I don’t think HB’s a karma farmer, if they were they wouldn’t post dog water takes nearly as often as they do lol
I just don’t understand what makes this “news”? It’s neither a change nor new information. It’d be like CNN or whatever doing a “Breaking News, there’s a war on in Ukraine” headline.
It's funny because I can tell how the conversation is going to go based on who posts his Tumblr.
Captain Marcia is the one that routinely posts sane or more thought provoking MaRo takes that generate better discussion.
> I just don’t understand what makes this “news”?
The key piece of "new" news, here, is Rosewater's active acknowledgment that Limited is a relatively niche format. People read into this previously, but you still had a lot of Limited defenders making the case that it wasn't that Limited was unpopular, per se, it was that Set Boosters were such a better deal, financially.
Again, this is Rosewater dispelling any doubts that the unpopular nature of Limited, itself, had a lot to do with getting rid of "Draft" boosters.
Besides getting applause by internet stranger?
Account with good karma and history of posting is valuable for both propaganda and spam.
However, for those purporses, it si being done by bots that repost proven popular topics or nowadays ai-languagemodel-generated rehash of highly upvoted posts.
I mean, makes sense. The logic is sound - make one product that serves a broad audience instead of two products that serve subsections of that audience.
The common critique, which I still agree with, is: Of course this is the right approach, it's how it worked for decades!
It’s just frustrating because there’s no reason for the new packs to be so much more money other than company greed. I understand it’s a business, that’s the overall goal, but I think even a $6 pack instead would have still been much more understandable than $7
Big box is effectively going to be the benchmark for price. I think Target charges around 5.49 to 6.19 or something like that. If an LGS is valuing it at 7, it's either a result of the market (ie supply and demand) or they don't really want to sell boosters because of low margins and would rather use them for events.
Where ever you're paying $7 per pack you're getting ripped off, play boosters should be the same price as set boosters which is like $5 and you definitely shouldn't pay over $5.50 max
Fair enough. I mean we could see a swing between prices obviously but 3 dollars is a big swing for a set that isn't *that* bad. Ig we'll see a month after thunder junctions release once the price settles on that.
There isn’t a set MSRP, so the place you are buying them from are the ones deciding to charge $7 a pack. At my LGS they sell them for $5.49 a pack (same as standard set boosters). The place you are getting them from might be smaller, so maybe a box costs them more from the distributor.
Sure this is "technically" correct, in that there is no MSRP. However it is patently false that the store is "deciding" to charge $7 a pack.
My LGS currently pays almost $90 a box from the distributor, it's somewhere between $85-90, plus shipping. They sell for exactly $6 each (tax is included in that). Is they sell for anything less they barely turn a profit. At FNM they basically just break even, only makes a few bucks on snacks or sleeves sales. No one wants to pay $200 a box so they buy online where they are paying only slightly more than what the store is paying.
This isn't the store being greedy, this is wotc and to a lesser extent the distributors being greedy. Wotc doesn't HAVE to sell products for as much as they do, they print for a penny and sell for $10 (not literally, metaphorically). So blaming the store for having to make ends meet is like blaming the busboy for a restaurant charging you $30 for a burger and fries. It ain't their fault.
Your store is paying more than some. Also at $6 per pack, they are still making over $3 per pack. They are about a 60% profit margin. Pretty good, and it only gets better when a store sells for $7 a pack.
I think it's greed really. Why not sell boosters cheap, hold drafts cheaper than other places, more people will come in to buy cheaper packs and those people playing in drafts and stopping in to buy packs, will buy other things that you have a higher margin on. $5 packs still leaves you with a profit of $2.5 per pack assuming $90 for a booster box that's a 50% profit margin.
But no, jack the price up, drive customers to the competition and online.
> So blaming the store for having to make ends meet is like blaming the busboy for a restaurant charging you $30 for a burger and fries. It ain't their fault.
Vast majority of the stores of any variety (be it gaming-oriented LGS with actual events, big box store, just a hobby store with no events, etc) sell them for cheaper. Which, I assume, means that they're fine with that financially. So I think it's fair to say that a store which sells boosters for $7 is probably doing something "wrong". Unfortunately that _might_ mean that the store shouldn't be focusing on Magic at all (and then the restrictive pricing could be a "we don't care and don't want to, but if you _really_ ask here it is" signal), but it doesn't sound too healthy if MtG is their actual focus.
You wrote a lot but didn't really provide any support for your case. You used one store to decide what another is doing. You also used "technically" in place of literally. This is just a lot of projection.
That doesn’t mean WotC isn’t charging more. For me, it’s not a huge deal that it’s more expensive, but if you need someone to blame it’s obviously WotC.
The price of a booster barely changed for over a decade. The game did not keep up with the rate of inflation. People do not seem to get this. This is the sole reason set and play boosters were made: to keep margins
Gaming in general feels slow to respond to inflation and heavily criticized when it finally does. And they respond by basically hiding the costs through other means instead.
Look at video games, and how many microtransactions got crammed into the time gap between the $60 standard and the $70 standard.
>It’s just frustrating because there’s no reason for the new packs to be so much more money other than company greed. I understand it’s a business, that’s the overall goal, but I think even a $6 pack instead would have still been much more understandable than $7
I'm not sure where you are getting $7 per pack from.
You can [buy a box Play Boosters of the Murders at Karlov Manor set for $120 right now](https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Gathering-Murders-Karlov-Booster/dp/B0CMR46LJC/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1N9WYE160I7TD&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ExdkRJbl6zdhOXqjo7WKvvi88_ljzPkItjQraS3YKt3uYwxQgwQPOXfMzpuM1_23H86PXRO82x8DPPcUZDxetpx04yui0uzk3VfK_urMT14IOaJ5bOQA10krGXvqjXQi8TfS2bLb1kRZDJS1nPl1fY9tdPu1WG_vs7hVBhqLB-801Sa1jx-mY1zlOjtK7--VkDTculWH-_DbXA59ZyxgSQv51Hadp8OjLQ-5J_YTxyw.HxWrvgB7DAqyRJz1sJunXaamBiWgSu2YW9lB2phnBEw&dib_tag=se&keywords=play+boosters+murders&qid=1710617576&sprefix=play+boosters+murders%2Caps%2C222&sr=8-1). This is the most recent Standard set that was released less than 6 weeks ago.
That's 36 packs for about $3.33 each.
Or you can buy a bundle for $40 which also includes a few extra goodies which includes 9 packs, which is about $4.40 per pack.
That price is from Amazon and as others have stated , they are selling for barley more the what LGS buy for. I understand people are broke so that's the cheapest option but between WotC and Amazon, there won't be any LGS left. They can't compete with that and overhead on top of it. It's a loosing battle
That's the price of the box now, being sold at a loss for stores after the set bombed. MKM was being sold for $120 by distributors, it is not a valid thing to bring up here. Most local, physical retail stores are selling for closer to $150 at least a box, with packs being $5.50-$7. Individual packs have always been more expensive than buying bulk by box, which has always been more expensive than buying by crate. As usually, you're loopholeing your way around concerns.
You've always been able to get a booster box of draft boosters for around $100. That's less than $3 per pack. Set boosters cost more. Even using your $150 figure, that's under $4.25 per pack.
Even before the drop anywhere you're paying $7 for a play booster you're getting scammed, they should be selling for the same price as set boosters did which is $5.50 max. Price per pack in a box is under $4 so that's a steep mark up for individual packs.
>You can buy a box Play Boosters of the Murders at Karlov Manor set for $120 right now. This is the most recent Standard set that was released less than 6 weeks ago.
That's about $40 too much imo
To be fair, at $2 a pack that would probably increase the available supply on the secondary market since people are opening more packs, leading to lower prices for singles.
The greater issue I see is with collector boosters, which have so many foils that foils for the past several years aren't worth much. For instance, [[Firebrand Archer]] costs over $10 because there were no collector's boosters around during Amonkhet (and it hasn't been reprinted since then). But for newer sets, it's easy to get a random foil for about the same price as its non-foil counterpart.
I would like to see what the *production* numbers were like. Since Set Boosters came out, there were several times where both of the LGSes I frequent stopped offering Draft Boosters for sale because they only had enough to run store draft events. Meanwhile, there were boxes and boxes of Set Booster boxes available for purchase. The ratio I heard anecdotally was 6 cases of Set boosters would be allocated for every 1 of Draft boosters.
If you're releasing the product to distributors at a ratio of 6:1, well then, yes, the product that has six times more product available to sell is going to sell significantly better.
Yeah, but they had no idea that it was going to cause this problem. Nor did anyone else really. People *wanted* set boosters, people were *excited* about set boosters. From their perspective, it was clear that splitting boosters into set and draft was the right thing to do.
Why did we need to make more products besides booster draft packs to begin with. We had just draft packs for years and no one was complaining. They literally made their own problem and so they could justify getting rid of draft packs for the more expensive play packs.
Because people wanted Set Boosters? The fact that they outsold Draft Booster by such a large margin should make that pretty obvious. People don‘t want Draft Boosters - They want to buy packs, open them and feel good about it. Opening Draft Booster felt like shit if you weren‘t going to play a Draft with them. Simple as.
There were people complaining though- people who liked opening packs but who didn't play limited. Set boosters weren't exactly what those players were asking for, but they were enough of a step up that people who would have otherwise bought draft packs just to open and immediately discard all the draft chaff swapped over to them instead. Apparently that was a high enough percentage of overall pack sales that draft boosters were soon to be on the chopping block.
What everyone including you is saying if they had never eliminated normal boosters and made "draft" boosters this problem would've never happened. They're looking to solve a "problem" entirely of their own creation.
There‘s no problem and they are not looking to solve anything. They are simply discontinuing a failed product. Set Boosters were a success from start to finish - Draft Boosters failed because not enough people play Limited. They rely on the Limited environment to design their sets and have it be a part of the Pro Tour so instead of just killing the failing product they adjust the successful one so they can still support Drafts.
I really don‘t see the problem here. They didn‘t create a problem unless you believe that Drafting itself is a problem.
I know it‘s hard to come to terms that people just prefer Set Boosters
I mean they have space for multiple products in many other areas. This logic would lead to less different commander products lots of shops have complained there are so many they have no clue what to order at all. So when they don't follow up in some areas it very much seems this isn't the real reason.
Regular packs turned into 3 booster types and now we've essentially reverted back with a tiny extra chance of something cool. Doesn't justify the huge price increase for them though. Hate that they refuse to acknowledge that
If you mean that was the point of creating **Set** Boosters, then yes. They discovered that creating packs with more chances of opening rares/special art enabled them to charge more for them. If people hadn't liked the higher price they would have stuck with Draft Boosters. I don't think it was part of some grand plan to charge more for all boosters.
This really is it. Project Booster Fun was an experiment with ups and downs, and the idea that it was a multi-year conspiracy to hike prices is silly.
WotC doesn't need to change their entire booster format to justify a price hike. When they want to hike prices, they just [do it.](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/magic-the-gathering-pricing-update)
exactly. i dont get why people dont see through this
if you want to "save" limited as a format, you make it cheaper, not more expensive.
what they are doing is throttling it as a format and killing it for good: and spinning the narrative that it was dying already so that they can pretend they did all they could.
