Magic the Gathering's 30th Anniversary debacle

Confused why they thought $999 was a good price point for 4 packs of non-tournament legal cards. It's going to be more expensive to gamble for a chance at fake power 9 than it is to buy the real deal.

If any of you play, what kind of formats are you into and how do you feel about the recent news? Particularly anyone who considers themselves "collectors" who this kind of thing might be aimed at.

I left the mtg boat a while ago, felt the powercreep was getting out of control since around the second generation of planeswalkers...

But anyway, i dont think its fair to call the price outrageous, its not that different from cosmetics on GGG, the "fair" price is wathever people are willing to pay, many people say its absurd to charge 10 bucks for a skin, but the only ones who can really tell is the devs. If they are not lowering the price, it means its selling, so its fair and youre just not the target audience, same deal i think

Especially if you consider from a purely objective perspective, collecting physical cards at this day and age itself dont make a whole lot of sense... magic arena exists and its likely it will stay long after the time it would take for a "real" card to deteriorate or be damaged by random happenstance(esp if you actually PLAY with them). Cards nowadays are really for the sake of collecting i would say(yugioh in particular is absolutely atrocious to play with "real" cards, the amount of times you need to search the deck and shuffle again and again...)

Physical cards were always overpriced anyway... making a decent deck was always quite expensive, so i dont find weird that they create special overpriced stuff aimed at collectors who are willing to buy stuff that is not format-legal. Collectors often dont really care about tourneys(not enough to participate i mean). You can still use the cards on home bouts, and i would say its where it matters most. The big advantage of physical cards is to play with a bunch of friends where there is no such thing as illegal card

If it were $999 for a full proxy beta set I might agree, but the fact its 4 randomized packs of 15 cards. And they loaded each pack with 3 lands and a token as filler is a bit confusing.

At that price point there are situations where the cards you pull could have been cheaper to buy in their old beta or unlimited printings, and those would be tournament legal.

I think collectors do care about legality, up until CE was allowed into some commander formats the price of CE power was much lower despite its lower print numbers. As little as four years ago you could buy a CE Black Lotus for less than the cost of a box of 30th Anniversary packs. And packs are only going to have a ~1.05% to contain a lotus anyways. Making it cheaper to buy a real lotus than to attempt to pull a fake one.

The other thing that bothers me about this is people have asked for official proxy or token versions of these cards for years, for commander and cube play. Just last year they released a card that made Black Lotus tokens and refused to print tokens for it. On the head designers blog, they said they weren't open to printing reserved list even with different borders or backs.

Not even going into the weird art cropping and removal of artists signatures, or the questionable printing rights on some cards whos original artists passed away.

Been playing since onslaught block, but mostly commander since the early 2010s, I think the last time I touched standard was in scars. The power creep has been bothering me too with all the junk they printed specifically for commander. This was the straw that broke the camels back for me. Done with buying sealed product, and going to downsize my collection. Only hanging onto decks and personals, like the cards I got signed at exilecon.

I think you are taking it with a too "functional" point of view

Collectors mostly dont care much about card power in general, let alone it being tourney-legal or not. Collectors aim to keep cards in cool and pristine conditions, they rarely play with the cards they consider part of the "collection", they often separate cards for play and cards for collect and for the cards for collect, things like artwork, relevance of the character in lore and wether a particular version with a specific artwork is still printed are far more relevant than place in meta

Black lotus might be a special case because its sheep place as the iconic blueprint for broken cards, but cards like time vault that also are pretty broken tend to not fech the same prices(though some might want to collect for the sake of having all forms of the card, considering how it was reviewed again and again), but thing is: Power dont matter much for cards meant to enter in a collection. They might go up if they are legal, but its mostly because players who are deckbuilding for actual play, not because collectors

I think other games have done things like this better. Like Pokemons celebration packs, which were a similar concept but accessible for everyone. Duel Monsters even did a MTG crossover event where they printed cards like Black Lotus, and you can get that for under $30.

