existence across god-knows-how-many expansions and supplemental products. In formats like Modern and Legacy, where you can pick cards from all across those twenty-five years of history, some cards are so old and were printed at such low quantities that there just aren't enough of them to meet the demands of the player base. These cards are so powerful and essential for tournament play that anyone serious about the game coughs up and buys them anyway, though.
This could be alleviated if the supply on these cards were drastically increased, but unfortunately, Chronicles is a thing that happened. The bad experience WotC had with a full-reprint booster set meant to make rare cards accessible backfired horribly in the '90s, nearly killing the game. The chances of them repeating the experiment are pretty low, even this many years down the road.
As a result, most players are forced to choose between buying old sealed product and playing the lottery for cards they actually want, which is a losing proposition, or pouring their money into the secondary market of Magic card resellers. And here's where our story starts to get... scummy.
3. Chapter 3: Like the Stock Market, but Actually Worse in Some Ways
All you need to know about the secondary market for Magic cards, particularly old ones, is that Martin Shkreli mentioned wanting to get involved at one point.
No. Really.
At the time, most of the buzz in the Magic community was horror at the idea of Shkreli buying up already-valuable cards and massively inflating their price. In retrospect it's just adorable that anyone thought a Fortune 500 scumlord getting involved would ever change that, because Magic cards are already subject to pump-and-dump schemes.
Here's the thing: not all Magic cards are created equal in price, even if they're equal in rarity. Of the rarest cards in the game, maybe something like ten to twenty percent are actually used in tournament decks with any frequency. Of those, an even smaller percentage are used among multiple tournament decks. It takes way more money to buy four copies of soul-crushing powerful cards like Wasteland than it does to get a playset of Unlicensed Disintegration, for instance.
It's become common practice in the secondary market to price 'singles' of cards based roughly on market demand for them. This means that buying Magic cards on the secondary market is a little bit like buying stock. The value of your cards can go down, remain stable, or go up. If you want, you can buy cards, hold them until their value increases, and then resell them at a profit. There's an entire sub-community of referred to as "MTGFinance" who do exactly that. In theory, this isn't the worst practice in the world. There are plenty of non-scummy ways to profit off the secondary market, like waiting for cards to spike in value after high-profile tournament finishes, for instance.
Or you can just be a sleazebag and profit off the misery of others.
4. Chapter AUUUUUUUUGH: Pump and Dump
One of the most reviled (and unfortunately, fairly widespread) practices in the MTGFinance community is the "buyout". Here's how it works - individuals or businesses purchase massive amounts of a single, relatively high-demand card. Then they wait. During this period demand for the card remains relatively high, but supply is now artificially scarce compared to previous levels. This has the effect of pushing up the price people are willing to pay for the card, at which point the person making the buyout sells their copies and pockets the difference. This floods the market with copies of the card and in theory depresses the price - but in practice, it almost never falls to its pre-buyout low.
Astute readers have probably already noticed that this is basically a pump-and-dump scheme.
Okay, that's not quite true. A classic pump-and-dump involves making deliberately misleading statements about the value of a stock you hold in order to inflate its value. Technically speaking, buyouts don't involve doing anything deliberately deceptive, they just exploit scarcity to create value. The problem with this practice is that the only person in the relationship who profits is the person making the buyout in the first place, and they're doing it by picking the pockets of their buyers. The card isn't any more valuable or desirable just because one person owns multiple copies, they're effectively just selling at an absurd markup and making the game more expensive for everyone else in the process.
Buyouts can be countered by smart consumer behavior. If consumers collectively decide not to buy copies of a card until it goes up for sale at its pre-buyout price, for instance, the person attempting the buyout will never find a buyer and the price of the card is unlikely to be inflated. This requires players to all, simultaneously, realize that a card has been bought out and that the value posted is inflated, though. There's a reason Pump-and-Dump schemes with actual securities are illegal: fact checking something like this is pretty difficult, especially when it only takes a few people too eager to finish their deck to ruin the whole scheme.
So okay, rare magic cards are in low supply, scummy people manipulate the market, blah blah blah, whatever. This could all be resolved by smarter consumer habits. After all, if people weren't buying these cards, the price would drop considerably. So isn't it their fault?