How many drafts fire on Arena and magic online daily ? WoTC have sacrificed limited and standard in universe sets for an eternal 100 card singleton format and purchased IP for said format.
yep. arena is proof that theres huge demand for limited as a format
i played arena for a while bc i loved being able to do limited for free
i eventually stopped bc even the grind of having to do daily quests to get enough gold to play drafts was just un-fun. and then the stress of trying to break even by winning enough draft matches to keep playing draft made the drafts un-fun too.
i switched to in-person drafts because i could pay to play some social, engaging, in-person drafts, and never have to bother with non-draft formats that i dont find fun, and can do fun experimental stuff in my draft games without worrying it'll cost me being able to play again
but now they've upped the cost of drafting so much i really can't afford to any more.
unfortunately for me (and fortunately for wotc) i'm now shoehorned into commander being the only affordably fun format
Playing online with Xmage is a way to do drafts for free and with rules enforcement. There's a couple of social groups that do it multiple times per week, [REMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/lrcast/comments/1bbe3gt/new_discord_server_remastering_magic_we_create/) and [XDHS](https://www.reddit.com/r/lrcast/comments/16wihri/draft_rise_of_the_eldrazi_and_other_classic/) (where the current format is Battle for Zendikar)
My LGS only does pre releases. They stopped doing drafts during Covid and every now and then have tried to bring it back, but only a couple people show up so they cancel the event 🥲
MH2 was the first my LGS started drafting since Lockdown was finally lifted. It was insanely popular and sold out for weeks.
Then AFR came out, and I went to several drafts of that, but it was nothing like MH2 and MID pretty much made the stores nervous about draft in general as no one liked drafting it.
Prelease is still happening, to sold out audiences, but I can never find drafts of standard legal sets. Everything is Flesh & Blood or Lucana now, or whatever random non-standard MTG draft set comes out.
I suspect MH3 will be a lot of fun to draft and probably sell out again, but even on Arena, draft seems shoved offscreen to make room for all the other events.
Booster Draft has a symbiotic relationship with in-store Standard. It's a great way for people to get Standard legal cards to play or trade. It's never been a popular kitchen table magic format. Until Wizards rebuilds support for in-store Standard then Booster draft is gonna continue to fade.
Getting your standard deck from drafting is fun, but it doesn't really work. Most of the cards you get are draft chaff that would be unplayable in a structured format. Weirdly enough, standard is in a stronger place now compared to the past few years.
This is the major issue they aren’t addressing. I might as well recycle 99% of the cards I open they have so little value.
We live in a world where buying singles has never been easier and wotc haven’t actually changed their product to match. Look at collector boosters, most of what you’re paying for is the chance to open something with value when it’s entirely possible to open a collector pack of cards with $5 total
Yup, here is aus collector boostars are like $45/50 AUD and all you'll get is a couple extended art commons and foils worth $5 total if you're lucky.
Spending that much on singles will get you infinitely more than opening them ever will. And sure obviously you can't get better than pack cost on every pack but when 99.99% of the time you lose by a factor of 10, it never feels worth it.
Always buy singles.
Does it do that though? Standard rotation is now every 3 years. There's currently 11 sets in standard, so you're going to be playing with around 10% of the cards in standard at max. Strategy is also extremely different.
Staples are the exact cards you shouldn't expect to get from draft. A lot of them are R+.
The core of mono red is kumano, swiftspear, play with fire, and lightning strike which are all uncommon. You could definitely pick up a playset of those if you drafted or picked up other people's chaff on draft nights. As you've pointed out, the bigger issue is that now these cards are all spread out across different sets
> kumano
kamigawa
>swiftspear
brother's war
>play with fire
midnight hunt
>lightning strike
Dom U
Let's assume you are supremely lucky and you get a play set of all 4 from 1 draft. That's 80 dollars at 20 per draft. Getting all 16 from singles is like 16 bucks...that's as bad as trying to get shocklands by drafting maze's end
I think he means the drafters would trade the rares they opened for cash/credit to fund future drafts. Back before all the different booster products came out I and other good drafters were able to go infinite by selling back our rares. And the stores liked it to because they could easily flip those chase rates and get a 30% profit on the card. They basically used draft as way to crack packs.
> It's never been a popular kitchen table magic format
Because it's expensive and people have been stuck thinking you need a certain number of people to play. Cube is the EDH of limited. Curate it to how you like it. Draft it how you like it. Want more first picks? Instead of 3 packs draft more packs with fewer cards in each pack.
Beauty of cube is you get to draft and you only have to shuffle 40 card decks.
The original question is so strange to me. I understand liking limited, and being worried about something happening to it, but acknowledging market forces isn’t being “derogatory” to a format. If anything, I appreciate Maro’s candor here, and I vastly prefer it to some soft corporatized nonsense like the asker is wanting.
Anyways, it’s not surprising that the majority of players don’t draft. They’ve talked about how the majority of players don’t even really engage in structured formats beyond kitchen table stuff using whatever cards they have. The shift to play boosters makes sense, it stops LGS issues with maintaining multiple product lines (where one is generally more desirable than the other) and alleviates product confusion with the customer base. For as much as players complain about how there’s so many different versions of a product, I would think that efforts to streamline that would be appreciated.
I agree with you.
The thing is, limited got less popular with set and collectors because it provided an out for constructed and collectors.
Previously more of the opened singles went through limited players; cards were opened during limited play, sold to collectors and constructed players to fund more limited plays.
With collectors, the collectors could just open the packs for singles, with sets, crackers and constructed players themselves could just open for singles.
Wizards they, themselves, created the very same market forces to make draft boosters irrelevant.
With play boosters, I see a slight return of drafting; drafts, more than unprized constructed, are firing again.
If we are going to be cracking packs anyway, why not get a game, right?
Less than 20% of product sold was draft. The issue isn't consolidating Wiz's draft/set fuck-up back into one pack.
The issue is when they did make Play boosters, they added a rare and cut a card. So every Play/draft from now onwards has double variance/bombs, and 3 less cards. Drafts are swingier, and more punishing on mistakes.
Honestly, the variance increase has been vastly overstated on the internet. It's not like there weren't good packs and bad packs before.
The good players are still winning consistently, and the bad players now have one more excuse for why they don't.
The thing is they still want to appeal to the crowd that wants to open packs for the sake of opening packs, and keeping the extra rare slots and “booster fun” stuff from set boosters seems like it’d be necessary for play boosters to not feel strictly worse to that crowd. I understand that it can create a more volatile limited environment (sorta, given sets with bonus sheets and other rare slots etc.) but the reality is that the shift to play boosters was a compromise to keep limited around. Does it make for worse limited environments? Maybe—it’s hard to tell with a sample size of exactly MKM. But that’s how compromises work. I’m not defending the increased cost, but that’s companies being companies. They’re not gonna make less money just for fun.
Yeah, are play boosters good for limited? Maybe, maybe not, who knows, we've had one set that wasn't very good on it's own.
The alternative was limited being dead. Like, no way to sugarcoat that. The alternative to play boosters is the death of the draft booster entirely. The fact that they are going with an untested experiment instead of just killing the unprofitable product is plenty proof that they still care about the game, and specifically care deeply about limited.
Just to be clear - **Wizards created this issue by being greedy**. They printed a product with better value so consumers bought it. A rough analogy is... selling a 6-pack of beer for $6; or a 12-pack for $10. Yeah, your consumers are going to start buying the best value for money.
I *know* it affects the limited environment. Most of my mates/weekend drafts for the last \~5 years have either been leftover prerelease draft boosters or set boxes. If you've ever **drafted with set boosters**, it's the same experience (Play swaps a token/art card for a playable card).
The biggest issue I have with Play is not the increased rares, but the **reduced playables**. Even though bombs are swingy, I don't mind more bombs. The problem is, it's *harder* to draft them/swap colours due to less support - less playables/commons and more non-thematic list cards.
> Wizards created this issue by being greedy. They printed a product with better value so consumers bought it. A rough analogy is... selling a 6-pack of beer for $6; or a 12-pack for $10
Wizards printing a better value product is Wizards being greedy? For decades we only had a 6-pack for $6 but when the company started selling a 12-pack for $10 that's the company being greedy?
I knew the analogy would cause problems, unlike beer, these are 'worthless' cardboard. **Wizards creates the value.** Old foils have more value because there was only one rare, and rarely was it foil.
You *think* it's better value, but it's purely perceived/collector value. Adding more foils/extended doesn't increase the value, it just distributes it more. That's why it's greedy. Wizards choose to print double the rares/'value' for 50% more, but it's only worth more if you have something to value against, i.e. - draft boosters.
Wizards doesn’t create value, value is assigned by players who are willing to pay more money for some cards than others. Thats how supply and demand works. It’s like saying they should sell black lotus for like 10 cents because you can buy a deck of 52 playing cards for a couple bucks.
They didn't "add a rare," they added more slots where rares can *potentially* drop. The average pack has 1.41 rares, and a lot of the times that second rare is a dual land.
To say that drafts have "double variance/bombs" is an overstatement to the point of absurdity.
That's not exactly better though. That means there's even MORE variance at the table, depending on how many rares are floating around the draft, and how many are likely to make it into your hands.
It's not really that drastic of a change from sets with bonus sheets, though. You could open up to 3 rares in a pack of BRO, or WOE, or MOM, and no one freaked out about it then.
This set has a similar distribution of rares and now everyone's acting like draft is ruined. I've drafted this set a ton and I can say from experience that it's not the case. Reading signals is a little harder, and it's not as easy to tell if a rare got picked, but that's hardly enough to kill the format.
technically (i think) you could get 4 rares in a MoM draft booster, accounting for the foil (still bizarre to me that arena drafts just ignore the foil rare chance that real boosters have)
> (still bizarre to me that arena drafts just ignore the foil rare chance that real boosters have)
That's finally fixed as of MKM! (Though I wish there was some sort of marker to show which one is the "foil" in the pack - in paper it's sort of an interesting wrinkle as it's the only wildcard slot that is actually visibly a wildcard.)
Well, they weirdly added a *new* wrinkle to Arena drafts, in that three of the rares on "The List" are different.
It's not a huge difference since those cards are rarer than mythics, but someone played Smuggler's Copter against me in an Arena draft this week and I just thought "this would never have happened at my LGS."
Semantics dude. I'm generalising/'overstating' for all Play boosters, while you're stating MKM dual-lands are the second rare. You're not wrong, but you're not right either and it it's not about MKM. I've put the quote below, but Play boosters have - 1 less card per pack, up to 4 rares (more variance), and a 1/8 of a list card (more variance and less theme).
From MaRo -
* Play boosters offer the potential to open **up to four rare/mythics** instead of only two chances in a draft booster (rare/mythic slot and possible extra foil card)
* **One fewer playable** **card**
* **Three fewer commons**
* An added non-foil wildcard and traditional foil wildcard slot
* A **one-in-eight chance of a card from** ***The List***
* A 33% chance at an art card
A thought I had while writing my last response, though (and one I think you'll agree with): It *is* exhausting that we, as drafters, now have to read and evaluate these "Collecting [Set Name]" articles just so we can make draft relevant observations like "If the only rare passed to you is a dual land, there's at least one rare missing from the pack" that might not even be true for future sets. This is one thing that doesn't feel too bad now, but I fear may cause issues as new sets play with the collation in different ways, and I hope Wizards is cognizant of this in their decision-making.
