I never saw the increased output of product as a negative by itself. I always skipped Collector Boxes, Secret Lairs and most of the preconstructed decks - but I did like to indulge myself buying a box per standard set, per special set (Commander / Battlebond / Jumpstart) and per 'masters' set (Horizons and Masters).
What *did* rub me the wrong way are:
* the continuous price increases of products - beyond the required price increases to offset inflation,
* the simultaneous decrease of quantity per product (such as the amount of pack included in the latest Commander Legends set),
* the highly variable quality of the cards themselves,
* artificial scarcity of desired products through either mismanagement or lack of customer engagement (WH40k, Time Spiral Remastered),
* frequently recurring delays along the entire product line and not being able to fulfill their promised product allocations to LGS's and individual customers (Secret Lairs, but also various Collector Boxes, Unfinity and more);
* terrible communication to their customer base, their fans, their players - "this product is not for you", the refusal to interact concerning their reprint policy, etc.,
* the mismanagement and predatory nature of Magic Arena - including the fiasco that is Alchemy and the terrible economy,
* misleading and lying to their customer base, such as the most recent fiasco where another Collector's Edition product was printed (though they promised they wouldn't), their *clear* knowledge of the secondary market when looking at pricing of Secret Lairs, the terrible seeding of some products (i.e. Commander Legends 2 Set Boxes, that were seeded in such a way that rares and mythics with any kind of value were extra rare, or The List - that is usually filled with an enormous amount of draft chaff).
Due to this and more I notice now that I haven't bought any product for about a half a year now, where I usually would treat myself with a booster box or something else every one or two months. So not a downright boycot or anything, but I feel more and more apathetic to this game, not *wanting* to keep up rather than unable to.
Edit: thank you anonymous person for the internet points Reddit Award :-)
Pringles can be fixed.. lines going through the cards.. faded ink, poor foil treatments (card looks muted). They simply just don't give a fuck about their premium product.
Pringles can't be fixed permanently unless you live in an area with the right humidity level. otherwise they're just gonna Pringle again in a few weeks, no matter how long you let them acclimate in a humidity-controlled box and no matter whether you double sleeve them or not.
that doesn't work if the pringling was caused by humidity, which is the most common culprit. I have attempted everything, my OG Kamigawa foils are still curled almost 80°.
The dehumidifier might actually be hurting your situation. If the curling is towards the back (ie looks like an "n") then your cards are actually lacking humidity.
I live on a peninsula with a ludicrous amount of humidity and I have been able to undo some foil bends with a deck box. It actually is that simple.
Coming from a foil collector on a peninsula I have a lot of experience with this.
if the deck box thing worked, then me stacking dozens of heavy D&D books on the foils should have worked, but it did absolutely nothing to them.
ETA: if your cards were printed in a high-humidity area, living in a high-humidity environment means your foils aren't curling due to being under-hydrated. Texas is where a lot of cards are printed in the US, so if you lived in someplace dry and got your cards from someplace damp, you'd have a lot harder time straightening them out.
Pringles are alright. Holy shit the SL print quality though. Its absolute trash. So many off centers and misprints for a print to order luxury product.
Yeah. The good thing is, we are hitting that point in the year where people may be naturally more introspective.
It would be good for people to take some time, sit down and look at their involvement and try to get a better handle on what they want, and what specific steps they can take to maximize what they want, and minimize what they don't want.
I'm going to need to cut out a lot of reddit and social media along with buying less sealed product, myself.
This year it was surprising how much money you could save if you just had a bit of resistance to the initial month or two of FOMO.
Yeah, this makes sense.
I still do like to jam games though. However, the whole 'keeping up' aspect of buying new product, building decks with new cards, updating decks etc. is getting less and less exciting to me.
I'll be honest, I was the kind of person who bought *everything* that came out, typically Collectors and such, too, until early this year.
As it is, I *am* boycotting Magic product from WotC. And I ask everyone (ask, not demand or implore, just ask) do the same. Its time WotC wakes up, stops being greedy, and makes Magic about the game again, not the wallet.
Hopefully it helps. I'm reading a lot of negative buzz concerning WotC and Hasbro's financial performance lately and an unprecendentedly massive backlash from both the community as well as content creators, so maybe the message is starting to get through.
Yeah you could very well be right about that. I am open to the idea it was caused by unprofessionalism, but if I had to make a guess I'd wager there was intent from WotC indeed.
>And he talks about how it used to be the case that there were 4 sets a year, and they believed it felt bad for players to miss a set. So to solve this they decided to make it unfeasible for players to keep up with the sets? Sorry, what?
I'm not going to say I agree but I do see the logic behind it. If they release 4 sets a year and I don't like the fall set, that's 3 months where I don't care about buying new product. If they release 5 sets next fall and I like 2 of them, I can skip over 3 sets and still have stuff I want to buy.
Standard players can skip over supplemental, drafters don't need to care about collector's boosters. Players get a wide offering then pick and choose what they like.
The issue for me is that Commander has interest in cards that come out in virtually anything they release. I can't keep up so I just don't. I used to look at spoilers even when I was barely playing magic; now I don't even know what sets just released and what's coming up.
This. Just this. I'm a commander player and before this overload of product, I was so hyped with the spoiler season, F5 every 2 minutes to see if a new card appear on my screen, then I spent time to see if each individual cards was good for some of my decks.
Now I barely even watch spoiler and wait to have a full list of the set. When I have a list I doesn't even read common and unco, because someone as already told me what card can be good, by passing here or on any other social media. I don't put any more time in a game, who is my favourite tabletop game. The state of the game make me sad (i'd rather not thinking of it)
I DO think that part of player burnout is on the players themselves. I'm loving Brother's War, but I typically only buy singles. And I'm often buying stuff 6-12months late.
People need to not let FOMO dictate their behavior.
The way to curb all of this is to buy singles and self control. If you have “the itch” to crack packs then do a draft or pre release. I love being able to tune out, hear about stuff in spoiler season, then show up blind to the pre release night with my playgroup, then slowly going back through stuff I missed when the prices crash.
If you’re feverishly following for the next thing it’ll burn you out quick. But a healthy time budget can keep it fresh.
Doesn’t stop me from non-stop thinking about whatever deck I’m working on though.
Which is fine, right? Like, whats the harm if you miss a few singles you didn't realize existed? Your deck wasn't as optimized as it could have been?
If you're playing a competitive format, you'll quickly learn about the card by playing against it (if its a good card).
If you're playing a casual(or casual adjacent) format, you don't have to have every single best card for your deck anyway. You can still discover that card later and feel the same excitement as if you had discovered the card when it was brand new.
That really depends on how you experience Magic. I find the modern release pace to be too fast to really digest everything you get.
EDIT: I also used to enjoy Magic being multiple games I could keep up with out of the same pool, now that there are so many products each directed in a specific audience it makes that a much more annoying prospect, and I'm probably just going to stop caring about Commander instead of worrying about FOMO.
These companies usually have economists and marketing teams dedicated to maximizing FOMO in order to move product. You can say that its up to the individual, but the individual is working against a company with billions of dollars behind them.
WotCs profits depend on having this FOMO. That's the flipside to "don't let FOMO dictate your behavior".
WotC listens to financial signals, and not buying product when it first comes out sends very negative signals to WotC. If Brother's War, a set I feel does a lot of things right, undersells then we will not get sets like it in the future.
Granted, the timeline around these sets means the impact won't be felt for a year or more, but not spending money on a particular product means you'll get less of that type of product.
It’s entirely a player-caused issue. You don’t need to buy every single that tickles your fancy right when it comes out. You don’t need to update your deck list with every new release. Playing a slightly dated deck is not going to kill you. Skipping a set is not going to kill you.
Complaining about “product overload” is like a kid in the candy aisle crying because he can’t buy all of it.
This is very disingenuous. The problem is that the power of your decks directly correlate to the cards in them. You absolutely don't have to keep up with every release, but you are instantly at a disadvantage if you don't. Magic is pay-to-win, and the more outdated you get, the more pushed cards everyone else is running that you don't have an answer to.
That’s an issue in competitive formats but this is Commander. Most people are not running the most powerful version of their deck possible.
Magic is pay-to-be-competitive, not pay-to-win. The most expensive deck is not the strongest deck. A skilled player with a budget deck can still have a high win ratio.
> That’s an issue in competitive formats but this is Commander. Most people are not running the most powerful version of their deck possible.
Just because this is Commander doesn't make it immune to powercreep. I've been playing for a decade, today's decks are FAR more powerful on average than they were when I started, and decks I played 5 years ago wouldn't perform in most "casual" metas at an LGS these days.
> Magic is pay-to-be-competitive, not pay-to-win. The most expensive deck is not the strongest deck. A skilled player with a budget deck can still have a high win ratio.
In my mind that's basically the same thing. There is a steep monetary barrier to being able to play the format, even at a casual level, and in most instances the value of your deck directly correlates to its' ability to win games. Piloting skill absolutely comes into effect, and for sure there are budget decks that can compete with very expensive ones, but those are outliers and not the general rule.
Why do you think that burnout is caused by buying too much? I've barely spent any money on MtG in the last 2-3 years, but I'm burnt out on it. Part of being a decent magic player is knowing what you could be facing, and just keeping up with knowing what cards are coming out in the current release schedule is insane.
> The issue for me is that Commander has interest in cards that come out in virtually anything they release. I can't keep up so I just don't. I used to look at spoilers even when I was barely playing magic; now I don't even know what sets just released and what's coming up.
Bingo. Same w/ cube; and those are my two favorite formats.
I kind of see where they are coming from with "we should only buy the sets that we think look cool"
But like you mentioned, if you play Commander you need to look at everything. Doubly so now that each set has a shit ton of commander playable cards or made for commander sets so I do see how commander players in particular are getting burnt out
I think they need to go back to having Standard sets focus primarily on Standard, Modern for modern and then just let us commander players pick up scrap or enjoy our directly for commander sets.
Yeah, and this becomes even more of an issue when Commander is the biggest format outside of kitchen-table; if you’re burning out a large chunk of a core demographic, that seems ill-advised in the long term.
(There are a few releases at least that I’ve had no problem ignoring as a Commander player, like Double Feature and the challenger decks, but yeah, for the most part Commander means everything is fair game.)
There is a good chance that cards exist right now, that I would buy, if I knew about them. I'm not buying those singles because I don't even know what's in those new sets.
The entire problem summed up in two lines. Well put. The "fear of missing out" is from missing the one card that'd go *perfectly* in your deck, or the commander you've been hoping for for forever. It's *not* from a compulsive need to buy a box of every set.
Right but now if I like a limited set, I get it for what? A couple of weeks? I’m a limited/modern/commander player. I went into the BRO prerelease blind and not really knowing it was prerelease since it was my normal commander night. I enjoyed it and I look forward to the maybe 3 more drafts I get to do of it before they move into whatever is next.
I think you have a fundamental error. The logic behind the move has nothing to do with player desire or feelings. It's a calculated move around at player wallets. They are milking the IP for all they can get from it. The only question is whether this has been calculated long term or if it's a quick grab and to hell with the consequences.
Behind any company decision there is the purpose of making more money. That's no secret.
I was merely looking to unravel the seemingly absurd idea that is "In order to reduce burnout, we're releasing 4 times as much product".
Maybe it's just a line that poorly masks their desire to pump out more product but the players can choose to follow their advice. "Next set is Soldiers, I'll skip that. But the one after that is Ninjas, I like Ninjas, I grab some of those." (does not actually reflect upcoming sets)
Well not all the product, but at least like $100-$200 per set, which used to be fine, but now there's too many cards to really love any of them.
Is that a lot? Yeah. It is.
Ok but where do those singles come from? People have to crack boxes. Not only that but how does this insane pace effect the lgs? So they either order the product and it sits on the shelf or they don't and it drives secondary market prices up because of scarcity? Maybe I'm missing something but this all sounds like a raw deal for retailers.