Well, from a certain angle, sure. From another angle it sure looks to me like what's actually happening is that people are invested heavily enough in Magic that they either make a significant portion of their income from it (streamers, pro players), or they're willing to make a losing economic bargain. Note that "willing" doesn't mean "excited" though, which brings us to our next point.
5. Wizards Mismanages All of the Things Forever
Everything I've just described - the high prices of old rare cards, the pump and dumps, the consumers spending absurd amounts of money to assemble one tournament deck - are all taking place outside of the direct control of the manufacturers of Magic. It's primarily private sellers, online retailers and local game stores who make up the market for 'singles', and where this kind of weird financial chicanery is taking place. Wizards of the Coast doesn't see a dime of that money directly - they make their coin selling sealed booster boxes and decks. In theory, the game being more expensive for the average consumer only hurts them. So why aren't they intervening?
Well, for starters, they don't see a dime directly, but that doesn't mean they aren't seeing any of this money. A massive amount of sealed product is purchased by the same people who resell cards, and that money does go straight into WotC's bottom line. More pertinently, local game stores and online retailers are very necessary for WotC's current business model. Wizards partners with local game stores to hold local events, and with larger online chains to hold their bigger tournaments. Channel-Fireball, for example, controversially received an exclusive contract to host every single official Wizards of the Coast Grand Prix for 2018.
Channel-Fireball makes most of its money selling singles and sealed product.
That said, while WotC might have reasons to be skittish about cutting into the profits of its business partners it also has very little reason to protect the kind of private investors responsible for individual card buyouts. While the price of individual singles would fall, it's fairly likely that the businesses WotC partners with would be able to weather that simply because there's already massive demand for these cards. Each individual sale might earn you less, but you'd be making more sales, and these businesses have the infrastructure to pull that off.
So why not just reprint expensive cards into oblivion? If you put more copies of these cards into the market, it should counteract the buyout, reducing the overall cost of singles, right? Well...
Far be it from me to be unfair to WotC (especially since I'm about to accuse them of a pattern of incompetence and almost willful misunderstanding of their core consumers and audience). They have pretty good reason to be skittish of mass reprinting - their first experience with a major project of just reprints resulted in the near death of the game. Doctrine at the company in the wake of Chronicles has been that reprints must be handled very, very carefully. Otherwise backlash is inevitable.
Of course, if that means you can sell more boosters by including only a smattering of valuable reprints in each, thus making the product more valuable to your enfranchised customers, you can make a lot more money by splitting up these requested reprints over years instead of doing them all at once. I'm sure that has absolutely nothing to do with WotC's current reprint policy. At all.
Yeah this is where things get somewhere between "slimy" and "roll the Fawlty Towers theme".
So you'd think even if Wizards are concerned about mass-reprints damaging their brand with a subset of consumers, they wouldn't make choices that exacerbate the problem of the secondary market. Instead, over the past decade, they've seemingly done almost everything they can to do so. Every single move they've made with the aim of changing the secondary market for the better has been almost laughably misguided.
For example, if you were trying to remedy the problem of individual investors buying out large amounts of rare, in-demand cards, introducing even rarer cards doesn't seem like a thing you would do. Yet in the past decade, that's exactly what happened. Following the release of the Shards of Alara block, Wizards of the coast added a new, fourth rarity to the already existing Common, Uncommon and Rare - the Mythic Rare. Unlike the other three rarities, which you were guaranteed to get at least one of in each pack opened, Mythic rares appear in the Rare slot of a booster at a rate of about one mythic rare per eight boosters.
This not only slightly decreases the frequency of each rare card in a set (since one in eight packs will have its one Rare replaced by a Mythic)2, but it means Mythic Rares have about an eighth of the supply an average Rare used to have. That's insane. Packaging Mythics in this way has some side benefits for Limited players, since it means you're less likely to get blown out by someone opening an insanely powerful card in their sealed or draft packs. For constructed players? It's almost entirely a net negative.
In WotC's defense, in theory Mythics make every other card in a pack a bit less expensive to acquire. If retailers and investors have to buy eight times as much product to get the supply they need of Mythics, then that's eight times as many copies of everything else on the market (roughly). You can see a similar impact made by Masterpieces, ultra-rare cards that appeared at a rate of 1/144 packs, which were introduced with Kaladesh and credited with helping to move a massive volume of booster boxes.
