Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

Prepare for the enshittification and bedbathandbeyonding of Magic the gathering.

If I had to make a guess as to why, given the fact that the people they laid off were all senior leaders and the numbers are good, it would be preparing for a pump and dump.

if you want to be able to pump and dump a really strong brand then you need to be able to have leaders who don’t mind burning the brands equity in order to make money. My guess is that specifically what intending to do here.

Change the leadership, make new “sticky” products, pump revenue numbers, then spin out a public offering of the magic brand that looks like a great new reboot and refresh.

However the brand is only there to smuggle in the subscription model around new products that have strong margin. Everyone* gets rich cause they slaughtered their fattest pig and yet another cultural staple is killed.

Don’t worry, another band of psychopaths will resurrect it in a few decades like Mattell is doing with the Barbie brand currently.

*Not everyone - very few actually

> Prepare for the enshittification and bedbathandbeyonding of Magic the gathering.

That happened during the original design of the game. M:tG was one of the first products to sell you a pig in a poke. That was the concept!

I've seen people say that it would be nice to regulate loot boxes in video games, but they can't figure out how to do it without banning Magic's business model. I never understood why that would be a problem.

Exactly. It would be a better game if they just sold entire expansions where you get all of the cards.

It may not even exist without such a model, on the other hand. Which may cause many other things to cease as well or never expand to mainstream-ish reception.

It might be slowly moving to that model: with precon decks, challenger decks and secret lairs, WotC is selling a lot of non-randomized stuff. They even split for a while draft boosters from collector boosters (and then reversed the decision when nobody was buying the draft boosters and risked killing the format).

They have non-randomized offers, but the vast majority of their stuff can only be obtained randomly (or secondhand).

They did one round, but I think it takes 3 rounds of pump and dump before it really dies

>I've seen people say that it would be nice to regulate loot boxes in video games, but they can't figure out how to do it without banning Magic's business model. I never understood why that would be a problem.

The genius thing about Magic is that it doesn't place individual value on a card. Even if there is indeed a "drop rate". But that drop rate doesn't always evaluate to higher value. It correlates and they try to make if so, but that's ultimately a different marketplace who externally decides what has value.

Video games don't have such safeguards. It's all on the studios servers and they can adjust value on the fly. Unless lootboxes are all cosmetics there's a more direct hand in the market that can influence value and worth. And it all comes crashing down the moment the studios decides to shut down the servers. I feel that's an intrinsic difference that places a video game closer to a casino ("the house always wins") than a TCG (throw out what you think is worth and let the community sort it out).

With MtG, I can go online and see what my odds are for just about any kind of packs I get: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/collecting-ravnica...

Not sure if they were always this forthcoming about the 'slotting', but I do appreciate it.

The enshittification already happened. The most recent incorporation of other IPs, like the upcoming Dr Who, is a series of last gasps. While sales have followed along the aging income growth of existing players, the inverse pressure of exiting players is past sustainable levels. Other forms of gamba have eroded the MTG gamba allure.

Re: Youtube - Tolarian Community College - which is very good at capturing the state of the ecosystem.

What is inherently wrong with co-branded product? Do you have any data to back up "exiting players"? I don't think we really have a good read on that. The MagicCons I've been to have been increasingly packed with people.

The concern many MtG players have is that throwing a bunch of other IP crossovers into the card game has a variety of potentially negative effects:

- established players who enjoyed the theme of Magic in the first place might be turned off

- it creates an increasing number of products and therefore product fatigue, which is something I’ve heard lots of players mention and was even brought up by Hasbro themselves in a financial call

- it adds to the increasingly confusing legality of cards/formats. Some crossovers have alternate in-universe versions. Many don’t. Some are commander legal. Some are commander and modern legal. Some have their own draft environments. Knowing what cards you can play in a given format is getting obnoxious to track.

- They clearly seem to be introducing new players to Magic, but they are also clearly driving old Magic players away. The question is how persistent are the new players? Do they stick around, or does their interest wane when their favorite crossover franchise isn’t getting new cards anymore?

I personally think it’s too soon to tell, but a lot of the moves strike me as very reminiscent of the types of moves that eventually are identified as enshitificafion as management tries to extract as much short term juice as possible in a way that damages long term health. I’d love to be wrong.

>What is inherently wrong with co-branded product?

it points towards brand dilution and financial straw-grasping. it indicates that the stewards of the IP no longer care about the thing being meaningful and the release schedule is now no longer ordered to increase impact and brand value, but rather to extract whatever value has been accumulated via customer good-will thus-far.

you can see this trend/process occur in just about any long-standing fantasy/fiction IP.

Some IPs are built to push product. Evangelion and Gundam are designed to shove plastic toys out the door since day 1.

Some IPs slowly evolve into that product push once main-line income dwindles; those are the ones that tend to upset folks with that sort of behavior, and frankly it cheapens the brand appeal by reducing exclusivity.

In other words : niche appeal exists, and generally the move towards synergistic advertisement partnerships over quality generally signals the corporate desire for generating mass market appeal at the sake of sacrificing the niche crowd.

The part of the player base that cares deeply about the lore of MtG was skeptical of having My little Pony, Warhammer 40k, Lord of the Rings, Fallout and Street Fighter cards (all real btw!).

The other thing is that there's a certain product-fatigue and format fatigue in the community. There are so many releases each year that it's increasingly impossible to give the monetary and time commitment to follow 100% of MtG. It was never a cheap hobby, but the price increases and the proliferation of products really is noticeable.

The old-school entrenched playerbase is also noticing that the formats they grew up with are becoming increasingly irrelevant. In-person standard-events in local stores are increasingly harder to find (and even if an event is planned it often fails because not enough people show up). The competitive tournament scene is almost completely dead. The big money-maker for wizards is Commander and you are thus seeing more and more cards aimed at that format, even in standard-sets.

In short: the extended universe is not aimed at the old-school base and can be seen as an unnecessary money-grab at best or as an "they killed my preferred format for this?!" outrage condensation point.

You are seeing the same thing in the MCU: it's hard to follow /all/ movies and TV shows and even worse: some of the shows are not aiming at the classically young singe male audience and thus shows aimed at female teenagers are produced. Some part of the nerd community sees that as a direct attack on their identity.

I did not care about Dr Who, Godzilla, Walking Dead, Fallout, etc. But I did buy the LotR and Warhammer decks (and I was not disappointed). The reality is that different people like different things, and I don't think Universe Beyond is a bad thing per se.

It is not like the default story is terribly interesting and little more than generic, second rate fantasy.

It seems like we're reliving 1980 all over again but with smartphones, internet, millions of homeless people, and slightly better fashion.

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