BEST IDEA EVAR: makes rares commons

KevinM wrote:

mirddes wrote:

so uh, sick of cards costing $10+ each...

Then don't play with them.

If you want to address a particular card, that is likely to gain you more than just complaining about SICK OF ALL RARESSZZ!!11!!

I may be mistaken, but I guess that Kevin, like most long-time devoted VTES players, acquired his collection by ordering full boxes of cards at the time they were released for less-than-retail price.

People who acquired their cards that way acquired their rares in the least expensive manner possible. They even got extras that they could trade or sell.

If I remember correctly, Mirrdes is a new or returning player who was not in a position to buy cards in such a fortunate manner.

The game would certainly be more friendly to new or returning players if all cards, including rares, were more easily or cheaply obtainable, such as at the price that long-time, devoted players got them for when the cards were first published.

I think that POD Will address these issues, regardless of if its true pod or sealed product.

we have been vocal and I'm fairly sure the vekn has listened.

an all rare set, I'd hate.

"Dude, I got a Joseph pander, a virilax, mind of a child, and a veles hunt. I wish I had uncommons like freak drive"

So, pod is very optimal looking.

From experience, rarity does affect variety. Almost every LCG deck becomes highly predictable 2-3 weeks into a release (which is done monthly). Not having certain cards has forced me to find interesting alternatives from time to time. Which is good.

While I agree, you will find most people touching his topic over and over again disagreeing.

I would simply point to Magic, where the 4CL and set rotations make sure that buying the best mythic rares for your deck is a reasonably affordable route (in the current block, sub-$100 decks are winning PTQs). In Standard tournaments you really only play against 3-4 different decks and metagaming up the right sideboard is a huge part of victory in a given tournament. The game is basically the sideboard vs sideboard game instead of deck vs deck.

High valuations on the secondary market are a good thing. They show that someone cares about the game. Scrye Magazine may be gone, but once upon a time, they put out a price guide "codex" for every English CCG that had been printed (100+). The games where the rarest cards went for $3 or the like? Dead games nobody played.

Comment about LCGs or other models of fixed rarity cards (like precons), which so many seem to want to embrace as eliminating the money sink that is a CCG - sure, it's incredibly easy to get one copy of every card, and it's incredibly easy to get as many copies of a card as you want knowing that a set will give you 1+ copies of that card, but there's still rarity for every one I've seen. Say a set is $40 and gives you one copy of card M and three copies of card N. If you want three copies of card M, you are either spending $120 or going to a secondary market where supply and demand influence prices just like they do for CCGs.

I figure I'd spend just as much money on a LCG as a CCG to get the quantities of cards I'd want. With V:TES and its lack of card limits, it would be absurd.

POD is just a completely different model that really has nothing to do with the CCG or LCG model. Removing rarity does a lot of things, not just bring prices down. For one thing, there's no point in creating cards for which you expect low demand - why bother with having the costs of art or time spent or even just keeping an entry in a database for a card that sells at 1% of the volume of what another card sells for?

As for Magic being inexpensive, while I'm hardly an expert on card/deck prices and the prices below aren't "real" prices since you wouldn't go out and buy every card for every deck as a single, I question how affordable Magic is ... to those people who think $10 or $20 a card is a lot.

List of examples of recent tournament winning decks from five most common archetypes for Standard Constructed from TCGPlayer website:
Bant Control
Jund Midrange
Selesnya Midrange
BR Zombies
4C Rites

Set rotation is not the devil that people want to make it out to be, but if the idea is that you only need currently Standard legal cards, then you are constantly getting rid of cards that will rotate out, which means not maintaining a long term collection. I wouldn't really call it a collection anymore, just a few cards that will keep getting reprinted and a bunch of cards that are only relevant for two years.

Anyway, I can't tell whether my question was answered. I vastly prefer there being $10 or $20 cards to there being: only $3 cards, since that probably means no meaningful demand which means no meaningful playerbase; $40, $50, $100, $500 cards that tournament decks often play. And, as Kevin brings up, you don't need any $10+ cards to compete with this game. It's a good thing for "want" and "need" to be two different things, or so I believe.

ICL wrote:

High valuations on the secondary market are a good thing. They show that someone cares about the game. Scrye Magazine may be gone, but once upon a time, they put out a price guide "codex" for every English CCG that had been printed (100+). The games where the rarest cards went for $3 or the like? Dead games nobody played.

Are you implying that low cost of singles causes games to die? I think that's a hasty conclusion and posit that you got the causal relationship backwards.

Um, no.

Secondary markets are markets driven by supply and demand. If individual cards have low values, that's a strong indicator of lack of demand.

Given that V:TES has a CCG model, it's a healthy sign for cards to go for $10+ dollars, which is why I wasn't clear why someone would have a problem with such. Then, at least you don't need $40 cards to be competitive at the tournament level ... actually, you don't need $10 cards either.

Meanwhile, just reiterating, taking away the CCG model, which is what many call for even with just such suggestions as whatever gimmick gives all of the cards someone wants at a low cost, changes far more than some individual card costs.

By the way, there are reasons the CCG model made a bunch of companies a lot of money and still makes a few companies good money. It's gambling. (Not talking about ante, talking about the lottery of cracking a high value rare/foil/whatever.) It appeals to people who enjoy collecting. There are costs to moving away from a CCG model.