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writerkitSome of you may recall my previous discussion of Magic pricing. And yes, I still haven't followed it up with the various other things that Wizards has done that make all of this especially egregious and frustrating. But now they've gone and done something new, which I am again going to try to explain for people who don't have context for this:
The VIP booster packs for Double Masters are $100 each.
Now, VIP boosters at *all* are a new product that are pretty much seen as a blatant cash grab-- and because their contents are different from draft boosters, some people have been pointing out recently that there's also no way to avoid the "these are loot boxes" accusation. There's no *game* there; you can't pick some number of them up and play the way you can with a draft booster. The only reason to buy them is that you're hoping to hit that fancy rare. (Previous products in the category of "fewer better cards for more money" mostly had a lower price tag-- certain Secret Lairs being the notable exceptions-- and *all* of them had non-randomized contents.) They contain 33 cards where a regular draft booster contains 15-- but 12 of the VIP booster cards are basic lands with special art and some that are foil, so it actually only contains 21 cards. Admittedly four of them are are rares (two of those rares with fancy art), and everything is foil-- but a normal Double Masters booster pack has two rares, and a booster box of 24 is the $300 set I was complaining about.
Double Masters is *already* explicitly a Premium Product that's horribly expensive--more expensive than any previous Masters set, expensive enough that most people can't buy it and lots of people were upset by it. This is a product that shouldn't exist in conjunction with it, one that more than anything else illustrates that Wizards is past caring whether anyone can actually afford their products.
The VIP booster packs for Double Masters are $100 each.
Now, VIP boosters at *all* are a new product that are pretty much seen as a blatant cash grab-- and because their contents are different from draft boosters, some people have been pointing out recently that there's also no way to avoid the "these are loot boxes" accusation. There's no *game* there; you can't pick some number of them up and play the way you can with a draft booster. The only reason to buy them is that you're hoping to hit that fancy rare. (Previous products in the category of "fewer better cards for more money" mostly had a lower price tag-- certain Secret Lairs being the notable exceptions-- and *all* of them had non-randomized contents.) They contain 33 cards where a regular draft booster contains 15-- but 12 of the VIP booster cards are basic lands with special art and some that are foil, so it actually only contains 21 cards. Admittedly four of them are are rares (two of those rares with fancy art), and everything is foil-- but a normal Double Masters booster pack has two rares, and a booster box of 24 is the $300 set I was complaining about.
Double Masters is *already* explicitly a Premium Product that's horribly expensive--more expensive than any previous Masters set, expensive enough that most people can't buy it and lots of people were upset by it. This is a product that shouldn't exist in conjunction with it, one that more than anything else illustrates that Wizards is past caring whether anyone can actually afford their products.
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Date: 2020-07-30 05:37 pm (UTC)Interesting. From a purely cynical business POV, this smells like a company that sees its main product line as dying, so they are doubling down on milking the fanatics for ever-more money.
That is, it isn't that they are "past caring whether anyone can actually afford their products" -- they wouldn't do this unless they were fairly sure that there existed enough people who can and will buy everything, no matter how pricey. But it strongly suggests that they see the endgame in sight, and are indeed, doing a cash grab while they still can.
Yes, that's extremely short-term thinking, but there's nothing unusual about that: it could even be coldly sensible based on the sales projections, especially in light of COVID (I assume) blowing a hole in tournaments and sales.
Not that they would ever admit that, of course. But it seems like the plausible interpretation. Any idea what the overall player count looks like, year-by-year?
no subject
Date: 2020-07-30 07:37 pm (UTC)On the other hand, the most popular format is supposedly Commander, which isn't available on Arena at all. (It's available on Magic Online, which is the old digital game, and yes, Magic has two digital games which function very differently.) Supposedly there's been a massive growth in Commander. Wizards itself keeps insisting that the player base is only growing year after year, that paper is still the most popular format, and that they have no intentions of doing away with paper... but we also have no idea whether to trust them on any of that; they've insisted numerous times that "market research shows" things that aren't borne out by the player community and then gone on to insist that the market research is showing it about the people who just play in their kitchens, with their friends, and never engage in the broader community, and that the number of people who do that dwarfs the number of people who go to game stores and play. (Many people are highly skeptical of this claim, especially since it's most often trotted out when they're doing something enfranchised players hate-- "we are doing it for the hypothetical market research people who are not deeply enfranchised!")
In Wizards' case it's also somewhat complicated by Wizards being owned by Hasbro-- the popular assumption in the community is that Wizards knows this is detrimental to the long-term health of the product but is being leaned on ever more heavily by Hasbro as one of the only still-profitable things.