Ha, funny looking back on this thread.
I was "thinking about" cashing out of Legacy 6 years ago. Being the lazy piece of shit I am, that never happened, even though I haven't played Magic in a few years now, or even really felt the itch to.
And because there is no justice in this world, my laziness has gone unpunished. Quite the opposite, actually. "OMG Underground Seas are over $300! Insane!" I mean, yeah, that
is insane, but for those of you that haven't looked at this shit in a while, it's just... wow. I could literally pay off my mortgage now. To be fair, that has a lot more to do with being 11 years into a 15 year mortgage and living in a tier 3 rust belt town, but still. Fuck.
I will say, I didn't see Arena coming. Sadly (or not), it came out after I stopped playing Magic, so I have no first hand experience with it, but it seems less bad than MTGO at least.
cave hermit wrote:I sold off most of my key standard cards (they were banned anyway)
From the outside, this seems like a weird new normal. Standard bannings used to be really rare, like once every few years rare, but now they happen frequently. Not necessarily a bad thing if the alternative is having a stale or broken metagame for several months, but if I was a Standard player it'd make me really uneasy about investing in the format.
BryanM wrote:There are ways to get around this.
Keyforge took a novel approach to this, although it then creates a new class of problems, so I don't know if I'd call it an improvement.
Every pack (MSRP $10 or so) is a complete deck: a randomly generated precon that is completely unique. But the catch is you
can't change the deck; you have to play it as is, so there's no secondary singles market. Power level varies quite a bit, but there's some secret sauce in the algorithm that provides some guardrails to ensure every deck falls somewhere between "barely playable" and "JFC this seems unbeatable."
Mechanically, I really like the game, even though it does lose the whole deck building aspect. Economically, the problem is that you wind up with a lot of useless, mediocre decks. And since you can't deconstruct them, it's not even like you can hope to salvage a good card out of them. It creates a weird problem for prize support too, since packs don't work as well (more expensive, likely less useful). Locally it's been mostly stuff like playmats or other trinkets for FNM equivalent events. And I say that as somebody that usually hated winning Magic packs instead of store credit, since packs are basically scratch-off lottery tickets as far as I'm concerned.