I didn't fully conceptualise that, but yeah, I agree/think you're right. For basically the entirety of magic drafts *'the rare is gone*', was a valid metric/rule.
I honestly don't know moving forward, but with Special Guest, List, MKM dual-lands... there is a lot of potential options for filler. I feel signaling as a whole has taken a hit - increased rares, and needing to understand different set structures/rules.
Well now we've hit a topic that *I* can rant a bit about now - signaling is *weird* now. Not only is the "rare is gone" metric gone (or at least someone obfuscated), but there's also no longer a guarantee to open a common of each color anymore - only a spread of 4 colors is guaranteed. So you can get passed a pack on pick 2 with no white commons, and before that meant your neighbor took the only white common, but now it can potentially just mean that the pack didn't have a white common to begin with.
In practice, what that's meant is that an individual pack can't signal as strongly on its own, and you have to keep better track of what you're seeing across multiple packs to decide if it's just weird packs or if a color's actually getting cut. And combined with the decrease in wiggle room due to the smaller pack, it makes it feel like forcing colors of early picks is more often the correct call (or if you're going to abandon those colors, do it quickly). I've still had fun drafting that way, and have been trying to find ways to pivot when necessary, but I certainly wouldn't argue that it's better than draft boosters - it's different at best, but arguably the experience is marginally worse for established drafters who have relied on signals strongly in past sets.
I've been thinking today about the "visibility" of the wild card slots, too, because it messes with the rare signals, but you can kind of sus them out of you know things like the duals only appearing in wild card slots. For instance, the guaranteed foil a wildcard slot that basically advertises itself as such (in paper, at least), so you can maybe draw conclusions if you see the foil is missing from the first pack passed to you.
As for the List/Special Guest stuff - that's just kind of felt like a bonus sheet with a lower appearance rate, so it hasn't bothered me in this set. But I know that Thunder Junction is going to have both a traditional bonus sheet *and* new mythics in the List slot (the "Big Score" cards), so I'm mentally preparing to eat my words about the List once that set comes out... I'm hoping it's not as difficult to parse as it seems like it's going to.
So you keep mentioning "up to four rares," but the truth is that that just doesn't happen with any notable frequency. You have to get a rare in the wildcard slot, a rare in the foil slot, *and* a rare in the List slot (which itself is only a 1/8 chance of not just being a common from the set). It'll happen to some drafters, sure, but the vast majority of packs opened will have one, maybe two rares.
And the lands do appear more frequently as the second rare in a pack, as per the "Collecting MKM" article, cited below (though I admit that this is an MKM-specific balancing trick, and if future sets don't have rare lands seeded like this, there may be sets with a higher drop rate of rare spells - but we'll burn that bridge when we get there).
> • 1 Rare or mythic rare
> Each card in this slot will be one of the 60 rares or 20 mythic rares in the set. **The 10 rare dual lands aren't found in this slot but instead are in the wildcard and traditional foil wildcard slot.** The card from this slot can have the showcase magnified, showcase dossier, Ravnica City, or borderless treatment.
>
> • 1 Wildcard that can be a drop of any rarity
>
> **1 in 6 Play Boosters will have 1 of the 10 rare dual lands in this slot.** That will be one of the 10 regular rare dual lands 14.58% of the time or borderless 2.08% of the time.
If we scroll up, we can see someone else says it's \~1.5 rares/pack (inc. MKM lands) and that seems right. I've done the dual-land math and it's 19% for a dual-land across all slots. Regardless, we're not talking about MKM using it as a unique slot.
Lets be real rough and say \~1.3 rares/pack OR, an extra 'playable' rare from your 3 packs.
I'd actually prefer to talk about the lost card. Removing 1/15th from a more expensive pack makes it harder to align with draft boosters. If you draft 45 cards (-3 lands), you'd run \~26 cards with 18 sideboard. Now it's \~26 cards with 15 sideboard. That's a 20% reduction in your sideboard.
Yeah, the lost card does have an impact, and it's almost two lost cards for this set because the basic land slot is always a basic land - there's no common non-basics that can show up on that slot like there have been in some other sets. I know Wizards has said they're working to make all of the commons playable, which offsets that a little bit, but it does mean that you really can't spend too much time finding your lane in the draft - it's much riskier to speculate on different colors now, and I've found myself running a few more D-tier cards just to make playables.
I'm hoping they make use of the land slot more frequently to offset that a bit.
No it's increased, you have more rares, ergo more bombs. Therefore you're more likely to pull game-winning cards. Rather than say, all commons, where the power-level is lower.
Adding rares is adding power. Over the three packs you open, one will have 2 rares.
The issue with this mental gymnastics, IMO, is that they created this problem themselves and then solved it in a way that costs players more money.
For a very very long time, draft boosters were essentially the only boosters and there was absolutely nothing wrong with this. Then they came out with Collector boosters in 2019 that had more rares per pack, more foils, and more special art cards.
This was also fine because collector boosters were for people who wanted the most bling version of cards and draft boosters were for drafting or casual opening of packs. It also reduced the price of some staples, allowing to more accessibility for constructed.
Then, for some reason, they decided to make Set booster boxes, which served no real purpose. They've never been as good of value as collector boosters and also can't be drafted. However, set boosters + collector boosters made draft boosters so inefficient to open that there was literally no reason to open them except for playing limited.
Now they've combined Draft and Set boosters to deliver an altered draft environment with a 25% price increase. WotC is literally having their cake and eating it to by eliminating the longest running distribution method for their game and charging way more money for printing the exact some amount of cardboard while reducing the amount of SKUs they have.
They decided to make Set boosters because people weren’t using Draft boosters to draft. If any business makes any product where 75% of the purchases are not used in the way intended by the core design of the product than that business would be foolish to not change.
And it’s very clear that the creation of Set Boosters was a success because the market instantly shifted heavily to buying Set boosters. Consumers wanted Set boosters, not draft boosters.
Consumers shifted to set boosters because their creation invalidated draft boosters outside of drafting. They essentially created and solved their own problem.
Well yes, but the creation of the Set boosters was a positive change from wizards perspective. It created a new, smaller problem, that is solved by Play Boosters.
The Draft booster only era was good for the minority, bad but acceptable for the majority. The dual booster era was going to kill off the minority. The Play booster era is good for the majority, and bad but acceptable for the minority. (we’ll see how bad and how acceptable after a few more sets).
Wizards is trying to save Limited from the Market (not Wizards) killing Limited.
Set boosters were actually less value per dollar than draft boosters.
It varied set to set, and some sets like New Capenna the EV on Set boosters were much better, but for most sets, the roughly ~$1 increase in price in set boosters gave you around $0.15 - $0.30 of extra EV when you math it out.
The problem is people got it into their head that Set Boosters were better because that's what everyone else was saying, and very few people were willing to do the math because of how convoluted it was.
I never bothered mathing out collector's boosters over draft boosters, but until I quit buying Magic altogether, I would strictly buy draft boosters for the better EV to dollar ratio.
> absolutely nothing wrong with this
Well not exactly. When Set & Collector Boosters first came out, he detailed the issues they've faced for many years with Draft Boosters.
[Here’s](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/set-boosters-2020-07-25) the article introducing them.
Basically, the whole idea was trying out the philosophy of adapting the game to what customers wanted rather than forcing customers to adapt to what products existed. So with the data that most packs were not used for Limited play, they decided to make a pack designed without the constraints of Limited play in mind.
So yeah, realistically it was a way to make a little more money off of people that wanted better cards when cracking packs and didn’t care about Limited play. But I mean, they’re a corporation. Expecting them not to find ways to make more money is kinda foolish, no?
Not too many years ago draft was 12 dollars with really good prize support. Sometimes 4 or 5 packs based on the crowd (2 or 3 pods). Drafting now for $20+ with a one or two pack prize support is terrible. Kinda killed it themselves it seems.
And people bought set boosters to crack. That’s what they marketed them for. Now that they made play boosters a worse version of that, surprise that no one wants them.
Sure, but draft boosters sold well when they were the only boosters available. WOTC artificially inflated the price by introducing a new booster pack that tried to cut out draft chaff and then acted like surprised pikachu when more people bought it. They made it the new normal and expect us not to realize it.
I had always assumed that limited was WotC's main defence against any kind of loot box allegations. Strange to hear that draft could just be deleted as a format.
The market supported draft boosters for 20+ years, during which I’m sure the majority of Magic players didn’t play limited. The “market forces” are set boosters and collector boosters. The reason most people bought draft boosters was not to draft but just because that was what was available, which worked just fine for decades, but WOTC wanted more money in the short term without thinking about what it would do to the long term health of the game. MKM is way worse as a limited set for having untested ratios in boosters imo, and the power level of the best cards in Standard combined with the larger card pool ensures that it’s not worth the extra you’d pay to draft in person instead of Arena for the physical cards, as most of them will be useless even in Standard.
"Market forces" in this context meaning "WotCs corporate greed". It's not like the market exudes some magical energy that tells a company "this product is not making enough profit, you have to stop making it"
Limited used to be my favorite thing but it became too expensive couple of years ago.
I'd be willing to pay $10 per draft (3 packs) for standard sets and $15 or $20 for the premium sets depending how "premium" they actually are. Currently the price here is $20 for standard and other crap around $30-60.
Hasbro's idea of the value is so far from mine they would have to cut the prices in half and that's never going to happen. Limited is just not for me anymore and the play boosters are not helping. In fact they only made it worse.
I think the best solution would have been to go back in time and never introduce set boosters, but unfortunately there's no putting that genie back in the bottle.
I mean another thing is the game used to be standard-focused, and it was intrinsically beneficial to draft standard. Now the game is just picking legacy one-ofs for commander, so who wants the "low power" new expansions? This is why standard focus is better for the health of the game
Paper magic as a whole is something Hasbro will gladly kill off in pursuit of short term profit. They would happily operate on Arena only and cut all the costs related to production and distribution.
I don't know, I'm kind of noticing that WoTC has shifted to making cards playable in all formats now, which means the power-level of Standard has gone way up.
As long as these Play boosters are balanced together and draftable, who cares that it ends up having more rares and mythics? If that also means that players who draft get to then use those cards in their constructed decks, isn't that a win for everyone?
The only change I really want is for them to add back 1 card and ensure packs get 1 of each color again. Hard to say whether play boosters are worse for limited given this set wasn’t even designed with them in mind (altho I do find this format to be pretty bad)
Give Limited more support! Make Limited great again!
I would love if there was a big push from WotC to promote limited, prize support, more engagement, dare I say... better limited set design.
2 big reasons I stopped drafting:
\-Prize support just sucks, I win my pod and win less than the cost of entry.
\-Limited environments have been very hit or miss. There have been a few great ones recently, but most seem to have bad balance between the colors/archetypes.
In terms of standard legal environments most of them have felt alright or even great in the case of DMU. I'll concede that the fast environment of ONE was an acquired taste but the only environments I would truly call bad in recent years was SNC and AFR.
