Ambition's Cost pt 4: What Should Wizards Do?

As the fourth and final installment of the Ambition's Cost series, we explore the 'so what?' of the high cost of entry for Modern, Legacy, and Vintage. The first three parts of this series examined the average cost of competitive entry into Standard, Modern, Legacy, and Vintage and found that the price roughly triples between each format moving from Standard, the cheapest at $340, to Vintage at nearly $13,000. Modern is about $900 and Legacy is near $2,000.  Nearly half of the cost of Standard, Modern, and Legacy is the land base, making non-basic lands the most expensive portion of every multicolored deck in these three formats. In Vintage, the non-basic lands will cost you over $1,000 on average, but since the cost of the entire deck is so high, the land price ends up being a small portion of the deck. Now, I hope you are asking the question, "So what?"

So What?

I want every major format to be competitive and see regular play because each format has its own flavor that every Magic player should be able to experience with actual Magic cards. The only way to play in a sanctioned Legacy tournament is to actually own the cards that make up your deck. Let's look at the tournament scene from Wizards in 2014.

Standard plays the biggest part of the Constructed tournament scene. I think that is correct. It is the most fluid format because the card pool is changing so much every couple of months. What is alarming to me is that the number of tournaments for Legacy and Vintage are such a small part of Wizard's overall events. They are only six percent of Constructed events and closer to two percent of the overall event schedule. If you are a Legacy or Vintage player, this should be alarming. It means Legacy is very nearly dead, and Vintage is very actually dead.

If you, like me, believe that each of these four formats needs support, then something needs to be done to save Legacy and Vintage from being relegated to the annals of history. What can we do?

Repeal the Reserve List

Wizards has the power to reprint any card. The decks in Vintage and Legacy are stagnant because the cards most heavily used in these formats were printed long ago and newer cards don't match the power level, and when they do, they get banned (hello Treasure Cruise  and Dig Through Time *wave*). There are a number of cards that, if reprinted, would open the doors to the Eternal formats of Legacy and Vintage.

I can feel the heat from some of your faces right now. The Reserve List is a hot topic sparking many a table-flipping debate in the Magic community. In my humble opinion, maintaining a list of cards that will never be reprinted while at the same time allowing those same cards in existing and supported formats, no matter how low the support, is incomprehensible. The Reserve List artificially maintains the price of a handful of cards, keeping players out of the format. It sounds like a nerd country club to me.

No Reserve on MTGO

The Reserve List does not apply to Magic Online, and many of the pricy Vintage and LEgacy staples were reprinted in a supplemental set called Vintage Masters. The reprinting of those key cards brought the format back to life online. Currently, if you want to enjoy playing Vintage, you can either pay a few hundred dollars for an online Vintage deck or $13,000 for a paper deck. I included a price comparison of the top 5 most-played decks in Legacy, Vintage, and Standard. Playing Standard online is cheaper than playing in paper, but notice how much cheaper it is to play Legacy and especially Vintage online.

It's a Different World from the Days of Chronicles

The Reserve List was created at a time when the player base for Magic was very small compared to the player base we have today. When Wizards reprinted many of the higher priced cards in Chronicles, some collectors felt betrayed after sinking a lot of cash into the expensive rares of the time. Chronicles dropped the price of those expensive rares to next to nothing, however today's collectors and players are much more selective of the cards they keep and prices for older printings tend to hold much more value even through reprints. If you look at one of those cards affected by Chronicles, Nicol Bolas, we can see that the Legends printing is easily 10 times the price of the Chronicles printing. They are the same card with the same effect. One has a white border and the other black. One is $18 and the other is $1,50. We don't need the Reserve List anymore to ensure that older printings hold value.

More Demand, Higher Prices for Older Printings

Older printings will drop in value when they are reprinted, but the floor will not drop out from under them. It is actually possible for the older printings to become even more valuable through reprinting as new players enter the format. We saw this happen to Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant when they were reprinted in Modern Masters. Tarmogoyf is worth more now than it was before the Modern Masters printing, largely due to a dramatic increase in player demand resulting from reprinting Modern cards in Modern Masters.

Something dramatic needs to be done or Legacy and Vintage will only survive in Magic Online. In order for the Eternal formats to live in paper, we need more copies of the cards to play them. Wizards must reduce or fully remove the Reserve List and reprint the staple cards in Legacy and Vintage. If they do not reprint Eternal staples, most people who want to play these formats in the future will have to log on to Magic Online.

Do you think that could have been Wizard's plan all along?

