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Comment by neaden | Hacker News Reader

This whole collector mania is hurting one of my hobbies. Namely the Legacy format in Magic: The Gathering. So the idea for this format is that all the different sets of MTG cards are legal, though some specific cards are banned. Well back in the 90s Wizards made a promise to early collectors they would not reprint certain cards, creating what is now known as the Reserved List. Unfortunately for Legacy, pretty much every Legacy deck requires at least some of these Reserved List cards. For most of the formats history, this was expensive, but manageable. However now the value of many of these format staples has shot through the roof, putting it out of the financial reach of a huge selection of the player base when it was already considered to be expensive.

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Have you looked into Pioneer? It's my new favorite formate by far. It avoids much of the degenerate combos that exist in legacy and even modern, yet has some crazy amount of depth. But most importantly, NO FETCHLANDS! You don't realize how much time and energy every deck constantly fetching takes up until you play without them.

Unfortunately I enjoy the degenerate combos and brainstorm shenanigans to much to let them go.

Since you're interested in playing, not collecting, is there a reason you can't just use proxies?

Stores can choose to allow proxies, but they are incentivized by Wizards to run a certain number of sanctioned events and report attendance, and events that allow proxies can't be sanctioned. People will play with proxies for testing purposes, but for Friday Night Magic you are expected to have legitimate cards.

Sounds like the problem isn't collectors so much as whatever incentives Wizards is setting up, then (along with Wizards's refusal to reprint the cards).

Perhaps I'm just uninformed about the business model of trading card games like MTG, but don't they need to set these rules for game stores to incentivize players to actually buy real cards to play with? Sure, not every player participates in tournaments like these, but I imagine there is a non-negligible amount of money spent by dedicated players who want to keep up with the competition when new cards release.

A small loophole, language doesn't count so you can sometimes find cheaper foreign cards online. That's modern more than legacy though.

screw proxies, just buy Chinese reprints.

For the purpose of playing the game, as opposed to collecting, why is it not possible to simply print a copy of the card, and play using it?

If it’s a legal/copyright issue, couldn’t you arrange to ‘rent’ this card for the duration of the game, or for inclusion in your deck from an owner / collector.

It seems ridiculous, as you mentioned, that playing the game is hampered, or not possible, due to the collectible nature of the playing cards.

The problem is playing in WOTC sanctioned events which do not allow for proxies. I can get why they want to do this, the whole point of these events is to sell more cards.

However there is a gameplay advantage as well. The high price of cards keeps players more stable and invested in their decks. You don't see players constantly running whole new decks, and sometimes people get creative due to financial or card availability constraints.

I was a part of a weekly legacy group that ran with a house rule of 10 proxies allowed. This hit a nice compromise between people being able to play decent decks while still having some kind of stability in the local meta.

So what you’re saying is I probably should go dig out the boxes of MTG cards I have from being a kid in the mid-90s? I haven’t thought about those in decades!

Not only that, but inventory the stuff genuinely valuable.

Because if you want it covered by your homeowner's or renter's insurance policy, you're going to need a rider on your policy for them, because homeowner's and renter's insurance policies tend to exclude valuable collectibles by default.

My M:tG collection isn't too crazy, but it does include 6 of the Power 9 (which I still play in decks), and my renter's insurance company has sent out an appraiser to verify the inventory so we could have a rider to cover it. They're worth as much as a pretty decent car.

The video games are getting to the point where they're probably next.

Sure, but be aware it depends heavily on the set. If they are from Revised edition or earlier they could be worth a lot, after that and the odds of a high valued cards goes down considerably. I started with Ice Age and didn't have anything valuable when I went through for instance.

If you haven't checked recently (within the last year) it might be worth it to check again, I started playing at around the same time as you so I have noticed that some cards, even from sets that were "overprinted" like Ice Age, have shot up in value considerably. You can check dawnglare to get an idea of what things are like now (https://mtg.dawnglare.com/?p=viz).

Most revised cards are almost worthless. Dual lands and Wheel of Fortune are the exception.

I came here to ruin your life and introduce you to Oldschool 93/94. The community is really awesome but at what price? :)

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