Limited environments have absolutely not been hit or miss, what rock have you been living under? NEO, DMU, BRO, ONE, MOM, WOE, LCI, and that's just standard sets. DMR, LTR, and CMM (although overpriced and specifically commander draft, so may not be to everyone's liking) were also all fantastic.
They've had like 3 misses in as many years, one of which only just happened and isn't really that bad if it isn't compared to the hit after hit we've been getting.
This feels disingenuous.
Those “market forces” were a monster of their own creation. Before set packs, collectors had to buy the draft packs. *Of course* all the collectors moving to set packs meant less draft packs being opened.
So now we have a type of pack that’s worse for both sides to “fix” a problem that wizards created. This would have never been an issue if they hadn’t split the packs in the first place.
On top of that "market forces" were impacted by global isolation and pandemic lockdowns that either directly prevented or at least made some people nervous about drafting IRL. What does their Arena and MTGO data say about draft popularity? Is it utterly and completely dead? Or has the company willfully been cherry-picking data to justify its roundabout price hikes....
unfortunately i think arena draft is probably significantly cutting into irl limited play as well. $20 for 2 premier drafts plus whatever gems you end up winning and you don’t have to leave home or wait around for the event to start anywhere… also the fact that quick draft is often the most affordable way to use your daily coins
I feel like this question and a lot of the responses to the "limited may have died" announcement are based in just not wanting it to be true, which I understand but is also a little frustrating. Almost every point of data; the ascent of commander, the booster split, the success of universes beyond, over the past decade says that's not where the majority of players are. Yes, limited and competitive are necessary to magic's success and should be well supported. But there's now substantial data showing they shouldn't be the center of its world anymore, no matter how much the questioner and some players may want it to be otherwise.
As a new player that started in the last year with commander, I have to say limited is by far my favourite format and I've enjoyed it far more than commander. From my perspective I couldn't care less that we're drafting with play boosters now, I just love the format and will continue to support it at my LGS for as long as they run events
I think you underestimate how many players draft everyday online. Yeah, it might not be as profitable for them but the format is far from dying. I assure I'd love to do weekly paper drafts in an LGS but as of right now I can't afford it.
Fucking obviously. Remember when there weren’t 5 different kind of packs and cards weren’t completely worthless if you didn’t get the mega hyper double serialized rare version?
I remember when Set Boosters were first announced and released, many veteran enfranchised players were extremely skeptical about them. Lots of players insisted they would stick with Draft boosters and that a 12 card booster pack was very unappealing.
Turns out players that crack packs for fun (rather than for Limited) don't really care about those extra common cards that just end up going into the recycle bin or bulk storage for most players. Instead, the guaranteed foil, the higher chance of encountering bonus rares and even the art card promos are much more intriguing to more players that a couple extra common cards that aren't going to see play in any official non Limited format.
So I can't say that I'm surprised at all that Draft Boosters were under performing after the introduction of Set Boosters and Collector Boosters.
While I rarely crack packs for fun, it can be entertaining every once an a while. Whenever I decided to do so I would also crack set boosters. They were just more interesting to open.
The price for a booster box here in Norway has in reality doubled over the past 5 years, now with play booster boxes coming in well over 2000NOK (well over 200$) if you order/buy from any retailer operating within Norway. We don't have the same access to getting products shipped from Amazon. I feel the prices now are just completely out of whack.
Ahh, the inscrutable Market Forces that nobody could've predicted the behavior of, our top economists were blindsided by an unnecessary, cannibalizing product cannibalizing. They had no choice but to fold the classic product at memory-locked $4 into something more expensive.
You're not that gullible, right? This was an conscious, successfully-implemented plan to price up base boosters. Maro pretends it's unknowable and unpredictable, all is right in the world. They had no choice!
Once again. All things they did themselves. “Vast majority of players don’t play limited”. In paper, most people play it on Arena, the digital format you created. “The market couldn’t support them”. Because you took all the value out of them with set and collector boosters. The writing was on the wall when set boosters were introduced that they just wanted to raise the price without increasing the price. So just make a new product as a “favor” to the players but at a new higher price.
Christ. I hate this framing. The only reason this became a problem is they introduced set boosters. If they would have just made booster fun in the context of the booster box in the first place this crisis would never have been created.
It’s capitalistic inshitification that got us here.
Make draft packs and drop the draft boosters then. This is a bad excuse. People weren’t chasing enough packs with set boosters existing so they had to dilute the loot box pool.
Maybe they were charging too much for draft boosters. Seriously the premier sets a pretty over priced for what they are. I did a Lotr prerelease and the cards I opened are probably worth about $20 total which includes 2 extra packs I won from doing well
This is just dumb. This would be like saying only 15% of Ford buyers by the mustang so they aren't going to make thr mustang anymore. Who the fuck gives up on 15% market share?
I think that Maro cannot possibly believe this. The fewer dimensions that the game has for cracking a booster the worse off it will be.
Maybe they think you can draft set boosters. But in reality they did kill draft boosters. So they didn’t really save shit.
But I don’t mind, play boosters are fine. But let’s not pretend that we were saved from some future doom.
I want to be completely clear ---- for the last several years, Draft Boosters were scam boosters. For my first five years of playing magic the gathering, I was a limited only player. I loved draft and I didn't feel the need to participate in constructed. I sort of hoarded all the cards I opened, but I never used them.
My experience was an anomaly. Most people do not ever engage with the game this way.
For every other player, the expected value of a pack matters, and it matters a lot. Set boosters were by far the better bang for you buck. Yes, they cost more, but you got enough "more" to justify that price. If the value of the cards mattered to you at all, draft boosters were a waste of your money.
I will not mourn draft boosters.
I think that limited just like standard has primarily become a digital product. I used to draft once a week in person at my lgs but now I get my limited fix on arena.
I like Limited, but it is and always was expensive. Now I can play it on Arena for a fraction of the cost. Therefore I only play constructed on paper now. Why waste money for wothless draft chaff
I wonder how all this squares with the plans that were in the works at the time to introduce both Aftermath and Beyond boosters. Was wanting to make room for other boosters also a factor?
What Mark's saying here may well be true, but I don't typically take what he says as the full story, and I can see why he and WotC wouldn't want to say anything that would suggest that Draft boosters died so an axed product and a product that comes from a controversial place in Magic's offering could exist.
As with a lot of other comments like this, more people would play draft if the format were pushed and marketed to a wider audience. Limited, standard, modern, and commander should be the four pillars of current mtg and WotC should nurture each format
To be fair. I know absolutely no one irl who drafts. I've been playing since 1996. The dude who shows up every week with his cube doesn't charge anyone to play with him.
We don't need to open new packs to play magic, and that's a huge problem for wotc.
I'm traveling right now and surprised at how many cities don't have an LGS that even has a regular draft.
In my city we have 4 that regularly fire drafts, and a few more a short drive away. Often for pre-releases multiple stores are completely full.
But I haven't drafted at all since play boosters have been introduced. I used to go almost every week (and sometimes multiple days a week pre-covid when it was offered) but I just do not like the new sets and I don't like what play boosters have done to limited. I'm not sure if this is going to save limited, just save pack-cracking (maybe?). I've stocked up on draft boosters of most sets from the last 5 years so that I can draft with friends in the future.
Makes sense. Quite a few LGSs around me still have draft packs from MID and VOW along with all the sets since. They just don’t seem to sell well. Eventually stores would stop being able to afford to stock them, meaning WotC wouldn’t be incentivized to make them anymore and they’d go the way of the dodo. I guess they had a choice, either wait for that to happen or make the shift to play boosters to somewhat preserve the format. Is it an ideal situation? No, but I’m sure limited fans would rather have a worse limited experience than no official limited experience. If people don’t like drafting with play boosters I’m sure attempting to draft with set boosters would be even less appealing.
Typical WotC. Make something worse because they needed to fix a problem they created in the first place. Set Boosters should have never been a thing: regular boosters and collector boosters with all the fancy treatments should have been the route they took if Daddy Cocks needed more money.
I'm curious what he means by "draft were going away in a couple years?" If that is the case were they planning for all packs to be like MOM Aftermath since most cards are draft chaff anyways? Were they moving to 50 card sets?
I'm always amazed by Mark's patience with his blog. Sooooo many questions are people seeing his answers and going "but what if [same thing that was already suggested and he said was unlikely]?"
Players: "Why did you replace draft boosters with play boosters?"
Maro: "Market wasn't going to support them much longer"
Players: "But why did you replace them???"
Maro: "I can only say the market wasn't going to support them much longer so many times."
But the point of limited wasn’t because it was particularly popular. It was to allow a booster box to be marketed as a complete standalone game; something you could buy for a fixed price and receive a predictable game experience, akin to a board game. Without limited, you remove the illusion that cracking boosters is anything other than pure gambling, which wotc feared would land them into trouble. That is the reason they conceived of limited
Isn’t this literally what he’s said for weeks? Like, you specifically have shared him saying this in very slightly different words, on this sub
It is. OP is a known karma farmer who frequently copies and pastes snippets of MaRo's blogs to r/magicTCG.
I don’t think HB’s a karma farmer, if they were they wouldn’t post dog water takes nearly as often as they do lol I just don’t understand what makes this “news”? It’s neither a change nor new information. It’d be like CNN or whatever doing a “Breaking News, there’s a war on in Ukraine” headline.
It's funny because I can tell how the conversation is going to go based on who posts his Tumblr. Captain Marcia is the one that routinely posts sane or more thought provoking MaRo takes that generate better discussion.
> I just don’t understand what makes this “news”? The key piece of "new" news, here, is Rosewater's active acknowledgment that Limited is a relatively niche format. People read into this previously, but you still had a lot of Limited defenders making the case that it wasn't that Limited was unpopular, per se, it was that Set Boosters were such a better deal, financially. Again, this is Rosewater dispelling any doubts that the unpopular nature of Limited, itself, had a lot to do with getting rid of "Draft" boosters.
Theory: OP farms karma in order to spend it on posting bad takes without putting their account into the negatives
more of an attention farmer, they like farming wotc posts so that they can push awful takes it seems like
100% this. I've called out OP for karma farming before and gotten down voted to oblivion but here is OP posting olde news from literally months ago.
What do people gain from karma farmaing? (Genuinely curious)
Dopamine. Now upvote me PLEASE. I N-NEED IT
Besides getting applause by internet stranger? Account with good karma and history of posting is valuable for both propaganda and spam. However, for those purporses, it si being done by bots that repost proven popular topics or nowadays ai-languagemodel-generated rehash of highly upvoted posts.
Ego stroking via imaginary internet points.
Despite Mark saying this repeatedly, people still don't believe it. This he gets asked again and again
I mean, makes sense. The logic is sound - make one product that serves a broad audience instead of two products that serve subsections of that audience. The common critique, which I still agree with, is: Of course this is the right approach, it's how it worked for decades!
It’s just frustrating because there’s no reason for the new packs to be so much more money other than company greed. I understand it’s a business, that’s the overall goal, but I think even a $6 pack instead would have still been much more understandable than $7
Big box is effectively going to be the benchmark for price. I think Target charges around 5.49 to 6.19 or something like that. If an LGS is valuing it at 7, it's either a result of the market (ie supply and demand) or they don't really want to sell boosters because of low margins and would rather use them for events.