The difference between Mythics and Masterpieces, though, is that Masterpieces were constructed from the ground up as collector chase cards. Every Masterpiece in a set was either available as a non-Masterpiece version in the set itself, or was a variant of an older card and not actually standard-legal. Constructed players didn't need to expend resources chasing down Masterpieces to complete their modern, standard, or legacy decks. They were exclusively there for players who had the resources to spend extra on blinging out their decks.
Mythic Rares, on the other hand, are Standard-legal. This means every time one of them is actually good enough to become the cornerstone of a tournament deck - and a lot of them are - it's average players, not collectors, who are pressured to buy them. And the more mythics that go into a deck, the more expensive that deck becomes. On top of that, remember when I said that 'in theory' mythics depress the price of other cards in a pack? Yeah that's not entirely true in practice. Put bluntly: Nobody actually buys eight times the amount of product to get a mythic. Rares and Uncommons that see tournament play really aren't any cheaper today than they were before.
Oh, and of course, Mythics are an excellent target for buyouts. Limited supply, consistent demand, and if they're necessary in Standard it puts a lot of pressure on players to buy now instead of waiting for prices to drop. Standard decks have a limited life span, so if you really want to play the deck you have to get it together sooner than later.
Really, the only thing Mythics do is increase the amount of sealed product you need to buy to get a playset of must-use cards, and while that has a small benefit for the consumer, the only people it really help are WIzards themselves.
Okay that's one problem. Surely Wizards does better when it's making products aimed specifically at its enfranchised audience, right?
Oh. Oh honey.
6. Masters Sets and ArgleFargleBlargleGAH.
Okay. Okay.
Okay.
Deep breaths, me. You can do this.
Fuck masters sets and fuck the horse they rode in on.
Okay so here's the pitch: Masters sets were introduced and pitched to players as sort of a fixed Chronicles. Their explicit, stated purpose was to get much-needed reprints of Modern staple cards into the hands of players who didn't want to pay a cool $280.00 for their playset of Tarmogyf. And they sort of did that! The first Modern Masters, and the Masters sets that have followed, have all contained at least a few valuable chase rares (and, ugh, Mythics) meant to get more supply into the market and depress the prices of certain cards. And they kinda did. Sort of. Maybe.
Not really.
In a lot of ways, Masters sets seem almost designed to fail to impress. For starters, they had a much smaller print run than a regular booster set. While this is normal for supplemental products, it also meant that the supply they introduced into the market was depressed from the start. In addition, Masters boosters were sold with a premium markup because fuck you, Modern players, we think we can get away with charging you more for the same card stock.
Magic players are capable of being whiny and entitled but when you remember that there's a recent history of shit like this going on, suddenly a lot of that displaced anger looks a lot less weird.
I wish I could say the Masters story gets better from here, but it really doesn't. Modern Masters 2017, Iconic Masters, and Master 25 all completely failed as products and as vehicles for getting reprints into the hands of players. While there were a few success stories - Path to Exile, a staple removal spell for Modern, is cheaper on the back of MM17 - the vast majority of modern staples rebounded to their original price. And that's for the ones that saw their price significantly fall at all. But hey, at least they were all great draft environments.
Wizards has seen more successful reprints, ironically, from sets that actually were intended for draft as opposed to depressing the value of cards. Conspiracy 2: Take the Crown and Battlebond both reprinted a number of cards with an absurdly high price tag. And since they weren't advertised as products explicitly meant to make a format more accessible, they've avoided community backlash. Also they were actually fun.
Oh and because I'd be silly to forget mentioning it, there's now a buy-a-box promo in every major set released from Dominaria forward. That promo is only available in a limited print run, and only if you order an actual sealed box of cards.
Yeah.
7. Why Should I Care?
If you don't play Magic, your wise response to all that I've told you would be that question. My answer: honestly, you don't need to.
What i'm trying to describe here is a situation in which a business has no incentive to give its customers what they're asking for and willing to pay for, and where those customers are being pickpocketed. In this same situation you have customers who have a massive amount of anger, some of which is displaced onto other (good) things the company is doing. And you have a market with few, if any actual controls ripe for abuse.
What I'm saying is welcome to the real world, I guess.
Blegh.
1No, I'm not sorry.
