43
votes
The unique printing of "The One Ring" has been found
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- Title
- The 1/1 "The One Ring" from The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth Has Been Found
- Authors
- David McCoy
- Published
- Jun 30 2023
- Word count
- 344 words
Given how ravenously anti-lootbox most gamers are, I am continually shocked at the lack of outrage towards WotC over this (and Magic's general reliance on "lootboxes" to distribute cards).
This is probably the most egregious example of artificial scarcity I've ever seen, and I'm disappointed that it still works so well.
I mean, card gamers and board/video gamers are different groups. If you're talking to a board gamer, they're looking for expansion packs that are worth their money. If you're a video gamer, you're looking for non-toxic DLC.
(This is ignoring the csgo-skin-type gamers)
Card gamers are their own breed, and by the amount of them I've hung out with, a lot of them tend to be gamblers. There's no judgement in that from me, per say, and honestly I have less beef with the 'one-in-a-million-card-packs' card than I do with the overall concept of richer person=more likely to have good deck=more likely to pay-to-win. As a young kid with little-to-no financial backing, I was almost always behind my friends in those games because they simply could afford to open more packs while I was stuck with the starter.
Something I personally find interesting as an M:TG player:
I've noticed that WotC has no "official store" (I could be wrong on this!) and hence they always promote it as "Buy our products at your local gaming store!"
Then I remember that they got into HUGE legal trouble back in their early days, due to the ante cards- which literally WERE gambling cards. Technically speaking, every time you buy a pack, you actually ARE gambling- there's no guarantee that the cards inside will ultimately be worth what you actually paid for the pack... of course, you can also get a card that's worth more than the pack itself. So yes, it's actually all gambling.
Which is why I rarely ever bought packs- I much preferred to buy stuff on the secondary market, so that I knew exactly what I was getting. And these days, I only play online in Arena- for free.
A) There definitely is a lot of anger at WotC nowadays, over a number of things - including the complexity and price of the alternate versions
B) For your average "just want to play Magic" player, the alternate arts are a huge benefit - between "shifting some demand to the alt versions" and "collectors just open more packs that way", the normal versions of a lot of chase rares end up cheaper than they otherwise would
C) If you're talking more fundamentally about the entire "cracking packs" model, I honestly think it's worth it to enable Limited gameplay. Granted, I'd prefer if pack prices were a little lower, but I think if you made Magic into an LCG, you'd lose a lot of the fun.
I have to wonder if there is a way we can implement game modes like draft without necessitating the manufacture and sale of countless piles of cards people don't want.
Like, how many Lawnmower Elves cards are sitting around collecting dust in basements and game stores?
Maybe the problem can be solved with software. You could provide a list of cards that can be found in virtual "booster packs" and assign them drop rates, then digitally open your packs and define your deck. You then build the real deck using real cards from your collection. Since this is supposedly an LCG, the base game and expansions would all include the maximum number of each unique card allowed in a deck.
A software solution like this would also prove more customizable, and let people play draft with old expansions that are no longer available, assuming players have access to the cards themselves.
There are a few options in that regard, the first of which being building a cube, and then reassembling packs when it's time to draft. That doesn't scale up to something like a Grand Prix main event, though, and unfortunately I don't think the software solution does either - to say nothing of the intangibles you'd lose by not having physical cards to pass around.
I say all this as someone who champions a digital-exclusive format (Gladiator) - there's still something about sitting down to draft that I'll gladly pay $15 for
I think you misunderstand the purpose of my proposed software. It would not actually implement the game, simply fill the role of the booster packs. Once you've decided what cards will comprise your deck using the "digital booster packs" you opened, you will go fish the real cards out of your physical copy of the game.
That's what I was interpreting, yes. I think the act of picking up 15 physical cards, studying them, choosing one, and passing the rest to a player sitting next to you is part of the experience, and I don't want to replace that with staring at my phone for 20 minutes.
Unfortunately, it's pretty hard to make some cards good if you don't make other cards bad. Magic is balanced in many different ways and not all cards are balanced against the same metrics, so it's not always obvious why one card might see a ton of play and another is "literally unplayable." - a lot of times, a card good in one format is just not super important in another (and what those metrics are, regardless of what youtubers will tell you, are completely in the eye of the beholder).
For example, Identifying good commons and uncommons would be good for your deck are incredibly important in limited play formats like sealed deck or draft. In constructed formats, most of those same cards are more or less useless. But you do need to supply the playbase with both, because players play formats ranging from commander to pauper to modern to vintage to standard to draft to.....you get the idea.
I'm not sure what that has to do with booster packs. I never suggested making all cards equal in power, I suggested distributing the cards in a way that does not put poorer players at a competitive disadvantage. You can still balance the game exactly the same.
Unless you are suggesting that it is "good balance" for rich players to have decks full of better cards than everyone else.
I thought your suggestion of "how many lawnmower elves cards are sitting around collecting dust in basements" was meaning that there's just a glut of cards that are just too weak to see any sort of play and I based my comment on that assumption. The reality is that most of those intrinsically less interesting cards are there to support formats like draft or pauper that need those cards in order to work.