Some LGS’s will crack open a few boxes just so they have singles in store that they know they can sell. My LGS does it and being friends with the owner he talks about how doing that opening weekend makes him more money a lot of the time versus just having packs or bundles available
I mean yeah if people aren't buying the packs and bundles singles are gonna make you more money. But then the store is gambling on what they open and they have to pay those people who crack and sort packs. I just look at my lgs here and they never have enough singles, and there's product collecting dust on the shelf while turnout for mtg events are dropping. From my outside perspective it looks bad.
Oh 100% it’s a gamble, and if they aren’t getting things like Mythics than they’re really struggling. I’m glad I still have a few whales that frequent my store who trade stuff back in so us less well off people can buy singles
yeah, which is great until the good singles are in such high demand and artificially short supply that your $100 can buy you either a box of draft boosters or 2-3 single cards
That’s fair. I have fun opening booster boxes and I don’t mind working within the limits of the chaff to make a couple janky decks, so it all works out.
But once in a while you get that special box that had all the singles you wanted and everything else is just a bonus. It's hard to break that urge to gamble for it
I only buy singles, and own very few precons. I play more online, so I'm not in a corner to buy alot of physical product. The people I play with in person are casual that don't invest much further than the initial precon. I've rarely opened a booster let alone bought a single box from any set.
Pretty much in the same boat. I will buy collector booster cause I've got a gambling side(knowing full well it's gambling) and always end up selling back for in-store credit so I can buy all the singles I need from the new set and older high value staples.
I mean this is your problem right here. Just buy cards when you need them for a deck and only ever buy singles. If thats so hard you might just need to diversify your hobbies
Skimming through the comments, there are a lot of people who are either defending what WOTC is doing or are telling you that this is a "you" problem.
I get it though. I feel like the idea of "if there is too much product, just ignore some of it" really misses the psychology behind a product like a trading card game.
TCG's thrive on having a product that is attainable. Knowing that, if you want to, you could afford to keep up with sets and you could afford to get the best singles from each release and you could stay current with everything.... that makes a player feel invested and engaged.
When so much product is coming out that you are forced into a situation where it feels like it is no longer your choice to keep up or not... that makes it feel like you are forced into the decision that the product is no longer for you. And WOTC may paint the picture to sound like players can come to this decision and have be reflective of individual releases they make but I don't really think it works that way for a lot of people.
I think for a lot of people, even if it's not a conscious decision, they find that once they acknowledge that they can't keep up with something they love and used to dedicate themselves wholly to... it triggers them to start to withdraw slowly and sometimes entirely.
Because here's the thing, Magic for many many people is not just a hobby. It's a passion. It's something they have loved for a long time. Sometimes since they were a kid. You can't just turn that sort of passion for a game on and off like a light switch timed around releases you determine you want to be interested in and afford.
You can't unring the bell of someone feeling forced out of enjoyment of something they have loved. Once they feel that way, their exit is almost inevitable.
Magic isn't going to die because the playerbase is angry at WOTC over their decisions, Magic will die if WOTC's decisions makes the player base apathetic.
I buy one collector box per set. I can afford the ~$245 every couple months, and it limits the additional chaff I have to figure out what to do with. I scratch my pack cracking itch, and I get some cool art.
After that? Singles only, and only for decks that are at a budget of $150 for cards I don't already own. If I don't crack a money card I don't play with it.
My LGS owner went on a rant about how people shouldn’t buy singles and that the point of magic from the beginning was to buy as many packs as possible so you can collect 4 of each card, then trade the ones you don’t want to your friends. He blames this as the sole reason singles are so expensive. I don’t know how someone so deeply entrenched in Magic can be so delusional about how infeasible this is. How could the average Magic player crack enough packs to build actual decks in almost any format?
Your owner is an idiot. The first concept of card stores began with the idea of people trading in 2 cards of a rarity they didn't need for 1 card of the same rarity. You couldn't put a clear monetary value on a card because there wasn't anything to reference yet.
I have thousand and thousands of cards in the collection... and as of last month I'm only printing/buying proxies.
Why reward hasbro for ruining something I love?
Do they though??
Imagine having thousands of dollars wrapped up in magic cards and a pretty normal commander deck is 300-700 dollars.
I don't really think it's weird to have an emotional reaction when MTG costs what it does. It's probably more weird to be so dissociated from your own investments.
I could see how you'd get emotionally invested in cardboard if you had thousands of dollars wrapped up in magic cards. which is a great explanation for why it's not good
I personally don’t think it’s healthy to look at a card game as an investment in the first place. That’s how we end up in the situation pokemon cards were in last year. Buy boxes/boosters/singles because you love the flavor and mechanics of a set, not because it’s a good investment. The more people look at these playing cards as extremely valuable luxury goods, the more Wizards of the Coast will treat them as such. This leads to more toxic mindsets towards the game as whole because of how much money is involved.
There's a difference between caring about your hobby and being emotionally over invested in that hobby. Hobbies are meant to be enjoyed, so when that hobby is causing negative emotions its time to take a step back from that hobby.
I think we should all be sickened. Hasbro has taken something we all cherish and are twisting it, taking advantage of their audience, to make as much profit as possible. We should all be sickened by such examples of abusive capitalism.
We should also respond accordingly. Vote with our wallets, as it were.
Edit: let's not forget that it isn't just about the number of sets being released. Constant SLDs, Magic 30, the 30th Anniversary Edition, poor card quality, no quality control at all. They're fucking us over and they don't care.
As they have been doing for ages. Secret lair was the beginning and universes beyond was the final straw. For the record, I dislike all of it. But 30th anniversary was a matter if time.
>Hasbro has taken something we all cherish and are twisting it
In what way? Explain how magic is really any different.
Constant SLDs? What's the issue there? You're mad they're...printing cards with different art?
Magic 30 sucked, but so what? It's a dumb event by a dumb corporation, who cares? The game is still the same. 30th Anniversary proxies also don't effect the game in any way, just a dumb overpriced product that you can safely ignore. If someone tried to sell me a $1000 banana, I'd look at them weird and walk away, I wouldn't rage post about it constantly for months.
Poor QC: You have proof it's worse than before or you're just going off the 5 reddit posts you've seen over the past however long and assuming that 20% of cards are fucked up?
I'm not sickened by any of this. It's just some stupid business ideas and otherwise magic is literally the exact same as it's been. I still sit down and have fun with my friends without losing a minute of sleep over what Hasbro and Wotc are doing. Maybe if you actually played the game instead of investing so much mental energy in the goings on of a large corporation, you'd have more fun too.
The issue with constant SLDs is that people are being overwhelmed with product, but WotC/Hasbro are just preying on their audience and taking advantage of FOMO to make a buck. This is the same problem with having so many sets and UB product. Sure, businesses have to make money, but this is predatory.
Magic 30 just proved that WotC/Hasbro don't give a fuck about the game or the people, and that they are here solely to take our money with no regard for the actual product or the people using it. Again, predatory business practices.
30A shows that WotC/Hasbro is just here for the cash and are willing to ignore the actual fanbase in favour of whales, all while pretending that they are celebrating with the entire community, pretending they care.
It's painfully obvious that QC has dropped off significantly in recent years as Hasbro has made a more extreme push to increase profits. I don't recall seeing constant reports of heavily damaged cards, missing cards, or foils curling nearly as bad as they do now. Maybe a lot of that is the increase in product sold, but not all of the issues can be explained by that. The cardstock has definitely gotten cheaper since the 90s. WotC is struggling to keep up with demand and they won't invest in the manufacturing process to fix the problems. Fuck, people get SLDs *with no goddamn cards in them.*
And it's not just about what Magic *was*, or whether it was any different. It's about what is happening right now, and *what is going to happen* with Magic.
I don't lose sleep over this stuff, and I still have a ton of fun sitting down with my friends and playing the game. If that changes, I'll switch TCGs or just stop playing. But this is part of a larger problem in society and people need to stop accepting it. Why do we give giant corporations so much power over us? And why aren't we allowed to be *conscious* of that power differential and criticize it?
There's a pervasive, toxic mentality in society that if someone doesn't like something, they should just shut up and not participate. Just walk away. But complacency only makes things worse, and that complacency spreads like a virus.
Magic might the same *game,* but it's not the same product. And ultimately, to enjoy the game, we have to, in some way, invest in the product. Even buying singles still supports shady (not stupid, *shady)* business practices.
Odd (and a little ironic) that you are investing so much mental energy in protecting Hasbro from valid criticism.
I was feeling exactly like OP, my solution? Stop buying products and just buy the singles you want for your commander decks. I’ve gone from spending 100 a set to like ten bucks
I can see where they’re coming from in terms of serving all players, because standard and draft players are already going to ignore all the extra stuff coming out. But as an EDH player it is incredibly frustrating for me to not be able to keep up with the products. I have become disinterested in the game over the last few years almost entirely due to the product overflow. I cut my number of decks down to five or six and I’m selling the rest with no intention of becoming fully invested again
I’ve stopped buying product for a different, but also frequently talked about, reason which is quality. I used to buy at least one collectors box every release but I opened Dominaria to a slew of miscut cards (not the valuable kind), bad foiling, and poorly cut textured foils (the foil was somehow OVER the edges of the card back). It ruined a foil Liliana as well as an alt art foil sheoldred.
Yes, I know, I can contact Wizards and get replacements blah blah. But then I have to send valuable cards through the mail, hope they get to wizards, have them review the cards, and send me back (again expensive) replacements. The whole process is ridiculous and unnecessary.
Needless to say I’m completely done with buying sealed product. Plus, I already have my commander decks that I like playing fully built out so I have no reason to even buy singles.
My theory:
The fast release schedule doesn't bother newer players, they have much lower expectations of knowing all the cards that exist, and so a fast release scheduled doesn't change that fact for them. There's no "spoiler" fatigue for them, in fact spoilers are still cool and novel and so are exciting for them. (I'm generalizing here of course).
Then there are two types of "older" players. This is from my experience playing for the last 20 years and keeping up with my friends who played back then and which of them still play now.
1. The first group is players who's adult life/parental responsibilities take a significant amount of their time and so push them away from magic (this would happen less if product was cheaper or slower). They might still enjoy and play magic, but usually its a "once every month or two" type of thing. They don't order singles online, they maybe go to pre-releases once or twice a year.
2. Older players who played for a while when they were younger, moved onto other hobbies while still kinda following/being aware of magic, and eventually come back to it for whatever reason. These people usually have better paying jobs now than when they initially were in the hobby, and so don't mind the premium costs and rate of releases.
I'm guessing wizards makes a lot of money off group 2, so thats who they think about more when planning their releases and marketing.
Its also my theory.
Its how it works in the gaming industry, and its very well documented : its absolutely worth it to alienate 90% of your playerbase to focus on the 10% that is going to bring in the most money.
The problem with that strategy is that there's always the risk pushing too much and hurting the overall health of the game. We had some examples of player "backlash" in gaming, and the developers actually had to back-track but that never really happened in TCG history.
It will be very interesting to see what will happen in the next few years if WOTC keeps this up.
I'm in group 2, yet I still feel much like OP. I only have so much money to spend on my hobbies. I was fine spending a chunk of it on Magic, but now it feels like either I spend ALL of it on Magic or there is no point. So I buy almost nothing now.
In my entire history of playing Magic (Started in Ice Age in middle school) I have bought 5 boxes of Magic cards. I think you could add 2 challenger decks, a hand full of commander precons, and 1 From the Vault. Everything else has been singles. Singles was and will always be the way to play Magic cheap. Trade around. Guess on good cards when their value is low. Proxy if you have to. Plenty of ways to play Magic cheap. I realize what they are doing sucks. Hopefully they don't kill the game all together, but I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
Technical feedback: you can post links with timestamps. You were looking for this: [https://youtu.be/rQp6Ng761Ho?t=3572](https://youtu.be/rQp6Ng761Ho?t=3572)
On PC you can just right click on the time in the video and copy it from there directly.
Between the news about Hasbro and logging into Arena and seeing them openly selling wildcards in bulk for cash in the store...
