Magic is dying thread v3

Let's keep this grievance-train rolling! Wizards won't listen anyway but that's not going to stop you from bitching.

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echomtg.com/blog/post/45/the-number-of-magic-players-worldwide-by-year/
shareholder.com/visitors/dynamicdoc/document.cfm?documentid=3185&companyid=HAS&page=1&pin=&language=EN&resizethree=yes&scale=100&zid=ccdb903d
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First for there being no evidence that MaRo ever said there were 20 million active players.

Second for "diversity" isn't necessarily bad so long as it fits the scenario, just like sex appeal.

inb4 cucked user posting pictures of women and blacks with YAAASSS

How about we just don't keep this going?
The whole thing started from a misunderstanding of terms and it's just being willfully ignorant at this point to continue.

Cards cost $20+ a piece and it's a common thing. It doesn't have to be literally gone from this world and dead to be a disgusting husk of its former self plodding around being supported by whales and other idiots.

Price out a competitive Modern/Eternal deck you own (or look one up) today and price it out from five years ago. Calculate the annual inflation. Whatever that number is you got, it's an unacceptable number and easily well over 20%.

Almost everyone I know that plays Magic has started playing EDH only. I'm guessing there is no way for Wizards to count those players since most of their data comes from DCI number signups for actual standard / modern / draft. I'll draft every once in a while, but fuck standard.

> The whole thing started from a misunderstanding of terms and it's just being willfully ignorant at this point to continue.

That isn't the whole story:

echomtg.com/blog/post/45/the-number-of-magic-players-worldwide-by-year/

Maro used 12 million *active* players in his post. Hasbro refered also refered to 12 million *active* players in their annual shareholder report in 2012.

The 20 million player number is an estimated number based on the revenue growth in the following years after the 2012 report, done by various sites (not stated by WotC or Maro). So either the number of active players stagnated OR it saw a significant rise and fall in the past few years.

What the fuck happened to mtgsalvation im locked out of my account until i make a fucking twitch account. Where do i go now

Perhaps you would be more interesting in playing an LCG where you will also spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on cards. Or maybe wargaming minis, or board games, or comic books, or role playing handbooks and modules, or action figures, or video games, or any other hobby where you will put in the same amount of money people do into their Magic cards.

Also, have you tried not being poor?

If anyone's interested, you can dig through Hasbro's annual report to glean something about Magic.

shareholder.com/visitors/dynamicdoc/document.cfm?documentid=3185&companyid=HAS&page=1&pin=&language=EN&resizethree=yes&scale=100&zid=ccdb903d

They're a bit more secretive than most companies about how their subsidiaries are doing, it seems. That said, it's more than likely innocuous; maybe a defense against buyout offers for brands.

I think the issue with everyone going to EDH is because:

A) Standard, Modern, Legacy can be absurdly expensive because...

B) There is a large range of power. You could have a Tier-2 Modern deck but everyone in your local area plays Tier-1 or whatever. Having to conform to other's spending habits sucks either up or down. I don't wanna play shitty vampires so it's not a fucking stomp.

3) Netdecking is fucking rampant. It's fucking boring. EDH is casual enough and due to the rules of EDH there are few netdecks and EDH isn't consistant enough at the casual level that every game feels the same. You can play with/against the same deck 3-4 times and go up against different strats or combos each time; a lot more fun for multiple plays.

4) I only have to pay for a single doubling season or a single Stoneforge Mystic etc. Fuck buying a playset.

EDH looks like the future. It's so easy to just fall into it because new players don't have 4 copies of a single good card to build a deck around or whatever and most don't want to be forced into a net deck or be forced to play at the level of their local group.

Oh I'm doing just well thanks. Thanks for the ad hominem I appreciate it.

I'm just expressing my concern for people who aren't doing as financially well as me because their well being means I have good people to talk and play with instead of this barren wasteland of events not firing and a store infested by people whose sole concern is sharking every scrap of value out of every trade and rule lawyering their way to victory at the expense of new players who don't want to play in this shitheap not only because the people are shit but because its expensive.

Wargaming minis are equally overpriced. Everything else you can buy tons of for the cost of a single competitive deck.

>Also, have you tried not being poor?
It's not really a question of affordability. It's the fact that you're paying more for a deck of cards than most people pay for a months rent.
That's a little excessive for some printed cardboard by any standard imo.

Wargaming is probably going to slowly decay with 3D printing getting cheaper and more accurate. It won't be perfect but I wouldn't be surprised if people with 3D printers started marketing to their local group that they'd make them some cheapo 3d printed minis for whatever gay game they are playing. They'd never go big obviously due to copyright but definitely start leeching from the greedy companies.

Things cost money, what a revelation.

The 20 million players estimation is total players, not just active players. Active players are the ones currently buying cards and attending events, the other 8 million are players who own cards from being an active player in the past but aren't currently buying or playing.

