MTG is a lootbox game

>What does something have to have in order to be a loot box?

Randomized contents that you don't know before purchase.

>What's something a thing could have that makes it NOT be a loot box?

It needs to not be random or secret. If you could open a booster pack before buying and make sure you only get cards you wanted, it would stop being a loot box and become a normal, non-cancerous purchase.

Living Card Game expansions aren't loot boxes

MtG should be banned by the government.

Considering how far they're going to piss some people off, and how those people have retaliated, (Jeremy forced WotC to restrict game stores from how they recruit judges) I wouldn't be surprised if someone goes with this (MtG is gambling!) and attempts to bring the law down.

Motherfucker I asked for a definition not examples

MTG Doesn't require you to buy the core game, so you can buy the necessary "loot boxes". For 60 dollars you can draft about 10 times(?) and sell all that you don't want to get few dollars back.

>Yes they are.
No, they aren't.
>Any form of random purchase is gambling. No exceptions whatsoever.
Buying Skittles is gambling then, because the flavors are random.

You actually own a physical product, unlike video games Wizards of the Coast can't just waltz into your house and tear up your cards at any time. They also can't dynamically change the outcome of the cards you draw to maximize the amount of money they can squeeze out of you.

If you're trying to compare MTG to video game lootboxes then you're sorely mistaken. See, MTG doesn't try to actively lie and decieve the consumer. You pay $10 and will receive a random assortment of physical goods who's monetary value is only determined by a 3rd party market.

Skittles are packaged in a way that tries to maintain an equal distribution of each flavor per bag. While there are occasional errors that sway the exact amounts you are basically guaranteed any specific flavor in a bag that includes that flavor to be at least 15% of the bag.

Weaseling out of one example doesn't change the point. Under that definition, a food product that had randomized flavors would be gambling.

How the fuck is proving why a provided example isn't gambling "weaseling out"?

Because it fails to address the point.

>Buying Skittles is gambling then, because the flavors are random.
I don't see how what said fails to address that point.

Read

The reason you don't see is because a blind man cannot open his eyes.

Skittles analogy fails because you know what you are getting. Fucking Skittles.

Skittles aren't substantially more or less valuable based on their flavor.
If I buy a back of 500 rocks, they will be of random sizes, but as long as they're all roughly the same size, it's no concern to me exactly how big or small each individual rock is.

If I buy a pack of magic cards I could get a return on investment as vast as a slot machine, or get complete shit.

*buy a /sack/

I think this fails to seriously consider the inequality of what shows up in either package. It's fair to say that any and everybody except for the mentally handicapped don't actually care about which flavors of Skittles we're over or under represented in a given package. It's also fair to say that, because booster pack are the only way you can get cards, everybody cares very much about the specific cards that they open in booster pack.

What I'm trying to say is that all Skittles packages contain equally desirable Skittles, such that it doesn't matter that the exact distribution is somewhat inaccurate. And that, despite there being the false premise that cards of equal rarity are of equal value, booster packs contain wildly different contents of wildly differing values depending on their rarity, actual in game effects, artwork, and the relationships of those variables to your own collection. One person, knowing what's inside, might just a soon throw away one booster pack as they would pay $100 dollars for the other. The same is true of scratch off loto. How doesn't this constitute gambling?

To be fair, I think the Skittles analogy definitely destroys the "Any random purchase is gambling." Argument. Valuation definitely matters.

Not him but absolutely nothing you said changes the fact that by the definition that was given for what constitutes gambling, skittles are gambling. They have a random aspect, which is all that matters in this specific context.

I'm not sure that anyone was arguing that any randomness at all is gambling, but I could be wrong.
Anyway, I agree with your conclusion.

See It's me.

Trade leads to a massive and nuanced player-created economy and ensures that almost none of the packs you open will be without value, while gambleboxes have quickly diminishing returns and more often than not stick you with worthless garbage you can't do anything with, akin to pulling a blank or being rewarded with pennies on your dollar on a slot machine.

Not to mention MtG cards have actual functionality on their own, and there are several formats in MtG that utilize the "random" factor of booster packs in many different ways, compared to gambleboxes full of items that are, in most games, completely useless by themselves.

There's a significant difference, in that /v/ lootboxes are digital goods, and Magic Cards are not.

That physical element makes a difference and makes things resellable.

This. If you sell a product that contains randomized goods with variable value, it's gambling.