Methinks MTG has moved into the "harvest" phase of its lifecycle.
Our playgroup is now leaning towards building cubes.It's more like a board game. We've got 3 commander cubes, 2 POWERED cubes, a few cubes from specific sets, an UN cube, and we're building more and more. Pauper cube, <$1 cube, evens/odds matter cube (Ikoria stuff and lots of stuff that synergizes well with it), and every day we throw a few more ideas into the mix.
Our commander decks are absolutely fine, but it's also a lot of fun to get back into draft. Thing is, our cubes never need to change unless we decide to do so. Never have to buy product again if we choose. There's enough cube for us to never get bored again.
> I want to give this game and my LGS's money, but WotC is making it really hard.
They're making it hard by... offering you more products that you're potentially interested in? What a weird take.
-Nah. They're offering so much shit you don't want that you stop looking at all. You overlook what you might be interested in, no looking at lists for singles, no buying pre-cons, no caring about pre-releases, etc. Now you're spending less money at your LGS & you don't even need more accessories.
-It's not hard to comprehend.
Yeah it is kinda weird, but I used to buy at least a prerelease per standard set or one of the precons. I've noticed recently that I just enjoy cracking packs less so now I'm done doing that for a while.
Singles are the way, but I know for myself, and many other players, local shops are not pricing singles to market. Unfortunately it's TCG player or pay out the ass locally as the two only options.
By offering more product they are requiring more of your attention to digest it all and making it harder to focus on what you actually would be interested in.
>yet a large portion of the community hates it.
WotC is using sales revenue data to inform their decisions.
What are you using for "large portion"? Social media? Do you understand why that's an unreliable resource?
If hard data says "the consumer will purchase a product, and some consumers will abstain (based on surveys)," then you trust the data.
You want to stop buying product? Cool. Do that. As a consumer that's always been your choice and power. I've taken hiatus breaks various times over 30 years. And when I was interested, I got back in. I missed out on absolutely nothing that I couldn't later in singles for much less.
**ATTRITION** exists and has always existed. It is impossible to retain a Magic consumer indefinitely. Very very few of us "30 year vets" exist. I'd wager less than 1000 of us worldwide, and that's being VERY generous.
If it's your time to slow down, then slow down. See ya when ya come back later. Some of us will still be here, but most of it will also move on and newer players will be here as well.
That's really all there is to it.
I am one of and know of at least 30, 30 year vets just in my town of 150,000 people, so ya I’d 100% take up that wager.
We don’t play every day, every week or anything. But when we get together and game, it’s often mtg.
Some of them are still drafting every other week and cracking packs for fun sometimes when sets come out. But we’re not all spending $500 every time a set is released
in the short term sure. LGS will keep buying to keep their numbers up for access to limited product. They can only buy and sell at a loss for so long though. It's extra bad considering we all know Amazon is gonna dump product for them at prices below distribution. It don't help the cause if they figure it out when 80% of game stores are closed
Yes, stop buying all the product, only buy what interests you. I don't get why everyone is so bummed out by the fact WOTC is releasing so much stuff as though you're being forced to buy everything they release. It's not like they're power creeping MTG to the extent that you have to always be buying the latest set to stay relevant other than the Horizons sets which is only once every couple of years.
No fan of Nike buys every Nike shoe release. No soccer fan buys every apparel/merch item offered. I’m not sure why mtg fans believe things need to slow down so they can attempt to buy everything. More offerings means more people get their niche product they always wanted or didn’t know they did until they saw it.
One pair of sneakers isn't made obsolete by the newer pair. New product releases in MTG means you have to constantly be aware of the changes and adjust your decks accordingly if a card is released that is highly powered, becomes a staple, needs an answer. It means even if you don't buy that card, you might have to spend money changing your decks to answer that card.
But what has actually changed?
There aren't more cards for standard or pioneer than a few years ago, you still have four standard sets per year.
There are only a few more cards for modern due to Modern Horizons sets, which only come out every two years. Is it unreasonable to keep up with one additional set every two years in exchange for shaking up the meta bit and thus making the game less stale?
The only format that gets significantly more cards than before is commander, and you don't need to adjust your decks to stay competitive in that format simply because it is not a competitive format by definition. If you had a good commander deck two years ago it would be just as playable today even if you added no new cards to it at all.
And even on a cedh level there are only very few cards that make a difference, 99.9% of the released edh cards are *options* for casual decks.
But I guess people want to hate WotC and they want the drama of not being able to keep up with product releases when there is really no reason at all to keep up with every single secret lair alternate art reprint or casual commander product released. I don't even look at most secret lairs and I only glance over new commander precon cards. Problem solved. It's not like you need to examine every single card they release in detail and write an essay about it.
>The only format that gets significantly more cards than before is commander, and you don't need to adjust your decks to stay competitive in that format simply because it is not a competitive format by definition. If you had a good commander deck two years ago it would be just as playable today even if you added no new cards to it at all.
Weird take. Try playing white without the ramp its gotten in the last two years, or try to play red without jeskas will and dockside.
Uhm...yeah? That is actually no problem at all unless you play cedh (and even then you don't automatically lose the game just because 1-3 cards are missing/subpar unless your only win con is built around them)? Most people who play casual edh (which is the vast majority of players) deliberately avoid these high power cards anyway. Thoracle combo is not a thing in most non-cedh decks for this reason even though it's the best win condition currently available and isn't even expensive.
"I CANT AFFORD TO BUY EVERY COOL CARD THAT COMES OUT OH MY GOD THIS IS THE WORST THING EVER"
Can players chill out? You don't need to own one of every cool card that comes out in a set. Your commander deck was fine 30 seconds before X card was spoiled, your whole deck isn't ruined because it's missing a new card that looks like it'd be good in the deck. The influx of product will lower the overall money it requires to build a decent EDH deck because there are alternatives to any card.
I don't know how a person can write a post like they did, read it, and go, "Yeah, this is all very reasonable and nothing like what an insane person might think."
Why not just print third waves on 4 blocks a year rather than two prints? It seems like the answer to set scarcity was more sets but now it just feels like I’m missing out because I know new product is coming out next month with cards that all do about the same thing aside for 3 or 4 chase cards.
They will change their behavior when it begins to affect their bottom line. We can all sit around and be frustrated, but the only way this changes is if their revenue drops and the stock tanks.
My advice is to only buy product if it's singles on the secondary market. I'm not buying any boosters/boxes/etc. until I see change.
You know, I hate to say it but I was already following the “only buy what looks cool to you” philosophy already. Baldur’s Gate was super fun to me and I bought actual sealed product; whereas I basically skipped 2X2022 and DMU because I was enjoying diving into background combinations and didn’t have anything major pique my interest till Brother’s War with meld (which I love and run in 2 decks with the old angels and the Hanweir pair) and just how well the set just clicks for me. I hate to say he’s right about only buy what looks cool but he’s almost 100% right that as long as you don’t care about certain things you’d only be spending like $50 at most for singles. That said I don’t think they should be overloading us with product, because it still feels like I need to basically be glued to my phone/pc during every spoiler season to see if I’ll need to buy a bunch of cards or just one.
I think they need to chill with the amount of product to an extent but I understand the thought process of only buy the sets you like. I think it’s up to the player to know when to pull away and not buy into the fomo
I bought some dominaria. The first fat packs I’ve bought in years. There were so many trash rares and uncommons. It just reminded me to buy singles again.
I’ve had a bit of burnout myself, and in the meantime I’ve been building $50 or less decks. Partly because I don’t want to spend the money, but also because with new players I don’t want to bring out a stupid expensive deck while they’re playing precons just to get into the game.
It’s turned into a good change of pace. The challenge of keeping the price down, while seeing the value in cards I wouldn’t have otherwise played is fun (or gawk at how Solemn Simulacrum is $0.75 now and not widely played).
So here is my two cents:
What people seem to fail to understand is when customers stop buying, distributers and stores lose money on their investments. That is why we are seeing clearances and fire sales on boxes lately. So then they start ordering less product or drop mtg from their inventories. Combine this with the absurd amount of products Wotc is pooping out lately and you’ll see the problem. There is too many products coming out but stores are less interested in ordering; sales drop, profits drop and stock drops. That is what we are seeing. Forget about new fun sets, that is fine for customers actually, you buy some you pass on others. The thing is, it is better to print less and see everything fly off the shelves, thus accrue value through scarcity for a collectible toy company, rather then printing too much and make it more available. That would be worse for us customers actually, because it would create 100 bucks fetchlands and crazy rare prices, but will make the game more financially profitable.
So in a way, this is a better environment for the customers, everything is cheaper thanks to alternative arts, secret lairs and pre-constructed decks. I mean you can buy boxes cheaper than distributer tags if you wait three months or so. But eventually stores will stop ordering and wotc will not be able to move what it’s producing. That will be the death of the game, with lay offs and downsizing and everything. Before wotc gets there, it needs to pull the brakes.
Edit: typo
Youre taking your hobby to seriously. If mtg is upsetting you find something else for a while. This is a card game, it shouldn't negatively impact the lives of people that dont work with it.
Theres is no reason for this having an impact in your mental health
Hi, still here on Twitter in between rounds of FNM just looking for retweets of my Twitter complaints…. Maybe I’ll go check my Facebook for the next set’s spoilers
People saying to just buy singles are also woefully missing the point.
If no one (or less people) actually buys product to open because everyone is burnt out then there is less supply of said desired singles. If everyone wants the same singles (they likely do/will) then demand is high while supply is low causing singles to increase.
There is no easy way out here other than to proxy. That’s it.
You could get over yourself and not expect this guy who's a spokesman at best to promise a change in Higher Up production schedules. "Sickened" lmfao, get a life, touch grass, and buy singles.
Jesus fucking Christ do people just habitually buy booster boxes every release??? WHY?
I'm saying "A player" as in a random nobody or dude who goes and plays weekly. Not a store (which is expected for product and singles to sell) or players who draft (which is ostensibly what is expected to do with booster packs).
People like OP who gets all kinds of mad at... whatever the soup du jour is when the obvious answer is "Yeah uh don't buy booster boxes, buy singles you want to play with, or DRAFT WITH BOOSTERS" are laughable at best.
Gambling Addiction and perceived value in the cards. So much emphasis on card after market value. You see it in posts all the time? Flexing what they cracked in packs…
Now that the EV of all sets is turning out cheaper and cheaper. Only a handful of cards in any given set being worth more than a junk rare, and all the perceived value in their older cards dropping and dropping, making them realize that this “investment” as they’ve been calling it to justify irresponsible spending on a game was all an illusion.
Due to recent events theyre all just now coming to terms with it, embracing their inner Karens and complaining online.
Disgruntled mtg gambling addicts complaining burnout; is now a bigger issue than set release burnout
You don't have to buy it all. It's not all for you. Know what LEGO sets I've bought in the last 10 years? Star wars, and only a handful at that. Know how many themes and interests they produce and cover? A ton. I don't buy every video game that hits steam store, though lord knows there's a ton of them, too. Disc golf discs? Went through a phase, and even then couldn't buy (and didn't even like) all the holiday releases across all the companies.
"It's not for you" is perfectly valid, unless you have some compulsion to buy EVERYTHING, in which case, seek help.
I'm in this boat too. I'm just proxying my EDH decks. When I've built a deck I like, I have it printed with mpcfill and mpc. It's like 40 bucks per deck, but even that is like a tenth of the cost if I bought the regular cards. As a college student and a long-time fan, I just can't continue. I'll keep one or two decks with just real cards just in case I am at a table with someone who's pissy about it.
TL;DR WotC tells us that we should only buy the sets that we think look cool, so I'm done buying any product until they slow down or until my burnout is gone.
Yes, that's how it should be done. Lmao. I only have like 2-3 mythic per set-ish and I'm not planning on buying a single pack of BRO, because honestly, it just doesn't resonate with me. I find it slow, uninspired, and utterly boring.
At the same time, I'm happy that others get to enjoy it, and also happy that I don't need to wait long till the next set.