If the ultimate goal is to collect a black lotus, do you want an older and rarer copy, or a modern printing? How about when that old printing is ~$5,000 to buy directly and the new one is $1,000 for a 4.15% chance? Why should the modern reproduction be more expensive than the decades old collectible based purely on MSRP and not on supply/demand? It's pure delusional greed, nothing is backing the price of the new copy except how much wizards wants you to give them for it.

Playability aside, lets say some will want to collect individual cards from this set regardless. That still means people have to open them from packs. I don't think anything outside of power 9 and the dual lands are going to have value. The market is going to be flooded as people are only opening these for a small handful of outcomes. Everything else has better versions to collect and ones that are cheaper and tournament legal.

Am I going to spend any amount of money that justifies a $250 booster price on something like this;

(Note they even managed to crop out the artists name, a lot of these anniversary cards are weirdly cropped or zoomed)


When right around the corner we're also getting another set that features these, in packs that are as cheap as $10. Plus they are tournament legal.



Or I can go back and get the original collector's edition copy of the card that's 30 years old for $99. It has more of a story tied to it, and there will almost certainly be less copies of this than the modern printing.



I know card packs are like gambling anyways, we've all accepted that about the hobby. But is this really the best way to celebrate 30 years of magic? A $1,000 lotto ticket?

A celebration should be for everyone, that was their whole gimmick with this, "to let people who didn't have the opportunity to open a lotus or dual land have a chance to". But if you can afford this, you can just buy the real thing which will be worth more instead of gambling for the chance to get a proxy.

It was a perfect chance to improve the accessibility of legacy cards for casual play, but its priced like a collectors product. Only they didn't put in any of the effort of their standard collectors products (Showcase frames, borderless or extended arts, alternate foils, etc) and it's priced 3-4x higher than any comparable collector's product they've put out in the past. It's a slap in the face to every collector, they want us to pay more for less, which has been a trend with WotC for the last couple of years.

I cant say much about recent politics of wotc, seeing i abandoned the boat completely, even magic arena feels overbloated. Its not just powercreep, the whole game feels bloated and its becoming overcomplicated with new rules clashing with old ones(left yugioh for a similar reason, the syncro era was great, but xyz and pendulum just made the whole game feels like countering decks to the point it almost devolved into rock-paper-sissors)

I used to know a handful of colectors myself, but i was never one of them, so i cant say what they are feeling about the whole thing... Its worth noting that even if a card have a set price that the community accepts, there are individual circunstances that might make getting those cards difficult: Not having someone in the area with a card that is in good condiction tends to be a common problem, other problem is when it comes to physical cards, price fluctuation is more problematic since not everyone lives in an area with a dedicated place where players gather on a regular basis and its risky to rely on the internet(even if you use a trustworthy site, problems like the card being damaged during transport or not being in the perfect condition you expected are still there), so it comboes with the previous point to allow scenarios of price-gouging. Even back when i played, cards being sold by the "fair" price were more exception than rule(not to mention, most oficial gathering spots had a ban on dealings involving money)

Fair enough, I can't say I experienced much in the way of rule clashing, but the game definitely feels bloated. A new set/product every month is hard to keep up with, and the print quality has gotten a lot worse. Damaged or missing cards in sealed product, foils curling, etc. It's hard to justify the ultra premium price when other TCGs don't have these problems, or at least not to the same extent.

They just released a new un-set this week. But since they wanted to do the full art treatments for collectors edition, they did away with silver borders as an indicator for "joke" cards. They also wanted to make any cards that could work be legal in eternal formats. Which was its own controversy, because the new mechanic involves putting stickers on cards.

So now the foil security stamp is shaped like an acorn on non-legal cards instead. Only the QA is so poor, some cards are being printed with the wrong stamp. You can find copies of a card thats legal and ones that aren't.

Yugioh got really weird, yeah. I played from LoB up until EoJ. That's a game that badly needed keywords. Some of those cards turned into mini-novels. I like their digital versions better though, certainly helps with the amount of deck searching. On legacy of the duelist I can just play with the era of cards that makes sense to me.

