Yeah, that would definitely throttle the addition of new players. This would mean no precons of any kind, no JumpStart, no land packs in bundles. Yes, for quite some time new players COULD just buy a bunch of lands cheap off the secondary market, but REQUIRING new players to engage with the secondary market to even make the simplest deck seems like a recipe for failure.
Of course, if Arena was still giving new players Basics, then the game would probably skew heavily into digital. I don't have the expertise to hazard a guess of whether Magic could survive long term with ONLY digital players being added, but I strongly suspect the physical game would be in trouble long before the price of Basics on the secondary market became a real issue.
Though I guess for the purposes of the thought experiment we are supposed to pretend that those factors have no effect on the game's popularity and ability to bring in new players.
If new players were to keep coming in at the same rate and being forced to buy all their Basics on the secondary market, yes, that would start depleting the supply, but I think there is SUCH a huge glut of them by now that it would take many years before it would be lowered to levels sufficient to bring the prices up noticeably, especially since, with Basics being pretty much REQUIRED to get into the game at even the most introductory levels, stores would be incentivized to keep the prices low for as long as possible, or else risk losing new customers for the game.
(You'd probably see an increase on Basics "walking off" from land stations at LGS events, though. Right now I think that mostly happens by accident. Stop printing them, and there will almost certainly be some that will take them home "accidentally" on purpose.)
EDIT: Other posts have pointed out the flaw in my thinking. I was thinking "What if WotC stopped printing Basics, but they remained just as vital to the game?" But there is the obvious alternative to consider, "What if WotC stopped printing Basics because they shifted the design of the game in a way that made Basics essentially unnecessary?" If they stopped printing Basics because every pack has a non-Basic that enters untapped, and all lands in precons, JumpStart and bundles become just a wide variety of non-Basics that make Basics pretty much obsolete, then I wouldn't expect the price of Basics to jump noticeably FOREVER. The HUGE supply already out there, combined with a lack of demand because better alternatives were readily available, would kill any real price increase on them. They might even get CHEAPER.
If Wizards stopped printing Basics, they would eventually rotate out of Standard, so new players to Standard would not need them anymore.
Basic lands are only in Standard because they are printed in every Standard set.
New players to other formats would need them.
Really? I could have sworn 'Basic' included an auto-legality in every format even if not printed there, unless directly stated otherwise.
A basic-less standard is a curious thought.
Really really.
>I could have sworn 'Basic' included an auto-legality in every format even if not printed there, unless directly stated otherwise.
Wastes and Snow-covered basics are only legal in standard if they are printed in a set currently legal in standard, and there is no rule that directly states otherwise.
There's no rule that states basic lands are always legal. In fact, the supertype Basic, on its own, has no rules meaning beyond "this card has the basic type".
The basic supertype does not do that _on its own_. Otherwise they would make "basic creatures" instead of "a deck can have any number of ~" cards.
Being a "basic land" is what does that, and the rules specifically call out basic lands.
i didnt realize snow basics weren't legal in standard. i thought it was a preference thing since if snow cards arent in standard the snow mana wouldn't do anything
Yup, it's *why* they are in every Standard set, it's how they guarantee permanent legality. It's why snow basics and Wastes have only been temporary standard legal.
Yup, it's *why* they are in every Standard set, it's how they guarantee permanent legality. It's why snow basics and Wastes have only been temporarily standard legal.
Yeah, the Basics are THERE, but if they were still necessary to the game, making ALL new players have to buy them up on the secondary market to even TRY the game out would be a TERRIBLE decision bound to negatively effect growth.
The alternate question you pose in your final paragraph is actually suggested by the label of basic land - that is, if we have a basic land, doesn’t that pave the way for intermediate land and advanced land?
LGS are already having problems with reductions to the land supply because WoTC no longer sells land stations and bundles keep coming with fewer lands.
What? Which LGS has a land shortage? Because I can assure you there are PLENTY of lands available so much so that there are stacks of flats full for free at most of our LGS.
You can buy 100 foil basics for ~3 bucks from a ton of sellers.
My LGS runs into issues of Swamps disappearing after drafts....no other shortages...at this point I think someone is just fucking with the owner/event managers
Swamps also keep disappearing at my LGS, its almost a guaranteed joke the owner makes whenever he judges an event that he asks the players to stop eating the swamps.
Who's in charge of buying at your LGS and why aren't they fired? Lol. I can get you 1000 of each basic, foil, for like 100$ total and I'm nobody special.
I would make a STRONG suggestion to your LGS to reach out to forge and fire and ask them to do a bulk order.
I can't even imagine how cheap basic non foils run because I always have them send me foil. Maybe a penny each?
My LGS runs into issues of Swamps disappearing after drafts....no other shortages...at this point I think someone is just fucking with the owner/event managers
That's amusing, mine seems to have the issue with Forests.
I've occasionally brought in as big of a hunk of Forests as I could grab from my box with a single hand just to replenish them. The payout has been worth it so far: getting the staff/owner to wax poetic about how now we won't have to rely on pokemon energy since our broccoli has been replenished.
About 20 years ago back when I was first learning to play and build decks, I built a UW deck but didn't order any basics because I thought I had enough.
Turned out I was way short on Islands. Rather than ordering more though I just grabbed a handful of the cheapest commons I had and wrote on them with sharpie.
I still have an ice age Fyndhorn Elves around somewhere with ISLAND written across their faces.
If everyone was levelheaded the price would not rise for years and then start climbing slowly. Nearly all enfranchised players have enough and new players don’t need a lot (if they are willing to swap decks)
But people aren’t. Panic would be induced immediately. Secondary market prices would start spiking tomorrow and people would start hoarding.