Ya'll know what this is? They used to call it a "fruit machine". The icons are shaped like fruit because it would give you different flavors of fruit gum. Other slot machines dispensed cigars, candy, or novelty tokens. They literally did this on purpose to get around gambling laws.

Another name for slot machines is "trade stimulator"? Why is it called that? You put the machine in your store, so someone can win a cigar or a token, and then you trade it for money!

This shit got so bad that gumball machines, cigarette vending machines, and even pinball machines were banned for decades in parts of the US.

>b-but the cards have no inherent value! The price of cards is determined by the market, not WotC.
Motherfucker, we live under capitalism. The value of EVERYTHING is determined by the market!
>But how can you regulate it if the value is variable and determined by the market?
Legal systems have deal with this issue for literally 4000 years. The value of gold varies constantly, but you're still gonna pay some big fines if you run an illegal gambling ring with gold bars.

Selling random card packs should be illegal. Literally nothing of value would be lost if MTG was forced to switch to an LCG model.

What is draft?

Packs are lootboxes, but are at least mitigated by being able to purchase singles from stores and packs being useful in themselves for drafting (which is what most people buy them for anyway).

>missing the point this hard on purpose

The important difference is the existence of Draft. Boosters have a method of play that is based on their random distribution, while loot-boxes add no gameplay.

Note that MTGO recently introduced Treasure Chests as prizes rather than boosters, much to everyone's rage and disappointment. If/when loot-boxes become illegal (which in the EU they are on the fast-track to becoming),I hope they are forced to switch back to actually useful prizes.

>The value of gold varies constantly
What did he mean by this?

with MtG, the deck building part of the game is extremely important, and I feel like choosing from a limited supply of cards to build a competitive deck is how deck building is meant to be done, at least at a casual level. Basically, the entire game is built around "lootboxes", and therefore works a lot better than other games that just try to jam them to games that weren't made for them.

>Selling random card packs should be illegal.
Why? It’s a game. If people don’t like how the cards are sold they shouldn’t play.

No.
Booster packs, as designed, are part of a legitimate game experience, see Draft and Sealed events.

But yes, booster packs as sold and marketed 99% of the time are a lootbox game because the majority of the contents are things nobody wants, and people 'crack' them in hopes that one single card is of use or interest to anyone.

>buy/sell/trade your duplicates
>implying your duplicates have any value or are desirable in the slightest.

This is obviously a tell thread but mods don't give a shit so I'll throw my hat in the ring.
Booster packs are not lootboxes because in the absence of the secondary market all product sold by wizards has the same value. If you declare that the secondary market exerting value over the contents of a booster pack converts the system to gambling then the entire stock market is gambling by your definition. Buying and selling art would also constitute as gambling since at it's core most art consists of very inexpensive components assigned value by the secondary market which swings in demand upon certain art such that you cannot with 100% certainty predict the value of an art piece you buy.
For the record I also don't think lootboxes are gambling because while they contain random contents they are all equally worthless in the context of no secondary market, all value is simply ascribed by the consumer.

They are not lootboxes.

You also know what you are getting when you are opening a magic booster pack. 10 commons, 3 uncommons and 1 rare. It's you who assigned arbitrary value on the cards.

You can be assmad about TCGs as much as you want, card games already went through the THIS IS GAMBLING Phase, have been found not guilty and will not be dragged into this argument again. If anyone tried, Hasbro, Konami and TPC would just point to the late 90s it and would go nowhere in court.

My issue is less with the fact it's random and more with the fact that 1) a card game kind of forces you to have specific cards to make your deck work, so it's not even "oh, I really want that skin", it's "I need X amount of copies of this specific card to play this deck at all", in addition to 2) there's not even a (official) way for me to just buy the card I need and while the idea of "just trade for the card you want" is cool and all but doesn't work when specific cards are in extremely high demand, and 3) it's an intentionally predatory practice designed to exploit a very specific type of person who will spend more than he can afford, much like gambling.

But most of you know this already and feel it's worth it. Draft is a cool way to play the game and all, but it doesn't actually excuse the business model being set up the way it is right now. Because it used to be way less scummy.

