PROTRADER: Catching Up With the Times

Hey everyone, before I go any further let me apologize for being absent the last two weeks. I certainly didn’t expect when I left to work Grand Prix Mexico City what the next few weeks would hold for me. And, unfortunately, those few weeks haven’t been great. I got sick while working Mexico City solo, and was back home for about 8 hours before jetting off to the Pro Tour in Atlanta.

The Pro Tour was great (how ‘bout them Eldrazi?), but even as I recovered from being sick and felt things were on the upswing, the flu hit me during the Top 8 on Sunday. And hard. Sunday and Monday were a fever-induced blur, and the only real memory I have from those days is that somehow my Canadian Highlander deck — fully decked out with foils, Expeditions and expensive crap like Library of Alexandria — didn’t make it back home with me. I don’t have any idea what happened to me over those two days, much less what happened to it. So that’s pretty disappointing. I came home from the Pro Tour and spent the next four days in bed, eliminating any chance of an article last week.

That’s a few hundred words about my personal life that don’t affect your Magic finance, but I did want to offer an explanation of why I’ve been away. Sorry about that, and let’s hope it doesn’t happen again.

Now, I hear a few things happened in the Magic world while I was gone, so let’s talk about those.

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4 thoughts on “PROTRADER: Catching Up With the Times”

  1. I was thinking too that eternal master will be full of modern playables. Wizard needs to sell boxes, and modern is the best way to sell 10 € boosters now.

    I think price of legacy only playables that will be in the set will seriously crash, taking up the supply while demand won’t moove.
    We all have to take a enlighted (tutor :)) look at our “hold” binders and clean them up from legacy only playable…

    I think, far from bringing more players to legacy, the set is here only to kill (or finish) this format, taking the RL stuff to the sky so that players can’t afford duals anymore. This will be the perfect excuse for wizard to cut this format into vintage, making by the way all the legacy playable’s price going down and don(t recover.

    The only logic thing to do for wizard is a “modern master 3” fullfill with legacy valuables that will not maintain their prices before the reprint because everybody will dump them to have modern / edh card they need.

    For thoses reason, i think we will have many modern cards in “eternal killer…master”

    1. Ya, I kind of agree. I’m not expecting nearly as many Legacy cards as people are talking about. I’m expecting a lot of Modern and Commander cards to show up in Eternal Masters.

      To me… it seems obvious that Wizards wants to move away from the smaller supplemental products that are targeted at specific markets… and move towards hitting multiple markets with large sets. We will see no more clash packs and who knows if Duel Decks will continue or if we see 5 different commander products each year. I’m sure From the Vault is being looked at as well.

      I think that if Eternal Masters includes a wide range of “Eternal-Playable” cards including Modern and EDH cards… And it is a huge success… I expect to see less and less random supplemental products. Wizards seems to be trying to funnel their playerbase into buying the same products because it is cheaper for them to do it like this. If they can attract Legacy, Modern and Commander players with a single product like Eternal Masters… Why would they keep losing money on 3/5 commander decks every year? Why not cut the number of commander decks down to 2? Just release the 2 commander decks with NEW commander cards people are interested in and leave the Modern/Legacy reprints for Masters sets.

      I think Clash Packs were just the first thing to get axed. We need to seriously consider where Wizards/Hasbro is heading in the next few years. Do they really need to release 5 different commander decks EVERY year now that we have reprint avenues like Modern Masters and Eternal Masters? Which I’m assuming will rotate on/off every 2 years now? I think its highly likely that Wizards experiments with releasing only 1-2 commander decks per year now. The “good” ones with NEW and exciting cards, rather than jamming a Modern reprint into a commander product to make the E.V. make sense. Neither Commander players nor Modern players want to buy a $10 commander deck with a $20 modern reprint shoved in there. It feels like a rip-off from both sides.

      Now that we have Eternal Masters and Modern Masters and Standard has a new 2-set rotation schedule… The next obvious place to look at is Commander products right? Everyone knows that 3/5 Commander decks released every year are absolute crap right?

      Am I wrong to assume that Wizards might want to maximize their profits by cutting down on their supplemental products because they FINALLY figured out how to reprint cards! Just reprint 20 cards in the same set rather than spread 20 reprints over 10 Commander decks. I think Wizards is finally opting for the “shotgun” approach to sales and product releases… rather than the “six-shooter” supplemental product approach. Too many “bullets” they fire miss (3/5 commander decks)… Might as well make a big ass hole in their target markets with a shotgun blast release like Eternal Masters.

      Its much more attractive to bring together Legacy/Modern/Commander players and get them excited about a single booster box… rather than hope that Modern players buy a commander deck for 1 card and commander players not notice that the “commander” cards in said deck aren’t really worth shit if you take out that 1 Modern card. Just my 92cents on the subject!

  2. How much recovery can cards like Wasteland expect? Modern Masters allowed everyone access to modern format and the demand allowed staples cards like Goyf and friends to rebound. However the lack of access to duals for people who want to get into legacy seems like a similar rebound is far less likely.
    I’m super nervous about all my holds that are like Daybreak Coronet and only have their price because they haven’t been reprinted.

    @WUBRG: I doubt they plan to discontinue FTV for at least several more years (say around 2022’s FTV Sphinxes).
    Also I expect one of these years to be only 4 EDH precons that are 4 colors each to give us those 4 color commanders we have wanted for years.

    1. Wasteland will do much better than Coronet. One of the things it has going for it is that a lot of the decks it’s good in don’t require duals – which helps new players get into them and props up Wasteland.

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