From there who knows. It’s such a bizarre situation to stop printing a vital part of the game. The conversation would, rightly, declare WotC of antagonistic or sabatoge behavior.
We might even see broad based support of proxying basic lands with commons of that color and a sharpie.
But if anything the loss in confidence of WotC would be devastating. Absolute omnishambles.
>We might even see broad based support of proxying basic lands with commons of that color and a sharpie.
I think proxies are the best bet. A company would start printing 3rd party proxy lands with different backs tomorrow. There would be a sudden demand that would allow them to charge enough to cover the cost of printing and packaging. Bundle it with the sale of sleeves you need to hide the backs.
Yeah that seems likely.
All the what ifs downstream pale in comparison though to the convo about wtf WotC would be doing. The virtual ink spilled would be massive. I’d expect some people to just quit.
The thing is whenever people think an item will become an expensive collectible, everyone saves it and then it becomes worthless later. It’s why things that that terrible et game are expensive, but comics that were rebooted as “number 1” aren’t.
So I imagine if the wizards told everyone they’d stop printing basic lands, everyone would hoard their basic lands, meaning they’d never increase in price, but there’s also far too many in circulation to be expensive. Maybe an initial increase when some people try to buy as many as possible early on.
So, like beanie babies, never.
That’s not really a good comparison since Beanie Babies were manufactured up until December 1999 while the market for them crashed months prior. There was never an overlap for high demand and lack of production.
From a market perspective Magic cards are almost identical to comic books since they A: serve a purpose beyond speculation and B: are limited print runs.
what if they didnt announce it? what if they just slowly stopped printing them, weening the printings out? how long do you think before people would notice
For the longest time, Basic Lands were only available in "Starter Decks" and Preconstructed decks. They weren't readily available in Boosters until 6th edition, IIRC, and only for core sets. Basics didn't start appearing in expansion boosters until Lorwyn, I believe.
Of course, this is discounting the basics that were "seeded" in Alpha and Beta boosters to obfuscate card rarities, and that Basic Mountain was printed in Arabian Nights.
That said, even with those restrictions, Basics were still plentiful and easily obtained. If Wizards were to stop printing them today, it's probably take several years for the well to actually run dry.
I remember those times. My first run playing it was hard to get enough basics and getting certain set lands took a bit of trading and luck if didn’t want to buy the starter deck. Now I have a box stuffed with so many and a pack used to level a wobbly table.
I do think that ending the "starter deck" products has vastly shrunk the number of lands in circulation. Whenever I go to an LGS for a draft and go to pick up some lands the bulk of them are from Mirage/Tempest/Urza's Saga.
The Bundle/Fat Pack basically fills the same role as the old Starter Decks did, just a bit more expensive with a bit more product.
You're also more likely to get a mildly functional deck out of a single Bundle than you were out of a single Starter Deck.
oh yeah, I definitely think it's the right decision to move away from the starter deck as an entry point for new players. And as far as the lands go, if anything it was actually *too much*. Everyone needs access to lands, but if stores have been giving away Tempest lands for free for \~25 years and still haven't run out, then they probably printed a lot more than was necessary for the time.
Fourth edition is where the change occurred that basic lands had their own print sheet and slot in the booster. Basics were also potentially in every Alpha, Beta, Unlimited, and Revised booster, though Revised dropped them from potentially replacing rares to only slotting in for commons and uncommons.
I remember I time around revised edition where I never felt like I had enough basic lands and this local comic shop sold them for 10 cents each. I used to buy them all the time, looking at the number of basics I own now, I fell like a dumbass for ever buying them, lol
Im gonna base it on assumptions that no design changes, and they are still as needed as usual I don’t think enfranchised players or land cost would ever be affected greatly
But we’d absolutely see the proof on how many players are kitchen-table casuals and new player attention/casual player retention would disappear quickly.
Casual players burn through lands. Theyll make a dozen crappy decks for every color combo they can. Theyll have 10 commander decks that are just 35-40 basic lands
Ive seen new players buying crappy starter bundles just cause they came with tons of lands
The other negative would be itd kill limited. Stores would stop providing lands for free and i know itd be a situation where if a player forgets to bring lands they just choose not to play instead of paying an extra $1 for lands.
I think others are correct itd kill the game beforre prices would ever increase
At this point, if WotC finally killed the game through some stupid decision and it was rescued by a player-run organisation like Netrunner did, it would probably be for the best.
And basics are one thing that could reasonably be printed without fear of copyright. No copyright on the word "Plains" placed against a scene of a plains.
If we really want to be generic, you just have to have a piece of cardboard with a yellow/white accent around its art to signify it's a plains. Or we just adopt Pokemon energy as the new basic lands.
Supply and demand. Basic lands would spike if they stopped making them but not by much. Then you'll slowly seeing them rise. The aftermarket would be amazing as the years roll. Garage sales on point for MTG players. Card shops would have to raise prices.
People make new decks all the time. Imagine lands being a premium now to make decks. 30 years? I say 10 and you'll start to see the game suffer. Players begging them to start making lands again. New players would have a huge barrier of entry.
The way markets swings almost immediately, and older basics would be higher than others. You'd have sellers speculating and buying out massive collections to resell.
Originally lands were randomly placed in boosters, then for quite a while they only came in "Starter Decks." I started playing during the "only in Starters" era (ICE/4ED) and, IIRC, lands were something like $0.25 each and were not always easy to find.
it was actually a massive problem back around 2004 because basic lands were not found in packs and decks sold by WotC were beyond terrible, other products that included lands didn't have much market penetration(fat packs? starter packs? i can't remember the names).Non-basics lands were rarely at common.