Remember Collector's Edition and International Collector's Edition? Guess what you have to pay for a gold border, non tournament legal Black Lotus?

I'm pretty sure these boosters will be gone instantly.

I started sometime in Mirage Block, or maybe it was before? I remember going to the Mirage draft prerelease as my first sanctioned tournament. Picked all the big green things, learned about removal that day.

Stopped really paying attention to the game shortly after the second rehash of Mirrodin? Ravnica? can't remember what plane they dug up and milked for junk-bond level mechanics when I'd had about enough.

The company doubled down on the gambling and pared back support for organized play.

The quality of mechanics and replay value of sets went down as the number of sets released per year went up.

The endless parade of collector sets, mini sets, box sets, commander fodder, and the like just burned out most of the regular players who really just wanted a strategy game that happened to use collectible cards, rather than a lottery that had the rules to some obscure card game printed on some tickets.

I mean, playing organized Magic meant you got to drive around the country, crash with 9 other buddies in a tiny hotel room, eat bad food or no food, play for days, meet really smart and interesting players from all over, represent your store, win big (or wiff big), trade big, and go home to write a humor filled postmortem and start testing again for the next one. And there were always asshats along the way, but the good times and cool joes usually outnumbered them.

Until they didn't. Until your buddies stopped playing, winnings disappeared, stores closed and you repped nobody but yourself, and paid your own way, and the wins, trades, and reports went byebye, but the asshats didn't.

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NotApsalar wrote:

Remember Collector's Edition and International Collector's Edition? Guess what you have to pay for a gold border, non tournament legal Black Lotus?

I'm pretty sure these boosters will be gone instantly.

I'm sure speculators will buy in, but I don't really see who else is going to be interested in collecting these at their current price point. Especially if retroframes are the chase cards and they have zero security features, no holo stamp, can't red dot test them, modern wotc printing too varied between printers to properly check for counterfeits. And at this price there definitely will be fakes.

It was $50 for an entire set, one of every card, for collector's edition/international edition. Just 4 years ago you could get a CE lotus for less than the cost one 30th anniversary display (4 packs). It took over 20 years for them to come close to demanding a similar price to tournament legal power. Maybe if 30A was $300-400 for a full set, people would actually be into it. But randomized packs for 50x the cost?

Also giving only 1 copy to stores and selling the rest online direct is just a massive dick move to all the LGS who helped grow the game over the last 30 years.

Bearing in mind $999 doesn't get you the gold border lotus, it gives you a ~4.15% chance. You're just as likely to pull an Animate Wall, Purelace, Drain Power and Dingus Egg from your box and be out hundreds of dollars vs buying the original beta printings for much cheaper.

If you can afford this, why not get unlimited power or duals, or a full set of CE? It doesn't make sense to gamble for an inferior product with WotC's current level of quality control and subpar materials. They just flubbed $500+ collectors edition 40k decks with a ton of duplicates/missing cards and miss-packaged standard editions in CE boxes, curling cards. No reason to think these will be any better.

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crunkatog wrote:

Stopped really paying attention to the game shortly after the second rehash of Mirrodin? Ravnica? can't remember what plane they dug up and milked for junk-bond level mechanics when I'd had about enough.

I didn't mind Scars of Mirrodin. Return to Ravnica was a pretty horrible block though, particularly dragon's maze. (IMO) It's a shame how far things have fallen since then. Now even when they do MTG lore fanservice sets like Brother's War, they have to mix in promo junk like transformers crossover cards into it too.

My first few decks were big green stompy as well. Cheating out a Krosan Cloudscraper or Thorn Elemental with Defense of the Heart, Elvish Piper. Fun times, simpler times...

The pro-tour is apparently coming back. I was never big on organized play outside of local drafts and FNM, but I will be interested to see how much of the universes beyond stuff and weird mechanics like sticker sheets make an appearance in vintage.