2EDIT: I realized while re-reading this post that I might have made an error of reckoning here. Mythics only make rares more scarce if you assume that the same number of rare cards are printed in each set, which isn't true - Mythics take up slots that used to be occupied by rares in set listings as well. The rest of what I posted holds up, but this bit is a math dumb. Oops!
This is why I only play Limited formats and for fun. I lack the interest, the competitive drive, and until recently the resources to plunk down so much for particularly effective pieces of collectible cardboard. And that's me saying that.
Interesting history stuff here, even if my sum experience with Magic is playing a bit with friends in Middle school.
Suddenly I'm feeling much less stupid about getting into Dominion and blowing around $400 on expansion sets before they got too recondite and annoying to play.
No, damnit, I'm not buying those last two sets for the sake of completeness. I don't even play Adventures anymore.
Having seen parts of this coming together over time, its a bleak picture to see it all presented together
This is why I got out a few years ago. However, the lore is unequivocally some of the best stuff ever, so there's that.
Since I know a lotta dorks, I've seen rooms full of shoeboxes of Magic cards in my time in peoples' houses.
Good to see my contempt wasn't misplaced.
except i actually feel really bad for these people now
Isn't that what Yu-Gi-Oh does and hasn't that failed spectacularly?
4890637
Limited is so good. I've been able to play standard for years now off the back of strong limited play building up enough store credit to both keep drafting and get cards for standard. Also sometimes I open good trade fodder (shoutouts to trading promo and regular Goblin Piledriver for 3x Thoughtseize).
4890721
Yu-Gi-Oh does more frequent reprints, but the issue is that for the most part the expensive cards in Yu-Gi-Oh aren't really old cards that often, they're new ones. Since there's only one format in Yu-Gi-Oh and old cards typically get banned out of playability very fast when they are any good, a lot of your money is being dropped on new bling. The cost of the game remains high even if it's easier to acquire old cards.
By contrast if the price of, say, the Ravnica shocklands were to tank, that would have pretty significant implications for the price of almost every modern tournament deck.
4890723
I suppose banning everything and power creep does solve the problem of old cards being expensive
That was an interesting read. My friend recently showed me how to play magic, but I don't think I'm going to get into it.
Now do one on the state of the MLP collectible card game? Do people still play that?
4890724
Yup. There are a few older money-cards in YGO still - Monster Reborn has a price tag, for example - but anytime those cards re-enter tournament play there's almost always a reprint to go along with it. YGO's expense is that it's got all the volatility of Standard with a cardpool approaching the size of modern.
Imagine if every twelve months or so, your modern burn deck lost 60-80% of its relevance because better versions of Goblin Guide, Monastery Swiftspear, and Lightning Helix were printed, and then Bolt was banned. That's Yu-Gi-Oh in a nutshell.
4890733
From what I've heard? Yes.
Do I play it or have any firsthand knowledge of the community or markets? Nope.
You're more likely to see something else about Cardfight! Vanguard if I branch out, since I actually used to play that. On a fairly high level, even.
I still like the MtG blogs! :D
Though this one confused me because economics. x.X MONEY BAD
4890826
Capitalism is a game that nobody actually wins except the people with capital. And they keep winning forever.
And this is why, when I was but a wee nerd and a friend offered to teach me Magic, I listened to him explain how it work and went "Bwa ha ha ha ha hno." I've not made many wise decisions in my life but that one was a masterpiece. Same as my longstanding ban on MMOs in my house.
Well-made post and a well-made point about what works out to a Tulipomania that interferes with an otherwise inoffensive game.
4890831
Which is the moral of Monopoly. Unfortunately, this bit of information got mislaid over the years and to this day thousands of families torment themselves playing Economic Unfairness Simulator 1935.
What I don't get is if that's hows it works (and my scattered random encounters with MtG writings on the internet sound generally consistent with what you're saying), then what the spork are you there for?
So wait... People don't want reprints of super good cards? I'm a yugioh heathen, and I'm pretty sure if there was anything like Chronicles the whole community would be rejoicing!
But certain Magic players don't want reprints all because they want to boast that they have better cards and others don't? Correct me if I'm wording this all in a wrong manner.
I think this was the bit of context I needed to start caring about Magic The Gathering. Thanks for putting it together. Maybe I'll try to pay more attention to your MtG blogs in the future.