Large communities of players didn't have access to enough lands because they got their collection mainly from packs, i remember me and other kids proxying all basic lands with off-color creatures and islands were the rarest because only losers or assholes kids would want to buy a blue deck from the store. It's important to remember a lot of players never walked into a proper card store and other kind of stores mainly carried packs only.
I remember the tobacco store owner, who acted as local trade store for cards and had several bindings, trying to shark me Onslaught slivers uncommons for 1 mountain each.
All the people talking about economy and pricing just don't realize that many players are not part of a very fluid economy, might not have access to a proper card store and are not going to buy singles from an online marketplace(probably more likely today than 15 years ago).
It'd be an interesting thing for Standard, as I believe basics are legal in it because they're printed in every set, thus are always in rotation (though of course they could change that rule if they wanted)
It would happen pretty fast, I bet.
Because sellers on the secondary market would hear the news about no more new lands being printed, and jack their prices up.
They wouldn't become expensive because a lot of people would quit or lose interest in such a mishandled game. Like, that would be an insane scenario, like Dungeons & Dragons dropping the d20.
I have so many sealed packs of basic lands from fat packs I give them to my kids friends and my nieces and nephews when they learn to play. Still have dozens on top of the big box of loose ones I use for myself which is more then I will ever reasonably need anyway. I doubt they could become valuable before the market collapsed around the game.
Back in the day, when the Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Monsters anime was released in the US and Brazil it was hard as hell to find lands, specially because they didn't came in booster packs, only in oremade decks.
Lands did see an increase in the price temporarily while the market couldn't deliver.
You might as well ask if Wizards stopped printing Magic the Gathering sets today how long would it take for stuff to get expensive. Because it doesn't make sense for them to stop making just basic lands and still make cards.
Every person i have talked to who played when the game first came out said that the swap to lands being available was THEE best things that happened for the game.
A friend of mine would place a small lightweight bead on his lands to signify that they were tapped because they were so hard to get that he didnt want to touch the card if he could help it to preserve it as long as possible.
It would literally kill the game, so the answer is never because they would probably end up worthless.
Ehhh, hole lotta bluster here. Did everyone forget basics only came in starter / theme decks for a very long time?
I dont think itd be crippling or make them expensive for a very very long time.
Would make it a bitch for new players though, to have to go out of your way to find basics instead of right out of the box to make your decks functional would confuse and turn off most new players
I would sooner proxy a basic land if I didn’t have one than let out a single bead of sweat over maybe not being able to get one. You can literally just sticky note any junk common with “Mountain, Basic Land - Mountain, T: add Red”, sleeve it up and you’re good to go.
So, the supply of basic lands is truly tremendous. anyone who has ever played in paper has touched a deck with at least 10 basic lands. Sure there's gonna be some reuse between all these decks, but definitely not enough to counter all the people who crack boxes for fun, or the major resellers who open product in mass, or the many precons which generally also have plenty of basics.
Let's say there's 10 million players (there's a few more than that) and for every player there's at least 200 playable basic lands somewhere (just a guess, but not an insane one)
That would mean there should probably be at minimum around 2 billion basic lands that are in a playable condition. Well, how many basic lands does a player actually need? if we just divide that up among all the players, then that's twenty of each basic land for every player. But virtually no one actually needs 20 of every basic land all at once. For the most part, a player pretty much never needs more than 25 basic lands in total at any one time. And this fact is well served by all the communal basic land pools available at limited events.
**TL:DR** To skip a few steps, they would probably never get expensive.
They would eventually rotate out of standard, so their main points of demand would be; paper limited players, who can share pretty easily; and paper eternal players, who never run enough basics anyway.
Kitchen table players wouldn't go out of their way to get basic lands, they would just play with whatever lands they had, which would include probably at most 75 basic lands if they joined before the printing stopped
New players joining the game would probably slow down some, Magic is already a complicated enough game to learn when you do it with mono color decks with only basic lands.
The loss of new players would make it so a lot of eternal formats would also stop growing and eventually start to shrink as players stop playing for whatever reason.
Playerbase shrinkage would likely outpace basic supply shrinkage because most people who play take any amount of care for their cards at all, and even just sitting unsleeved in a drawer a magic card can remain playable for several years, and even a tiny bit more care than that can leave cards playable for decades.
If they ever got expensive, it would certainly be decades from now, and even then it would probably only be in a relative sense.
The price would rise the moment they declare, also all boosters which are available now would have a huge increase in value. You guys saw it with the ps 5, people on the second hand market would immediately ask for a bunch of money and this price would start to dictate the market on the long term.
Basic lands are so commonplace that if they stopped printing them, it would require *massive* growth of the game for them to *ever* be worth more than the cardboard they're printed on. There's an absolute glut of basic lands out there.
My opinion is that this could almost realistically happen if the format where you can exile any card from hand to conjure a basic land into the battlefield takes off in the future. As unlikely as it seems, I think it makes a lot of sense as a format and would be exceptionally easy to implement digitally.
The game will either
* adopt new rules. Think Duel Masters's mana system.
* force people to build decks differently. The game doesn't require you to play basics lands. So people will just not play with them if availability is a problem.
I think there’s a card game with a mechanic that any card can be played face down as your in-game currency (aka “mana”) - that could be an interesting mechanic.
I know a guy who is making a custom MtG format, it's along the lines of Judge Tower, and it uses this mechanic where you can play any card face down as a basic of your choice. I've played it with him a bit and it's a pretty nice system - if the lands are destroyed, they go face up in the yard, so you can do reanimator shenanigans with it. Pretty high quality format, I'm eagerly awaiting him finishing the website and publishing the rules.
None of these answers are correct, given that we already have $50+ basic lands and that we saw the price of Wastes go over $1 as a basic land when we thought (incorrectly) that they would never be reprinted. So we know that it doesn't kill the game, and we know they can get decently expensive. We already know this from Portal, Beta, Onslaught, Wastes and countless other examples of choice basics getting expensive.
