Rereleasing not revised

TomB

Administrator
Staff member
Did I read that right? $999 for 4 packs of 15 cards with normal rarities? Are they kidding? :ROFLMAO:
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Yep. I mentioned it in the "Racist cards" thread, but didn't really bother to post about it anywhere else until now. Crusade was flagged as "racist" by WotC in 2020, so it won't be in this product. The ante cards are also being removed for some reason. The other two cards that were in the original Collector's Edition and won't be reappearing here are Weakness and Earthbind. In the case of Earthbind, I guess the art is considered too provocative or something, and that's been the subject of complaints for years. I do not understand why Weakness was removed.

Did I read that right? $999 for 4 packs of 15 cards with normal rarities? Are they kidding? :ROFLMAO:
You did indeed. Would it surprise you to hear that there's been some uproar over this? :p

So, I've seen a lot of controversy surrounding this product, but very few people have touched on what I think WotC is really trying to do with this one. If you poke around online, most of the discussion you're likely to find almost frames this as a blunder, as though WotC is missing an opportunity by making this product so expensive. After all, they could sell so many more if they made it cheaper, and the demand is there. But that misses the point. I'll do a write-up here at some point explaining what I mean. Not trying to be cryptic, it's just that this topic would need me to be a bit more longwinded than I can be right now.
 

TomB

Administrator
Staff member
I saw that bit in the "racist cards" thread and to be honest, I didn't really think it was that big of a deal if they decided to not reprint a few cards that most people would rarely play with anyway. Granted, their reasoning seems a little vague, and while most of the people I remember playing with didn't play for ante I suppose someone MIGHT if given an opportunity, and if they pay a grand for a pack of cards and get an ante card for their trouble there's every reason to believe they'd certainly consider trying it... :rolleyes:

Not to steal your thunder here (or even to detract from it), but I imagine WotC's is doing it this way so they can generate some publicity while protecting their "reserved list" card values. Since people would have to spend $1000's to acquire the "New" versions of the cards they'd have a high value in and of themselves. The older cards would still be MORE valuable, since they would be valid for legal play whereas the newer cards would not be, but the new cards would still be attractive to a certain (very limited) group of consumers with money to burn and groups they play in that wouldn't care about using cards that are only proxies. Sleeve them up and to most players they wouldn't care whether they were technically "legal" or not, and since they would have an inflated value they might even drive the price for the authentic cards up a bit.

It IS kinda fun playing with the old-time power cards. I myself have a fake "Black Lotus" and a fake "Library of Alexandria" that are actually pretty good copies of those cards (they would fail the bend test) that I break out sometimes when playing with my kids, but they wouldn't impress anyone since they only cost me $5 each...;)
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
I saw that bit in the "racist cards" thread and to be honest, I didn't really think it was that big of a deal if they decided to not reprint a few cards that most people would rarely play with anyway. Granted, their reasoning seems a little vague, and while most of the people I remember playing with didn't play for ante I suppose someone MIGHT if given an opportunity, and if they pay a grand for a pack of cards and get an ante card for their trouble there's every reason to believe they'd certainly consider trying it... :rolleyes:
To be clear, it's not so much that I have a gripe with them removing a particular card from this product that I wasn't going to purchase anyway, but more the general interest in which things they believe to be OK vs. not OK, since they've been tight-lipped about that ever since 2020. We get glimpses that let us know indirectly that certain pieces of art are ones they want not to reprint, but they never explain their reasoning. And it's kind of fun to speculate? I don't know. I've heard that the art on Weakness is "ableist" and that seems like a really bizarre analysis to me, since the implication was always that black magic is being used to afflict a creature, so the creature should appear, well, weakened. I briefly thought that perhaps the card was removed just because the illustration is very low-quality (I do not think this would be an insult to Douglas Shuler because it's pretty obvious that the quality of his work improved dramatically as time went on), but that's true for a lot of the early stuff, so singling out just one card would be strange.

As an aside, I do find it interesting that some people are talking about drafting this product. That would be one expensive draft! So the removal of ante cards and the uptick in dual lands generally improve draft decks across the board. But completely removing Crusade nerfs White Weenie. I do not know enough about Limited/Unlimited draft archetypes to know if White Weenie gets drafted much, but this would seem to affect that.

Not to steal your thunder here (or even to detract from it), but I imagine WotC's is doing it this way so they can generate some publicity while protecting their "reserved list" card values. Since people would have to spend $1000's to acquire the "New" versions of the cards they'd have a high value in and of themselves. The older cards would still be MORE valuable, since they would be valid for legal play whereas the newer cards would not be, but the new cards would still be attractive to a certain (very limited) group of consumers with money to burn and groups they play in that wouldn't care about using cards that are only proxies. Sleeve them up and to most players they wouldn't care whether they were technically "legal" or not, and since they would have an inflated value they might even drive the price for the authentic cards up a bit.
That's a big part of it, yeah. Thunder stolen. :p

But seriously, this product doesn't have to even be profitable (which it will) in order to do its real job of inflating secondary market values on old cards.

It IS kinda fun playing with the old-time power cards. I myself have a fake "Black Lotus" and a fake "Library of Alexandria" that are actually pretty good copies of those cards (they would fail the bend test) that I break out sometimes when playing with my kids, but they wouldn't impress anyone since they only cost me $5 each...;)
The "bend test" is really something that no one should be doing at all anymore. It was popular in the 90's when most fakes were crappy enough that they failed it and real cards almost always passed it. Things have gone the other way. Newer fakes almost always pass. And while newer real cards would probably mostly pass, cardboard does lose its elasticity with age. Plenty of very real cards would fail a bend test just because they're nearly thirty years old. A flashlight and a loupe can easily be used to detect nearly all fake Magic cards.
 

TomB

Administrator
Staff member
Well, I haven't really played competitively at all since around '98, so I reckon referring to the bend test marks me out as a bit of a relic, eh? 👴

Sorry about the thunder...⚡
 

Nightstalkers

New member
And release giant foil artwork...

I've noticed that they're trying to regress a little with the sets lately. Reusing old ideas. Some of us would be tickled pink about the revisit of urza.
 
Top