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.
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