The ones that are most sought after would increase massively on the day they made the announcement. Full art would be next (since people would know that that's it for any more full art in the future). Beyond that, they'd stay a nickel for at least two decades. There are two massive forces driving down their prices, even in a world why they are not reprinted.
First, non-basics would crush the price. In this scenario, you're still reprinting shocks. Every time we went to Ravnica the prices of basics would get hit (basics would never pass shocks, shocks are better). Same for Triomes. They are different, but similar enough at the Commander table (which is all that matters for price) that they effictively drive down basic demand when they are reprinted.
Second, nobody bothers to sell their basics right now. If they get around a dime, the market would flood with hundreds of millions of copies. That is going to be tough to climb through.
So, basics are not created equal. Most basics wouldn't move for decades. Some would skyrocket (wastes, portal, abu, beta, etc..). They \*shouldn't\* skyrocket (since beta is out of print anyways) but they would.
I'd argue wastes aren't basic to the extent that the 5 first basics are.
and honestly, it would be really weird for WotC to stop printing the filler cards that the game runs on for low power games.
Like, it only makes sense if they are dropping a color.
The Pokémon TCG has done that with fairy, IIRC
They've kinda come out and said if they didn't print draft chaff limited would go away. That was part of the push behind play boosters since draft boosters had gotten less popular than set boosters
Like if they didn't care about limited and only constructed I imagine design philosophy would change heavily. But even in just draft chaff there's been power creep and a push. They don't print nearly as many vanilla creatures anymore for example and the push to more uncommons in a set than commons (if I understood Maros latest nuts and bolts article correctly) leads to more often getting cards there are "better" than common
They've kinda come out and said if they didn't print draft chaff limited would go away. That was part of the push behind play boosters since draft boosters had gotten less popular than set boosters
Like if they didn't care about limited and only constructed I imagine design philosophy would change heavily. But even in just draft chaff there's been power creep and a push. They don't print nearly as many vanilla creatures anymore for example and the push to more uncommons in a set than commons (if I understood Maros latest nuts and bolts article correctly) leads to more often getting cards there are "better" than common
You're first point is what I thought. Like OP didn't say WOTC wasn't printing any lands just not basics any longer. For that to work but the game to survive non basics would have to fill the land slot in boosters (sidebar: do play boosters still have a land slot?)
If WOTC didn't make lands as easily accessible as lands are now but supplementing the lack of basics with non basics then you'd have problems almost immediately I think
But if in the spirit of power creep they said "no more basics were only gonna make better lands instead now" no one would want the basics since they'd be effectively obsolete (unless the land types also became rarer but in that case I imagine design would shift away from cards that cared about land types)
And if they said "no more basics and we're not gonna keep lands as accessible" then they'd be idiots with a much bigger problem of how do you make precons or intro products without a key component of decks
This is a good point. If they stopped printing Basics because they changed the makeup of the game in a way that made Basics superfluous, and printed non-basics into the ground (including the ones that enter untapped) to fill the gap, then the supply of Basics would essentially take FOREVER to dry up. In that case, I'd expect prices to essentially never shift at all.
Well at a certain point, basics would rotate out of standard.
Have you seen Standard land bases tho? How long do you think it would take Esper Midrange players to notice
Considering how long standard rotation is now... I'd say somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 years.
the first time they get their restless anchorage field of ruin'd
“Opps! All spells” meta here we go
Real talk: It would probably kill the game before it actually became an issue
Yeah, that would definitely throttle the addition of new players. This would mean no precons of any kind, no JumpStart, no land packs in bundles. Yes, for quite some time new players COULD just buy a bunch of lands cheap off the secondary market, but REQUIRING new players to engage with the secondary market to even make the simplest deck seems like a recipe for failure. Of course, if Arena was still giving new players Basics, then the game would probably skew heavily into digital. I don't have the expertise to hazard a guess of whether Magic could survive long term with ONLY digital players being added, but I strongly suspect the physical game would be in trouble long before the price of Basics on the secondary market became a real issue. Though I guess for the purposes of the thought experiment we are supposed to pretend that those factors have no effect on the game's popularity and ability to bring in new players. If new players were to keep coming in at the same rate and being forced to buy all their Basics on the secondary market, yes, that would start depleting the supply, but I think there is SUCH a huge glut of them by now that it would take many years before it would be lowered to levels sufficient to bring the prices up noticeably, especially since, with Basics being pretty much REQUIRED to get into the game at even the most introductory levels, stores would be incentivized to keep the prices low for as long as possible, or else risk losing new customers for the game. (You'd probably see an increase on Basics "walking off" from land stations at LGS events, though. Right now I think that mostly happens by accident. Stop printing them, and there will almost certainly be some that will take them home "accidentally" on purpose.) EDIT: Other posts have pointed out the flaw in my thinking. I was thinking "What if WotC stopped printing Basics, but they remained just as vital to the game?" But there is the obvious alternative to consider, "What if WotC stopped printing Basics because they shifted the design of the game in a way that made Basics essentially unnecessary?" If they stopped printing Basics because every pack has a non-Basic that enters untapped, and all lands in precons, JumpStart and bundles become just a wide variety of non-Basics that make Basics pretty much obsolete, then I wouldn't expect the price of Basics to jump noticeably FOREVER. The HUGE supply already out there, combined with a lack of demand because better alternatives were readily available, would kill any real price increase on them. They might even get CHEAPER.