MTG investment is gambling, yes, and there's a reason everyone serious about the game calls buying packs hoping for valuable cards "playing the pack lottery".
The thing is, so much shit is "gambling" that lines do have to be drawn where what is acceptable gambling and what isn't. Insurance is gambling on your stuff getting destroyed and needing money to replace it. Stock trading is gambling that the stocks you're selling aren't going to go much higher and the stocks you're buying aren't going to drop any lower.
MTG gambling was generally considered okay for most of its run because
>You always get 10 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare, and a token or basic land.
>Low power spread over those categories, most commons are equal in power, same for uncommons and rares.
>Due to the nature of the secondary market, buying boxes to sell will always average out at a certain profit.
However, in more recent years, the packs have slowly become more and more gambly.
>Mythic rares in 1/8 of packs or fewer, drastically increasing the randomness of return
>Climbing power spread in packs, with the majority of rares being trash, and plenty of flashy but useless mythics
>true hyper-mythic lottery cards introduced where you might get 1 per crate of boxes if you're lucky.
All these ensure that the average selling price of a box for an investor, and the likely selling price only grow in disparity. If an investor buys a dozen boxes and finds no lottery cards they're a few hundred down the drain, so they're encouraged to buy as many as humanly possible, basically turning them into rats in a skinner box.
So MTG is gambling, but while it used to be fairly acceptable, it's gone overboard in recent years.
Plus I mean the shit card resellers get away with for magic cards would put them behind bars for life if they were doing it with stocks.

>Literally nothing of value would be lost if MTG was forced to switch to an LCG model
Actually, that's incorrect. It would pretty much kill the secondary market overnight, which buys massive amounts of sealed product so they can open them en masse and sell them as singles. That's how LGSs that subsist heavily on trading cards work.

Eh, it's dying anyway, not meming anymore, losing millions of players and revenue yearly. Won't be around much longer so don't sweat it, most of my LGS switched to YuGiOh recently and only kept our EDH decks

You mean I can get FLGS to cater to RPG players by killing booster packs?

Wizards could make their own cubes

It's the devil satan

Frankly, while I know there is some debate as to whether Lootboxes and Card Packs are "Gambling" or not, I do think we have enough proof that they have a corrosive effect on certain types of people. Many of us know of the Whales that end up spending millions of dollars in these games over time via their micro-transaction loot boxes. In my opinion, because it is a business practice that flourishes by preying on a particularly vulnerable subset of the population, something should be done to protect citizens with overly addictive personalities. They don't have to be banned entirely (as the majority of the population can handle a little bit of chance-based activity in moderation), but you could introduce regulations to help protect the particularly vulnerable people from ruining their lives chasing the dopamine high.

at Ixalan release I saw a few people buying yugioh for the first time in years at my LGS, I thought it was a giant false flag but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it MAY actually be making a return. MTG isn't going anywhere I don't think user, we had a large drop off during Timespiral aswell.

Any regulation put on them will ultimately end with the average person getting limited in some way as well, which is bad business practice when we are talking about a small portion of the user-base being helped. Need of the many blah blah blah...

yeah I'm sure you could convince RPG players to drop the kind of money they do on TCGs at the same rate on dice and miniatures

Okay, if the results of the item have a random monetary value, it's gambling. There. Your autistic nitpick now no longer matters, because that's obviously what was meant by what user said.

as has pointed out, booster packs may logically count as gambling, but legally they do not.
While this is a moral component to using such practices in a consumer product it would be more efficient and successful to provide aid to the incredibly small number of whales and teach them coping mechanisms to lower their spending than it would be to apply blanket regulations on the entire product.

If TCGs had actual good miniatures for D&D, I would buy those fucks all day. D&D is the red-headed stepchild of WotC at this point.

Hasbro is going to drop WOTC after the pedo shit, depending on the company MTG will either die for good or the #MakeMagicGreatAgain tag will be memed into reality.

Be cautious.

Despite this being an obvious bait thread, here’s what I can tell. MtG only becomes loot boxes when you can go to the WotC website and buy singles of different value. Everyone knows a goyf is worth more than a grizzly bear, but that’s because the secondary market of players said so, and wizards will forever argue that cards are all worth the same.

Where battlefront fucked up was saying oh yeah you can buy loot boxes and win this shitty gun for 50 credits, or win this great fun for 500 credits. They attached different values to the prizes, and became gambling.

>entire stock market is gambling by your definition
> Buying and selling art would also constitute as gambling

No, because you know how valuable stock/art is when you buy it. The value of it going up or down afterwards has nothing to do with gambling, that's normal economics.

It's the same as saying that buying an apple is gambling because the next day they go on sale.

