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Comment by boomboomsubban | Hacker News Reader

>WoTC releases the 30th aniversary edition for MTG, which is 60 random cards for 1000 $ which are officially marked as non-tournament legal. The MTG community is furious and for once people from all corners of the community come together to boycott this product. The rage is great and enduring.

Yet somehow the product completely sold out in under an hour. I really don't understand the outrage on that decision, would you prefer that everyone can buy their useless commutative coins?

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It's honestly not so much that set. It's the sheer amount of new supplemental sets that they're throwing out, many of which are cards that you basically _have_ to but to remain competitive.

Formats like legacy and vintage are no longer things you can buy into and play a similar deck for a long period of time. Instead, they're things where you have to buy new cards once every two to four weeks to remain competitive. That's a big change from a few years back when those formats tended to be relative stable for 1-2 year periods.

That's the real thing that folks are frustrated with. The 30th anniversary packs are just something that's easy to point at and go "this is a money grab". If it were just those, it would really be a "to each their own".

Having the creator of the game say "..keep focused on this idea that this is a game first. As if you treat it as a collectible first then you are not doing your game players any favors" during the same event before they announced $300 for 60 proxies threw gas on it.

> It's the sheer amount of new supplemental sets that they're throwing out, many of which are cards that you basically _have_ to but to remain competitive.

That’s literally been going since around Mirrodin. It’s why I gave up on the game.

Now I just have a massive set of only commons that everyone can build their decks with and I don’t have to deal with the insane power inflation.

https://i0.wp.com/onlyontuesdays27.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

Thanks, that kinda kames it abundantly obvious how the releases have evolved.

I was talking mostly about power inflation of the cards themselves though.

I think the problem has always existed, but to a much lesser extent than it has in the last 3-4 years. Vintage has always had the bulk of deck's value in Power 9 and lands, and the only recent changes there have been things like Mystic Sanctuary ($1 card), Cavern of Souls ($10 when it came out in 2012, now $50), Urza's Saga ($40), etc. Legacy & Modern also rely on an expensive but versatile land base, but in terms of staples they've both been hit hard by stuff like Modern Horizons 2 where stuff like Ragavan, Urza's Saga, and the elementals (Fury, Endurance, Subtlety, etc) are so pushed that they warp the metagame drastically. I can't think of a time when that was case in a way which impacted so many different decks. Some cards were problematic (Oko!) and made specific decks that included it much better for a time, but I've never seen a single set impact modern in such a big way.

WoTC says it sold out, there's no actual proof of that (in fact, some insiders are saying that it was taken off the market due to the bad publicity)

They have never claimed that it sold out, just that the sale concluded. Stores are actually on the list to get allocation for M30 product to sell.

The gp is saying that the set sold out within an hour and that is what the parent is responding to.

Neither the GP nor the parent to my original comment were correct. Nobody said anything sold out, they ended the sale - which is very different. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that it didn't.

Ironically, removing them early from the market further increases their value.

Read the sale ended early [1], not necessarily sold out.

[1] https://dotesports.com/mtg/news/magic-30th-anniversary-editi...

Shutting it down for publicity after starting the sale makes no sense, you're pissing off both those that want them and those that hate them.

The product didn’t sell out. Sales were merely stopped after 30 minutes.

Gotta protect that exclusivity.

> I really don't understand the outrage on that decision

What decision are you claiming people were outraged?

Because the actual reason people where outraged is the very existence of the magic 30th edition in the first place. It is one of the clearest and starkest examples of a company disrespecting it's customer, ever.

Also the fact that WotC has promised over and over that these cards would never get reprints, not even non-tournament legal reprints.

As of at least 2016, I'm not checking older ones, non-tournament legal reprints have been acceptable under their reprint rules. https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/official-rep...

>. It is one of the clearest and starkest examples of a company disrespecting it's customer, ever.

Why?

Compare it to some other fanbases. With music, printing a super pricy limited edition of an album with extra non-music content is a normal decision. With sneakers, that's like the entire market. With comic books limited edition posters and figures are commonplace.

So many fandoms have outlets for the rich megafans that the average fan can just ignore without any real issue. Why is it disrespecting the customer? I can understand disliking the side sets having chase cards that are necessary for some formats, and could see those as disrespecting the customer, but not these.

"We had to create an experience for fans new and old that would be worthy of three decades of the original trading card game." doesn't fit a 250 dollar pack of non-cards.

If it was real very rare cards, there would be upset but they could have made it work.

If it was non-cardlike collectibles, it would have been fine.

But to sell non-legal cards at such a high price is so much the opposite of the community celebration they were pushing for overall.

And the last time they sold something like this, it was the entire set and it wasn't expensive. Even if that was a long time ago.

And wizards constantly pretends that all their pieces of cardboard have similar value, so it's extra obnoxious whenever they price something like this. But this one in particular is an order of magnitude worse even if we forget for a second they aren't legal cards.

And various ways of playing the game are actively dying because it's so hard to get cards like this, which just adds salt.

Also - why are people upset over a product (that doesn't affect the game) being sold to people others? I feel like important context is missing here over why anyone would be upset by this.

My guess is the feeling that if the product is successful, then the corporation might create similar products that are less optional. Or they may neglect or discontinue their less customer hostile products.

It's also probably reasonable to be upset that they are pricing a significant portion of their community out of a product that ostensibly celebrates the success of the community.

Imagine a game with 30 years of history, genre defining, that has die hard fans and then take some cards, make effectively "fake" versions (not tournament legal) and charge $1000 for 60 of them.

They could have done a LOT more cooler things and passionate lovers of the game wish that they did.

Why not make them tournament legal? It’d cut down on some of the insane prices for these things (like house prices, sad for those who just bought at a huge premium, but ultimately good for the rest).

Long story but there is a list of cards called the "reserved list" and WoTC promised to never reprint them. So they got cheeky and said "well, we didn't really reprint them because they aren't legal, see?" Oh, and pay us $1000 for these cards.

https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Reserved_List

One of the most famous cards is on the RL:

https://scryfall.com/card/leb/233/black-lotus?utm_source=mw_...

And the new "not legal" version:

https://scryfall.com/card/30a/228/black-lotus

I think that there was a sense that WotC was going to do something special for Magic's 30th anniversary - something for the community at large. Instead, they released a mediocre, $1000 product.

This is a segment of geek culture that has all sorts of ego/identity stuff tied up with these brands. So when they don't "act properly" it feels like it reflects on them and they take it personally.

That's the downside to having that market segment as your customers, the upside is that they are fanatically loyal and are not remotely picky or discerning as customers/consumers.

You don't understand why people who own what was supposed to be a limited edition collectible/in game power up got upset when more were released? Cards that they bought for large amounts on the secondary market because WOTC promised they would never be reprinted.

Isn't there a youtuber who just buys this stuff all up to sit in his garage?

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