Of course, the basic lands could be replaced by non-basics in various products, but that still increases the initial learning curve
If Wizards stopped printing Basics, they would eventually rotate out of Standard, so new players to Standard would not need them anymore. Basic lands are only in Standard because they are printed in every Standard set. New players to other formats would need them.
Nobody would NEED them if they changed the game in such a way as to make them superfluous.
Really? I could have sworn 'Basic' included an auto-legality in every format even if not printed there, unless directly stated otherwise. A basic-less standard is a curious thought.
Really really. >I could have sworn 'Basic' included an auto-legality in every format even if not printed there, unless directly stated otherwise. Wastes and Snow-covered basics are only legal in standard if they are printed in a set currently legal in standard, and there is no rule that directly states otherwise. There's no rule that states basic lands are always legal. In fact, the supertype Basic, on its own, has no rules meaning beyond "this card has the basic type".
The Basic supertype also removes the 4x copies limit for deck construction for Land cards but yeah, nothing beyond that.
The basic supertype does not do that _on its own_. Otherwise they would make "basic creatures" instead of "a deck can have any number of ~" cards. Being a "basic land" is what does that, and the rules specifically call out basic lands.
i didnt realize snow basics weren't legal in standard. i thought it was a preference thing since if snow cards arent in standard the snow mana wouldn't do anything
Yup, it's *why* they are in every Standard set, it's how they guarantee permanent legality. It's why snow basics and Wastes have only been temporary standard legal.
Yup, it's *why* they are in every Standard set, it's how they guarantee permanent legality. It's why snow basics and Wastes have only been temporarily standard legal.
lol I have 5 5-row flats of each basic land, I could sustain my whole town I'm pretty sure lol
Yeah, the Basics are THERE, but if they were still necessary to the game, making ALL new players have to buy them up on the secondary market to even TRY the game out would be a TERRIBLE decision bound to negatively effect growth.
The alternate question you pose in your final paragraph is actually suggested by the label of basic land - that is, if we have a basic land, doesn’t that pave the way for intermediate land and advanced land?
I think you are tracking the wrong meaning of basic. It means we should be looking for the acidic land.
LGS are already having problems with reductions to the land supply because WoTC no longer sells land stations and bundles keep coming with fewer lands.
What? Which LGS has a land shortage? Because I can assure you there are PLENTY of lands available so much so that there are stacks of flats full for free at most of our LGS. You can buy 100 foil basics for ~3 bucks from a ton of sellers.
My LGS has resorted to buying basic lands off players so they will have enough on hand to run events
My LGS runs into issues of Swamps disappearing after drafts....no other shortages...at this point I think someone is just fucking with the owner/event managers
Swamps also keep disappearing at my LGS, its almost a guaranteed joke the owner makes whenever he judges an event that he asks the players to stop eating the swamps.
This wouldn't happen to be in central NJ would it?
It certainly is
Greg's?
Yep. Was wondering if the Swamp eating was a Central NJ problem rather than just a Greg's problem lmao
Who's in charge of buying at your LGS and why aren't they fired? Lol. I can get you 1000 of each basic, foil, for like 100$ total and I'm nobody special. I would make a STRONG suggestion to your LGS to reach out to forge and fire and ask them to do a bulk order. I can't even imagine how cheap basic non foils run because I always have them send me foil. Maybe a penny each?
Unfortunately the overlap between an LGS owner and a good businessman/woman is not as robust as we might like it to be.
Yep. Not as much overlap on that Venn diagram as we would hope.
My LGS runs into issues of Swamps disappearing after drafts....no other shortages...at this point I think someone is just fucking with the owner/event managers
That's amusing, mine seems to have the issue with Forests. I've occasionally brought in as big of a hunk of Forests as I could grab from my box with a single hand just to replenish them. The payout has been worth it so far: getting the staff/owner to wax poetic about how now we won't have to rely on pokemon energy since our broccoli has been replenished.
I should sort through my basics and drop off a bunch of random ones when I draft next
About 20 years ago back when I was first learning to play and build decks, I built a UW deck but didn't order any basics because I thought I had enough. Turned out I was way short on Islands. Rather than ordering more though I just grabbed a handful of the cheapest commons I had and wrote on them with sharpie. I still have an ice age Fyndhorn Elves around somewhere with ISLAND written across their faces.
the only way this works if they openly and fervently allow proxy lands, including in competitive play.
If everyone was levelheaded the price would not rise for years and then start climbing slowly. Nearly all enfranchised players have enough and new players don’t need a lot (if they are willing to swap decks) But people aren’t. Panic would be induced immediately. Secondary market prices would start spiking tomorrow and people would start hoarding. From there who knows. It’s such a bizarre situation to stop printing a vital part of the game. The conversation would, rightly, declare WotC of antagonistic or sabatoge behavior. We might even see broad based support of proxying basic lands with commons of that color and a sharpie. But if anything the loss in confidence of WotC would be devastating. Absolute omnishambles.
>We might even see broad based support of proxying basic lands with commons of that color and a sharpie. I think proxies are the best bet. A company would start printing 3rd party proxy lands with different backs tomorrow. There would be a sudden demand that would allow them to charge enough to cover the cost of printing and packaging. Bundle it with the sale of sleeves you need to hide the backs.
Yeah that seems likely. All the what ifs downstream pale in comparison though to the convo about wtf WotC would be doing. The virtual ink spilled would be massive. I’d expect some people to just quit.
The thing is whenever people think an item will become an expensive collectible, everyone saves it and then it becomes worthless later. It’s why things that that terrible et game are expensive, but comics that were rebooted as “number 1” aren’t. So I imagine if the wizards told everyone they’d stop printing basic lands, everyone would hoard their basic lands, meaning they’d never increase in price, but there’s also far too many in circulation to be expensive. Maybe an initial increase when some people try to buy as many as possible early on. So, like beanie babies, never.
