Are booster packs gambling?

So now that Belgium and Australlia have decided that loot boxes count gambling, wouldn't booster packs like in Magic and Yugioh count for the same reason? Do you think it is likely that we could see a ban or crack down on trading card games?

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It's possible, but not guaranteed. The key difference is that real life physical booster packs have resale value on a secondary market not owned by the provider of the booster packs, unlike the closed in game economies you see with microtransactions.

Well if they do decide to do that it'll basically kill card games in those spots. LCGs are basically dead

No, because Magic boosters have utility in themselves as game pieces, since you need them for drafting to the point of most of set design being built around this fact.

It might be with games like Yugioh or Pokemon where you don't have drafting formats.

What, seriously? I thought they were still at the bureaucracy does what it does best phase of looking like they're doing something. What reasoning did they give?

But microtransactions providing necessary game pieces is the whole problem with games like Battlefront 2.

Not necessarily, it could actually just increase the secondary market...
I mean it's only randomized cards that are banned, singles and starter packs are safe.

That's cause they're selling the game separately. There's no illusion for booster pack based games.
In other words, You don't need to also pay for an incomplete part of the game that you need to shell out further to complete

>Are booster packs gambling?
That's actually a good question. Let's look at a definition of gambling to see if we can discern a clear answer:

>Gamble
>a : to play a game for money or property
>b : to bet on an uncertain outcome
(courtesy of Merriam-Webster)

Based on this, the answer is not really. When you purchase a booster you are neither playing a game for money (opening a pack is not playing a game) nor are you betting on an unclear outcome (betting requires stakes). However, it is very close, since you *are* taking an action with an unclear outcome that you paid money to do, which certainly feels gambling-esque.

Would I call it true gambling? No. I would however call it gambling adjacent.and would probably watch it closely. If Australia/Belgium decided that loot boxes are gambling, they'll probably file booster packs in the same area, since loot boxes and booster packs are both very similar with the difference being how you acquire them (a big and relevant difference).

Boosters drive sales. If this went through, wizards would likely just flat out stop printing German and French cards in their entirety. Sides. Even the shitty planeswalker decks come with two boosters.

Do people other than children even open boosters for packs noawadays?

>open boosters for packs

For cards, I mean.

The thing is, the cards themselves only hold intrinsic value. You dont not HAVE to have high-secondary-market-value cards in your pack to play the game. Hasbro/WotC could just make the arguement tht the pack itself is designed as a game piece for drafting, and that opening packs for the sole purpose of trying to profit is solely the decision of whoever bought the pack, and that they cannot control what a customer does with a booster pack.

Lucky people

So what you're saying is, EA would not be doing anything illegal if they just made it where you could sell the contents of opened lootboxes to other players for in-game currency.

In any event, I think the existence of a secondary market doesn't affect whether or not it's gambling. The act/product itself has to be determined to be legal or illegal itself. Besides, even if a secondary market exists, the initial purchase will still be a "gamble" regardless of whether a person or company is doing the reselling.

To be fair, you don't have to have lootboxes either, and opening the lootbox for the purpose of saving time is solely the decision of whoever bought the box.

Not a pro forma ban on small breasts per se, but on a variety of legal-in-America porn that they thought had models that looked "too young"...and these were usually small-breasted ones, of course.

somebodythinkofthechildren.com/australia-bans-small-breasts/

We need that ban for females in mtg art.

>And Hasbro would flip their shit.
>Because Hasbro has more clout than EA
No but it operates on the same principle. You're all addicts being exploited by the brain tricks. It doesn't fit the legal definition but it matches intent and I hope they crack down just to see the salt

Those seem to be pretty adult-sized to me. She appears to be of adult age as well. Am I missing something?

EA is in trouble because of a trifecta of shitter they tried to pull off.

Firstly, not buying the loot boxes denies you access to portions of the product, and there isn't reasonable accommodation to circumvent - if you don't own any heroes, you literally could not proceed in a game if you got to hero spawn, you were stuck on the selection screen. They estimated it would take hundreds of dollars to unlock everything, on top of the base game. Contents of the boxes were completely random and provided no renumeration for duds.

This is being perceived as particularly egregious because it is a star wars game and star wars is perceived as a brand aimed at children. Que moral outrage. EA created a unique spectacular shitshow all for themselves.

Those are white sizable tetas, stop playing so many Japanese games

And nothing of value was lost.

>carnage tyrant
Hate to break it to ya, but carnage tyrant isn't very good, and won't be worth any money.

