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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9844246" data-attributes="member: 907">Wizards of the Coast has had various reprint policies in the past, aimed at providing some protection for secondary market value. Originally, I don't believe they had any such policy, but in the mid-90s after the release of 4th edition and Chronicles, they got a lot of feedback from customers who were angry about devaluing their cards, because they had bought them with the understanding that they'd actually retain value. This lead to the creation of the first reprinting policy, and there may or may not have been legal stuff involved (Mark Rosewater, one of the main influences on Magic and one of their more prominent spokespeople, have said something along the lines of "I can't tell you why we can't make meaningful changes to the reserved list, and I can't tell you why I can't tell you", which sounds like there's some sort of legal settlement involved).It is somewhat notable that there are some cards (500-something) where there is a promise of not reprinting them, as that would imply that no such guarantee exists about the other bazillion cards. And yet, we can look at the events of mid-2024 to see that a not insubstantial number of people do consider their card collection partially as an investment – maybe not in the sense of "I'm seeing a 3% RoI per year on my card collection", but at least as a rainy day fund. What happened? Well, there is a highly popular casual-ish Magic format called Commander, which is played with 100-card decks that can't have more than any copy of any non-basic land, and where one of the cards is your Commander which can be played from outside the game and imposes some limits on deck construction. This format used to be run by fans, without any direct control from Wizards – Wizards did print cards designed for the format, but didn't officially control legality and such. Anyhow, in September 2024 the people who did run the format decided to ban four cards... and people went apepoop. One of the cards had been pretty much expected on account of having been overpowered and a nuisance, but the other three cards were all highly valuable cards that were pretty powerful. Some people went so far as accusing the rules committee (the people deciding on the ban) of "insider" trading, or even sending death threats. The end result was that the rules committee handed the format over to Wizards who now control it directly (but with input from a panel of fans).Anyhow, that was a long-winded way of saying that while Wizards no longer makes any promises about the value of their cards, there are definitely a fair number of players/collectors who care about it.</blockquote>

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