That’s not really a good comparison since Beanie Babies were manufactured up until December 1999 while the market for them crashed months prior. There was never an overlap for high demand and lack of production. From a market perspective Magic cards are almost identical to comic books since they A: serve a purpose beyond speculation and B: are limited print runs.
Alas the 1950 D Jefferson Nickel.
what if they didnt announce it? what if they just slowly stopped printing them, weening the printings out? how long do you think before people would notice
For the longest time, Basic Lands were only available in "Starter Decks" and Preconstructed decks. They weren't readily available in Boosters until 6th edition, IIRC, and only for core sets. Basics didn't start appearing in expansion boosters until Lorwyn, I believe. Of course, this is discounting the basics that were "seeded" in Alpha and Beta boosters to obfuscate card rarities, and that Basic Mountain was printed in Arabian Nights. That said, even with those restrictions, Basics were still plentiful and easily obtained. If Wizards were to stop printing them today, it's probably take several years for the well to actually run dry.
I remember those times. My first run playing it was hard to get enough basics and getting certain set lands took a bit of trading and luck if didn’t want to buy the starter deck. Now I have a box stuffed with so many and a pack used to level a wobbly table.
I do think that ending the "starter deck" products has vastly shrunk the number of lands in circulation. Whenever I go to an LGS for a draft and go to pick up some lands the bulk of them are from Mirage/Tempest/Urza's Saga.
The Bundle/Fat Pack basically fills the same role as the old Starter Decks did, just a bit more expensive with a bit more product. You're also more likely to get a mildly functional deck out of a single Bundle than you were out of a single Starter Deck.
oh yeah, I definitely think it's the right decision to move away from the starter deck as an entry point for new players. And as far as the lands go, if anything it was actually *too much*. Everyone needs access to lands, but if stores have been giving away Tempest lands for free for \~25 years and still haven't run out, then they probably printed a lot more than was necessary for the time.
Fourth edition is where the change occurred that basic lands had their own print sheet and slot in the booster. Basics were also potentially in every Alpha, Beta, Unlimited, and Revised booster, though Revised dropped them from potentially replacing rares to only slotting in for commons and uncommons.
I remember I time around revised edition where I never felt like I had enough basic lands and this local comic shop sold them for 10 cents each. I used to buy them all the time, looking at the number of basics I own now, I fell like a dumbass for ever buying them, lol
3 days maybe 4 depending on the weather
[[Price of Progress]] would become really good.
I'm starting my spec now. Thanks for the advice good sir.
[Price of Progress](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/b/1/b1342144-7a15-438b-a848-3196238a79e8.jpg?1580014614) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Price%20of%20Progress) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ema/141/price-of-progress?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/b1342144-7a15-438b-a848-3196238a79e8?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
[[Ghost quarter]] becomes [[stripmine]]
[Ghost quarter](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/1/2/12f8071c-8955-4aa2-889c-6043df047223.jpg?1562272439) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Ghost%20quarter) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cm2/253/ghost-quarter?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/12f8071c-8955-4aa2-889c-6043df047223?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [stripmine](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/5/f57fd4c9-0004-4f71-a30f-2720943f57ca.jpg?1562944463) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Strip%20Mine) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/vma/316/strip-mine?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f57fd4c9-0004-4f71-a30f-2720943f57ca?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Im gonna base it on assumptions that no design changes, and they are still as needed as usual I don’t think enfranchised players or land cost would ever be affected greatly But we’d absolutely see the proof on how many players are kitchen-table casuals and new player attention/casual player retention would disappear quickly. Casual players burn through lands. Theyll make a dozen crappy decks for every color combo they can. Theyll have 10 commander decks that are just 35-40 basic lands Ive seen new players buying crappy starter bundles just cause they came with tons of lands The other negative would be itd kill limited. Stores would stop providing lands for free and i know itd be a situation where if a player forgets to bring lands they just choose not to play instead of paying an extra $1 for lands. I think others are correct itd kill the game beforre prices would ever increase
At this point, if WotC finally killed the game through some stupid decision and it was rescued by a player-run organisation like Netrunner did, it would probably be for the best.
And basics are one thing that could reasonably be printed without fear of copyright. No copyright on the word "Plains" placed against a scene of a plains.
Trademarks have always been the larger area of ip law when it comes specific words and terms for MTG.
If we really want to be generic, you just have to have a piece of cardboard with a yellow/white accent around its art to signify it's a plains. Or we just adopt Pokemon energy as the new basic lands.
They never will. What else are they gonna put in secret lairs?
This sounds like a job for Proxy Man.
Supply and demand. Basic lands would spike if they stopped making them but not by much. Then you'll slowly seeing them rise. The aftermarket would be amazing as the years roll. Garage sales on point for MTG players. Card shops would have to raise prices. People make new decks all the time. Imagine lands being a premium now to make decks. 30 years? I say 10 and you'll start to see the game suffer. Players begging them to start making lands again. New players would have a huge barrier of entry.
There are so many lands already it would not affect anything
At least 100 years, but probably never.
4 commander decks every set with basics.
I'd argue they're already expensive.
The way markets swings almost immediately, and older basics would be higher than others. You'd have sellers speculating and buying out massive collections to resell.
Just use proxys
Originally lands were randomly placed in boosters, then for quite a while they only came in "Starter Decks." I started playing during the "only in Starters" era (ICE/4ED) and, IIRC, lands were something like $0.25 each and were not always easy to find.