MtG cards have inherent value
You can sell them, trade them, masturbate onto one and top your Christmas tree with it, even if everyone on Earth stops playing it's still kindling for your fireplace
Digital items from video games do not have inherent value
Even items that can be sold via steam marketplace are contingent on Steam still providing that service in 10 years in order to retain value (fwiw if they decide to stop profiting off of Russian mob money laundering and finally block Russia from the marketplace, I think we'd see a major decline in marketplace trading)
I hope the video OP watched at least pointed some of that out

Legal gambling for children, just like kinder surprise.

Literally illiterate

>I declare that I personally value gold equal to masonry.
>I place a 10lbs gold bar into a box, and 999 bricks into 999 identical boxes.
>I sell these boxes on ebay for $100.
>It's not gambling because all the boxes have the same value, one of them just coincidentally contains a gold bar.

The value of everything in the market is determined by the market. If the market is willing to pay for MTG cards, then MTG cards have a value.

Speculation is different from gambling because it's transparent. If I buy a Picasso, I know that I'm buying a Picasso (and I can sue the seller if they lied to me). I don't know how the Picasso's value will change, but I know that it is definitely a Picasso.

>I have no counterargument so I'll pretend you can't read

I touched on the points you made perfectly. You know the value of stock/art when you buy it. You do NOT know the value of the cards in a booster pack when you buy it. The two are not REMOTELY comparable.

>But muh secondary market
I assume that you're saying I can't read because I didn't mention this. So let me mention how fucking retarded it is that you said this. Stock/art has a SET value at any given time. Even if it's worth more to someone else, anywhere else, when you buy it, you buy it at a SET value and know what you're getting it for. You know how valuable Microsoft stock or a van gogh painting is. The set value MEANS SOMETHING.

When you buy a booster pack of MTG cards, you have no idea what cards you're buying. You don't know if you're getting a Picasso or some unknown liberal arts major's trashy bullshit. The set value means NOTHING because the actual value of the cards inside is almost guaranteed to not have the same value as the set value, for better or worse.

Besides that, in essence, just because the value could change after you buy the item doesn't effect whether it's gambling or not. Like I said, with that logic, buying ANYTHING AT ALL is gambling because it could be on sale tomorrow.

As somebody well educated in game design and decently educated in business law, seems to me that the easiest workaround would just be to put the rarest card in the front of the pack and make the front of packs semi-transparent so you could see that one card. That way, you're ACTUALLY just buying the rarest card and getting other (blind picked) cards as extras, which eliminates the core argument of gambling in the legal definition.

Reminder that the legal definition of gambling (in Burgerland anyway) is as such:
>Risking something of value on a contest or future occurrence that has no guarantee and is outside the control or influence of the risker.
Packs are totally gambling under that definition.

By US law, card packs aren't considered gambling because Wizards assigns no value to any of the cards inside. The moment they ever say "x is worth y" then they become gambling.

Or buy the singles you need?

Good. They should have been banned and are in fact banned, in NY at least. Fuck off, gambling scum.

Also
>free market
GOOD JOKE

As a predominantly TTRPG player, I fail to see the flaw in this. Hell, I do most of my RPG playing online anyway.

>as someone who doesn't play this game, I don't see how making this huge change would impact it negatively
why did you even bother posting?

Because a) I used to play a lot of MtG, b) I hate lootboxes, c) I hate the corporations that implement lootboxes, d) hate MtG, e) really hate LGSs, f) really hate MtG players, g) hate you personally. If you were on fire, I wouldn't piss on you to put you out.

>You know the value of stock/art when you buy it.
no, you really don't. The price of stocks and art is entirely arbitrary based on historical and current demand. Stock is percentile ownership of a company and art is colored material on paper, both have tremendously low intrinsic value, a majority of the value assigned to them is based on the secondary market, just like playing cards.
>Besides that, in essence, just because the value could change after you buy the item doesn't effect whether it's gambling or not. Like I said, with that logic, buying ANYTHING AT ALL is gambling because it could be on sale tomorrow.
that's literally what I'm arguing. WoTC sells every card in a specific set for the same price, you can't specify which cards you get beyond narrowing your selection down to possible cards from one set. If Washington state was hit with a meteor tomorrow and Wizards ceased to exist as a company, and no one else adopted the game, Magic as a property would cease to have value. The secondary market may try to persist with the existing stock, but the inherent value of Magic cards in general would cease to exist.
Like the Skittles example above, buying a package with randomized contents is not gambling if all the contents have inherently the same value. Just because an outside entity assigns different values to the contents doesn't retroactively make it gambling.
If Star City Candies announced they were buying all purple Skittles for $10 each Skittles as a product does not suddenly become gambling.
If a house runs a game where you put your dollar in a box and receive a pog randomly from a pool of colored pogs that is not legally gambling because all the pogs costs a $1, even if you really want a purple one and are willing to put $50 in the box to get it.