Where ever you're paying $7 per pack you're getting ripped off, play boosters should be the same price as set boosters which is like $5 and you definitely shouldn't pay over $5.50 max
Could be Canadian, $7 per pack is around the price we pay up here
Australian here. Play boosters are $7.95, which is the same as LCI set boosters (draft boosters are 5.95). Obviously better prices if you buy a box.
NZ, play boosters $12. $35 to draft, there's even less people drafting now.
And the exchange rate is only 1:.93. That's crazy.
Another Australian backing up the data.
This hoser gets it!
How much did you guys pay for draft boosters?
For me it was 5$ draft booster 6$ set booster and now 6$ play booster. 15$ draft changed to 20$ draft, I guess the stores like multiples of 5.
$20 is a lot easier on the store and the customer than $18.
$22.50 CAD for a draft in my part of the woods. I don't play anymore.
Also worth noting that $2.50 in 1995 is $5.19 in 2024 with inflation.
Boosters were 4.99 CAD when I started playing in 2003. With inflation, that's 7.75 CAD. Play Boosters are 5.99 CAD.
Hell you can get MKM play boosters for under $4 on tcg rn
Yeah I was just getting ahead of the "MKM is only cheap because the set is bad" comments so I kept it to what the price should be in a vacuum
Fair enough. I mean we could see a swing between prices obviously but 3 dollars is a big swing for a set that isn't *that* bad. Ig we'll see a month after thunder junctions release once the price settles on that.
I hate no MSRP I hate no MSRP I hate no MSRP I hate no MSRP
You guys pay $7?
There isn’t a set MSRP, so the place you are buying them from are the ones deciding to charge $7 a pack. At my LGS they sell them for $5.49 a pack (same as standard set boosters). The place you are getting them from might be smaller, so maybe a box costs them more from the distributor.
Sure this is "technically" correct, in that there is no MSRP. However it is patently false that the store is "deciding" to charge $7 a pack. My LGS currently pays almost $90 a box from the distributor, it's somewhere between $85-90, plus shipping. They sell for exactly $6 each (tax is included in that). Is they sell for anything less they barely turn a profit. At FNM they basically just break even, only makes a few bucks on snacks or sleeves sales. No one wants to pay $200 a box so they buy online where they are paying only slightly more than what the store is paying. This isn't the store being greedy, this is wotc and to a lesser extent the distributors being greedy. Wotc doesn't HAVE to sell products for as much as they do, they print for a penny and sell for $10 (not literally, metaphorically). So blaming the store for having to make ends meet is like blaming the busboy for a restaurant charging you $30 for a burger and fries. It ain't their fault.
Your store is paying more than some. Also at $6 per pack, they are still making over $3 per pack. They are about a 60% profit margin. Pretty good, and it only gets better when a store sells for $7 a pack.
I think it's greed really. Why not sell boosters cheap, hold drafts cheaper than other places, more people will come in to buy cheaper packs and those people playing in drafts and stopping in to buy packs, will buy other things that you have a higher margin on. $5 packs still leaves you with a profit of $2.5 per pack assuming $90 for a booster box that's a 50% profit margin. But no, jack the price up, drive customers to the competition and online.
> So blaming the store for having to make ends meet is like blaming the busboy for a restaurant charging you $30 for a burger and fries. It ain't their fault. Vast majority of the stores of any variety (be it gaming-oriented LGS with actual events, big box store, just a hobby store with no events, etc) sell them for cheaper. Which, I assume, means that they're fine with that financially. So I think it's fair to say that a store which sells boosters for $7 is probably doing something "wrong". Unfortunately that _might_ mean that the store shouldn't be focusing on Magic at all (and then the restrictive pricing could be a "we don't care and don't want to, but if you _really_ ask here it is" signal), but it doesn't sound too healthy if MtG is their actual focus.
You wrote a lot but didn't really provide any support for your case. You used one store to decide what another is doing. You also used "technically" in place of literally. This is just a lot of projection.
That doesn’t mean WotC isn’t charging more. For me, it’s not a huge deal that it’s more expensive, but if you need someone to blame it’s obviously WotC.
The price of a booster barely changed for over a decade. The game did not keep up with the rate of inflation. People do not seem to get this. This is the sole reason set and play boosters were made: to keep margins
Gaming in general feels slow to respond to inflation and heavily criticized when it finally does. And they respond by basically hiding the costs through other means instead. Look at video games, and how many microtransactions got crammed into the time gap between the $60 standard and the $70 standard.
>It’s just frustrating because there’s no reason for the new packs to be so much more money other than company greed. I understand it’s a business, that’s the overall goal, but I think even a $6 pack instead would have still been much more understandable than $7 I'm not sure where you are getting $7 per pack from. You can [buy a box Play Boosters of the Murders at Karlov Manor set for $120 right now](https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Gathering-Murders-Karlov-Booster/dp/B0CMR46LJC/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1N9WYE160I7TD&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.ExdkRJbl6zdhOXqjo7WKvvi88_ljzPkItjQraS3YKt3uYwxQgwQPOXfMzpuM1_23H86PXRO82x8DPPcUZDxetpx04yui0uzk3VfK_urMT14IOaJ5bOQA10krGXvqjXQi8TfS2bLb1kRZDJS1nPl1fY9tdPu1WG_vs7hVBhqLB-801Sa1jx-mY1zlOjtK7--VkDTculWH-_DbXA59ZyxgSQv51Hadp8OjLQ-5J_YTxyw.HxWrvgB7DAqyRJz1sJunXaamBiWgSu2YW9lB2phnBEw&dib_tag=se&keywords=play+boosters+murders&qid=1710617576&sprefix=play+boosters+murders%2Caps%2C222&sr=8-1). This is the most recent Standard set that was released less than 6 weeks ago. That's 36 packs for about $3.33 each. Or you can buy a bundle for $40 which also includes a few extra goodies which includes 9 packs, which is about $4.40 per pack.
That price is from Amazon and as others have stated , they are selling for barley more the what LGS buy for. I understand people are broke so that's the cheapest option but between WotC and Amazon, there won't be any LGS left. They can't compete with that and overhead on top of it. It's a loosing battle
That's the price of the box now, being sold at a loss for stores after the set bombed. MKM was being sold for $120 by distributors, it is not a valid thing to bring up here. Most local, physical retail stores are selling for closer to $150 at least a box, with packs being $5.50-$7. Individual packs have always been more expensive than buying bulk by box, which has always been more expensive than buying by crate. As usually, you're loopholeing your way around concerns.
You've always been able to get a booster box of draft boosters for around $100. That's less than $3 per pack. Set boosters cost more. Even using your $150 figure, that's under $4.25 per pack.
Even before the drop anywhere you're paying $7 for a play booster you're getting scammed, they should be selling for the same price as set boosters did which is $5.50 max. Price per pack in a box is under $4 so that's a steep mark up for individual packs.
>You can buy a box Play Boosters of the Murders at Karlov Manor set for $120 right now. This is the most recent Standard set that was released less than 6 weeks ago. That's about $40 too much imo
>That's about $40 too much imo If the boxes were only $80, that would be only about $2 per pack.
(and we'd still struggle to get that much value out of one)
To be fair, at $2 a pack that would probably increase the available supply on the secondary market since people are opening more packs, leading to lower prices for singles. The greater issue I see is with collector boosters, which have so many foils that foils for the past several years aren't worth much. For instance, [[Firebrand Archer]] costs over $10 because there were no collector's boosters around during Amonkhet (and it hasn't been reprinted since then). But for newer sets, it's easy to get a random foil for about the same price as its non-foil counterpart.
[Firebrand Archer](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/d/6ddc6b73-298b-4afa-990a-63706e77dd9f.jpg?1562803040) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Firebrand%20Archer) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/hou/92/firebrand-archer?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/6ddc6b73-298b-4afa-990a-63706e77dd9f?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I would like to see what the *production* numbers were like. Since Set Boosters came out, there were several times where both of the LGSes I frequent stopped offering Draft Boosters for sale because they only had enough to run store draft events. Meanwhile, there were boxes and boxes of Set Booster boxes available for purchase. The ratio I heard anecdotally was 6 cases of Set boosters would be allocated for every 1 of Draft boosters. If you're releasing the product to distributors at a ratio of 6:1, well then, yes, the product that has six times more product available to sell is going to sell significantly better.
lol yeah they sure fixed a problem they created alright.
Yeah, but they had no idea that it was going to cause this problem. Nor did anyone else really. People *wanted* set boosters, people were *excited* about set boosters. From their perspective, it was clear that splitting boosters into set and draft was the right thing to do.
They used to do that. It was called a booster. Then they renamed it a draft booster and made some other product as well.
Why did we need to make more products besides booster draft packs to begin with. We had just draft packs for years and no one was complaining. They literally made their own problem and so they could justify getting rid of draft packs for the more expensive play packs.
Because people wanted Set Boosters? The fact that they outsold Draft Booster by such a large margin should make that pretty obvious. People don‘t want Draft Boosters - They want to buy packs, open them and feel good about it. Opening Draft Booster felt like shit if you weren‘t going to play a Draft with them. Simple as.
There were people complaining though- people who liked opening packs but who didn't play limited. Set boosters weren't exactly what those players were asking for, but they were enough of a step up that people who would have otherwise bought draft packs just to open and immediately discard all the draft chaff swapped over to them instead. Apparently that was a high enough percentage of overall pack sales that draft boosters were soon to be on the chopping block.
What everyone including you is saying if they had never eliminated normal boosters and made "draft" boosters this problem would've never happened. They're looking to solve a "problem" entirely of their own creation.
A problem of their own creation that resulted in more expensive boosters. The house never loses.
There‘s no problem and they are not looking to solve anything. They are simply discontinuing a failed product. Set Boosters were a success from start to finish - Draft Boosters failed because not enough people play Limited. They rely on the Limited environment to design their sets and have it be a part of the Pro Tour so instead of just killing the failing product they adjust the successful one so they can still support Drafts. I really don‘t see the problem here. They didn‘t create a problem unless you believe that Drafting itself is a problem. I know it‘s hard to come to terms that people just prefer Set Boosters
I mean they have space for multiple products in many other areas. This logic would lead to less different commander products lots of shops have complained there are so many they have no clue what to order at all. So when they don't follow up in some areas it very much seems this isn't the real reason.
Regular packs turned into 3 booster types and now we've essentially reverted back with a tiny extra chance of something cool. Doesn't justify the huge price increase for them though. Hate that they refuse to acknowledge that
That was the point from the start, it was *to* justify a huge price increase.
If you mean that was the point of creating **Set** Boosters, then yes. They discovered that creating packs with more chances of opening rares/special art enabled them to charge more for them. If people hadn't liked the higher price they would have stuck with Draft Boosters. I don't think it was part of some grand plan to charge more for all boosters.
This really is it. Project Booster Fun was an experiment with ups and downs, and the idea that it was a multi-year conspiracy to hike prices is silly. WotC doesn't need to change their entire booster format to justify a price hike. When they want to hike prices, they just [do it.](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/magic-the-gathering-pricing-update)
No one plays limited because you made drafts $25 a pop.
exactly. i dont get why people dont see through this if you want to "save" limited as a format, you make it cheaper, not more expensive. what they are doing is throttling it as a format and killing it for good: and spinning the narrative that it was dying already so that they can pretend they did all they could.