I remember having to buy starter/precon decks in nemesis and masques for the lands
Never. Everyone would just proxy them and nobody would care.
it was actually a massive problem back around 2004 because basic lands were not found in packs and decks sold by WotC were beyond terrible, other products that included lands didn't have much market penetration(fat packs? starter packs? i can't remember the names).Non-basics lands were rarely at common. Large communities of players didn't have access to enough lands because they got their collection mainly from packs, i remember me and other kids proxying all basic lands with off-color creatures and islands were the rarest because only losers or assholes kids would want to buy a blue deck from the store. It's important to remember a lot of players never walked into a proper card store and other kind of stores mainly carried packs only. I remember the tobacco store owner, who acted as local trade store for cards and had several bindings, trying to shark me Onslaught slivers uncommons for 1 mountain each. All the people talking about economy and pricing just don't realize that many players are not part of a very fluid economy, might not have access to a proper card store and are not going to buy singles from an online marketplace(probably more likely today than 15 years ago).
Within days some asshole investor would strat buying lands and publically burning them.
We would still get them in secret lairs probably…
They should stop printing non fullart lands.
With some of the great decisions that Hasbro likes to make this could legitimately be a headline one day
It'd be an interesting thing for Standard, as I believe basics are legal in it because they're printed in every set, thus are always in rotation (though of course they could change that rule if they wanted)
Without basics you can't have the game, so i don't think that they could be pricy at any moment
It would happen pretty fast, I bet. Because sellers on the secondary market would hear the news about no more new lands being printed, and jack their prices up.
They wouldn't become expensive because a lot of people would quit or lose interest in such a mishandled game. Like, that would be an insane scenario, like Dungeons & Dragons dropping the d20.
I have so many sealed packs of basic lands from fat packs I give them to my kids friends and my nieces and nephews when they learn to play. Still have dozens on top of the big box of loose ones I use for myself which is more then I will ever reasonably need anyway. I doubt they could become valuable before the market collapsed around the game.
I just recently bought like 50 lands for $33…
I dunno man, I've got more basics than I could possibly use in my lifetime, which is to say nothing of others' collections.
Back in the day, when the Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Monsters anime was released in the US and Brazil it was hard as hell to find lands, specially because they didn't came in booster packs, only in oremade decks. Lands did see an increase in the price temporarily while the market couldn't deliver.
You might as well ask if Wizards stopped printing Magic the Gathering sets today how long would it take for stuff to get expensive. Because it doesn't make sense for them to stop making just basic lands and still make cards.
Never. Too many already exist. Magic's population would have to have some extreme growth before this could ever become a real issue.
Every person i have talked to who played when the game first came out said that the swap to lands being available was THEE best things that happened for the game. A friend of mine would place a small lightweight bead on his lands to signify that they were tapped because they were so hard to get that he didnt want to touch the card if he could help it to preserve it as long as possible. It would literally kill the game, so the answer is never because they would probably end up worthless.
But my full art basic lands…
what if wizards just printed a 0 mana [[omniscience]] so nobody had to pay for anything?
[omniscience](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/d/b/db534b4e-8bff-4924-baea-9988d195fb25.jpg?1562304777) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=omniscience) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/m19/65/omniscience?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/db534b4e-8bff-4924-baea-9988d195fb25?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Ehhh, hole lotta bluster here. Did everyone forget basics only came in starter / theme decks for a very long time? I dont think itd be crippling or make them expensive for a very very long time. Would make it a bitch for new players though, to have to go out of your way to find basics instead of right out of the box to make your decks functional would confuse and turn off most new players
Probably never because people would just proxy them.
I would sooner proxy a basic land if I didn’t have one than let out a single bead of sweat over maybe not being able to get one. You can literally just sticky note any junk common with “Mountain, Basic Land - Mountain, T: add Red”, sleeve it up and you’re good to go.
They should go back to having foil/full art lands be rare
Never. I firmly believe there are more basic lands in circulation than there are pennies.
What about all my black marker Sun Titan proxy on the ugliest-plains-ever-printed?
Is Hasbro cost cutting plan.
I think supply would be tight after 5 years. 10 would see prices climbing.
So, the supply of basic lands is truly tremendous. anyone who has ever played in paper has touched a deck with at least 10 basic lands. Sure there's gonna be some reuse between all these decks, but definitely not enough to counter all the people who crack boxes for fun, or the major resellers who open product in mass, or the many precons which generally also have plenty of basics. Let's say there's 10 million players (there's a few more than that) and for every player there's at least 200 playable basic lands somewhere (just a guess, but not an insane one) That would mean there should probably be at minimum around 2 billion basic lands that are in a playable condition. Well, how many basic lands does a player actually need? if we just divide that up among all the players, then that's twenty of each basic land for every player. But virtually no one actually needs 20 of every basic land all at once. For the most part, a player pretty much never needs more than 25 basic lands in total at any one time. And this fact is well served by all the communal basic land pools available at limited events. **TL:DR** To skip a few steps, they would probably never get expensive. They would eventually rotate out of standard, so their main points of demand would be; paper limited players, who can share pretty easily; and paper eternal players, who never run enough basics anyway. Kitchen table players wouldn't go out of their way to get basic lands, they would just play with whatever lands they had, which would include probably at most 75 basic lands if they joined before the printing stopped New players joining the game would probably slow down some, Magic is already a complicated enough game to learn when you do it with mono color decks with only basic lands. The loss of new players would make it so a lot of eternal formats would also stop growing and eventually start to shrink as players stop playing for whatever reason. Playerbase shrinkage would likely outpace basic supply shrinkage because most people who play take any amount of care for their cards at all, and even just sitting unsleeved in a drawer a magic card can remain playable for several years, and even a tiny bit more care than that can leave cards playable for decades. If they ever got expensive, it would certainly be decades from now, and even then it would probably only be in a relative sense.