You're almost right. As far as WotC is concerned though, any rare card is worth as much as the other one and are as common as each other.
Since they don't attribute any value to cards, something the players do, they can't be blamed for that.
What you can blame them for is mythic rarity

There are decks worth hundreds of dollars flying all over. I have spent around 400$ for TTRPGs during my entire lifetime, counting boxes, dice, books, minis and so on. There's no way you can make half the money card games make with TTRPGs so stores are always either TCG focused or Wargaming focused

Well, whether or not it should be illegal is a different question. This type of low stakes gambling is really fun, you would be losing actual fun.

The value of the magic cards are assigned by you and the secondary market, not wizards.
If the time came when wizards are selling Cryptic Command for $50 and Primal Command for $1 themselves, (thus officially determining the value of the content of a pack) then you can make this thread again and i'll fully support you that magic packs are gambling.

Magic cards have no value except for that which is attributed to it by collectors and the secondary market.

a.k.a Jews and fiscally irresponsible neckbeards

Battlefront 2 was a mistake.

But you can already buy booster packs at different value. The usual $4-ish standard ones or the master's for $10.

>No, because you know how valuable stock is when you buy it.

Absolute lie. Stock trading is almost all microsecond transactions controlled by computer now.

What's the problem, no one forces you to buy packs, you can buy singles, everyone knows buying packs is basically gambling, and?

You can buy singles, like for real. Therefore MTG is not a lootbox game. Most high-level players buy singles, while the typical booster box is used for Draft games. Everything else covers a niche of people who are thrilled to open lootboxes, or have a specific interest in a given type of product(Commander/Planeswalker Decks/etc.).

>protestants
OHH NOO NO NO NO HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Mtgheadquarters pls go

Cube is better.

Bookstores now sell books that are all the same size, shape, weight, thickness, etc inside an opaque vacuum sealed bag. You give the person at the counter ten dollars and they give you a book. It may or may not be the book you wanted. It may or may not be of any entertainment value. It may or may not even have any words in it, just pictures that may or may not be pretty.

If you want the exact book you're looking for you have to go to a third party seller that has bought tons of books, organized those books, priced those books by what the market will bear, and trades in used books with other folks to try and meet a demand in the market place. Some of those books are incredibly rare because the publisher just decided they ought to be, and some of them are super common because hey why the fuck not? And it just so happens that the really good books are the really rare books, so everyone wants them and really it's a total coincidence that there's a scarcity of them thus driving up the price.

Do you see the fallacy of your argument?

>uses reductio ad absurdum
>”Do you see the fallacy of your argument?”
Well do you?

Any game that allows one player to be better than another just because they have more money to throw at the game is a shit game.
No, I don't play MtG anymore and stopped when someone pointed out that it's basically "paper crack".

Not that guy, but reductio ad absurdum isn't a logical fallacy. Continue on, though, this is pretty entertaining.

It’s not gambling due to the existence of both preconstructed deck products that give you a functioning deck and the presence of Limited formats. Booster packs are game pieces whose contents are used to play a specific form of Magic, and can later be used in other formats.

Do the bookstore also sold the single books with different prices?
If yes, then it's gambling. If no then it's not.

>Some of those books are incredibly rare because the publisher just decided they ought to be
They are incredibly rare because you and the secondary market puts a value on them and hoard them.

You don't buy a card, you buy the booster pack experience. It's that simple.

>Some of those books are incredibly rare because the publisher just decided they ought to be
Nah. You can buy mythic cards for pennies. It's the players that decide the value of a card and then sellers might inflate it.

>>uses reductio ad absurdum
>>”Do you see the fallacy of your argument?”
>Well do you?

I don't think those words mean what you think they mean.

so I guess you play only, what, Chess and Go?

Isn't it fascinating how these people only become interested in gambling, identity politics and other political issues the moment they perceive them as influencing their precious video games?