By: Travis Allen

@wizardbumpin

Don’t miss this week’s installment of MTG Fast Finance! An on-topic, no-nonsense tour through the week’s most important Magic economy changes.

This article was originally posted 5/3/16 as ProTrader only. Due to the feedback received, I’ve chosen to make the part of this article relating to reprints public. Enjoy!

Not as Easy as it Looks

This all blends into a much larger discussion of reprints as a whole. It’s been a hot topic again recently, with the removal of Modern from the Pro Tour circuit. Without a Modern PT, there’s concern that WotCaHS (Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro Subsidiary) won’t reprint nearly as many staples, and it will lead to players being priced out of the format. I understand the concern here, and it comes from a well-intentioned placed. However, reprints are not nearly as simple as “shove card X into set Y.” Check out this recent Rosewater Tumblr post on the topic:

He states it blatantly. Yes, we’d like to do something about making Modern more accessible, but no, jamming everything into Standard isn’t the right path.

Corbin Hosler had an excellent string of tweets not too long ago documenting one piece of this rather challenging puzzle. He probably should have made it an article, but he didn’t, so instead I’m stealing his content and using it for mine.

(1)Magic was built on a platform of desirable cards – some will be “chased” after, leading players to open more packs. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(2) This leads to some cards being worth more than others as players want those cards to play with. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(3) Over time, these differences become more pronounced as older formats see cards rise to the top and supply is lessened. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(4) This brings us to reprints. Reprints drive big sales for Wizards, but there is danger is printing too many reprints. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(5) Not enough reprints make things inaccessible. Too many – Chronicles – drive players away from the game and nuke the value of collections — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(6)Lots of people say they don’t want expensive cards – then they buy a pack of MMA hoping to crack a Goyf. This is desirable if you’re WOTC — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(7) It is generally agreed that Modern and Legacy are better than Standard. They are also vastly more expensive most of the time. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(8) Because WOTC doesn’t profit from secondary market sales, people want WOTC to reprint stuff like Liliana and Snapcaster themselves. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(9) Wizards is dabbling in this with MMA and EMA. This sells sets and is good. However, there are dangers to overprinting. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(10) For instance, if Modern and Legacy were the same price as Standard, why would anyone choose to play Standard over those two formats? — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(11) But because those formats change so much more slowly than Standard, it is impossible to sell as many new booster packs to players. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(12) Yes, stuff like MMA and EMA sell out immediately. However, if they truly printed those to demand, why would we care about Standard? — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(13) What happens after those sets sell out and everyone can now play Modern? Standard is forgotten and no one buys new Standard set. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(14) So yes, while a fully-printed EMA would make WOTC a ton of money now, it would come back to bite them in the next few years. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(15) At that point, the only way to sell new product is to either push the power level – a danger to the game’s very existence. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(16) Or to force players to play a different format, which is also not desirable. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(17) To summarize: Standard should be low-cost and easy to get into – $700-800 Standard decks are too much. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(18) But Modern and Legacy – if they are to be at all supported by WOTC – must be more expensive for the business model to survive. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

(19) This shows why the issue of reprints is more complicated than it appears when someone yells “REPRINT LILY NOW” Done spamming you now. — Corbin Hosler (@Chosler88) April 21, 2016

Chronicles was a disaster for Wizards back in the day, and it was cited by Aaron Forsythe as exactly what they wanted to avoid when discussing how to manage Modern Masters. It’s far safer to underprint a product like that than overprint, because overprinting can ruin future profits, and thus the health of the game as a whole. If it’s $400 for a tier one Standard deck and $450 for a tier one Modern deck, how many people would play Standard instead of Modern? Many fewer packs of the new set would be opened, and Wizards would end up cannibalizing their own product’s long term health for some short term profits. They’re already bad about that as it is with regards to MTGO. Do we really want paper Magic to begin experiencing the same failures as MODO?

Right Bullet, Wrong Target

One of the more common proclamations is that WotCaHS should give absolutely zero consideration to maintaining collection values of the enfranchised, so that new players can get into the format. Slash and burn card prices, screw the privileged elite, and let everyone into the party. It sounds great, right?

As someone who owns a set of Tarmogoyfs, let me say this: I don’t care if they reprint him as a rare in Standard. I don’t care if Goyf’s price drops. I’ve had them for years, will continue to have them, and wouldn’t sell them unless I was selling the entire damn collection, which is a long ways away. They represent only a small portion of my collection’s value.

However, I’m not the average player. Most people don’t own nearly as many cards as I do, and a $600 set of Tarmogoyfs is a much larger percentage of their total collection’s value than mine. If you reduce that number by $500, you’ve just taken a humongous chunk out of the average player’s Magic gross worth. Why punish those that don’t have a house’s value tied up in cardboard?