I agree with you that it's gambling, because it literally is. I buy packs specifically to crack things that will make me money, even though I still buy singles. For example, I literally cracked a mana drain at draft today and everyone was jealous. Why? Because it's worth a fuckload of money, paid for my draft, and then some. But that being said, it wouldn't really lose business, they'd just make it so adults are the only ones who can purchase packs, or slap an age limit like 14 on it or something.

So counter-strike GO would be not gambling due to a marketplace?

It's possible, but IMO it's all gambling and should be regulated. We'll see how it pans out.

Depends on your definition.
In my opinion, it is in a sense. You're betting that the cards in the pack will either contain cards you need, or cards that have enough value to cover their cost of $3.99.
Like if you buy an AER pack looking specifically for Fatal Push, you're taking the risk that one of those there uncommons will contain a push. To me, that is a gamble.

WotC covered their ass here by making the game draft-first and making sure that once in a blue moon the best card in the set is not a Rare/Mythic.

It was a typical example of what we'll never see in mtg art again, but that's for another thread.

Isn't there some legal stipulation somewhere that allows Wizards of the Coast to sell booster packs as randomized product ONLY if they distribute their product as pieces of a game? Isn't that why they are required to support LGS activity to provide an area to "play" their "game" and refuse to supply product to online-only retailers?

>>Because Hasbro has more clout than EA
>$5 Billion vs $1.2 Billion
Yes, the second largest toy company in the world does have more clout than a top fiver in a much younger and less liquid industry.

Funnily enough, both have the rights to star wars in their respective industries.

What is wrong with children gambling?

Opening boosters is fun. You get that thrill of anticipation waiting to see if you get a good card or not

People think it's bad. They don't want the kids to get addicted to gambling for fear of it being an issue for them as an adult, and losing everything they have at either age.

It's a recurring theme too. Remember when they took the casino (where everyone I knew just bought tokens instead of playing slots) out of Pokemon? That was a thing.

On one hand, I absolutely hate this sort of nanny state bullshit and the sorts of precedents it sets.

On the other hand, I hope EA gets fucked up by this.

I'm personally in the camp of yes, but shouldn't be regulated. The "think of the children" rhetoric really falls flat in my eyes. Say a kid buys 3 booster packs with his allowance every other week for a year. That's ~300 dollars. So the kid is having a bad draw on his packs, not getting barely any cool shiny cards, sits down and realizes that he's been pissing away money he could have saved his money and bought something much more grand than cardboard. That's a critically important lesson in the value of money that won't likely be forgotten. I hold the same stance on lootboxes or basically anything. If regulation needs to be put in place, that's on the parents. Certainly not the government.

Yu-Gi-Oh has a drafting format
Only a few sets are designed for it though and it's not competitive

If booster packs were declared gambling, what would companies have to do to survive? Could companies survive if they switched over to a model where they sell individual cards at various prices?

Switch over to the LCG model like they should have fucking years ago.

>LCG
Never heard about that before and started googling it. So basically it is like buying an entire set and then building a deck out of that?

>the difference being how you acquire them

Another key difference is what you can do with them. As has been said, cards you collect have some value in a secondary market (the Trading part of Trading Card Game). Computer game lootbox stuff dosen't have that. Of course they cannot be sold, but they also cannot be traded at all. In fact, you yourself don't even have control of them, the game company does.

Yep

I actually like the idea of pre-built decks and then being able to combine those

>In that case, why not sell the cards directly without the use of packs? Magic can sort of get away with it by saying that packs are in themselves modes of play due to the existence of draft, but Pokemon and Yugioh can't. In these games, the fact that I can get a given card directly from a third party doesn't change that I can also attempt to bet money on getting that card through packs, that is, doesn't change the nature of the card opening experience.

That opens up a whole new range of issues. That in itself would now be implying that cards have an actual currency value that can be set and adjusted by the company. Those companies would have to change from being classed as a toy company to a financial institution of sorts like a bank or money lender and thus be held to a different set or regulations and laws.

I'm not sure that specific model exists, but the standard LCG model of "buy an entire set of cards and make decks from it" isn't far off.

It is gambling, though. Look at the first definition:
>to play a game for money or property
In this case, the game is "open a booster pack", and the money or property is the cards inside it, and the difference in value that different cards have.

Commander preconstructed decks, maybe.

ITT: Video gamers who's only point of reference is video games don't understand why lootboxes are bad in the first place

Gee what a shocker that people who play video games are braindead retards.

Go look at lootbox opening animations than go look at a modern slot machine and than rub two brain cells together faggot

This is a topic that's been discussed to death but you faglords wont accept that people don't agree that booster packs aren't the same as lootboxes except on very minor technicalities.

>the difference in value that different cards have.

All the cards are equally worthless outside frame of reference. The value you extrinsically place upon certain cards does not somehow make their intrinsic value more than a fractional penny. That's part of how CCG / TCG manufacturers skate around gambling laws.