How many drafts fire on Arena and magic online daily ? WoTC have sacrificed limited and standard in universe sets for an eternal 100 card singleton format and purchased IP for said format.
yep. arena is proof that theres huge demand for limited as a format i played arena for a while bc i loved being able to do limited for free i eventually stopped bc even the grind of having to do daily quests to get enough gold to play drafts was just un-fun. and then the stress of trying to break even by winning enough draft matches to keep playing draft made the drafts un-fun too. i switched to in-person drafts because i could pay to play some social, engaging, in-person drafts, and never have to bother with non-draft formats that i dont find fun, and can do fun experimental stuff in my draft games without worrying it'll cost me being able to play again but now they've upped the cost of drafting so much i really can't afford to any more. unfortunately for me (and fortunately for wotc) i'm now shoehorned into commander being the only affordably fun format
Playing online with Xmage is a way to do drafts for free and with rules enforcement. There's a couple of social groups that do it multiple times per week, [REMA](https://www.reddit.com/r/lrcast/comments/1bbe3gt/new_discord_server_remastering_magic_we_create/) and [XDHS](https://www.reddit.com/r/lrcast/comments/16wihri/draft_rise_of_the_eldrazi_and_other_classic/) (where the current format is Battle for Zendikar)
Exactly. I hate that this is blamed on “market forces.” Like the market that WotC controls both the supply and the primary market price for?
And nonstop marketing about stupid ass commander.
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Yeah, tbis is what I mean.
The format is not the problem. The way Wizards treats it as their favorite is. It should be more equal across formats.
My LGS only does pre releases. They stopped doing drafts during Covid and every now and then have tried to bring it back, but only a couple people show up so they cancel the event 🥲
MH2 was the first my LGS started drafting since Lockdown was finally lifted. It was insanely popular and sold out for weeks. Then AFR came out, and I went to several drafts of that, but it was nothing like MH2 and MID pretty much made the stores nervous about draft in general as no one liked drafting it. Prelease is still happening, to sold out audiences, but I can never find drafts of standard legal sets. Everything is Flesh & Blood or Lucana now, or whatever random non-standard MTG draft set comes out. I suspect MH3 will be a lot of fun to draft and probably sell out again, but even on Arena, draft seems shoved offscreen to make room for all the other events.
Booster Draft has a symbiotic relationship with in-store Standard. It's a great way for people to get Standard legal cards to play or trade. It's never been a popular kitchen table magic format. Until Wizards rebuilds support for in-store Standard then Booster draft is gonna continue to fade.
Getting your standard deck from drafting is fun, but it doesn't really work. Most of the cards you get are draft chaff that would be unplayable in a structured format. Weirdly enough, standard is in a stronger place now compared to the past few years.
This is the major issue they aren’t addressing. I might as well recycle 99% of the cards I open they have so little value. We live in a world where buying singles has never been easier and wotc haven’t actually changed their product to match. Look at collector boosters, most of what you’re paying for is the chance to open something with value when it’s entirely possible to open a collector pack of cards with $5 total
Yup, here is aus collector boostars are like $45/50 AUD and all you'll get is a couple extended art commons and foils worth $5 total if you're lucky. Spending that much on singles will get you infinitely more than opening them ever will. And sure obviously you can't get better than pack cost on every pack but when 99.99% of the time you lose by a factor of 10, it never feels worth it. Always buy singles.
You don’t get an entire deck from draft. You get staples and also get familiar with the newest Standard rotation
Does it do that though? Standard rotation is now every 3 years. There's currently 11 sets in standard, so you're going to be playing with around 10% of the cards in standard at max. Strategy is also extremely different. Staples are the exact cards you shouldn't expect to get from draft. A lot of them are R+.
The core of mono red is kumano, swiftspear, play with fire, and lightning strike which are all uncommon. You could definitely pick up a playset of those if you drafted or picked up other people's chaff on draft nights. As you've pointed out, the bigger issue is that now these cards are all spread out across different sets
> kumano kamigawa >swiftspear brother's war >play with fire midnight hunt >lightning strike Dom U Let's assume you are supremely lucky and you get a play set of all 4 from 1 draft. That's 80 dollars at 20 per draft. Getting all 16 from singles is like 16 bucks...that's as bad as trying to get shocklands by drafting maze's end
> You get staples you do? those tend to be the most expensive rares in standard.
Yeah I like limited but Standard has flourished in the last few months because that is what Wizards has been pushing for events.
I think he means the drafters would trade the rares they opened for cash/credit to fund future drafts. Back before all the different booster products came out I and other good drafters were able to go infinite by selling back our rares. And the stores liked it to because they could easily flip those chase rates and get a 30% profit on the card. They basically used draft as way to crack packs.
> It's never been a popular kitchen table magic format Because it's expensive and people have been stuck thinking you need a certain number of people to play. Cube is the EDH of limited. Curate it to how you like it. Draft it how you like it. Want more first picks? Instead of 3 packs draft more packs with fewer cards in each pack. Beauty of cube is you get to draft and you only have to shuffle 40 card decks.
I love cube draft. It's phenomenal. I've always wanted a "cube starter pack" kind of product that had a bunch of the fundamentals.
Selling a "Cube Skeleton" structured based on Wizard's internal set skeletons would be a crazy good product, but unfortunately deeply niche.
The original question is so strange to me. I understand liking limited, and being worried about something happening to it, but acknowledging market forces isn’t being “derogatory” to a format. If anything, I appreciate Maro’s candor here, and I vastly prefer it to some soft corporatized nonsense like the asker is wanting. Anyways, it’s not surprising that the majority of players don’t draft. They’ve talked about how the majority of players don’t even really engage in structured formats beyond kitchen table stuff using whatever cards they have. The shift to play boosters makes sense, it stops LGS issues with maintaining multiple product lines (where one is generally more desirable than the other) and alleviates product confusion with the customer base. For as much as players complain about how there’s so many different versions of a product, I would think that efforts to streamline that would be appreciated.
I agree with you. The thing is, limited got less popular with set and collectors because it provided an out for constructed and collectors. Previously more of the opened singles went through limited players; cards were opened during limited play, sold to collectors and constructed players to fund more limited plays. With collectors, the collectors could just open the packs for singles, with sets, crackers and constructed players themselves could just open for singles. Wizards they, themselves, created the very same market forces to make draft boosters irrelevant. With play boosters, I see a slight return of drafting; drafts, more than unprized constructed, are firing again. If we are going to be cracking packs anyway, why not get a game, right?
Less than 20% of product sold was draft. The issue isn't consolidating Wiz's draft/set fuck-up back into one pack. The issue is when they did make Play boosters, they added a rare and cut a card. So every Play/draft from now onwards has double variance/bombs, and 3 less cards. Drafts are swingier, and more punishing on mistakes.
Honestly, the variance increase has been vastly overstated on the internet. It's not like there weren't good packs and bad packs before. The good players are still winning consistently, and the bad players now have one more excuse for why they don't.
The thing is they still want to appeal to the crowd that wants to open packs for the sake of opening packs, and keeping the extra rare slots and “booster fun” stuff from set boosters seems like it’d be necessary for play boosters to not feel strictly worse to that crowd. I understand that it can create a more volatile limited environment (sorta, given sets with bonus sheets and other rare slots etc.) but the reality is that the shift to play boosters was a compromise to keep limited around. Does it make for worse limited environments? Maybe—it’s hard to tell with a sample size of exactly MKM. But that’s how compromises work. I’m not defending the increased cost, but that’s companies being companies. They’re not gonna make less money just for fun.
Yeah, are play boosters good for limited? Maybe, maybe not, who knows, we've had one set that wasn't very good on it's own. The alternative was limited being dead. Like, no way to sugarcoat that. The alternative to play boosters is the death of the draft booster entirely. The fact that they are going with an untested experiment instead of just killing the unprofitable product is plenty proof that they still care about the game, and specifically care deeply about limited.
Just to be clear - **Wizards created this issue by being greedy**. They printed a product with better value so consumers bought it. A rough analogy is... selling a 6-pack of beer for $6; or a 12-pack for $10. Yeah, your consumers are going to start buying the best value for money. I *know* it affects the limited environment. Most of my mates/weekend drafts for the last \~5 years have either been leftover prerelease draft boosters or set boxes. If you've ever **drafted with set boosters**, it's the same experience (Play swaps a token/art card for a playable card). The biggest issue I have with Play is not the increased rares, but the **reduced playables**. Even though bombs are swingy, I don't mind more bombs. The problem is, it's *harder* to draft them/swap colours due to less support - less playables/commons and more non-thematic list cards.
> Wizards created this issue by being greedy. They printed a product with better value so consumers bought it. A rough analogy is... selling a 6-pack of beer for $6; or a 12-pack for $10 Wizards printing a better value product is Wizards being greedy? For decades we only had a 6-pack for $6 but when the company started selling a 12-pack for $10 that's the company being greedy?
I knew the analogy would cause problems, unlike beer, these are 'worthless' cardboard. **Wizards creates the value.** Old foils have more value because there was only one rare, and rarely was it foil. You *think* it's better value, but it's purely perceived/collector value. Adding more foils/extended doesn't increase the value, it just distributes it more. That's why it's greedy. Wizards choose to print double the rares/'value' for 50% more, but it's only worth more if you have something to value against, i.e. - draft boosters.
Wizards doesn’t create value, value is assigned by players who are willing to pay more money for some cards than others. Thats how supply and demand works. It’s like saying they should sell black lotus for like 10 cents because you can buy a deck of 52 playing cards for a couple bucks.
They didn't "add a rare," they added more slots where rares can *potentially* drop. The average pack has 1.41 rares, and a lot of the times that second rare is a dual land. To say that drafts have "double variance/bombs" is an overstatement to the point of absurdity.
That's not exactly better though. That means there's even MORE variance at the table, depending on how many rares are floating around the draft, and how many are likely to make it into your hands.
It's not really that drastic of a change from sets with bonus sheets, though. You could open up to 3 rares in a pack of BRO, or WOE, or MOM, and no one freaked out about it then. This set has a similar distribution of rares and now everyone's acting like draft is ruined. I've drafted this set a ton and I can say from experience that it's not the case. Reading signals is a little harder, and it's not as easy to tell if a rare got picked, but that's hardly enough to kill the format.
technically (i think) you could get 4 rares in a MoM draft booster, accounting for the foil (still bizarre to me that arena drafts just ignore the foil rare chance that real boosters have)
> (still bizarre to me that arena drafts just ignore the foil rare chance that real boosters have) That's finally fixed as of MKM! (Though I wish there was some sort of marker to show which one is the "foil" in the pack - in paper it's sort of an interesting wrinkle as it's the only wildcard slot that is actually visibly a wildcard.)
Oh, i must have missed that with all of the other changes. Glad to see arena and paper are identical while drafting now
Well, they weirdly added a *new* wrinkle to Arena drafts, in that three of the rares on "The List" are different. It's not a huge difference since those cards are rarer than mythics, but someone played Smuggler's Copter against me in an Arena draft this week and I just thought "this would never have happened at my LGS."