Going beyond that, assuming you don’t care about the 1% of Magic players that wouldn’t be bothered by a drop in Goyf’s price, what about all those players out there that are actively working towards sets? Nearly 4,000 non-foil Tarmogoyfs show up on Want lists right now on PucaTrade. Imagine spending however many months it may take to earn enough points for a Tarmogoyf, receiving it, and then finding out it’s showing up at rare in Eldritch Moon. Poof, there goes $100 worth of card value that you just spent six weeks grinding out. Is it fair to those players? Forget about guys like me, I’m not the one that a Standard reprint would hose. It’s all the mid-level players that those reprints really screw. Reprinting Tarmogoyf in Standard at rare is a dramatic example, of course, but you get the idea. Crashing card values doesn’t harm the hoarders like myself nearly as badly as it harms the thousands of people trying to scrape together a reasonable Modern collection.

It’s First Order or Something

Corbin spoke about how it’s important for WotCaHS to manage the cost of entry of Modern and Legacy relative to Standard, so as to avoid cannibalizing their own product. We talked about how crashing card values harms players, but not necessarily the players you’d expect it to. Now, let’s look at another facet: reprinting Modern cards tends to ruin Standard.

Here’s my for-fun theorem:

Modern has many more sets legal than Standard As a card pool grows, it is tougher and tougher for individual cards to rise to the top Those that do stand out in a card pool are exceptionally powerful A format is defined by its most powerful cards Format defining cards are more desirable Controlling for rarity, the more desirable a card, the more expensive it is The most expensive cards are the ones most in need of a reprint Cards that would be identified as ideal reprints are exceptionally powerful The smaller a format, the more influence a powerful card exerts Therefore: Modern’s best cards will have a dramatic impact on any Standard format in which they appear

(Yeah yeah I know it’s not a valid or sound proof.)

Because of how good the cards in Modern need to be to see considerable play, they will by their nature impact Standard heavily. We don’t need to look far to see evidence of this. When Thoughtseize was reprinted, it had a tremendous impact on Standard as a whole. Remember Mono-Black and Pack Rat and Desecration Demon? Standard was 50% MBC mirrors for six months. Even without those support cards, Thoughtseize would have been a key player in that format. In fact, that Temur was basically non-existent in constructed Magic during that time can certainly be at least partially attributed to the presence of Thoughtseize.

Similarly, the fetches in Khans of Tarkir did a lot to Standard. Do you remember what the decks looked like before Shadows over Innistrad? They were all four color messes. Fetches, in combination with the battle lands, were responsible for that. You could make the argument that fetches wouldn’t have had such an impact on Standard had the battle lands not been printed, but that’s sort of the point — WotCaHS needs to bend over backwards to make sure these higher power cards don’t screw everything up.

Heck, look at two newer cards, Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy and Siege Rhino. Neither one is a reprint, but they’re both seeing play in older formats. And while doing so, also made Standard all about them the entire time. Standard only has a handful of exceptionally powerful cards in it at a time, and all the meaningful cards in Modern are exceptionally powerful.

This isn’t to say that Standard can’t accommodate for these cards whatsoever. After all, each of these reprints had to exist the first time, right? Sure, but don’t forget what these looked like the first time around. Tarmogoyf, in conjunction with Garruk Wildspeaker, was a pillar of Standard when it was legal. Cryptic Command was key in 5c Control, another top Standard deck. Snapcaster Mage was all over Standard for two entire years. Did they “ruin” Standard? Probably not. They definitely warped it though.

I fully admit that any card could be reprinted in Standard and the format could be shaped to accommodate it. A great example of this was Mirrodin, where they brought back Atog and Terror. Terror had been an amazingly powerful piece of removal prior to Mirrodin block, but with artifact creatures everywhere, it seemed much less impressive. At the same time Atog, which had been garbage in the past, was now impressively useful on a plane with so many artifacts.

Yeah, we could have Snapcaster Mage in Standard and not have him be the most important card in the format. But it would mean almost no playable one mana instants and sorceries, and the two mana ones would need to be powered down too. Not just in the set he’s legal either. You’d need these restrictions in place in the block preceding him, the block including him, and the block following him. That’s a year and a half of Magic sets that would need to be designed within strict guidelines, just to allow for a single card to be reprinted. And what about the other reprints going on at the same time? And what about the blocks even further out that are impacted by the presence or absence of those one mana instants or sorceries in adjacent blocks? You can see how making room for a single powerful card can impact years worth of Magic design. When Rosewater talks about how difficult it is to balance reprints, he’s not kidding.

QED or Something

I’m not saying reprints aren’t helpful or necessary, because they absolutely are. Without them, formats tend towards stagnation, and if reprints are simply not an option whatsoever, as in Legacy, there is only one conclusion. However, shoving multiple highly-desired cards into Standard sets comes with a host of problems that go far beyond simply costing a handful of enfranchised players some value. WotCaHS runs the risk of alienating burgeoning players, crashing markets, cannibalizing future Standard sets, and driving players out of the game altogether. When you consider how bad the consequences can be, and how many ways there are for things to go poorly, it should come as no surprise that they’re (rightfully) erring on the side of caution.