>he thinks wargaming and comic books aren't dying

Not going to bother reading three threads of panicked idiots.

Has anybody bothered to point out that whenever a company says they have X consumers, what they are really saying is "we have X consumers as measured by this metric"?

There is no 40% drop. There is a 40% difference in metrics used. If you ask MARO how many players buy packs at walmart from time to time and how many players show up for FNM every week, you will get wildly different numbers.

Rudy from alpha investments knows this shit. He's not an idiot, he's just a youtuber that know you will all eat up bullshit. This is clickbait and fake news.

what if i go to pre-releases and a single draft of supplemental sets
i intend to draft unstable a shitload, assuming the other half of the set isn't more black border vanilla cards with unfunny jokes on them

Good riddance imo.
Maybe the companies will finally get the boot to the ass they've needed for years when people can print their own minis with templates from the internet.

Sure they do. But there's a point where it just becomes silly, and magic is way beyond that point.
Prices like that just limit the hobby to a few diehard nerds who don't have anything else to spend money on.
Anybody else has better things to do with 500-1000$ than spending it on a deck of cards, no matter how much they like the game otherwise.

It just hurts the people who actually enjoy playing while benefitting only a few elitist neckbeards who think their overpriced deck they copied from the internet somehow makes them pro.
It's pay2win at its finest.

It's been pointed out several times, but someone keeps making new threads because the circlejerk is more fun than the truth.

The conversation has shifted beyond the decline in attendance/population. The quality of life has declined.

i don't understand why people actively play standard unless they're shitters looking to get "value" off of reselling things
why pay like $400 every year or whatever the rotation is now since wotc has changed it so much
modern/vintage/legacy/etc are also retarded in that their entry's multiple thousands of dollars but at least those cards (usually) keep a fair amount of their value and aren't changed around every 6 months.

>The conversation has shifted to whatever we believe supports our opinions.
How convenient.

True. It's probably a few years off yet but i figure it'll be the same thing that happened to music when cd burners became affordable (if on a smaller scale because it's not as widespread).

Once most people have a 3d printer at home or can buy one for half the price of a decent army there's really no point paying premium for minis.

Games are most fun when they're fresh and new and seem full of possibility. Remember the feeling when you cracked your first few packs? Remember the smell? So you remember when you cobbled together your first deck? Or won your first draft? But time sours things. You begin see the flaws in the game's design. You get utterly destroyed by people who spent more money than you. What seemed at first to be an endless variety of decks boils down to variations on a theme: aggro, combo, control, aggro, midrange, control, combo, aggro..

You can try to spice it it up - perhaps you start playing a lot of commander in an attempt to capture the flavor of those early kitchen table games. But it doesn't quite work. Something just isn't right. No matter how sweet your pulls are, the pack doesn't smell as sweet as it did the first time. Humans crave variety, and even the freshest, most exciting expansion is still just a twist on the same game you've been playing for years.

You can blame the SJWs, or the corporate gremlins at Hasbro. You can blame Maro, or /pol/, or netdecking, or fascist art directors. But the truth is this: Magic hasn't changed as much you think, but you've changed more than you know.

Just switch to a better game, like Yugioh

It's incredible that people can't understand that the corporate bigwigs can and will twist the data to say whatever they want it to say. There's a big difference between someone who plays the occasional game of EDH but never buys packs to someone who goes to a draft every Saturday and reads Maro's blog. You use one set of figures when you want to big up your player count for the investors, and another set when you want to figure out your internal expansion strategy.

Too bad circlejerking, self-pitying, and crying about SJWs is more fun than actually thinking.

>Anybody else has better things to do with 500-1000$ than spending it on a deck of cards, no matter how much they like the game otherwise.
Good thing you can play magic for as little as $20 then

You can twist MaRo's words around all you want, the truth is very simple: Even Star City Games had to diminish the ammount of events they run compared to 2010-2014 because less people are playing even if more people are buying boosters by the case at Wal Mart.

LGS are dying because WotC refuses to support them in a meaningful way, and that means they'll have to
>a) Start spending millions in advertising
>b) Live with decreasing numbers as anybody who doesn't already have a playgroup of friends finds it impossible to actually play the game with other people
>c) Both of the above

Already did. It's fucking fun. No worries about mana screw. Waifus. Some neato art. Cheap. As. Fuck. and most of the people i've played with are pretty casual.

I wouldn't say it's better than magic, but it's pretty fun. I've played pokemon TCGO too. That's also fun but I'd argue all decks are pretty similar. Seriously, why the fuck do we keep playing magic?

Habit and nostalgia?

>As little as $20 dollars

Enjoying that 10% win rate deck? Fuck, I too can make a deck with 45 lands and 15 usable cards.