Ambition's Cost Pt. 3: Cheapest Available Printing

In the first two installments of Ambition's Cost, I explored the tool I am using to compare format prices and then analyzed the same price data for patterns. I uncovereed the relative price of lands in each of these format's best decks and discovered that in Standard, Modern, and Legacy, the price of non-basic lands are 35 to 55 percent of the average competitive deck's total cost. In Vintage, where lands make up 10-15 percent of a deck's cost, lands still account for nearly $2,000 of the average competitive deck's total price.

Cheapest Available Printing (CAP)

The Cheapest Available Printing or CAP is simply the least expensive version of a card that is available. A format staple is a card that can be found in multiple deck archetypes. Often these are lands, but they can also be other cards like Tarmogoyf. Format staples tend to be expensive, because they are in high demand due to their inclusion in multiple competitive decks. Many of the format staples have been printed a few different times either through a standard set or in a supplemental product like Modern Masters, duel decks, or a special promo.

Elspeth, Knight Errant has been printed six times. Its CAP is from the Duel Deck: Elspeth vs. Tezzeret, at $14.05. The most expensive printing is the Modern Masters promo foil at $49.99, more than three times the price of the CAP. Budget-conscious deck builders would prefer to use the CAP, and having affordable CAP prices lowers the price barrier to entry into any given format. It is also important to point out that having an affordable CAP does not mean that all copies of a card are affordable. Some printings become more valuable due to the art, foil, or rarity. These are things that are important to collectors, but are not necessarily that important to a player looking to get into a format with a competitive deck.

Affordable CAPs Mean Healthier Format

Having affordable CAP prices for staples is very important for the health of a format. I am in agreement with Wizards on promoting Standard to be the most played format. It is ever-changing, with cards entering at a fast clip, while other cards rotate out. Pro tours featuring Standard are exciting, because there are always new decks that appear resulting from professionally-tested, new interactions. Modern, Legacy, and Vintage suffer from too much stability in their card pools. Cards from new sets rarely make significant dents in them. However, these formats all play differently and each is fun in its own right. Unfortunately, for many Magic players, all formats outside of Standard are well out of range for their budgets,

In order to keep the player base of non-rotating formats healthy, format staples must stay affordable. $200 for a CAP Tarmogoyf, one of the most widely played creatures in Modern, is unacceptable. $100 or more for a CAP dual land, which are ubiquitous in Legacy and Vintage, is also unacceptable. Price adjustments are needed to improve the health of these formats, otherwise they will likely die out. Vintage and Legacy are already most of the way dead. They are rarely played at stores with actual cards. There are few events for these formats and those few events are orders of magnitude smaller than Modern and Standard events. These are signs that these formats are dying. I don't want them to go away, and to save them drastic measures must be taken.

Reprinting Does Not Necessarily Mean Instant Price Reduction

Reprinting old cards is contentious because of their current prices. There are a lot of unknowns, and collectors expect the Reserve List to protect their investments in old expensive cards. When expensive cards are reprinted, we expect their prices to drop because economics tells us that increasing supply drives prices down, but that is not always the case. Format staples used in multiple deck archetypes have price benefits from modest reprintings. We can look at Tarmogoyf and Dark Confidant before and after Modern Masters was printed just before M14.

Tarmogoyf - Future Sight (7/2013, $141 vs. $143 - MMA)

Dark Confidant - Ravnica: City of Guilds (7/2013, $77 vs. $74 - MMA)

Looking at the price lines between Modern Masters and M14, you can clearly see fast movement upward. This should be somewhat surprising considering more copies of each card were entering the market. What we sometimes fail to notice is that opportunities like this often get new players interested in a format, increasing demand. In these cases, we can think about a Standard player who jumps into a modern Masters draft, opens a Tarmogoyf, enjoys playing with the other cards in the format and decides to make a Modern deck. Now that player needs to buy three more Tarmogoyfs to complete their new deck. The price of Tarmogoyf ends up climbing because more decks are being built with a need for Tarmogoyf than new Goyfs are being opened. In the case of Goyf, that price continued to climb and rests at approximately $200 today. Dark Confidant, after the initial climb after Modern Masters was printed, has seen a drop in price over time because new cards made him less desirable in the decks he was being played. Either way, both staples presented collectors and financiers a window to make some cash off the staples they had collected because new players entered the format.

The same thing would happen for Legacy and Vintage staples were they to be reprinted in similar fashion. In the final installment of Ambition's Cost, I will explore the actions I think Wizards should take to revive Vintage and Legacy while at the same time giving collectors a chance to make money off their staples should they choose to do so.