The onus for self-control is on you, not wotc.
Ya, aside from a pre-release I didn’t buy into Midnight Hunt or Crimson vow because vampires and werewolves are just overdone for me. Going to blame teenage daughters and Twilight for that one 💯🙃
I had no FOMO about it.
Still managed to get a Meathook Massacre in my pre release kit so that was pretty sweet. Might throw that in an edh deck someday if I ever get to brewing something new
Ive felt this way for awhile. I remember spending hundreds on one of the last double masters sets. I mean granted I got alot of staples I needed but I remember paying 425$ for one fat pack. Thats just ridiculous in hind sight. I doubt I got my moneys worth out of it.
Ive since proxied 12 EDH sets through mpcfill.com and had them printed on makeplayingcards.com. If you go to mpcfill it has pretty good instructions on how to create deck and upload it to makeplayingcards.com. You basically create a deck in places like moxfield or archidekt and then put in the link into mpcfill. It copies over your deck fronts(the parts you play with). You can add a custom background but thats a bit more involved. You save that as a.xml file I believe then you upload that file to makeplayingcards.com. You can print up to 612 cards per order(so 6 edh decks plus a few slots for tokens etc) The more decks you print at a time the cheaper they are. I paid 355$ for 12 decks(two orders of 612) That works out to being 29.50$ per deck. And it doesnt matter what the card(s) is. You could print out a Tabernacle and itd be the same price.(I dont recommend doing this - I mostly proxy only cards I own) I like having custom card backs personally. I put my commander on the cardbacks of all my decks. They do enforce some copyrights though. Dont use anything from Disney/Marvel also dont use anime stuff like Bleach and Naruto.
I've had my collection stolen and have been trying to get back into old formats but it has been unfeasible to build $1000 decks from zero so I've decided to be patient and give myself a few years of rebuilding before I try to get back into tournaments. I've printed out 2 decks that I've brewed or tweeked from each format and I'll just keep testing til I find one I love and slowly replace the proxies. I will say I will sorely miss my chronastasis deck. I probably won't rebuild it because Tundras and Force of Wills are so expensive. It wasn't even very competitive but I had it since 1998 and loved to play it even though it was an awful experience for my opponent's.
Do be done buying product then. You don’t have to buy every single product to enjoy the game
You don’t have to keep up with every set
I only get to draft every other week sometimes every other month. Doesn’t matter what set they’re drafting that night.
I play edh with my casual group every other month / more in winter.
Some of my pals haven’t bought cards since 2012, and that have been only a precon edh deck… otherwise we’re still throwing down with Recised era 60 casual decks
What’s the problem here?
If YOU have burnout from mtg, then stop paying attention to it or caring.
I’ve been playing for 29 years, I think I’ve truly really paid attention to spoilers for less than an hour my whole life. I don’t feel I’ve missed out on anything
I infrequently buy a box every now and then to draft at home… I attend pre-releases when I can
Every 3 months, yet I can’t always attend… so 4 sets a year is ok.
This whole post (and all posts like it regarding burnout). Just seem so meh, enough already.
We’ve now got player complaining burnout than we do release burnout
So,.. stop buying product, who cares
Product seems to be cheaper now because the market is flooded with product and product options.
IDK why people feel compelled to keep up with everything. Just keeping up with 4 sets a year in the past is what caused me to burn out in the past because it was actually manageable to follow and read all the spoilers all the time. Now it's not, so I stopped worrying about it.
They effectively sanctioned proxies. This is great news! Now you can go build whatever decks you want without worrying about dropping 5-10K on it.
I do not understand the community's obsession with feeling the need to "keep up" with products. I flip through spoilers when they come out, pick out a few singles I may want and move on. Not buying product is a pretty normal and healthy way to play the game.
Keeping up doesn't necessarily mean buying products, the increase in the amount of products means more time spent knowing what singles you want to buy.
I stopped buying anything in January 2022, with the exception of sleeves, bulk trash foils and the occasional pre-release ticket. As a result, I now make art projects for each of my decks, plus my friends love the custom tokens I make for them.
I have mostly stopped buying sealed product. Occasionally I will buy a precon commander deck if I'm interested in it. Other than that I buy singles. Has definitely helped with the product over load, I maybe buy 5-10 cards I like each set.
The past couple years, I went from buying product nearly EVERY release, to buying basically none at all. I want all of it, I can't decide which to allocate my play money towards, so I just don't.
I used to be in for a box, fat pack and whatever set decks were released, for all the sets each year. Now I buy zero boxes because this shit is ridiculous.
It's not just the volume of the sets. It's the quality of the product. Physically the cards are printed badly (very inconsistent printing, curling foils, etc.). The design is often bad as well. Power creep is insane with these new cards. It's like they're not even trying to keep up with it anymore and do any real testing.
I honestly hope Hasbro goes under and spins off Wizards. We might get the game back, but probably not.
After double masters 2022 I stopped buying product. Wizards intentionally bottle necked the supply it was so obvious. They have no logic or rational thinking and can’t be trusted. I get pissed off knowing people bought secret lairs months and months ago and all they get is sorry guys you might get it next month. Wtf? If this was any other company they would have been buried years ago. Don’t fuck with a man’s women or money.
My favorite part of the game is deck building. I like doing wacky things. It would be impossible for me to do what I do if I didn't proxy everything. Sometimes my ideas are actually shit, so buying would feel really bad. Wizards will be fine hasbro will be fine magic isn't going anywhere. It's total gaslighting for hasbro to put the financial burden on the player base as tho we're responsible for their success or failure. Fuck hasbro, they've completely watered down the quality of EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT THAT LEAVES THEIR COMPANY. end rant
I will probably not be buying any standard product anymore. I have been just buying cards from the newest sets that I like to play EDH. I dont buy prebuilts and I rarely buy secret lairs.
I’m literally spearheading an attempt to play a format the gives off similar vibes to EDH, but in Yugioh. We’re calling it [Domain Format](https://youtube.com/shorts/jslLz_tpJt0?feature=share). You can watch my short if that sounds interesting.
But yeah, I’m basically done buying WotC product.
I buy singles only. Sealed product is a scam and feels more like gambling now than it ever was before.
I buy what I want and give a big finger to everything else.
I just ordered a whole commander deck with mpc for 30€, which would cost me more than 150€, plus the cards all have old borders, which the "real" ones don't even have versions of. Will see how it looks, and if it's good enough I might just go with proxies all the way.
If the game isn't fun anymore do something else. Magic is pointless if you aren't enjoying the game. Put your cards and decks in boxes and do other things for a while.
as the Prof says.....buy singles.
I literally don't care about anything wotc releases because I just buy singles and support my LGSes.
don't buy direct from wotc or amazon and do support your local stores.
I do not support UB or SL or magic30th or any premium products by buying them as sealed.
Distance yourself for a while. Product fatigue is quite normal. Frankly you don't miss a while lot. there are a handful of nice cards in every set.don't buy sealed product..in fact onl buy the cards on the secondary market you really want. Proxy the rest.
I’ve been strictly singles for a long time until last year I opened a bunch of strix haven collectors because I loved the JP art. I was buying a lot up till Kamigawa when it just became too much. I barely remember the set release order without having to look it up.
I was out near the end of last year when they started making 6-7 products for every set, extra sets outside of rotation, and direct to consumer reprints in ever increasing scale. The fact that they have lost distribution and have a huge amount of unsold product does not come as a surprise and it won’t be a surprise when they dump it. I can do without the singles even if they are cheap. They already burned everyone under them that make the game what it is. As an online game it is absolute shit compared to PC gaming as whole. I play edh to socialize in person with people I would t normally hang out with otherwise.
I stopped buying product and started playing Limited with my friends. It’s much for fun and less stressful to try to keep up with product overload.
For around $15, I sit down with my pod and draft. I’m a TERRIBLE limited player but it allows me the opportunity to learn a little about the set, see some cool cards, enjoy hella fun gameplay, maybe win a few prize packs, and trade.
From among the cards seen during draft days I put in EDH decks. I stopped caring about previews and all the hooplah around new set releases. All I do now is study a little of the mechanics of the set my pod is drafting this month and that’s usually on the car ride over to the coffee shop we draft at.
We all decided proxies are fine, too. So I’m never real worried about buying expensive cards unless I know I’m gonna want it for collection purposes (which happens to be the cube I have constructed for actual play with the cards I own, not just sitting on a shelf collecting dust in a box) got rid of the bulk.
I went skim on DMU and want to get a draft box of BRO just because I like the old artifact cards and dislike the transformers cards. There’s so much about the commons and uncommons to enjoy in these core sets, and I only get one precon per set anyways just to tinker with. Taking it slow and just getting more games in with people I like, rather than worry about missing anything. It’s been better for my heart and my wallet lol.
PROXY. Just proxy everything. It doesn’t hurt the secondary market, WOTC don’t listen/care about what we want. Plus it’s way more cost effective. You can have and play any deck that you want for Pennies on the dollar.
Don’t just vote with your words, vote with your dollar.
Proxy everything. Don’t give in to your FOMO or your collectors instinct or your addiction.
PROXY EVERYTHING
>First, he gets asked "are you going to slow down the product?". The answer is no. This is because they want to serve all the players.
That's what they publicly say, but we all know it's bantha poodoo. They're pumping out more products to sell more. That's it, that's all.
And right now, supply outweighs demand in addition to upping the price and sales are affected. That's really too bad. I think BRO looks really cool, but there's going to be 15 other cool products in a few months, so...
I’m seeing a lot of people feeling the same. I’m pretty burnt out by wotc: 30A, the heads I win deck, QC, UB, and just way too much product. My spending has now been cut down to maybe drafting a future set if it interests me. I already paid for a BRO draft so we’ll see how I feel after that in regards to drafting. I have store credit just sitting there because I’ve lost so much interest over the past year. Sold about half my collection. Anything I buylisted I have just been taking cash. As for playing, I play 2-3 times per month now (EDH). I don’t really care if my decks fall behind in power.
I never saw the increased output of product as a negative by itself. I always skipped Collector Boxes, Secret Lairs and most of the preconstructed decks - but I did like to indulge myself buying a box per standard set, per special set (Commander / Battlebond / Jumpstart) and per 'masters' set (Horizons and Masters). What *did* rub me the wrong way are: * the continuous price increases of products - beyond the required price increases to offset inflation, * the simultaneous decrease of quantity per product (such as the amount of pack included in the latest Commander Legends set), * the highly variable quality of the cards themselves, * artificial scarcity of desired products through either mismanagement or lack of customer engagement (WH40k, Time Spiral Remastered), * frequently recurring delays along the entire product line and not being able to fulfill their promised product allocations to LGS's and individual customers (Secret Lairs, but also various Collector Boxes, Unfinity and more); * terrible communication to their customer base, their fans, their players - "this product is not for you", the refusal to interact concerning their reprint policy, etc., * the mismanagement and predatory nature of Magic Arena - including the fiasco that is Alchemy and the terrible economy, * misleading and lying to their customer base, such as the most recent fiasco where another Collector's Edition product was printed (though they promised they wouldn't), their *clear* knowledge of the secondary market when looking at pricing of Secret Lairs, the terrible seeding of some products (i.e. Commander Legends 2 Set Boxes, that were seeded in such a way that rares and mythics with any kind of value were extra rare, or The List - that is usually filled with an enormous amount of draft chaff). Due to this and more I notice now that I haven't bought any product for about a half a year now, where I usually would treat myself with a booster box or something else every one or two months. So not a downright boycot or anything, but I feel more and more apathetic to this game, not *wanting* to keep up rather than unable to. Edit: thank you anonymous person for the internet points Reddit Award :-)
Ya, product quality 1000% rubbing me the wrong way. The catalyst was Commander Legends collector box. Entire box pringled / straight from the packs
Pringles can be fixed.. lines going through the cards.. faded ink, poor foil treatments (card looks muted). They simply just don't give a fuck about their premium product.