I'm not suggesting it's good balance for rich players to have decks full of better cards than everyone else, but if someone cares about that kind of balance (I do, and that's why I don't play vintage or competitive commander), many formats intentionally correct for the cost of cards on the secondary market (e.g. I don't think I've ever seen a pauper deck with a card that was worth more than $3 in it.) Others like standard and sealed and draft (the last of which is the only way I play these days) also correct for balance over time by strongly limiting the pool of cards available. Obviously, maybe someone in your pod cracks a huge bomb card, but they're hardly filling their deck with them.
I wasn't saying you were suggesting that cards should be equal in power - I was saying that 2 similar cards might have been balanced to satisfy two very different play groups. I guess my point is that there will always be "cards people don't want" in a game that has so many varied ways to play.
My comment about lawnmower elves is about how WotC has printed milliions more of them than anyone wants because they need stuff to fill out booster packs while maintaining the scarcity of higher quality cards. You never need more than 4 of them to build a deck that uses them. My box of old MTG stuff probably has dozens of copies of this card (not to mention countless similar low tier cards) that have never even been used in a deck.
Whether WotC moved to an LCG format or started selling cards individually, there would be a lot fewer of these "waste" cards, since people would only buy what they actually need to play.
I think there is a fair amount of anger at Wizards these days. I know many people have stopped buying, and our local game store is having to figure out alternatives to branch out into because of how people feel I don't think it's local either; from the online places I have read discussion, the tides have turned on things such as proxies, and now the majority has a "screw WotC" mentality.
I used to buy at least a few packs every set, and booster boxes for sets I was fond of. Nowadays WotC releases too many sets for me to keep up. Coincidentally I’ve stopped buying paper cards and occasionally play on Tabletop Simulator.
I occasionally buy things from my LGS - I bought two packs of the LotR set for example - mostly to help him out more than anything. I have switched to mpcfill.com for most of my Magic needs - they make cards that are generally better quality, and you can get them shipping in a week for a pretty low amount of money.
We have also upped our Tabletop Simulator using this table that @Inveigh suggested. It is very good.
Flesh and Blood is really good, plus the way they handle the collectible side of things is refreshing.
These guys will sit there with a straight face and tell you that gambling for a piece of cardstock with a few cents worth of printing on it makes it totally different from a video game where you get nothing physical.
They're disgusting and should be legislated the same way gambling is. It's the same concept, except you'll never make your money back.
I'll be honest, the time when trading card games could pique my interest has been so long past I cannot even recall it.
At the very latest, LCGs like Netrunner/NISEI fully removed them from my mind space, I never even check them out at all any more.
I only ended up reading this because I thought it was about a book. 😅
In other words, old man yells at cloud.
"The person wishes to remain anonymous" and already had it sent to a grading service? Yeah, they probably work for wizards.
I don't think that's likely; a store in southern Ontario claims that it was opened in the store.
I think remaining anonymous is a pretty good option here; I wouldn't want people to know if I had just opened a million collar pay out.
Edit: if I had opened it, this is exactly what I would have done, and I don't work for WotC.
WoTC already made their money with the increase in booster box sales and publicity from this whole thing, they have no incentive to risk something like rigging the card pulling
I find it interesting it's graded 9/10 when it was just opened and probably immediately graded.
Grades also take into account the quality of the print and cut, if it was misaligned when printed or cut, or damaged during packaging and shipping, it would affect the grade.
I looked into it after I wrote my post and you're right, it does seem to need a good picture quality and alignment too aside from a lack of damage.
But.. this is it. It's a one of a kind. If the picture is misaligned it doesn't matter, what you see is what you get. Any misprint is by default the perfect print because there's no comparison. At this point it isn't grading the card but judging Wizards for their shitty print.
Unless there's damage, which I don't think there is, I'm still left wondering if it shouldn't be 10/10 regardless.
I think that's exactly what happened:
https://mtg.cardsrealm.com/en-us/articles/mtgs-rarest-card-the-one-ring-is-already-damaged
I can't read Elvish and unless I missed it in the article, what do these rare/unique cards do? Are they purely collectables or do they have an in game ability?
They are special versions of a normal cards. This card is based on this. The special versions don't do anything different, just looks different and is rarer.
Predictions on whether this card holds it’s value?
When we have a 1/1 Star Wars card, a 1/1 Marvel card, etc. etc. with no end in sight it’s hard for me to imagine these will all fetch such insane prices but then again the collectibles crowd always seems to surprise me.
I think it will retain it's valuation for a relatively long time. It's unique and there are some high profile people who want to own it. I don't think it'll get sold very much, though.
I moved this to ~games.tabletop, since that's where most other M:TG content has gone, but was there any particular reason you wanted it in ~hobbies, @aphoenix? I can move it back if there was a particular reason for it being there.
(please label this comment as "Offtopic")
No particular reason, it's fine here.