Never.

Also to note you have a a certain outcome. You'll get your fixed number of rares, uncommons and commons. Unlike videogame lootboxes where the range of the rarity is mostly wider and unclearer, as in you get one uncommon and maybe more.

Technically it would be Illegal to play certain FoW cards in Australia.

Material gain.
Even if you don't get what you want all cards in a booster pack can be useful. You can trade them with other players or use them in other ways, because no card is absolutely useless and copies of the same card are useful nonetheless.
Lootboxes are completely random, but this gambling shit has come up only with Battlefront because 1) if you find the same weapon or skill more than once it means you wasted money because clones have no use and 2) the system is very biased so that only a specific set of skills or equipment are really worth it, so you must wade through heaps of shit to get the few things that you need, with no way to get rid of the garbage you collect along the way.
TF2 boxes system was not gambling because whatever came out you could trade/sell/combine it. Battlefront boxes system is gambling because you literally have to spin to win

Australia bans all kinds of weird things. I read somewhere that they banned violence in team fortress by replacing blood and severed limbs with cogs and rainbows

There’s an optional “low violence” mode that does that. The German (I don’t know about Australia) version of the game is locked that way.

Banning lootboxes hurts greedy as fuck publishers who are already rolling in cash but still want to nickel and dime their consumers.

Banning boosters hurts LGSs. It will probably kill a lot of them.

No. Neither are loot boxes. People are trying to stretch the meaning of current laws instead of trying to make new ones to prevent loot boxes.

One major difference between buying boosters and buying loot boxes is that you are always getting a random assortment of certain things in a booster pack where as loot boxes usually have a completely random contents.

When buying most modern Magic booster packs you are buying:

1 Marketing Card
1 Basic Land
10 Common cards
3 Uncommon cards
1 Rare or Mythic Rare card

You might be making a personal gamble on which specific cards you get but you are always getting that arrangement when you open a pack.

Battlefront Loot Crates on the other hand give out:

4 or 5 objects of random rarity.

A crate can give out "rewards" anywhere between 4 commons and 5 rares.

>One major difference between buying boosters and buying loot boxes is that you are always getting a random assortment of certain things in a booster pack where as loot boxes usually have a completely random contents.
That's not inherently true. You're retarded.

But they are not since you can sell them at different prices

You need to use a legal, not a dictionary, definition for gambling.

>Do you have to pay to open one?
>Is the reward in them based on luck?
>Can you lose money on it and gain stuff of much lower monetary value?
>Can you win money or something of high monetary value?
If all answers are yes than it's gambling.
the fact that lootboxes, card boosters and the likes try to stay in a legal grey area doesn't mean they are not effectively gambling.

that's untrue, foils and mythic rares completely screw that logic.
the fact that blizzard makes less of some cards also screws it, it's been proved that some chase uncommon are printed less than some rares.
wizards definition of rarity doesn't mean anything when the chance of getting something are not actually the same as their rarity would imply.
the fact that they give you 4 different pool of random rewards doesn't mean they are not making you gamble, effectively you are still gambling and you could say you are doing 4 different gambles at the same time.

That environment is run by valve as well, so probably not.

no, it doesn't. You can easily do it for stickers album where the distributor will also sell on demand up to a certain number of them, making sure no single one costs more than you pay for it.
Removes the predatory side of gambling while still letting you do it.

the reason why booster box should be regulated as gambling is because Wizards (and all other companies) wants their cards to have a monetary value based on their power and availability, something that makes the range of possible outcomes from buying a booster much wider creating much more losing situations.

That's silly, the card itself is not valuable for what it is. It's still cardboard worth pennies. The secondary market assigns a value to it, the same as it does any other collectible, like trading cards or die cast cars.

>FoW
I want to like this game but the art is cluttered, the formatting rubs me the wrong way, and moe is just godawful. Also there are way too many ruler-specific cards, it's more archetypal than ygo.

you are explaining the loophole that pachinko uses to not be considered gambling, but do you actually think that it isn't?
The fact that thay operate in grey areas in the law doesn't mean they are any less bad.
Trading cards are not gambling by design, booster box are.
A Commander preconstructed is not gambling because you are sold a certain amount of cards and you know everything you are getting, a booster is gambling because what you get is luck based.

Doesn't really matter where it gets its worth from, only that it's worth something.

>WotC reengineers booster boxes so they now contain at least one of every card from the set

It's basically weeb trash.

Nothing of import, move on.

Oh yea I will say, as you pointed out, the formatting fucking triggers me.