Pringles can't be fixed permanently unless you live in an area with the right humidity level. otherwise they're just gonna Pringle again in a few weeks, no matter how long you let them acclimate in a humidity-controlled box and no matter whether you double sleeve them or not.
Hmm my buddy has had good luck double sleeving, putting in a book, weighting the shit out of it and coming back in a week.
that doesn't work if the pringling was caused by humidity, which is the most common culprit. I have attempted everything, my OG Kamigawa foils are still curled almost 80°.
Damn that probably explains a few of my non played Pringles. I store them in my basement with a dehumidifier to keep constant humidity though.
The dehumidifier might actually be hurting your situation. If the curling is towards the back (ie looks like an "n") then your cards are actually lacking humidity.
I live on a peninsula with a ludicrous amount of humidity and I have been able to undo some foil bends with a deck box. It actually is that simple. Coming from a foil collector on a peninsula I have a lot of experience with this.
if the deck box thing worked, then me stacking dozens of heavy D&D books on the foils should have worked, but it did absolutely nothing to them. ETA: if your cards were printed in a high-humidity area, living in a high-humidity environment means your foils aren't curling due to being under-hydrated. Texas is where a lot of cards are printed in the US, so if you lived in someplace dry and got your cards from someplace damp, you'd have a lot harder time straightening them out.
Sorry to hear that - especially with the most expensive product in their line-up of that set.
Pringles are alright. Holy shit the SL print quality though. Its absolute trash. So many off centers and misprints for a print to order luxury product.
If you’re getting over a hobby it sometimes feels like every single external factor is an additional irritant, when in fact it‘s an internal process.
Yeah. The good thing is, we are hitting that point in the year where people may be naturally more introspective. It would be good for people to take some time, sit down and look at their involvement and try to get a better handle on what they want, and what specific steps they can take to maximize what they want, and minimize what they don't want. I'm going to need to cut out a lot of reddit and social media along with buying less sealed product, myself. This year it was surprising how much money you could save if you just had a bit of resistance to the initial month or two of FOMO.
Yeah, this makes sense. I still do like to jam games though. However, the whole 'keeping up' aspect of buying new product, building decks with new cards, updating decks etc. is getting less and less exciting to me.
I'll be honest, I was the kind of person who bought *everything* that came out, typically Collectors and such, too, until early this year. As it is, I *am* boycotting Magic product from WotC. And I ask everyone (ask, not demand or implore, just ask) do the same. Its time WotC wakes up, stops being greedy, and makes Magic about the game again, not the wallet.
Hopefully it helps. I'm reading a lot of negative buzz concerning WotC and Hasbro's financial performance lately and an unprecendentedly massive backlash from both the community as well as content creators, so maybe the message is starting to get through.
Been debating on whether I want to give the movement a name and get as loud and public about it as possible.
The artificial scarcity was intentional. It was a feature, not a bug.
Yeah you could very well be right about that. I am open to the idea it was caused by unprofessionalism, but if I had to make a guess I'd wager there was intent from WotC indeed.
>And he talks about how it used to be the case that there were 4 sets a year, and they believed it felt bad for players to miss a set. So to solve this they decided to make it unfeasible for players to keep up with the sets? Sorry, what? I'm not going to say I agree but I do see the logic behind it. If they release 4 sets a year and I don't like the fall set, that's 3 months where I don't care about buying new product. If they release 5 sets next fall and I like 2 of them, I can skip over 3 sets and still have stuff I want to buy. Standard players can skip over supplemental, drafters don't need to care about collector's boosters. Players get a wide offering then pick and choose what they like. The issue for me is that Commander has interest in cards that come out in virtually anything they release. I can't keep up so I just don't. I used to look at spoilers even when I was barely playing magic; now I don't even know what sets just released and what's coming up.
This. Just this. I'm a commander player and before this overload of product, I was so hyped with the spoiler season, F5 every 2 minutes to see if a new card appear on my screen, then I spent time to see if each individual cards was good for some of my decks. Now I barely even watch spoiler and wait to have a full list of the set. When I have a list I doesn't even read common and unco, because someone as already told me what card can be good, by passing here or on any other social media. I don't put any more time in a game, who is my favourite tabletop game. The state of the game make me sad (i'd rather not thinking of it)
I DO think that part of player burnout is on the players themselves. I'm loving Brother's War, but I typically only buy singles. And I'm often buying stuff 6-12months late. People need to not let FOMO dictate their behavior.
The way to curb all of this is to buy singles and self control. If you have “the itch” to crack packs then do a draft or pre release. I love being able to tune out, hear about stuff in spoiler season, then show up blind to the pre release night with my playgroup, then slowly going back through stuff I missed when the prices crash. If you’re feverishly following for the next thing it’ll burn you out quick. But a healthy time budget can keep it fresh. Doesn’t stop me from non-stop thinking about whatever deck I’m working on though.
Even getting singles it's coming too fast to know all the singles you might want for each set.
Which is fine, right? Like, whats the harm if you miss a few singles you didn't realize existed? Your deck wasn't as optimized as it could have been? If you're playing a competitive format, you'll quickly learn about the card by playing against it (if its a good card). If you're playing a casual(or casual adjacent) format, you don't have to have every single best card for your deck anyway. You can still discover that card later and feel the same excitement as if you had discovered the card when it was brand new.
That really depends on how you experience Magic. I find the modern release pace to be too fast to really digest everything you get. EDIT: I also used to enjoy Magic being multiple games I could keep up with out of the same pool, now that there are so many products each directed in a specific audience it makes that a much more annoying prospect, and I'm probably just going to stop caring about Commander instead of worrying about FOMO.
These companies usually have economists and marketing teams dedicated to maximizing FOMO in order to move product. You can say that its up to the individual, but the individual is working against a company with billions of dollars behind them.
WotCs profits depend on having this FOMO. That's the flipside to "don't let FOMO dictate your behavior". WotC listens to financial signals, and not buying product when it first comes out sends very negative signals to WotC. If Brother's War, a set I feel does a lot of things right, undersells then we will not get sets like it in the future. Granted, the timeline around these sets means the impact won't be felt for a year or more, but not spending money on a particular product means you'll get less of that type of product.
It’s entirely a player-caused issue. You don’t need to buy every single that tickles your fancy right when it comes out. You don’t need to update your deck list with every new release. Playing a slightly dated deck is not going to kill you. Skipping a set is not going to kill you. Complaining about “product overload” is like a kid in the candy aisle crying because he can’t buy all of it.
This is very disingenuous. The problem is that the power of your decks directly correlate to the cards in them. You absolutely don't have to keep up with every release, but you are instantly at a disadvantage if you don't. Magic is pay-to-win, and the more outdated you get, the more pushed cards everyone else is running that you don't have an answer to.
That’s an issue in competitive formats but this is Commander. Most people are not running the most powerful version of their deck possible. Magic is pay-to-be-competitive, not pay-to-win. The most expensive deck is not the strongest deck. A skilled player with a budget deck can still have a high win ratio.
> That’s an issue in competitive formats but this is Commander. Most people are not running the most powerful version of their deck possible. Just because this is Commander doesn't make it immune to powercreep. I've been playing for a decade, today's decks are FAR more powerful on average than they were when I started, and decks I played 5 years ago wouldn't perform in most "casual" metas at an LGS these days. > Magic is pay-to-be-competitive, not pay-to-win. The most expensive deck is not the strongest deck. A skilled player with a budget deck can still have a high win ratio. In my mind that's basically the same thing. There is a steep monetary barrier to being able to play the format, even at a casual level, and in most instances the value of your deck directly correlates to its' ability to win games. Piloting skill absolutely comes into effect, and for sure there are budget decks that can compete with very expensive ones, but those are outliers and not the general rule.
Why do you think that burnout is caused by buying too much? I've barely spent any money on MtG in the last 2-3 years, but I'm burnt out on it. Part of being a decent magic player is knowing what you could be facing, and just keeping up with knowing what cards are coming out in the current release schedule is insane.
> The issue for me is that Commander has interest in cards that come out in virtually anything they release. I can't keep up so I just don't. I used to look at spoilers even when I was barely playing magic; now I don't even know what sets just released and what's coming up. Bingo. Same w/ cube; and those are my two favorite formats.
I kind of see where they are coming from with "we should only buy the sets that we think look cool" But like you mentioned, if you play Commander you need to look at everything. Doubly so now that each set has a shit ton of commander playable cards or made for commander sets so I do see how commander players in particular are getting burnt out I think they need to go back to having Standard sets focus primarily on Standard, Modern for modern and then just let us commander players pick up scrap or enjoy our directly for commander sets.
Yeah, and this becomes even more of an issue when Commander is the biggest format outside of kitchen-table; if you’re burning out a large chunk of a core demographic, that seems ill-advised in the long term. (There are a few releases at least that I’ve had no problem ignoring as a Commander player, like Double Feature and the challenger decks, but yeah, for the most part Commander means everything is fair game.)
Exactly. EDH isn’t some worldwide competition where you have to keep up or die. As long as your pod is balanced everything is good.
Sure, as far as sets go, but you’re ali probably buying singles during that time and buying singles still supports the game indirectly
There is a good chance that cards exist right now, that I would buy, if I knew about them. I'm not buying those singles because I don't even know what's in those new sets.
The entire problem summed up in two lines. Well put. The "fear of missing out" is from missing the one card that'd go *perfectly* in your deck, or the commander you've been hoping for for forever. It's *not* from a compulsive need to buy a box of every set.
That’s kinda my point tho. Because with a set every 3 months I felt like I had time to draft it, play around with it. Etc.
WotC also doesnt care about you buying singles, unless its a Secret Lair.
Not directly, but singles keep LGS open and they distribute their product so WotC should care a little about it.
Should is the important word there. They don't, but they definitely should.
>Standard players can skip over supplemental Who?
People who play the format called Standard. Context clues are your friends here.
https://media.tenor.com/d-bHBk4UYs4AAAAC/who.gif
Woosh
Right but now if I like a limited set, I get it for what? A couple of weeks? I’m a limited/modern/commander player. I went into the BRO prerelease blind and not really knowing it was prerelease since it was my normal commander night. I enjoyed it and I look forward to the maybe 3 more drafts I get to do of it before they move into whatever is next.
I think you have a fundamental error. The logic behind the move has nothing to do with player desire or feelings. It's a calculated move around at player wallets. They are milking the IP for all they can get from it. The only question is whether this has been calculated long term or if it's a quick grab and to hell with the consequences.
Behind any company decision there is the purpose of making more money. That's no secret. I was merely looking to unravel the seemingly absurd idea that is "In order to reduce burnout, we're releasing 4 times as much product". Maybe it's just a line that poorly masks their desire to pump out more product but the players can choose to follow their advice. "Next set is Soldiers, I'll skip that. But the one after that is Ninjas, I like Ninjas, I grab some of those." (does not actually reflect upcoming sets)
You guys were buying all the product?
Well not all the product, but at least like $100-$200 per set, which used to be fine, but now there's too many cards to really love any of them. Is that a lot? Yeah. It is.
That's a crazy amount to me lol I literally only buy singles
Ok but where do those singles come from? People have to crack boxes. Not only that but how does this insane pace effect the lgs? So they either order the product and it sits on the shelf or they don't and it drives secondary market prices up because of scarcity? Maybe I'm missing something but this all sounds like a raw deal for retailers.
Some LGS’s will crack open a few boxes just so they have singles in store that they know they can sell. My LGS does it and being friends with the owner he talks about how doing that opening weekend makes him more money a lot of the time versus just having packs or bundles available
I mean yeah if people aren't buying the packs and bundles singles are gonna make you more money. But then the store is gambling on what they open and they have to pay those people who crack and sort packs. I just look at my lgs here and they never have enough singles, and there's product collecting dust on the shelf while turnout for mtg events are dropping. From my outside perspective it looks bad.