Solution : Nab some of that capital, then go FUFUFU and buy the anime
With you on the mythics, less so on the masters sets. Getting the print run and price point right is a hard balancing act (I think they could have been more aggressive, but the degree to which that's the case I'm less sure of), since it seems like the goal is probably more to stop upward trends or get modest price declines than to strongly depress prices. And with that in mind, you need the print run to be limited rather than the more or less "we'll print and ship as many as distributors want to order as long as it's the current run" for normal sets, or you just get people selling above the too-low MSRP. (Or else you get things like what happened with the black Betrayers of Kamigawa precon, which had a Jitte, and they sold out everywhere and people were going around to Targets and Wal-Marts to find them, and that's not what that product was supposed to be.)
Where I am disappointed is that (though there are some gems, like Crucible) M19 looks pretty weak in the reprint department. Plus side to it though: they've got decent (if not truly competitive) duals in all combinations, and at common.
Side note, I'm actually surprised at how low the price of Rav duals are: the three I checked, including two blue ones, were all under $20, or not far from where they were when they were in Standard (the first time around), well below the $30-40 I think was happening before their reprint. Considering the success of Modern and that it's been a while (2-3 years?) since they were last printed, that's pretty well under control. (On a small sample) Zendikar fetches look like the bigger problem, and given the success with both the shocks and the Onslaught fetches, a real-set reprinting in the next couple years would probably do the job, and hold for a decent time. Granted, that requires they do one.
4890921
Remember, a lot of what I'm saying is true mostly for tournament players at your friendly local game store. I'm not a tournament player. I purchase sealed product pretty exclusively, and when I'm not doing that I play Pauper, which has a much lower price tag since it's an all-commons format. Plus, bootleg sims, proxy cards, etc.
I still feel scummy about this.
4890923
Bear in mind that Chronicles happened relatively early on, back when a higher percentage of Magic players were also collectors. For a collector, anything that makes their collection less valuable - not necessarily less powerful, worth less money - is a big problem. Collections are about showing off how much money and effort the collector was willing to expend to get their hands on something pointless. If that something loses its value, the collection becomes less impressive.
These days it's pretty widely agreed that there are players who would love a set like Chronicles, but it's unlikely WotC will ever print one. They not only have bad precedent, they make more money by spacing the reprints out over multiple products.
4891002
So basically if your goal is to give the players almost nothing and have the set fail to reasonably impact the accessibility of modern, then yes you've succeeded. The precon I follow, but precons are products made for new players - hence why it's a problem when people are buying them out. Wizards pitched the first Modern Masters as being about getting Modern staples into the hands of players. Well, we're still waiting on that.
Side note to the side note: Magic prices are so out of whack that you can look at a land base that costs you $80.00 for a single playset of a single dual land for your two-color deck and say that the prices are "well under control". That's the land base. What you need to even get started building a deck in those colors. Not even the meat of the actual deck.
In a sane world I'd argue that the good duals, the competitive ones, would be printed in the uncommon slot or readily available in constructed products or both, rather than being marketed as premium power cards.
4890974
Honestly I’d watch a magic the gathering anime thats all about the crazy antics of speculators and collectors rather than the actual card games themselves.
That's the shithole of inelastic demand. :\ The true value of a card is how expensive it has to be before people stop buying it. If it's a deck staple, either you buy it or you bail to an alternate format where you don't need it. And due to sunk costs, someone committed to investing $500 on a deck doesn't have much incentive not to spend $800 instead. You just keep going until you chase out the people who can't afford to play.
Man, I really ought to just sell my dual lands while there's still a thriving market for the game. I could clear four digits easy if I made a genuine effort to offload my Beta/3e stuff (and that would basically break me even from the old college days when I bought in hard). I'm just too lazy to put in the nontrivial work to dive into the market from scratch enough to make certain I'm getting a good deal for them.
4899081
I mean at this point unless you're actively playing with them, it's been a long enough time that even getting some of the money back is a net win for you. A lot of big secondary market sellers like TCGPlayer have buylists with fixed prices that should let you sell for slightly under market value depending on the condition of your cards, which - when adding shipping costs, etc. - does mean you're unlikely to break completely even, but guarantees you're close. If you can't use 'em, may as well take the money you can get and run.