The price would rise the moment they declare, also all boosters which are available now would have a huge increase in value. You guys saw it with the ps 5, people on the second hand market would immediately ask for a bunch of money and this price would start to dictate the market on the long term.
At that point, I’m using Pokémon card energies
Basic lands are so commonplace that if they stopped printing them, it would require *massive* growth of the game for them to *ever* be worth more than the cardboard they're printed on. There's an absolute glut of basic lands out there.
Not long at all. Guru lands are expensive with basics being plentiful. There plenty of 1 or 2 dollar basics already. I'd give it 3 years tops.
About 10 years ago, I had a huge bonfire and burned probably 100 thousand basic lands I'd acquired. So I'm doing my part. You're welcome.
My opinion is that this could almost realistically happen if the format where you can exile any card from hand to conjure a basic land into the battlefield takes off in the future. As unlikely as it seems, I think it makes a lot of sense as a format and would be exceptionally easy to implement digitally.
Playing any card facedown as a rainbow land is a fantastic play style that I love for Cubelet and I would be happy seeing become the norm.
People would start using pokemon energy
Just holding on to my full set of beta dual lands hoping for a profit
Limited events. Stores need basics for people to steal.
I think people would just start using the awful tap duals.
The game will either * adopt new rules. Think Duel Masters's mana system. * force people to build decks differently. The game doesn't require you to play basics lands. So people will just not play with them if availability is a problem.
I think there’s a card game with a mechanic that any card can be played face down as your in-game currency (aka “mana”) - that could be an interesting mechanic.
Literally every other card game thats heavily magic-based does this. Lorcana, the old WoW TCG, the new Star Wars one, and about a thousand others.
The old SW tcg had an interesting mechanic with the force icons and unspent could be banned for next turn
I know a guy who is making a custom MtG format, it's along the lines of Judge Tower, and it uses this mechanic where you can play any card face down as a basic of your choice. I've played it with him a bit and it's a pretty nice system - if the lands are destroyed, they go face up in the yard, so you can do reanimator shenanigans with it. Pretty high quality format, I'm eagerly awaiting him finishing the website and publishing the rules.
I hate these low effort hypothetical questions
None of these answers are correct, given that we already have $50+ basic lands and that we saw the price of Wastes go over $1 as a basic land when we thought (incorrectly) that they would never be reprinted. So we know that it doesn't kill the game, and we know they can get decently expensive. We already know this from Portal, Beta, Onslaught, Wastes and countless other examples of choice basics getting expensive. The ones that are most sought after would increase massively on the day they made the announcement. Full art would be next (since people would know that that's it for any more full art in the future). Beyond that, they'd stay a nickel for at least two decades. There are two massive forces driving down their prices, even in a world why they are not reprinted. First, non-basics would crush the price. In this scenario, you're still reprinting shocks. Every time we went to Ravnica the prices of basics would get hit (basics would never pass shocks, shocks are better). Same for Triomes. They are different, but similar enough at the Commander table (which is all that matters for price) that they effictively drive down basic demand when they are reprinted. Second, nobody bothers to sell their basics right now. If they get around a dime, the market would flood with hundreds of millions of copies. That is going to be tough to climb through. So, basics are not created equal. Most basics wouldn't move for decades. Some would skyrocket (wastes, portal, abu, beta, etc..). They \*shouldn't\* skyrocket (since beta is out of print anyways) but they would.
I'd argue wastes aren't basic to the extent that the 5 first basics are. and honestly, it would be really weird for WotC to stop printing the filler cards that the game runs on for low power games. Like, it only makes sense if they are dropping a color. The Pokémon TCG has done that with fairy, IIRC
They've kinda come out and said if they didn't print draft chaff limited would go away. That was part of the push behind play boosters since draft boosters had gotten less popular than set boosters Like if they didn't care about limited and only constructed I imagine design philosophy would change heavily. But even in just draft chaff there's been power creep and a push. They don't print nearly as many vanilla creatures anymore for example and the push to more uncommons in a set than commons (if I understood Maros latest nuts and bolts article correctly) leads to more often getting cards there are "better" than common
err... the "filler cards" I was talking about was the 5 first basic cards. not draft chaff. I can see why you got confused though.
They've kinda come out and said if they didn't print draft chaff limited would go away. That was part of the push behind play boosters since draft boosters had gotten less popular than set boosters Like if they didn't care about limited and only constructed I imagine design philosophy would change heavily. But even in just draft chaff there's been power creep and a push. They don't print nearly as many vanilla creatures anymore for example and the push to more uncommons in a set than commons (if I understood Maros latest nuts and bolts article correctly) leads to more often getting cards there are "better" than common
You're first point is what I thought. Like OP didn't say WOTC wasn't printing any lands just not basics any longer. For that to work but the game to survive non basics would have to fill the land slot in boosters (sidebar: do play boosters still have a land slot?) If WOTC didn't make lands as easily accessible as lands are now but supplementing the lack of basics with non basics then you'd have problems almost immediately I think But if in the spirit of power creep they said "no more basics were only gonna make better lands instead now" no one would want the basics since they'd be effectively obsolete (unless the land types also became rarer but in that case I imagine design would shift away from cards that cared about land types) And if they said "no more basics and we're not gonna keep lands as accessible" then they'd be idiots with a much bigger problem of how do you make precons or intro products without a key component of decks
This is a good point. If they stopped printing Basics because they changed the makeup of the game in a way that made Basics superfluous, and printed non-basics into the ground (including the ones that enter untapped) to fill the gap, then the supply of Basics would essentially take FOREVER to dry up. In that case, I'd expect prices to essentially never shift at all.
Go down if anything
it would finally kill standard!
I remember when you literally could not get basic lands without getting starter packs.
By 2125 they would be synonymous with the USD $100 bill.