The UK recently commented that Star Wars loot boxes do not constitute gambling because you can't cash out. Which would imply that, at least in the UK, physical boosters WOULD constitute gambling. It flies under the radar because authorities don't know how extensive the secondary market in mtg is. Doesn't matter if the company creating itself isn't directly controlling the secondary market.

>no, it doesn't. You can easily do it for stickers album where the distributor will also sell on demand up to a certain number of them, making sure no single one costs more than you pay for it. Removes the predatory side of gambling while still letting you do it.

Yes actually everything what I said does. First of all selling sticker albums have no bearing whatsoever in related to CCG's and the secondary market value of CCG's not to mention the fact that any company can legally print stickers, only one company is allowed to print and distribute for instance MTG cards. A company like WotC cannot sell cards directly because of the very fact that to sell the cards directly in corollation to an actual secondary market value would violate certain laws that as a toy company are allowed to do. The very fact that WotC product has real high secondary market value and they are in complete control over the distribution of the card availability would be a form of market manipulation. They cannot sell individual cards to you direct ever as they are under the classification as a toy company, if they did not only could they quite literally print money but they could also dictate market prices. The whole point of MTG's classification is that it is a game first and foremost.

>the reason why booster box should be regulated as gambling is because Wizards (and all other companies) wants their cards to have a monetary value based on their power and availability, something that makes the range of possible outcomes from buying a booster much wider creating much more losing situations.

Do you know why Ante was banned? One part of it was that people don't want to lose cards but the other bigger factor was that you would end up getting MTG classified as a gambling game which then means that any place running an MTG tournament needs to apply for a gambling license to run it. There's a whole slew of legal issues that will come about if they ever sold cards direct to the public.

Hasbro don't have exclusive rights. Their rights to the license are pretty limited, especially compared to the deal EA got.

A better legal question to ask, is refusal to reprint reserve list cards grounds for others being allowed to print them?

>lcgs are basically dead
nice hot take, but lcgs are doing very well
they are just shielded from the ccg bubble we're experiencing right now so they appear to be performing more poorly

They would be gambling if WotC sold singles and set their own prices for them. Since a card's value is decided by the secondary market, they're not gambling.

The existence of the reserve list is a mode of 'deciding value'. Upholding the reserve list is a form of value control, and thus wizards is enabling gambling.

what cunt?

No

Incorrect.

No. You will get exactly what it said on the pack. 1 rare, 3 uncommon and 10 commons.
The same as why sport card packs are not gambling.

Well you've changed my mind, we're done here

How can it be gambling when the whole point of out of print cards is that they are no longer being printed and sold in packs?

Because wizards isn't just not printing them, they're not printing anything that could replace them. Wizards is actively trying to preserve the value of those cards for collectors. Since they're doing that, all other cards have a defacto value based on their comparative worth to reserve list cards. Shocks trading on the value of original duals is an obvious example. They'd be worthless if WotC printed the original duals again, but since they don't it give the shocks value.

To defend against this argument, WotC would have to say that they didn't create the reserve list because of secondary market concerns. The problem is that they obviously did. The reserve list is, and always will be, direct secondary market manipulation.

The other element that's missing from any potential lawsuit is damages. Unless a regulatory body comes in and breaks things up, anyone else is powerless to do anything about it because it's not directly costing anyone money. This is why they haven't done away with the reserve list. It would almost immediately draw lawsuits from players because it destroyed value, and would force the above reserve list/secondary market interaction argument. They don't want to have ANY reserve list argument in court because losing said argument exposes them to decades of back damages that they'd have to pay out, or whatever punishment they'd receive violating existing laws for decades. If it's proven that they knew they were violating the law and didn't change it (which is the likely case) then the damages would be even worse.

Legally, so long as Wizards doesn't place a monetary value on the product inside it is not considered gambling.

(((investors))) open some of their stock and keep the rest sealed

that doesn't sound right to me, would it only affect wizards? The other two BIG card names do this too but not to the extent Wizards does and some tcgs don't do it at all

they also rated a game r18+ for high impact sexual viloence because of a single lewd joke or something
everywhere else it is 12/13+

I think it does matter, WOTC and other card doesn't have very much control how much a card is worth
the only way they can assign worth to a card is through rarity and through the banlist
but even then there are exceptions
take "Akoum Firebird" for example
it is a mythic, but isn't really worth anything at all, it's not the same as a casino giving you standardized currency
banlist can also reduce value of cards, since they can't be played, best example being the difference between cloudpost and urza lands in price
you can't really fault WOTC because they don't know how much a card can be worth when they first print it
you could maybe find fault with Masterpieces and other highly desirable reprints, but not with the base system

The boxes aren't, the sites where you bet them against others on the result of a roulette or coin toss are.