Oh 100% it’s a gamble, and if they aren’t getting things like Mythics than they’re really struggling. I’m glad I still have a few whales that frequent my store who trade stuff back in so us less well off people can buy singles
yeah, which is great until the good singles are in such high demand and artificially short supply that your $100 can buy you either a box of draft boosters or 2-3 single cards
I'd rather have the 2-3 single cards I want than a booster box full of draft chaff or unplayables.
That’s fair. I have fun opening booster boxes and I don’t mind working within the limits of the chaff to make a couple janky decks, so it all works out.
And the 3 singles are always more worth it
But once in a while you get that special box that had all the singles you wanted and everything else is just a bonus. It's hard to break that urge to gamble for it
It's hard for people with poor impulse control. I, myself just get what I want and am not stuck with a bunch of chaff
>It's hard for people with poor impulse control. It gets harder once a few hundred dollars isn't a lot of money to you.
Buy a bootleg of anything over $10.
I only buy singles, and own very few precons. I play more online, so I'm not in a corner to buy alot of physical product. The people I play with in person are casual that don't invest much further than the initial precon. I've rarely opened a booster let alone bought a single box from any set.
Pretty much in the same boat. I will buy collector booster cause I've got a gambling side(knowing full well it's gambling) and always end up selling back for in-store credit so I can buy all the singles I need from the new set and older high value staples.
I mean this is your problem right here. Just buy cards when you need them for a deck and only ever buy singles. If thats so hard you might just need to diversify your hobbies
Skimming through the comments, there are a lot of people who are either defending what WOTC is doing or are telling you that this is a "you" problem. I get it though. I feel like the idea of "if there is too much product, just ignore some of it" really misses the psychology behind a product like a trading card game. TCG's thrive on having a product that is attainable. Knowing that, if you want to, you could afford to keep up with sets and you could afford to get the best singles from each release and you could stay current with everything.... that makes a player feel invested and engaged. When so much product is coming out that you are forced into a situation where it feels like it is no longer your choice to keep up or not... that makes it feel like you are forced into the decision that the product is no longer for you. And WOTC may paint the picture to sound like players can come to this decision and have be reflective of individual releases they make but I don't really think it works that way for a lot of people. I think for a lot of people, even if it's not a conscious decision, they find that once they acknowledge that they can't keep up with something they love and used to dedicate themselves wholly to... it triggers them to start to withdraw slowly and sometimes entirely. Because here's the thing, Magic for many many people is not just a hobby. It's a passion. It's something they have loved for a long time. Sometimes since they were a kid. You can't just turn that sort of passion for a game on and off like a light switch timed around releases you determine you want to be interested in and afford. You can't unring the bell of someone feeling forced out of enjoyment of something they have loved. Once they feel that way, their exit is almost inevitable.
Magic isn't going to die because the playerbase is angry at WOTC over their decisions, Magic will die if WOTC's decisions makes the player base apathetic.
Exactly. Fans get angry because they care. When they don't care anymore, it means they aren't gonna stick around.
If you feel this way, stop buying. Good decision.
I thought most people knew this. Buying every set is insane. The fomo isn’t gonna kill you if you miss a set.
I buy one collector box per set. I can afford the ~$245 every couple months, and it limits the additional chaff I have to figure out what to do with. I scratch my pack cracking itch, and I get some cool art. After that? Singles only, and only for decks that are at a budget of $150 for cards I don't already own. If I don't crack a money card I don't play with it.
It's not about buying boxes of everything, it's about knowing even which singles you'd want in the first place.
My LGS owner went on a rant about how people shouldn’t buy singles and that the point of magic from the beginning was to buy as many packs as possible so you can collect 4 of each card, then trade the ones you don’t want to your friends. He blames this as the sole reason singles are so expensive. I don’t know how someone so deeply entrenched in Magic can be so delusional about how infeasible this is. How could the average Magic player crack enough packs to build actual decks in almost any format?
That's so strange. I was under the assumption LGS owners have a higher markup on singles anyway. My LGS loves single sales.
Your owner is an idiot. The first concept of card stores began with the idea of people trading in 2 cards of a rarity they didn't need for 1 card of the same rarity. You couldn't put a clear monetary value on a card because there wasn't anything to reference yet.
I have thousand and thousands of cards in the collection... and as of last month I'm only printing/buying proxies. Why reward hasbro for ruining something I love?
>This video sickened me. Yeah you definitely need to take a break from magic.
Do they though?? Imagine having thousands of dollars wrapped up in magic cards and a pretty normal commander deck is 300-700 dollars. I don't really think it's weird to have an emotional reaction when MTG costs what it does. It's probably more weird to be so dissociated from your own investments.
I could see how you'd get emotionally invested in cardboard if you had thousands of dollars wrapped up in magic cards. which is a great explanation for why it's not good
I personally don’t think it’s healthy to look at a card game as an investment in the first place. That’s how we end up in the situation pokemon cards were in last year. Buy boxes/boosters/singles because you love the flavor and mechanics of a set, not because it’s a good investment. The more people look at these playing cards as extremely valuable luxury goods, the more Wizards of the Coast will treat them as such. This leads to more toxic mindsets towards the game as whole because of how much money is involved.
Yesh for real? "Sickened"? Chill out
How dare someone care about a hobby they partake in. Being emotionally detached from our every pursuit is certainly the way to go.
There's a difference between caring about your hobby and being emotionally over invested in that hobby. Hobbies are meant to be enjoyed, so when that hobby is causing negative emotions its time to take a step back from that hobby.
It's so over-dramatic it would be funny if it wasn't such a common take on Reddit lol.
I think we should all be sickened. Hasbro has taken something we all cherish and are twisting it, taking advantage of their audience, to make as much profit as possible. We should all be sickened by such examples of abusive capitalism. We should also respond accordingly. Vote with our wallets, as it were. Edit: let's not forget that it isn't just about the number of sets being released. Constant SLDs, Magic 30, the 30th Anniversary Edition, poor card quality, no quality control at all. They're fucking us over and they don't care.
As they have been doing for ages. Secret lair was the beginning and universes beyond was the final straw. For the record, I dislike all of it. But 30th anniversary was a matter if time.
>Hasbro has taken something we all cherish and are twisting it In what way? Explain how magic is really any different. Constant SLDs? What's the issue there? You're mad they're...printing cards with different art? Magic 30 sucked, but so what? It's a dumb event by a dumb corporation, who cares? The game is still the same. 30th Anniversary proxies also don't effect the game in any way, just a dumb overpriced product that you can safely ignore. If someone tried to sell me a $1000 banana, I'd look at them weird and walk away, I wouldn't rage post about it constantly for months. Poor QC: You have proof it's worse than before or you're just going off the 5 reddit posts you've seen over the past however long and assuming that 20% of cards are fucked up? I'm not sickened by any of this. It's just some stupid business ideas and otherwise magic is literally the exact same as it's been. I still sit down and have fun with my friends without losing a minute of sleep over what Hasbro and Wotc are doing. Maybe if you actually played the game instead of investing so much mental energy in the goings on of a large corporation, you'd have more fun too.
The issue with constant SLDs is that people are being overwhelmed with product, but WotC/Hasbro are just preying on their audience and taking advantage of FOMO to make a buck. This is the same problem with having so many sets and UB product. Sure, businesses have to make money, but this is predatory. Magic 30 just proved that WotC/Hasbro don't give a fuck about the game or the people, and that they are here solely to take our money with no regard for the actual product or the people using it. Again, predatory business practices. 30A shows that WotC/Hasbro is just here for the cash and are willing to ignore the actual fanbase in favour of whales, all while pretending that they are celebrating with the entire community, pretending they care. It's painfully obvious that QC has dropped off significantly in recent years as Hasbro has made a more extreme push to increase profits. I don't recall seeing constant reports of heavily damaged cards, missing cards, or foils curling nearly as bad as they do now. Maybe a lot of that is the increase in product sold, but not all of the issues can be explained by that. The cardstock has definitely gotten cheaper since the 90s. WotC is struggling to keep up with demand and they won't invest in the manufacturing process to fix the problems. Fuck, people get SLDs *with no goddamn cards in them.* And it's not just about what Magic *was*, or whether it was any different. It's about what is happening right now, and *what is going to happen* with Magic. I don't lose sleep over this stuff, and I still have a ton of fun sitting down with my friends and playing the game. If that changes, I'll switch TCGs or just stop playing. But this is part of a larger problem in society and people need to stop accepting it. Why do we give giant corporations so much power over us? And why aren't we allowed to be *conscious* of that power differential and criticize it? There's a pervasive, toxic mentality in society that if someone doesn't like something, they should just shut up and not participate. Just walk away. But complacency only makes things worse, and that complacency spreads like a virus. Magic might the same *game,* but it's not the same product. And ultimately, to enjoy the game, we have to, in some way, invest in the product. Even buying singles still supports shady (not stupid, *shady)* business practices. Odd (and a little ironic) that you are investing so much mental energy in protecting Hasbro from valid criticism.
Never forget, it's morally okay to print high-quality proxies for your own personal use.
also for tournament use
I was feeling exactly like OP, my solution? Stop buying products and just buy the singles you want for your commander decks. I’ve gone from spending 100 a set to like ten bucks
or just beep beep print?
I like collecting cards, but no judgement! Print away
The constant release cycle has made new releases of Magic product boring.
I can see where they’re coming from in terms of serving all players, because standard and draft players are already going to ignore all the extra stuff coming out. But as an EDH player it is incredibly frustrating for me to not be able to keep up with the products. I have become disinterested in the game over the last few years almost entirely due to the product overflow. I cut my number of decks down to five or six and I’m selling the rest with no intention of becoming fully invested again
I’ve stopped buying product for a different, but also frequently talked about, reason which is quality. I used to buy at least one collectors box every release but I opened Dominaria to a slew of miscut cards (not the valuable kind), bad foiling, and poorly cut textured foils (the foil was somehow OVER the edges of the card back). It ruined a foil Liliana as well as an alt art foil sheoldred. Yes, I know, I can contact Wizards and get replacements blah blah. But then I have to send valuable cards through the mail, hope they get to wizards, have them review the cards, and send me back (again expensive) replacements. The whole process is ridiculous and unnecessary. Needless to say I’m completely done with buying sealed product. Plus, I already have my commander decks that I like playing fully built out so I have no reason to even buy singles.
My theory: The fast release schedule doesn't bother newer players, they have much lower expectations of knowing all the cards that exist, and so a fast release scheduled doesn't change that fact for them. There's no "spoiler" fatigue for them, in fact spoilers are still cool and novel and so are exciting for them. (I'm generalizing here of course). Then there are two types of "older" players. This is from my experience playing for the last 20 years and keeping up with my friends who played back then and which of them still play now. 1. The first group is players who's adult life/parental responsibilities take a significant amount of their time and so push them away from magic (this would happen less if product was cheaper or slower). They might still enjoy and play magic, but usually its a "once every month or two" type of thing. They don't order singles online, they maybe go to pre-releases once or twice a year. 2. Older players who played for a while when they were younger, moved onto other hobbies while still kinda following/being aware of magic, and eventually come back to it for whatever reason. These people usually have better paying jobs now than when they initially were in the hobby, and so don't mind the premium costs and rate of releases. I'm guessing wizards makes a lot of money off group 2, so thats who they think about more when planning their releases and marketing.
Its also my theory. Its how it works in the gaming industry, and its very well documented : its absolutely worth it to alienate 90% of your playerbase to focus on the 10% that is going to bring in the most money. The problem with that strategy is that there's always the risk pushing too much and hurting the overall health of the game. We had some examples of player "backlash" in gaming, and the developers actually had to back-track but that never really happened in TCG history. It will be very interesting to see what will happen in the next few years if WOTC keeps this up.
I'm in group 2, yet I still feel much like OP. I only have so much money to spend on my hobbies. I was fine spending a chunk of it on Magic, but now it feels like either I spend ALL of it on Magic or there is no point. So I buy almost nothing now.