Ambition's Cost Pt. 2: The Price of Land

During my last article I organized the prices of decks in popular formats. You should go back and take a look. I’ll be referencing those tables in this article. Quick recap: I found the average price of four formats using the prices of the most played decks and calculating the weighted average by the percent of the meta-game that each of the top 12 decks occupied.

The average cost of entry of the formats from Standard to Vintage is vastly different. The fact that there is a difference should not be news, but the magnitude of each difference might be. If we display the average deck price for each format into an area model, we can visualize the differences. This area model compares formats by displaying each’s price of entry as a circle with an area proportional to the average deck price of each format.

Analysis

The price differences are shocking. Just who exactly is playing Vintage -- with actual cards? Judging by the price of entry for Vintage, almost no one. The average American adult can probably afford to play a competitive Standard deck. At about $340 per average deck, this compares well to other hobbies like video game playing (console + games).  Still, $340 for a deck of 75 cards is laughable in most social circles! Choose your friends wisely, my magically inclined friends.

The jump from Standard to Modern is steep, and most American adults would spend at least a year accumulating the cards they would need to play competitively in a sanctioned Modern tournament. This dramatically reduces the number of people playing Modern. I believe that Modern would be healthier with more players, and increasing the number of players requires a lower price point for competitive decks.

Moving from Modern to Legacy, prices start to get ridiculous. The average price of entry for Legacy is $2,600. With that price point, there just isn’t going to be much new blood in this format. It’s too expensive for the average person to buy into no matter how much time is allotted. Some of the cards are so expensive, that it makes me nervous to shuffle them. Spending over one thousand dollars on a deck of cards for tournament or social play is just too much for almost everyone.

If you can’t afford Legacy, then Vintage is laughable. The area model really puts Vintage in perspective. It is often spoken in the same sentences as Legacy, but competitive Vintage decks are no where near Legacy’s price point. Legacy decks are over four times as expensive as the format that I just described as ridiculous.

Most Played Equals Most Expensive

Another pattern evident in the price data is that the most-played decks legal in Standard and Modern are also the most expensive in their respective format. This pattern does not hold exactly true for Legacy and Vintage, however, their most popular decks are above the average price of each format at $2,900 and $13,000 respectively. Additionally, the highest priced decks in Legacy and Vintage rank in the top three most popular decks. The correlation of popularity and price is not really surprising to a Magic financier as we all know that popularity drives up demand and then prices. This is one of the most important drivers of high prices of entry to all the formats.

The Price of Land

The lowest-priced yet still popular decks present an interesting anomaly in the data. The lowest-priced decks in Modern and Legacy are nearly identical in price while the average deck price between the formats is dramatically different. Merfolk in Modern is mono-blue and comes in under $400, and Burn in Legacy is mono-red and shares the same price point as Merfolk in Modern. The lowest-priced deck in Standard, Red Deck Wins, is mono-red and hovers at just above $100, which is very affordable. All three of these uncharacteristically low-priced decks are just one color.

The best lands for these decks are often basic mountains and islands with a set of man-lands thrown in for good measure. As you may have seen from the final table in the previous article, the cost of the land base in most decks is significant. In Standard, Modern, and Legacy the lands often make up 30 to 50 percent of the total cost of the deck. Building a mono-color deck dramatically reduces its cost. In Vintage, all of the cards are so expensive that the land cost is only about 13 percent of the total deck cost, but that still amounts to over $1,000 per deck. Lands are expensive. Lands are also boring, and these two facts put together are problematic for the price of non-rotating competitive formats.

The price of land is the most significant problem with the prices of Modern and Legacy decks. Lands make up 37 to 50 percent of the deck cost for these two formats. The first time a new player discovers that good non-basic lands are expensive, they get this funny confused look on their face like, “huh? Wait a second, you are telling me this card, whose only role it to tap for two colors of mana, is 40 dollars? And that sweet angel/demon/dragon/etc is just $1? That makes no sense.” A competitive deck needs 8-24 of these expensive non-basics, most of them are rare, and many of them are very old and cannot be reprinted.

The question I am left with after looking at the price data is: are Legacy and Vintage actual formats played by actual people with actual cards? Are Legacy and Vintage formats we sometimes talk about but can only access with proxies? If we want them to become or return as actual formats, something drastic needs to happen, because very few people, even in the most affluent countries in the world, can play these formats with actual cards. I am looking right at you, Reserve List. Have your little dual-land ears been burning? I will explore the Reserve List in more detail in the fourth and final article in this series.

In the next installment, I am going to expand on the concept of the Cheapest Available Printing (CAP) and how it can be used to reduce the entry price to all formats.