Ranting about Magic.

I am neither creative nor well rested tonight, so I don't have anything important or interesting to say, so I am going to talk about Magic: The Gathering.

Wizards of the Coast just announced a new set coming this summer called Eternal Masters, this may actually have a big impact on the market and is a new direction for the company a little bit. First some detail.

In Magic, there are a few tournament formats where players build decks out of their own cards, by far the most popular are Standard and Modern, Standard consists only of cards currently in print, which in practice means cards up to two years old depending on the time of year you are playing in, it is the most accessible and cheapest format to get into, but changes with regularity as sets rotate out of print.
Modern has a much more expanded card pool, with the ability to use cards from as a far back as 8th Edition which came out in 2003, there is a small banned list, but it  is a diverse and healthy format, and a competitive deck will cost two hundred or more dollars, though there are exceptions.

Finally there are the Eternal formats, Vintage and Legacy. The differences between the two are not worth going into, but as the name implies cards from every era of Magic are allowed, these formats have the lowest player population because the powerhouse cards from the dawn of the game are powerful, and as such have not been reprinted and are vanishingly rare. There are a number of them that Wizards of the Coast has promised to never reprint, this list is called the reserve list, and the cheapest member of that list might be  about a hundred bucks, with the most expensive routinely selling for multiple thousands of dollars.
Now cards on the reserve list are not required to compete in the format, but decks are frighteningly expensive and the staples are far outside the budget of most people, Eternal Masters is apparently an attempt to make the format more accessible, which I totally am a fan of.

The secondary market, singles sales, has long been the most profitable part of Magic, to the point where when running the store I had a few regulars who made their entire living off of the practice, and it wasn't a bad living either. Some(many) of this type of collector are kind of furious about the idea of reprints happening as they think it will tank their current collections and their profits with it, these people are whiny babies who are wrong.

It has literally been a generation since most of these cards last saw print, and they only saw print once for the most part, those original printings will still hold their value regardless of what other stuff is printed now, they will still be rare, and they will almost certainly have different art, and for this crowd that matters kind of a lot, what's more, the market will benefit from having more of the cards in circulation because people will know that they can get replacements for stuff if they have to, thus being more willing to trade and sell their current copies. Also, these cards where printed back in the days before foils, and there will be foils in the new printing, causing another high demand product to rush for. I will certainly be on the lookout.

The reason I feel like it is a departure is that WOTC stopped really providing much in the way of support for the eternal formats last year, which indicated to most people that they weren't interested in promoting the format at all, which leaves me wondering if this was the plan all along or if there was a shakeup at some level in the company to change direction? We'll find out more as we approach release date, and I am going to pick up as many of the things as I can lay hands on, gonna be fun.