I know what you are trying to say, but good luck playing against the people who HAVE spent 100, 300, 1000 dollars on their deck. The problem isn't just the price, it's the fact that every local group has a different price range that they are confortable with. Playing against the fagleague that plays 500+ dollars of EDH decks? You're 100% fucked trying to play against that group. Same with every other format.

They sold out to twitch. You go here now.

Stop playing constructed against power players.

Also sunk-cost fallacy

Oh ok, I'll just go find another group that enjoys playing homeless-tier money decks... so many of those.

Does a game even deserve to live for 20+ years? Like, haven't it been milked of all of its potential, isn't it time to move on to other games? It's why the unstable spoilers are so fun, because they can pull from all the previously impossible design space to make things fresh again, but if they started pumping out unsets I bet even that well would start to dry out.

No you faggot, I mean play kitchen table. No person should enter any hobby expecting to follow the meta and play competitively from day one. Go back to LoL and press f6 every ten minutes you tryhard loser

Didn't WotC also kill off lots of LGS in non-US countries since they applied their retarded "one size fits all" standards which don't work well in other countries, especially in the EU?

but the other card games are weaboo shit.

yes. there's plenty of games like dnd that are old and still deserve to be played.

mtg just stands out because it's a moneymaker.

>Seriously, why the fuck do we keep playing magic?
yugioh is a clusterfuck and i enjoy just playing the new set once every 4 months or whatever

where the fuck do you live that the only people playing magic you can find are autists who only play $400 decks

Reminder that wizards is supposedly creating an mtg based mmo. No news about it recently, but it may increase interest in the game.

This is actually the problem with pokemon right now. They've literally run out of design space. They've made EEEE ECKS pokemon which were absurdly powerful for their time.. then they made GEEEEE ECKS pokemon who are even more powerful. There are no new mechanics, no new strategies, just 100% pure power creep. It's incredible really.

Yu-gi-oh is weird. They just keep changing the fucking rules and make entirely new mechanics that don't even work with old cards. Mostly because old cards don't synergize with anything but the 'tribe' they are associated with. "Kozmo" decks will never get new cards or synergize with new cards ever... because "Kozmo" is a contained way to play and all the cards call out specific other "Kozmo" cards: they only work with each other. It's a weird balancing mechanic and I'm not good at explaining it.

>7th seas
dead
>warlord
dead
>conquest
dead
other games that aren't weebs
most often dead.

it's more common then you think.
a friend used to play up with racist, rich korean kids and came back the worst power gaming dick. I think it was because the rocked expensive decks and picked on the poor faggot because he was white and outgroup.

>I mean play kitchen table.
Why waste money on a £20 deck then? Do as I do and just print £500 decks off. Play 'em at the table. Fuck Magic the Gatherings economic shenanigans. Print off all your cards as anime waifu variants and play with your actual friends, not the ones that pay to play against you under the watchful eye of Wizards of the Cost.

>Getting this angry, even bringing up video games

Ignoring this sperglord. Dunno what she's even trying to say.

>they only work with each other. It's a weird balancing mechanic and I'm not good at explaining it.
It's called "parasitism."

dnd lets you do fucking anything though, it's barely even a "game"

>Print off all your cards as anime waifu variants and play with your actual friends, not the ones that pay to play against you under the watchful eye of Wizards of the Cost.
i don't know if you're being serious or not but i highly recommend this.

and you can play mtg however you want. the formats define competitive play, but you don't have to follow them.

I literally do this.

out of curiosity who do you waifu and onto what cards

>Why waste money on a £20 deck then? Do as I do and just print £500 decks off
I'm not arguing against this. I'm saying don't spout fucking bullshit that a game is too expensive to get into when there are nigh infinite budget options available. Imagine someone saying don't take up golfing as a hobby because high end golf clubs cost $500 each

you can play monopoly however you want, but at some point you're not playing monopoly anymore
that point is crossed much later with tabletop RPGs than with magic

...

Vintage could save mtg.

It's the only fun remaining format. It's crazy, you can pull of ridiculous things, there's tons of combos, and you get to play with the most op cards in the game.

But wizards would essentially need to get rid of the reserved list.

wizards should have gotten rid of the reserved list a decade ago

Vintage has been dead for longer than legacy, and legacy has been dead for well over a decade

Really, they're not all waifu. I just make 'em up as I go along. It's just fun when you're trying to play a tense game and you draw into Alex Jones riding a horse or something.

You can't really print off a good golf club though. You can print off the best deck ever imaginable for £3 instead of spending £500 or more.

vintage and legacy are only unpopular due to buy in costs.

So this thread is still going? Despite the only evidence being some vague statement?
Or is this thread here to complain how the SJW's are ruining magic.

