For those unaware, Magic: the Gathering recently banned several expensive cards ($100 and $2-300) from the game’s most popular way to play (Commander a.k.a. Elder Dragon Highlander). This is after one of those cards was put in a recent set that was a selling point for lots of people. Wizards of the Coast knew about this ban from an independent group of organizers almost a year ago, but went ahead with the printings anyway.
So now some people have cards they bought for over $100 plummet to prices below $50 (and continuing to drop) since this one type of play is the only place these cards were used. Foil versions were once going as high as $800 to $1,000 but are now dropping to $200.
The thing is, these cards were never on Magic’s “reserve list,” cards Wizards has promised to never print tournament-legal versions of. The last cards added to the list were in 1999/2000. Cards after that can be printed into the ground. Anyone who pays attention to Magic prices knows cards not on that list can have their prices gutted overnight. You shouldn’t be investing in collectables, anyway. But especially Magic cards and especially not ones that can be reprinted.
We now have this situation where capitalists do what they do and a bunch of people, including Tim Pool, are flipping the fuck out after getting scammed by Wizards of the Coast and their owner, Hasbro. Older players warn people about this all the time that WotC will print cards they know they’re going to ban, then wait until those cards have been sold off before pulling the trigger. They win either way. Whales who must always buy new thing before getting hyped to buy the next new thing fork over their money trying to get ahead of everyone else. Players wanting a balanced and fair game are happy because the problem cards are gone (and thus not quitting).
“”“”“Investors”“”“” have been a blight on TCGs from the get-go. A lot of Magic’s recent problems have been from the feedback loop created by Commander/EDH (a whole other can of worms I’m not getting into in this post). So it’s doubly hilarious when the overlap of EDH players who treat their decks like an investment get burnt. Especially since their format isn’t a tournament-oriented one so you can just use proxy/fake versions of cards and anyone who cares is someone you can ignore.
Vintage and Cube players continue to win bigly since we own these cards because we actually play with them, so their value is irrelevant.
This is why I play MTG on Cockatrice. Can’t sell cards for a 96 kajillion % markup cuz you want to mint precious NFTs if you can just use them online. Like I can tell you, all these NFT cards cost 5c to make. But they sell them at such a high price because they’re turning TCGs into an NFT market.
Holy fuck you have no idea how bad people are at this. It costs WotC the same amount of money to print basic land cards as it does to print any other card. You’ll have people say dumb shit like “they can’t reprint that because it costs them too much money and will hurt the value an–”
No shut the fuck up you dipshit. It does not matter what the card is. The printing process is the same. TCG companies create artificial scarcity and their decisions are arbitrary. Tons of playing cards from dozens of different games are worth absolutely fuck all because those games are dead. Tons of Magic cards are worth less than $1 when they were worth $20 in their heyday because they’ve been power crept.
I have no idea what goes on in these people’s brains other than would-be scammers getting scammed because the actual scammers know how to prey on people who think they’re infallible.
I remember years ago when I was getting into the game I found MTGO, and it was the most janky client I’ve ever played on. The way you bought cards was like, topping up an account with credits and then opening a trade with some random bot and trading for the cards. Then a friend was like “you can just play with any cards for free” and showed me Cockatrice lol. Same thing happened when a group of us wanted to play D&D during covid lockdown so we all got tabletop simulator, downloaded the rule book pdfs and played that way.
A friend of mine plays warhammer and just 3D prints all his miniatures because fuck paying hundreds of dollars for what is essentially like 50 unpainted army men.
Hey! That’s how I play Warhammer too! It’s worse when you want to play a xeno and the Tau models are the same price or even more for less models. Like fuck that.