Hasbro CEO Cocks and Execs Sued for Alleged Securities Violations

[soviet]

So, the secondary market clearly matters, Wizards clearly tracked it, and when it was being managed responsibly Wizards would sprinkle reprints into Standard to manage both card prices, and packs and boxes being sold to chase those value reprints.

This system was sustainable, drove people to shops to Crack packs AND kept the cost of Standard down by nature of bulk sales.

Wizards knew all this, still does. However short term greed, has throw all kinds of intelligent management of the secondary market, game power level, and formats, completely out the window.

You may be aware but there's a format called Premodern that has absolutely blown up in popularity over the last year or so, precisely because it offers a refuge from WotC's short termist and exploitative business practices.

Premodern is all cards printed between 4th edition and Scourge (so 1995 and 2003). This is the 'classic' era when gameplay was slower and more skill-intensive, because you were trying to do more with less. A lot of events allow you to use proxies or at least gold-bordered reprint cards, so other than about half a dozen expensive cards on the reserved list most decks are pretty affordable. And, importantly, you never have to give Wizards a penny, because no new cards (other than reprints of old cards) will ever be legal. Other than (very rare) bannings, you can rely on your deck remaining relevant or at least playable for the life of the format.

I used to play Legacy which was essentially every non-busted card in the game's history. For a long time this amounted to playing all the OP cards from every era combined with occasionally a new thing. Decks would remain static and relevant for years, with maybe a new sideboard card or new possible main deck card appearing every now and again. What changed was that in 2019 they started printing lots and lots of incredibly powerful cards that absolutely overtook most of the old cards, so that nowadays a lot of legacy decks are almost 50% new broken stuff. I remember in 2021 having to replace almost all the threats in my delver deck with brand new £20-£50 cards and then, a month or two later, watching one of those cards get banned.

If you sat down a few years ago and said 'how can I maximise my short- and medium-term revenue as the publisher of this game, even if it ultimately kills what was good about it', you would do what they've done.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's kind of a bizarre thing for me because this same argument is going around right now for the CCG that I do play, Star Wars Unlimited, with players complaining that the "value" of a booster box is less than what they pay, and stores complaining that they have to deeply discount what they have for sale to move product as a result, with many players advocating for more high rarity/high powered cards in sets to encourage "chase" buying. As someone who just plays the game to play, and hates the feeling that a tool I need to play the game is locked behind a paywall, it's frustrating that people trying to look at playing cards as in investment as reducing my ability to play and enjoy the game.

The two markets are clearly linked; that they are I think says we've lot the plot. But MTG has been around for more than 30 years -- I'm either deeply wrong, or there's a crash coming.

Sadly if there's an MTG crash, D&D probably gets wiped out. Thank goodness for the SRD and all those books sitting on my shelf.

Sadly, IME most of these companies are making games for reasons that have little to do with liking games and/or wanting to make good ones, at least at the level where the big decisions are made.