If you hate the game as it is now, just don't play it.

i think most of the trolls left and there's just more-or-less normal discussion of the game now

Provided there's no absolutely asinine self-imposed restriction against it by WotC, they could print slightly stronger versions of reserve list cards with a special rule that the reserve list version card can't be in your library, hand, or graveyard or you lose the game. Something like Black Lotus with scry 1. Maybe feature them with an exile-after-use function as well.

I think the aspies have left. It's just chill people talking about why buying Magic cards isn't intelligent.

or just don't buy new product, avoid official WotC events, and hold private; unsanctioned; unofficial tournaments.

>You can't really print off a good golf club though.
You can rent one though for miniscule cost. My point is it's retarded to value any hobby based on top tier competitive costs

As someone who has only gotten into magic over the last 7 years, I see no way of me ever affording vintage. Yeah, the decks are cool, however I really can't imagine myself ever coughing up the dough for those kind of decks.

I'm fine with modern.

>If you hate the game as it is now, just don't play it.
>wheredoyouthinkyouare.jpg

If you're just playing with friends, you could get counterfeits of the ridiculously expensive cards. I think that's what EDH players do.

I play at my LGS, so unfortunately, I don't think that would work.
I however do proxy for my EDH, so it's not that I have any gripes about it, I just don't think I can convince my local group to accept it.

In order for your friends to accept it, they need to reach a superior state of human evolution--a higher state of consciousness. Your LGS needs to reach such a high level of civilization that its patrons can collectively encompass profound issues of Magic and come together to work towards a more efficient and enlightened gaming group.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

As a guy who was competitive enough to have a lot of meta decks from Legacy, Modern and EDH decks, I must say I miss the competitive scene. I sold all of my cardpool to Card Kingdom, LotusVault, StarCity and my LGS but prices started to get ridiculous for a mere cardboard.

The nice part of EDH is it follows the Cosmic Encounter mindset of "If you are the most powerful player, it becomes a game of 1v3"

I fucking hate Atraxa and Breya

Gay kings always make me laugh.

Wizards of the Cost are so scared of being pegged as racist, they couldn't even include black as a mana-cost.

no doubt it's counterintuitive to their virtue signaling. Calling that anything other than "gay kings" just feels wrong.

Whats going on?
Can I get an abridged, but thru explanation?

nothing at all has happened, shitposters were shitposting earlier but they're mostly gone

Oh, I AM glad to read that. Thanks user!

Hundreds in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, S. Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and India.
The second and third largest markets for MtG are Latin America and East-Asia.

how much you got after selling your entire collection to those jews?

>So either the number of active players stagnated OR it saw a significant rise and fall in the past few years.

Everyone knows it grew substantially after then before crashing over the last few years. That was the time before constant reprints where holding onto modern staples guaranteed profit a few years later. The game is in a downturn.

>why pay like $400 every year or whatever the rotation is now since wotc has changed it so much

lol user no one who plays standard only spends 400 each year. They probably spend 100-200 each rotation as cards rotate out of their deck, and probably have to buy into an entire new archetype once a year.

Yeah, about 4-5 years ago when every major fantasy IP was trying to get an MMO out the door, most of them flopped or were shitcanned when people realized that the MMO market is very niche (And the game designers who are contracted to make MMOs are generally shit at making MMOs)

You know stores are fucking scared of proxies ever since WotC caught one with proxied decks and dropped their support right?
Are you going to support your store through proxies?

Stores just run unsanctioned events that allow proxies user...

>You know stores are fucking scared of proxies ever since WotC caught one with proxied decks and dropped their support right?
what

Holy shit that's an underrated card. Into Volrath you go.

>iconic masters
>not iconic
>draft set is just khans
>ok reprints
>still poor cardstock
great job wotc

it was supposed to be the "iconic creatures" of each color but even as that it barely functioned

it's got to be the worst named thing they've ever made, at least the real iconic masters is in march

You know that was one regional WPN rep throwing a shitfit, which was then "clarified" by a random bozo in PR that didn't know what he was talking about right? After which WOTC told both to can it and smoothed things over as best they could.

Nothing actually changed at any point for store owners that aren't retards. The ones that are deserve to go out of business anyways.

And as soon as Wizards finds that out gone are the MSRP priced products and support for other rewards. Like I said, proxies are fun and all, but they are not helping your store stay alive by paying only 5$ at proxy tournaments.

>And as soon as Wizards finds that out gone are the MSRP priced products and support for other rewards.
That'd be a PR nightmare

I work at a store run by someone that's been in the business since beta.

This is horseshit.

The rule is that events that allow proxies can't be sanctioned. WOTC does not give a single fuck about stores running proxy events as long as they're not uploaded via WER. Even then, I don't think they really care. They're not going to drop support for businesses that carry their products over something that petty.

The "you cannot allow players to use proxies in your building" bullshit was started by a random-ass PR guy that didn't actually know what he was talking about.