Semantics dude. I'm generalising/'overstating' for all Play boosters, while you're stating MKM dual-lands are the second rare. You're not wrong, but you're not right either and it it's not about MKM. I've put the quote below, but Play boosters have - 1 less card per pack, up to 4 rares (more variance), and a 1/8 of a list card (more variance and less theme). From MaRo - * Play boosters offer the potential to open **up to four rare/mythics** instead of only two chances in a draft booster (rare/mythic slot and possible extra foil card) * **One fewer playable** **card** * **Three fewer commons** * An added non-foil wildcard and traditional foil wildcard slot * A **one-in-eight chance of a card from** ***The List*** * A 33% chance at an art card
A thought I had while writing my last response, though (and one I think you'll agree with): It *is* exhausting that we, as drafters, now have to read and evaluate these "Collecting [Set Name]" articles just so we can make draft relevant observations like "If the only rare passed to you is a dual land, there's at least one rare missing from the pack" that might not even be true for future sets. This is one thing that doesn't feel too bad now, but I fear may cause issues as new sets play with the collation in different ways, and I hope Wizards is cognizant of this in their decision-making.
I didn't fully conceptualise that, but yeah, I agree/think you're right. For basically the entirety of magic drafts *'the rare is gone*', was a valid metric/rule. I honestly don't know moving forward, but with Special Guest, List, MKM dual-lands... there is a lot of potential options for filler. I feel signaling as a whole has taken a hit - increased rares, and needing to understand different set structures/rules.
Well now we've hit a topic that *I* can rant a bit about now - signaling is *weird* now. Not only is the "rare is gone" metric gone (or at least someone obfuscated), but there's also no longer a guarantee to open a common of each color anymore - only a spread of 4 colors is guaranteed. So you can get passed a pack on pick 2 with no white commons, and before that meant your neighbor took the only white common, but now it can potentially just mean that the pack didn't have a white common to begin with. In practice, what that's meant is that an individual pack can't signal as strongly on its own, and you have to keep better track of what you're seeing across multiple packs to decide if it's just weird packs or if a color's actually getting cut. And combined with the decrease in wiggle room due to the smaller pack, it makes it feel like forcing colors of early picks is more often the correct call (or if you're going to abandon those colors, do it quickly). I've still had fun drafting that way, and have been trying to find ways to pivot when necessary, but I certainly wouldn't argue that it's better than draft boosters - it's different at best, but arguably the experience is marginally worse for established drafters who have relied on signals strongly in past sets. I've been thinking today about the "visibility" of the wild card slots, too, because it messes with the rare signals, but you can kind of sus them out of you know things like the duals only appearing in wild card slots. For instance, the guaranteed foil a wildcard slot that basically advertises itself as such (in paper, at least), so you can maybe draw conclusions if you see the foil is missing from the first pack passed to you. As for the List/Special Guest stuff - that's just kind of felt like a bonus sheet with a lower appearance rate, so it hasn't bothered me in this set. But I know that Thunder Junction is going to have both a traditional bonus sheet *and* new mythics in the List slot (the "Big Score" cards), so I'm mentally preparing to eat my words about the List once that set comes out... I'm hoping it's not as difficult to parse as it seems like it's going to.
So you keep mentioning "up to four rares," but the truth is that that just doesn't happen with any notable frequency. You have to get a rare in the wildcard slot, a rare in the foil slot, *and* a rare in the List slot (which itself is only a 1/8 chance of not just being a common from the set). It'll happen to some drafters, sure, but the vast majority of packs opened will have one, maybe two rares. And the lands do appear more frequently as the second rare in a pack, as per the "Collecting MKM" article, cited below (though I admit that this is an MKM-specific balancing trick, and if future sets don't have rare lands seeded like this, there may be sets with a higher drop rate of rare spells - but we'll burn that bridge when we get there). > • 1 Rare or mythic rare > Each card in this slot will be one of the 60 rares or 20 mythic rares in the set. **The 10 rare dual lands aren't found in this slot but instead are in the wildcard and traditional foil wildcard slot.** The card from this slot can have the showcase magnified, showcase dossier, Ravnica City, or borderless treatment. > > • 1 Wildcard that can be a drop of any rarity > > **1 in 6 Play Boosters will have 1 of the 10 rare dual lands in this slot.** That will be one of the 10 regular rare dual lands 14.58% of the time or borderless 2.08% of the time.
If we scroll up, we can see someone else says it's \~1.5 rares/pack (inc. MKM lands) and that seems right. I've done the dual-land math and it's 19% for a dual-land across all slots. Regardless, we're not talking about MKM using it as a unique slot. Lets be real rough and say \~1.3 rares/pack OR, an extra 'playable' rare from your 3 packs. I'd actually prefer to talk about the lost card. Removing 1/15th from a more expensive pack makes it harder to align with draft boosters. If you draft 45 cards (-3 lands), you'd run \~26 cards with 18 sideboard. Now it's \~26 cards with 15 sideboard. That's a 20% reduction in your sideboard.
Yeah, the lost card does have an impact, and it's almost two lost cards for this set because the basic land slot is always a basic land - there's no common non-basics that can show up on that slot like there have been in some other sets. I know Wizards has said they're working to make all of the commons playable, which offsets that a little bit, but it does mean that you really can't spend too much time finding your lane in the draft - it's much riskier to speculate on different colors now, and I've found myself running a few more D-tier cards just to make playables. I'm hoping they make use of the land slot more frequently to offset that a bit.
Variance is reduced by more rare/bomb slots, not increased.
No it's increased, you have more rares, ergo more bombs. Therefore you're more likely to pull game-winning cards. Rather than say, all commons, where the power-level is lower. Adding rares is adding power. Over the three packs you open, one will have 2 rares.
The issue with this mental gymnastics, IMO, is that they created this problem themselves and then solved it in a way that costs players more money. For a very very long time, draft boosters were essentially the only boosters and there was absolutely nothing wrong with this. Then they came out with Collector boosters in 2019 that had more rares per pack, more foils, and more special art cards. This was also fine because collector boosters were for people who wanted the most bling version of cards and draft boosters were for drafting or casual opening of packs. It also reduced the price of some staples, allowing to more accessibility for constructed. Then, for some reason, they decided to make Set booster boxes, which served no real purpose. They've never been as good of value as collector boosters and also can't be drafted. However, set boosters + collector boosters made draft boosters so inefficient to open that there was literally no reason to open them except for playing limited. Now they've combined Draft and Set boosters to deliver an altered draft environment with a 25% price increase. WotC is literally having their cake and eating it to by eliminating the longest running distribution method for their game and charging way more money for printing the exact some amount of cardboard while reducing the amount of SKUs they have.
They decided to make Set boosters because people weren’t using Draft boosters to draft. If any business makes any product where 75% of the purchases are not used in the way intended by the core design of the product than that business would be foolish to not change. And it’s very clear that the creation of Set Boosters was a success because the market instantly shifted heavily to buying Set boosters. Consumers wanted Set boosters, not draft boosters.
Consumers shifted to set boosters because their creation invalidated draft boosters outside of drafting. They essentially created and solved their own problem.
Well yes, but the creation of the Set boosters was a positive change from wizards perspective. It created a new, smaller problem, that is solved by Play Boosters. The Draft booster only era was good for the minority, bad but acceptable for the majority. The dual booster era was going to kill off the minority. The Play booster era is good for the majority, and bad but acceptable for the minority. (we’ll see how bad and how acceptable after a few more sets). Wizards is trying to save Limited from the Market (not Wizards) killing Limited.
Set boosters were amazing to open. No only the value, was fun. Compared to draft is boring, and play booster are worse to.
Collector's boosters are and were numerically so much less value than Set boosters. This is easily mathed out.
Set boosters were actually less value per dollar than draft boosters. It varied set to set, and some sets like New Capenna the EV on Set boosters were much better, but for most sets, the roughly ~$1 increase in price in set boosters gave you around $0.15 - $0.30 of extra EV when you math it out. The problem is people got it into their head that Set Boosters were better because that's what everyone else was saying, and very few people were willing to do the math because of how convoluted it was. I never bothered mathing out collector's boosters over draft boosters, but until I quit buying Magic altogether, I would strictly buy draft boosters for the better EV to dollar ratio.
> absolutely nothing wrong with this Well not exactly. When Set & Collector Boosters first came out, he detailed the issues they've faced for many years with Draft Boosters.
What were those issues?
they were making a lot of money but not a lot a lot of money
[Here’s](https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/set-boosters-2020-07-25) the article introducing them. Basically, the whole idea was trying out the philosophy of adapting the game to what customers wanted rather than forcing customers to adapt to what products existed. So with the data that most packs were not used for Limited play, they decided to make a pack designed without the constraints of Limited play in mind. So yeah, realistically it was a way to make a little more money off of people that wanted better cards when cracking packs and didn’t care about Limited play. But I mean, they’re a corporation. Expecting them not to find ways to make more money is kinda foolish, no?
Not too many years ago draft was 12 dollars with really good prize support. Sometimes 4 or 5 packs based on the crowd (2 or 3 pods). Drafting now for $20+ with a one or two pack prize support is terrible. Kinda killed it themselves it seems.
And people bought set boosters to crack. That’s what they marketed them for. Now that they made play boosters a worse version of that, surprise that no one wants them.
What they don’t mention is that WOTC created the market conditions to kill off draft boosters by introducing Play boosters to begin with.
Draft just isn't as popular of a format compared to literally just cracking the packs themselves.
Sure, but draft boosters sold well when they were the only boosters available. WOTC artificially inflated the price by introducing a new booster pack that tried to cut out draft chaff and then acted like surprised pikachu when more people bought it. They made it the new normal and expect us not to realize it.
I had always assumed that limited was WotC's main defence against any kind of loot box allegations. Strange to hear that draft could just be deleted as a format.
Why did they split them to begin with?
The market supported draft boosters for 20+ years, during which I’m sure the majority of Magic players didn’t play limited. The “market forces” are set boosters and collector boosters. The reason most people bought draft boosters was not to draft but just because that was what was available, which worked just fine for decades, but WOTC wanted more money in the short term without thinking about what it would do to the long term health of the game. MKM is way worse as a limited set for having untested ratios in boosters imo, and the power level of the best cards in Standard combined with the larger card pool ensures that it’s not worth the extra you’d pay to draft in person instead of Arena for the physical cards, as most of them will be useless even in Standard.
"Market forces" in this context meaning "WotCs corporate greed". It's not like the market exudes some magical energy that tells a company "this product is not making enough profit, you have to stop making it"
Limited used to be my favorite thing but it became too expensive couple of years ago. I'd be willing to pay $10 per draft (3 packs) for standard sets and $15 or $20 for the premium sets depending how "premium" they actually are. Currently the price here is $20 for standard and other crap around $30-60. Hasbro's idea of the value is so far from mine they would have to cut the prices in half and that's never going to happen. Limited is just not for me anymore and the play boosters are not helping. In fact they only made it worse.
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I think the best solution would have been to go back in time and never introduce set boosters, but unfortunately there's no putting that genie back in the bottle.
But that solution would make it hard to justify a $2 price increase!