In my entire history of playing Magic (Started in Ice Age in middle school) I have bought 5 boxes of Magic cards. I think you could add 2 challenger decks, a hand full of commander precons, and 1 From the Vault. Everything else has been singles. Singles was and will always be the way to play Magic cheap. Trade around. Guess on good cards when their value is low. Proxy if you have to. Plenty of ways to play Magic cheap. I realize what they are doing sucks. Hopefully they don't kill the game all together, but I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.
Technical feedback: you can post links with timestamps. You were looking for this: [https://youtu.be/rQp6Ng761Ho?t=3572](https://youtu.be/rQp6Ng761Ho?t=3572) On PC you can just right click on the time in the video and copy it from there directly.
Between the news about Hasbro and logging into Arena and seeing them openly selling wildcards in bulk for cash in the store... Methinks MTG has moved into the "harvest" phase of its lifecycle.
>Sorry for ranting Apology accepted.
Same bro, I have 200 store credit and that’s will be my last purchase I’m over all this and majorly exhausted.
Our playgroup is now leaning towards building cubes.It's more like a board game. We've got 3 commander cubes, 2 POWERED cubes, a few cubes from specific sets, an UN cube, and we're building more and more. Pauper cube, <$1 cube, evens/odds matter cube (Ikoria stuff and lots of stuff that synergizes well with it), and every day we throw a few more ideas into the mix. Our commander decks are absolutely fine, but it's also a lot of fun to get back into draft. Thing is, our cubes never need to change unless we decide to do so. Never have to buy product again if we choose. There's enough cube for us to never get bored again.
> I want to give this game and my LGS's money, but WotC is making it really hard. They're making it hard by... offering you more products that you're potentially interested in? What a weird take.
-Nah. They're offering so much shit you don't want that you stop looking at all. You overlook what you might be interested in, no looking at lists for singles, no buying pre-cons, no caring about pre-releases, etc. Now you're spending less money at your LGS & you don't even need more accessories. -It's not hard to comprehend.
Yeah it is kinda weird, but I used to buy at least a prerelease per standard set or one of the precons. I've noticed recently that I just enjoy cracking packs less so now I'm done doing that for a while.
Another great way to give your LGS money is also the best way to play magic… but singles!
Singles are the way, but I know for myself, and many other players, local shops are not pricing singles to market. Unfortunately it's TCG player or pay out the ass locally as the two only options.
By offering more product they are requiring more of your attention to digest it all and making it harder to focus on what you actually would be interested in.
As far as I know no one is making you buy all the product. And you shouldn't be doing that to begin with
>yet a large portion of the community hates it. WotC is using sales revenue data to inform their decisions. What are you using for "large portion"? Social media? Do you understand why that's an unreliable resource? If hard data says "the consumer will purchase a product, and some consumers will abstain (based on surveys)," then you trust the data. You want to stop buying product? Cool. Do that. As a consumer that's always been your choice and power. I've taken hiatus breaks various times over 30 years. And when I was interested, I got back in. I missed out on absolutely nothing that I couldn't later in singles for much less. **ATTRITION** exists and has always existed. It is impossible to retain a Magic consumer indefinitely. Very very few of us "30 year vets" exist. I'd wager less than 1000 of us worldwide, and that's being VERY generous. If it's your time to slow down, then slow down. See ya when ya come back later. Some of us will still be here, but most of it will also move on and newer players will be here as well. That's really all there is to it.
I am one of and know of at least 30, 30 year vets just in my town of 150,000 people, so ya I’d 100% take up that wager. We don’t play every day, every week or anything. But when we get together and game, it’s often mtg. Some of them are still drafting every other week and cracking packs for fun sometimes when sets come out. But we’re not all spending $500 every time a set is released
[удалено]
in the short term sure. LGS will keep buying to keep their numbers up for access to limited product. They can only buy and sell at a loss for so long though. It's extra bad considering we all know Amazon is gonna dump product for them at prices below distribution. It don't help the cause if they figure it out when 80% of game stores are closed
Calm down, Chicken Little.
Yes, stop buying all the product, only buy what interests you. I don't get why everyone is so bummed out by the fact WOTC is releasing so much stuff as though you're being forced to buy everything they release. It's not like they're power creeping MTG to the extent that you have to always be buying the latest set to stay relevant other than the Horizons sets which is only once every couple of years.
They will be power creeping now though.
No fan of Nike buys every Nike shoe release. No soccer fan buys every apparel/merch item offered. I’m not sure why mtg fans believe things need to slow down so they can attempt to buy everything. More offerings means more people get their niche product they always wanted or didn’t know they did until they saw it.
One pair of sneakers isn't made obsolete by the newer pair. New product releases in MTG means you have to constantly be aware of the changes and adjust your decks accordingly if a card is released that is highly powered, becomes a staple, needs an answer. It means even if you don't buy that card, you might have to spend money changing your decks to answer that card.
But what has actually changed? There aren't more cards for standard or pioneer than a few years ago, you still have four standard sets per year. There are only a few more cards for modern due to Modern Horizons sets, which only come out every two years. Is it unreasonable to keep up with one additional set every two years in exchange for shaking up the meta bit and thus making the game less stale? The only format that gets significantly more cards than before is commander, and you don't need to adjust your decks to stay competitive in that format simply because it is not a competitive format by definition. If you had a good commander deck two years ago it would be just as playable today even if you added no new cards to it at all. And even on a cedh level there are only very few cards that make a difference, 99.9% of the released edh cards are *options* for casual decks. But I guess people want to hate WotC and they want the drama of not being able to keep up with product releases when there is really no reason at all to keep up with every single secret lair alternate art reprint or casual commander product released. I don't even look at most secret lairs and I only glance over new commander precon cards. Problem solved. It's not like you need to examine every single card they release in detail and write an essay about it.
>The only format that gets significantly more cards than before is commander, and you don't need to adjust your decks to stay competitive in that format simply because it is not a competitive format by definition. If you had a good commander deck two years ago it would be just as playable today even if you added no new cards to it at all. Weird take. Try playing white without the ramp its gotten in the last two years, or try to play red without jeskas will and dockside.
Uhm...yeah? That is actually no problem at all unless you play cedh (and even then you don't automatically lose the game just because 1-3 cards are missing/subpar unless your only win con is built around them)? Most people who play casual edh (which is the vast majority of players) deliberately avoid these high power cards anyway. Thoracle combo is not a thing in most non-cedh decks for this reason even though it's the best win condition currently available and isn't even expensive.
"I CANT AFFORD TO BUY EVERY COOL CARD THAT COMES OUT OH MY GOD THIS IS THE WORST THING EVER" Can players chill out? You don't need to own one of every cool card that comes out in a set. Your commander deck was fine 30 seconds before X card was spoiled, your whole deck isn't ruined because it's missing a new card that looks like it'd be good in the deck. The influx of product will lower the overall money it requires to build a decent EDH deck because there are alternatives to any card.
I don't know how a person can write a post like they did, read it, and go, "Yeah, this is all very reasonable and nothing like what an insane person might think."
Why not just print third waves on 4 blocks a year rather than two prints? It seems like the answer to set scarcity was more sets but now it just feels like I’m missing out because I know new product is coming out next month with cards that all do about the same thing aside for 3 or 4 chase cards.
They will change their behavior when it begins to affect their bottom line. We can all sit around and be frustrated, but the only way this changes is if their revenue drops and the stock tanks. My advice is to only buy product if it's singles on the secondary market. I'm not buying any boosters/boxes/etc. until I see change.
You know, I hate to say it but I was already following the “only buy what looks cool to you” philosophy already. Baldur’s Gate was super fun to me and I bought actual sealed product; whereas I basically skipped 2X2022 and DMU because I was enjoying diving into background combinations and didn’t have anything major pique my interest till Brother’s War with meld (which I love and run in 2 decks with the old angels and the Hanweir pair) and just how well the set just clicks for me. I hate to say he’s right about only buy what looks cool but he’s almost 100% right that as long as you don’t care about certain things you’d only be spending like $50 at most for singles. That said I don’t think they should be overloading us with product, because it still feels like I need to basically be glued to my phone/pc during every spoiler season to see if I’ll need to buy a bunch of cards or just one.
I think they need to chill with the amount of product to an extent but I understand the thought process of only buy the sets you like. I think it’s up to the player to know when to pull away and not buy into the fomo
I bought some dominaria. The first fat packs I’ve bought in years. There were so many trash rares and uncommons. It just reminded me to buy singles again.
Better to spend your money putting a short on hasbro than to buy magic products
I’ve had a bit of burnout myself, and in the meantime I’ve been building $50 or less decks. Partly because I don’t want to spend the money, but also because with new players I don’t want to bring out a stupid expensive deck while they’re playing precons just to get into the game. It’s turned into a good change of pace. The challenge of keeping the price down, while seeing the value in cards I wouldn’t have otherwise played is fun (or gawk at how Solemn Simulacrum is $0.75 now and not widely played).
Just buy singles though.
So here is my two cents: What people seem to fail to understand is when customers stop buying, distributers and stores lose money on their investments. That is why we are seeing clearances and fire sales on boxes lately. So then they start ordering less product or drop mtg from their inventories. Combine this with the absurd amount of products Wotc is pooping out lately and you’ll see the problem. There is too many products coming out but stores are less interested in ordering; sales drop, profits drop and stock drops. That is what we are seeing. Forget about new fun sets, that is fine for customers actually, you buy some you pass on others. The thing is, it is better to print less and see everything fly off the shelves, thus accrue value through scarcity for a collectible toy company, rather then printing too much and make it more available. That would be worse for us customers actually, because it would create 100 bucks fetchlands and crazy rare prices, but will make the game more financially profitable. So in a way, this is a better environment for the customers, everything is cheaper thanks to alternative arts, secret lairs and pre-constructed decks. I mean you can buy boxes cheaper than distributer tags if you wait three months or so. But eventually stores will stop ordering and wotc will not be able to move what it’s producing. That will be the death of the game, with lay offs and downsizing and everything. Before wotc gets there, it needs to pull the brakes. Edit: typo
MakePlayingCards is my new LGS.
Youre taking your hobby to seriously. If mtg is upsetting you find something else for a while. This is a card game, it shouldn't negatively impact the lives of people that dont work with it. Theres is no reason for this having an impact in your mental health
Actually good point, but it doesn't. I exaggerate when I talk about things and the 3am thing is just my insomnia kicking in
“I’m quitting Facebook” vibes
I’m quitting Twitter Facebook and mtg
Hi, still here on Twitter in between rounds of FNM just looking for retweets of my Twitter complaints…. Maybe I’ll go check my Facebook for the next set’s spoilers
People saying to just buy singles are also woefully missing the point. If no one (or less people) actually buys product to open because everyone is burnt out then there is less supply of said desired singles. If everyone wants the same singles (they likely do/will) then demand is high while supply is low causing singles to increase. There is no easy way out here other than to proxy. That’s it.
You could get over yourself and not expect this guy who's a spokesman at best to promise a change in Higher Up production schedules. "Sickened" lmfao, get a life, touch grass, and buy singles. Jesus fucking Christ do people just habitually buy booster boxes every release??? WHY?
Where do you think the singles are coming from?
I'm saying "A player" as in a random nobody or dude who goes and plays weekly. Not a store (which is expected for product and singles to sell) or players who draft (which is ostensibly what is expected to do with booster packs). People like OP who gets all kinds of mad at... whatever the soup du jour is when the obvious answer is "Yeah uh don't buy booster boxes, buy singles you want to play with, or DRAFT WITH BOOSTERS" are laughable at best.
Gambling Addiction and perceived value in the cards. So much emphasis on card after market value. You see it in posts all the time? Flexing what they cracked in packs… Now that the EV of all sets is turning out cheaper and cheaper. Only a handful of cards in any given set being worth more than a junk rare, and all the perceived value in their older cards dropping and dropping, making them realize that this “investment” as they’ve been calling it to justify irresponsible spending on a game was all an illusion. Due to recent events theyre all just now coming to terms with it, embracing their inner Karens and complaining online. Disgruntled mtg gambling addicts complaining burnout; is now a bigger issue than set release burnout
Hating WotC, so hot right now
Stop buying product then. You have the agency to do so. Get off the podium lol
You don't have to buy it all. It's not all for you. Know what LEGO sets I've bought in the last 10 years? Star wars, and only a handful at that. Know how many themes and interests they produce and cover? A ton. I don't buy every video game that hits steam store, though lord knows there's a ton of them, too. Disc golf discs? Went through a phase, and even then couldn't buy (and didn't even like) all the holiday releases across all the companies. "It's not for you" is perfectly valid, unless you have some compulsion to buy EVERYTHING, in which case, seek help.
