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Comment by snapcaster | Hacker News Reader

This and the magic 30th debacle really sucks. I don't play D&D but magic is my favorite game and what's messed up is that it's still really good. I play primarily draft and felt like 2022 was a great year for content yet the business practices are so short sighted and dumb it feels like they're going to run this thing I love into the ground. Good luck to D&D players hope you guys can influence Hasbro to stop being stupid

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The design team is mostly doing a good job. Kamigawa and Dominaria United were both great formats. Balance isn't fantastic but it's fairly good, and since they're incentivized to print busted cards to move packs that's about the best you can expect.

The way they've handled Arena has been a total joke though, which is pretty funny considering it's basically Hasbro's top product.

What was the Magic 30th debacle? The super expensive cards with only nostalgia value seemed strange, but I can't see that as a debacle.

I think they reprinted cards that they had promised would not be printed again, thus devaluing the whole market.

There was no appreciable devaluation from the move. The new reprints honoring old cards that they promised not to reprint were not actual Magic cards, they have an alternate card back that makes them not Magic cards, not tournament legal, and a completely different class of cardboard for collectors. (Heck, plenty of players and some collectors actively want Magic to go back on that promise—called the "Reserved List"—because it prices otherwise-potential players out of playing certain forms of the game.)

As an example, let's examine, one of the cards they printed an homage to is Volcanic Island--the most-available, lowest-cost real English Magic printing (Revised). Its average price on Oct 1, a few days before the 30th anniversary announcement, was (according to mtgstocks.com) $799. Its average price today is $779 (the $20 difference is within normal seasonal variation). A more-collectible printing, Unlimited, had an average price on Oct 1 of $1342.50. That's its exact average price today. The much-more-collectible Beta printing was $12,500 on Oct 1, and $14,999 today.

No, the uproar from the community had much more to do with the way they marketed and sold the product in which these homage prints existed, the way their messaging about its sales performance seemed sketchy, and most importantly the price of the product.

Huge thanks for the very informative write up.

The reprint policy specifically excludes reprints that aren't tournament legal[1] and I'm pretty sure it always has.

[1] https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/official-rep...

There were quite a few things that made it a "debacle":

- $999 for 4 packs of non-playable cards is just a huge turn off to basically everyone, so nobody was excited about this to start

- they "soft violated" the reserve list. I don't really care about speculators in general but in the case of magic the "speculators" are often game stores that sell singles and thus are "forced" to be exposed on the long side to the prices of magic cards. My favorite local game store ended up going out of business because they keep reprinting cards and devaluing the inventory of local game stores

>$999 for 4 packs of non-playable cards is just a huge turn off to basically everyone, so nobody was excited about this to start

Didn't they sell out instantly? I found the price point dumb as well, but clearly people liked it. Their target was always middle aged members of the middle class, going for rarity made sense.

I doubt the set devalued the restricted list much.

I guess I knew everything about it and don't see it as a debacle.

We don’t need WotC or Hasbro.

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