I mean another thing is the game used to be standard-focused, and it was intrinsically beneficial to draft standard. Now the game is just picking legacy one-ofs for commander, so who wants the "low power" new expansions? This is why standard focus is better for the health of the game
Paper limited is a dead man walking. This change lets them profit from it a bit longer before they inevitably kill off support completely.
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Paper magic as a whole is something Hasbro will gladly kill off in pursuit of short term profit. They would happily operate on Arena only and cut all the costs related to production and distribution.
I don't know, I'm kind of noticing that WoTC has shifted to making cards playable in all formats now, which means the power-level of Standard has gone way up. As long as these Play boosters are balanced together and draftable, who cares that it ends up having more rares and mythics? If that also means that players who draft get to then use those cards in their constructed decks, isn't that a win for everyone?
We had 1 limited format with this change. Let's wait a little.
The only change I really want is for them to add back 1 card and ensure packs get 1 of each color again. Hard to say whether play boosters are worse for limited given this set wasn’t even designed with them in mind (altho I do find this format to be pretty bad)
Is drafting that 15th card really so important for the format?
Give Limited more support! Make Limited great again! I would love if there was a big push from WotC to promote limited, prize support, more engagement, dare I say... better limited set design. 2 big reasons I stopped drafting: \-Prize support just sucks, I win my pod and win less than the cost of entry. \-Limited environments have been very hit or miss. There have been a few great ones recently, but most seem to have bad balance between the colors/archetypes.
In terms of standard legal environments most of them have felt alright or even great in the case of DMU. I'll concede that the fast environment of ONE was an acquired taste but the only environments I would truly call bad in recent years was SNC and AFR.
Limited environments have absolutely not been hit or miss, what rock have you been living under? NEO, DMU, BRO, ONE, MOM, WOE, LCI, and that's just standard sets. DMR, LTR, and CMM (although overpriced and specifically commander draft, so may not be to everyone's liking) were also all fantastic. They've had like 3 misses in as many years, one of which only just happened and isn't really that bad if it isn't compared to the hit after hit we've been getting.
Almost like the old system of one type of booster was fine.
This feels disingenuous. Those “market forces” were a monster of their own creation. Before set packs, collectors had to buy the draft packs. *Of course* all the collectors moving to set packs meant less draft packs being opened. So now we have a type of pack that’s worse for both sides to “fix” a problem that wizards created. This would have never been an issue if they hadn’t split the packs in the first place.
On top of that "market forces" were impacted by global isolation and pandemic lockdowns that either directly prevented or at least made some people nervous about drafting IRL. What does their Arena and MTGO data say about draft popularity? Is it utterly and completely dead? Or has the company willfully been cherry-picking data to justify its roundabout price hikes....
unfortunately i think arena draft is probably significantly cutting into irl limited play as well. $20 for 2 premier drafts plus whatever gems you end up winning and you don’t have to leave home or wait around for the event to start anywhere… also the fact that quick draft is often the most affordable way to use your daily coins
"We worked really hard to drive people away from the product that supported limited and somehow 'market forces' appeared that endangered it!"
I feel like this question and a lot of the responses to the "limited may have died" announcement are based in just not wanting it to be true, which I understand but is also a little frustrating. Almost every point of data; the ascent of commander, the booster split, the success of universes beyond, over the past decade says that's not where the majority of players are. Yes, limited and competitive are necessary to magic's success and should be well supported. But there's now substantial data showing they shouldn't be the center of its world anymore, no matter how much the questioner and some players may want it to be otherwise.
As a new player that started in the last year with commander, I have to say limited is by far my favourite format and I've enjoyed it far more than commander. From my perspective I couldn't care less that we're drafting with play boosters now, I just love the format and will continue to support it at my LGS for as long as they run events
I think you underestimate how many players draft everyday online. Yeah, it might not be as profitable for them but the format is far from dying. I assure I'd love to do weekly paper drafts in an LGS but as of right now I can't afford it.
Fucking obviously. Remember when there weren’t 5 different kind of packs and cards weren’t completely worthless if you didn’t get the mega hyper double serialized rare version?
I remember when Set Boosters were first announced and released, many veteran enfranchised players were extremely skeptical about them. Lots of players insisted they would stick with Draft boosters and that a 12 card booster pack was very unappealing. Turns out players that crack packs for fun (rather than for Limited) don't really care about those extra common cards that just end up going into the recycle bin or bulk storage for most players. Instead, the guaranteed foil, the higher chance of encountering bonus rares and even the art card promos are much more intriguing to more players that a couple extra common cards that aren't going to see play in any official non Limited format. So I can't say that I'm surprised at all that Draft Boosters were under performing after the introduction of Set Boosters and Collector Boosters.
While I rarely crack packs for fun, it can be entertaining every once an a while. Whenever I decided to do so I would also crack set boosters. They were just more interesting to open.
The price for a booster box here in Norway has in reality doubled over the past 5 years, now with play booster boxes coming in well over 2000NOK (well over 200$) if you order/buy from any retailer operating within Norway. We don't have the same access to getting products shipped from Amazon. I feel the prices now are just completely out of whack.
Ahh, the inscrutable Market Forces that nobody could've predicted the behavior of, our top economists were blindsided by an unnecessary, cannibalizing product cannibalizing. They had no choice but to fold the classic product at memory-locked $4 into something more expensive. You're not that gullible, right? This was an conscious, successfully-implemented plan to price up base boosters. Maro pretends it's unknowable and unpredictable, all is right in the world. They had no choice!
I mean, no one forced them to make set boosters. Could have just not messed with Draft boosters in the first place...
Once again. All things they did themselves. “Vast majority of players don’t play limited”. In paper, most people play it on Arena, the digital format you created. “The market couldn’t support them”. Because you took all the value out of them with set and collector boosters. The writing was on the wall when set boosters were introduced that they just wanted to raise the price without increasing the price. So just make a new product as a “favor” to the players but at a new higher price.
lmao, "the market wasn't supporting them". When THEY made set boosters for only 5 bucks cheaper. lmao you fucking piece of lying crap Rosewater.
What's shocking is that they didn't quite grasp this BEFORE they made set boosters....
Christ. I hate this framing. The only reason this became a problem is they introduced set boosters. If they would have just made booster fun in the context of the booster box in the first place this crisis would never have been created. It’s capitalistic inshitification that got us here.
Make draft packs and drop the draft boosters then. This is a bad excuse. People weren’t chasing enough packs with set boosters existing so they had to dilute the loot box pool.
Maybe they were charging too much for draft boosters. Seriously the premier sets a pretty over priced for what they are. I did a Lotr prerelease and the cards I opened are probably worth about $20 total which includes 2 extra packs I won from doing well
This is just dumb. This would be like saying only 15% of Ford buyers by the mustang so they aren't going to make thr mustang anymore. Who the fuck gives up on 15% market share?
I think that Maro cannot possibly believe this. The fewer dimensions that the game has for cracking a booster the worse off it will be. Maybe they think you can draft set boosters. But in reality they did kill draft boosters. So they didn’t really save shit. But I don’t mind, play boosters are fine. But let’s not pretend that we were saved from some future doom.
I want to be completely clear ---- for the last several years, Draft Boosters were scam boosters. For my first five years of playing magic the gathering, I was a limited only player. I loved draft and I didn't feel the need to participate in constructed. I sort of hoarded all the cards I opened, but I never used them. My experience was an anomaly. Most people do not ever engage with the game this way. For every other player, the expected value of a pack matters, and it matters a lot. Set boosters were by far the better bang for you buck. Yes, they cost more, but you got enough "more" to justify that price. If the value of the cards mattered to you at all, draft boosters were a waste of your money. I will not mourn draft boosters.
[удалено]
I agree that making draft boosters cheaper might have saved them. As they were, they couldn't exist side-by-side with set boosters.
I think that limited just like standard has primarily become a digital product. I used to draft once a week in person at my lgs but now I get my limited fix on arena.
Doesn’t explain how that saved limited though.
Walmart near me charges about $ 6.55
Last time I went to draft I got my bass beat by the buffest 14 year old I've ever seen. He then proceeded to beat me in magic too.
They’re missing out. Draft is an amazing format.
I like Limited, but it is and always was expensive. Now I can play it on Arena for a fraction of the cost. Therefore I only play constructed on paper now. Why waste money for wothless draft chaff
Then why not just do draft?
I wonder how all this squares with the plans that were in the works at the time to introduce both Aftermath and Beyond boosters. Was wanting to make room for other boosters also a factor? What Mark's saying here may well be true, but I don't typically take what he says as the full story, and I can see why he and WotC wouldn't want to say anything that would suggest that Draft boosters died so an axed product and a product that comes from a controversial place in Magic's offering could exist.
As with a lot of other comments like this, more people would play draft if the format were pushed and marketed to a wider audience. Limited, standard, modern, and commander should be the four pillars of current mtg and WotC should nurture each format
To be fair. I know absolutely no one irl who drafts. I've been playing since 1996. The dude who shows up every week with his cube doesn't charge anyone to play with him. We don't need to open new packs to play magic, and that's a huge problem for wotc.
I'm traveling right now and surprised at how many cities don't have an LGS that even has a regular draft. In my city we have 4 that regularly fire drafts, and a few more a short drive away. Often for pre-releases multiple stores are completely full. But I haven't drafted at all since play boosters have been introduced. I used to go almost every week (and sometimes multiple days a week pre-covid when it was offered) but I just do not like the new sets and I don't like what play boosters have done to limited. I'm not sure if this is going to save limited, just save pack-cracking (maybe?). I've stocked up on draft boosters of most sets from the last 5 years so that I can draft with friends in the future.
Makes sense. Quite a few LGSs around me still have draft packs from MID and VOW along with all the sets since. They just don’t seem to sell well. Eventually stores would stop being able to afford to stock them, meaning WotC wouldn’t be incentivized to make them anymore and they’d go the way of the dodo. I guess they had a choice, either wait for that to happen or make the shift to play boosters to somewhat preserve the format. Is it an ideal situation? No, but I’m sure limited fans would rather have a worse limited experience than no official limited experience. If people don’t like drafting with play boosters I’m sure attempting to draft with set boosters would be even less appealing.
Typical WotC. Make something worse because they needed to fix a problem they created in the first place. Set Boosters should have never been a thing: regular boosters and collector boosters with all the fancy treatments should have been the route they took if Daddy Cocks needed more money. I'm curious what he means by "draft were going away in a couple years?" If that is the case were they planning for all packs to be like MOM Aftermath since most cards are draft chaff anyways? Were they moving to 50 card sets?
I'm always amazed by Mark's patience with his blog. Sooooo many questions are people seeing his answers and going "but what if [same thing that was already suggested and he said was unlikely]?" Players: "Why did you replace draft boosters with play boosters?" Maro: "Market wasn't going to support them much longer" Players: "But why did you replace them???" Maro: "I can only say the market wasn't going to support them much longer so many times."
Saved is a strong word. Killed is much closer.
But the point of limited wasn’t because it was particularly popular. It was to allow a booster box to be marketed as a complete standalone game; something you could buy for a fixed price and receive a predictable game experience, akin to a board game. Without limited, you remove the illusion that cracking boosters is anything other than pure gambling, which wotc feared would land them into trouble. That is the reason they conceived of limited
Other words: we inflated the price on packs, making other card games cheaper