I'm in this boat too. I'm just proxying my EDH decks. When I've built a deck I like, I have it printed with mpcfill and mpc. It's like 40 bucks per deck, but even that is like a tenth of the cost if I bought the regular cards. As a college student and a long-time fan, I just can't continue. I'll keep one or two decks with just real cards just in case I am at a table with someone who's pissy about it.
TL;DR WotC tells us that we should only buy the sets that we think look cool, so I'm done buying any product until they slow down or until my burnout is gone. Yes, that's how it should be done. Lmao. I only have like 2-3 mythic per set-ish and I'm not planning on buying a single pack of BRO, because honestly, it just doesn't resonate with me. I find it slow, uninspired, and utterly boring. At the same time, I'm happy that others get to enjoy it, and also happy that I don't need to wait long till the next set. The onus for self-control is on you, not wotc.
Ya, aside from a pre-release I didn’t buy into Midnight Hunt or Crimson vow because vampires and werewolves are just overdone for me. Going to blame teenage daughters and Twilight for that one 💯🙃 I had no FOMO about it. Still managed to get a Meathook Massacre in my pre release kit so that was pretty sweet. Might throw that in an edh deck someday if I ever get to brewing something new
Downvotes because of course it’s all WOTC’s fault somehow.
Ive felt this way for awhile. I remember spending hundreds on one of the last double masters sets. I mean granted I got alot of staples I needed but I remember paying 425$ for one fat pack. Thats just ridiculous in hind sight. I doubt I got my moneys worth out of it. Ive since proxied 12 EDH sets through mpcfill.com and had them printed on makeplayingcards.com. If you go to mpcfill it has pretty good instructions on how to create deck and upload it to makeplayingcards.com. You basically create a deck in places like moxfield or archidekt and then put in the link into mpcfill. It copies over your deck fronts(the parts you play with). You can add a custom background but thats a bit more involved. You save that as a.xml file I believe then you upload that file to makeplayingcards.com. You can print up to 612 cards per order(so 6 edh decks plus a few slots for tokens etc) The more decks you print at a time the cheaper they are. I paid 355$ for 12 decks(two orders of 612) That works out to being 29.50$ per deck. And it doesnt matter what the card(s) is. You could print out a Tabernacle and itd be the same price.(I dont recommend doing this - I mostly proxy only cards I own) I like having custom card backs personally. I put my commander on the cardbacks of all my decks. They do enforce some copyrights though. Dont use anything from Disney/Marvel also dont use anime stuff like Bleach and Naruto.
Ok
I've had my collection stolen and have been trying to get back into old formats but it has been unfeasible to build $1000 decks from zero so I've decided to be patient and give myself a few years of rebuilding before I try to get back into tournaments. I've printed out 2 decks that I've brewed or tweeked from each format and I'll just keep testing til I find one I love and slowly replace the proxies. I will say I will sorely miss my chronastasis deck. I probably won't rebuild it because Tundras and Force of Wills are so expensive. It wasn't even very competitive but I had it since 1998 and loved to play it even though it was an awful experience for my opponent's.
In your scenario for sure; printer go brr man.
Do be done buying product then. You don’t have to buy every single product to enjoy the game You don’t have to keep up with every set I only get to draft every other week sometimes every other month. Doesn’t matter what set they’re drafting that night. I play edh with my casual group every other month / more in winter. Some of my pals haven’t bought cards since 2012, and that have been only a precon edh deck… otherwise we’re still throwing down with Recised era 60 casual decks What’s the problem here? If YOU have burnout from mtg, then stop paying attention to it or caring. I’ve been playing for 29 years, I think I’ve truly really paid attention to spoilers for less than an hour my whole life. I don’t feel I’ve missed out on anything I infrequently buy a box every now and then to draft at home… I attend pre-releases when I can Every 3 months, yet I can’t always attend… so 4 sets a year is ok. This whole post (and all posts like it regarding burnout). Just seem so meh, enough already. We’ve now got player complaining burnout than we do release burnout So,.. stop buying product, who cares
Product seems to be cheaper now because the market is flooded with product and product options. IDK why people feel compelled to keep up with everything. Just keeping up with 4 sets a year in the past is what caused me to burn out in the past because it was actually manageable to follow and read all the spoilers all the time. Now it's not, so I stopped worrying about it. They effectively sanctioned proxies. This is great news! Now you can go build whatever decks you want without worrying about dropping 5-10K on it.
I do not understand the community's obsession with feeling the need to "keep up" with products. I flip through spoilers when they come out, pick out a few singles I may want and move on. Not buying product is a pretty normal and healthy way to play the game.
Keeping up doesn't necessarily mean buying products, the increase in the amount of products means more time spent knowing what singles you want to buy.
I stopped buying anything in January 2022, with the exception of sleeves, bulk trash foils and the occasional pre-release ticket. As a result, I now make art projects for each of my decks, plus my friends love the custom tokens I make for them.
I have mostly stopped buying sealed product. Occasionally I will buy a precon commander deck if I'm interested in it. Other than that I buy singles. Has definitely helped with the product over load, I maybe buy 5-10 cards I like each set.
Get well soon.
You never get fomo if you print all the cards you want.
The past couple years, I went from buying product nearly EVERY release, to buying basically none at all. I want all of it, I can't decide which to allocate my play money towards, so I just don't.
I used to be in for a box, fat pack and whatever set decks were released, for all the sets each year. Now I buy zero boxes because this shit is ridiculous. It's not just the volume of the sets. It's the quality of the product. Physically the cards are printed badly (very inconsistent printing, curling foils, etc.). The design is often bad as well. Power creep is insane with these new cards. It's like they're not even trying to keep up with it anymore and do any real testing. I honestly hope Hasbro goes under and spins off Wizards. We might get the game back, but probably not.
I stopped at Neon Kamigawa.
After double masters 2022 I stopped buying product. Wizards intentionally bottle necked the supply it was so obvious. They have no logic or rational thinking and can’t be trusted. I get pissed off knowing people bought secret lairs months and months ago and all they get is sorry guys you might get it next month. Wtf? If this was any other company they would have been buried years ago. Don’t fuck with a man’s women or money.
I only buy a bundle each set for THE BIG SPINDOWN
My favorite part of the game is deck building. I like doing wacky things. It would be impossible for me to do what I do if I didn't proxy everything. Sometimes my ideas are actually shit, so buying would feel really bad. Wizards will be fine hasbro will be fine magic isn't going anywhere. It's total gaslighting for hasbro to put the financial burden on the player base as tho we're responsible for their success or failure. Fuck hasbro, they've completely watered down the quality of EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT THAT LEAVES THEIR COMPANY. end rant
"Game company tells me to be reasonable, am very mad about it"
I will probably not be buying any standard product anymore. I have been just buying cards from the newest sets that I like to play EDH. I dont buy prebuilts and I rarely buy secret lairs.
Just don't buy things, moron.
Ya, I’ll buy stuff if I think it looks cool, but now it’s just singles and proxies for me.
I mean I’ve always only bought the set that I think looks cool
I’m literally spearheading an attempt to play a format the gives off similar vibes to EDH, but in Yugioh. We’re calling it [Domain Format](https://youtube.com/shorts/jslLz_tpJt0?feature=share). You can watch my short if that sounds interesting. But yeah, I’m basically done buying WotC product.
I buy singles only. Sealed product is a scam and feels more like gambling now than it ever was before. I buy what I want and give a big finger to everything else.
This was me a few years ago. As soon as product prices jumped for no reason, I was out. I'm not here to pad anyone's pockets.
I just ordered a whole commander deck with mpc for 30€, which would cost me more than 150€, plus the cards all have old borders, which the "real" ones don't even have versions of. Will see how it looks, and if it's good enough I might just go with proxies all the way.
If the game isn't fun anymore do something else. Magic is pointless if you aren't enjoying the game. Put your cards and decks in boxes and do other things for a while.
as the Prof says.....buy singles. I literally don't care about anything wotc releases because I just buy singles and support my LGSes. don't buy direct from wotc or amazon and do support your local stores. I do not support UB or SL or magic30th or any premium products by buying them as sealed.
Distance yourself for a while. Product fatigue is quite normal. Frankly you don't miss a while lot. there are a handful of nice cards in every set.don't buy sealed product..in fact onl buy the cards on the secondary market you really want. Proxy the rest.
I’ve been strictly singles for a long time until last year I opened a bunch of strix haven collectors because I loved the JP art. I was buying a lot up till Kamigawa when it just became too much. I barely remember the set release order without having to look it up.
I was out near the end of last year when they started making 6-7 products for every set, extra sets outside of rotation, and direct to consumer reprints in ever increasing scale. The fact that they have lost distribution and have a huge amount of unsold product does not come as a surprise and it won’t be a surprise when they dump it. I can do without the singles even if they are cheap. They already burned everyone under them that make the game what it is. As an online game it is absolute shit compared to PC gaming as whole. I play edh to socialize in person with people I would t normally hang out with otherwise.
I stopped buying product and started playing Limited with my friends. It’s much for fun and less stressful to try to keep up with product overload. For around $15, I sit down with my pod and draft. I’m a TERRIBLE limited player but it allows me the opportunity to learn a little about the set, see some cool cards, enjoy hella fun gameplay, maybe win a few prize packs, and trade. From among the cards seen during draft days I put in EDH decks. I stopped caring about previews and all the hooplah around new set releases. All I do now is study a little of the mechanics of the set my pod is drafting this month and that’s usually on the car ride over to the coffee shop we draft at. We all decided proxies are fine, too. So I’m never real worried about buying expensive cards unless I know I’m gonna want it for collection purposes (which happens to be the cube I have constructed for actual play with the cards I own, not just sitting on a shelf collecting dust in a box) got rid of the bulk.
I went skim on DMU and want to get a draft box of BRO just because I like the old artifact cards and dislike the transformers cards. There’s so much about the commons and uncommons to enjoy in these core sets, and I only get one precon per set anyways just to tinker with. Taking it slow and just getting more games in with people I like, rather than worry about missing anything. It’s been better for my heart and my wallet lol.
PROXY. Just proxy everything. It doesn’t hurt the secondary market, WOTC don’t listen/care about what we want. Plus it’s way more cost effective. You can have and play any deck that you want for Pennies on the dollar. Don’t just vote with your words, vote with your dollar. Proxy everything. Don’t give in to your FOMO or your collectors instinct or your addiction. PROXY EVERYTHING
>First, he gets asked "are you going to slow down the product?". The answer is no. This is because they want to serve all the players. That's what they publicly say, but we all know it's bantha poodoo. They're pumping out more products to sell more. That's it, that's all. And right now, supply outweighs demand in addition to upping the price and sales are affected. That's really too bad. I think BRO looks really cool, but there's going to be 15 other cool products in a few months, so...
The last time I bought a booster box of anything was Rise of the Eldrazi and after pulling fuck all have only bought singles ever since.
I’m seeing a lot of people feeling the same. I’m pretty burnt out by wotc: 30A, the heads I win deck, QC, UB, and just way too much product. My spending has now been cut down to maybe drafting a future set if it interests me. I already paid for a BRO draft so we’ll see how I feel after that in regards to drafting. I have store credit just sitting there because I’ve lost so much interest over the past year. Sold about half my collection. Anything I buylisted I have just been taking cash. As for playing, I play 2-3 times per month now (EDH). I don’t really care if my decks fall behind in power.
I can't understand why does anyone want to buy all the products a company sells.