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There are more cards that I want to play with in MED4 than in any other previous Master's Edition and that includes the very awesome MED3. Rares like Mishra's Workshop, Time Vault, Fastbond, Wheel of Fortune, Library of Alexandria and Mana Vault are all good enough for Classic play, and will immediately make their way into my collection. Sinkhole and Regrowth don't excite me at all, but I imagine Legacy players will be happy with it Other non-rare cards like Energy Flux and Red Elemental Blast are also something I want But I'm still disappointed There are a lot of fun cards too. Island Sanctuary, Transmute Artifact, Acid Rain, and one of my very favourite, casual old-timer card, Xenic Poltergeist will let me have some less-than-competitive fun in the casual room. Oh yeah, and one other card Stasis. Sorry casual room. Stasis is a "fun" card in my opinion. Pick up your Frozen Aethers and Chronatogs now! But I'm still disappointed And of course, the Power 9 are not in the set. But that's not what's making me disappointed. I've long been prepared that WoTC are either frozen stiff scared or not-prepared to release these cards online. As I have already intimated, I'm pretty sure the MED4 was the last really good shot to provide these cards in a manner that befits their stature and provide means to acquire them without alienating either the money-strapped or those who would rather them not be too affordable. I am sure that by not releasing them in MED4, they've missed the best window of opportunity to release them online, as now they are stuck either using a terrible promotion (that everyone will complain about), a singles-release (like a Duel Deck or FTV - that everyone will complain about), or of course packing them in some other set, say MED5, which will be chalk full of reprints... Wait. There it is. That's one reason why I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed because of reprints. Oh, I won't stoop to the level of saying I'm upset at Dual Land reprints because I own some and now they'll be cheaper I'm not. I didn't (and won't) even bother to sell them and buy them back. I've known (in my own head) for a long time that dual lands were always going to be reprinted. In fact if there ever is an MED5, it'll probably have dual lands as well. I like the idea of reprinted duals. But the reprints didn't quite stop with duals, did it? Here are the list of cards that appear in MED4 that are already available online: Air Elemental The total number, in case you were wondering, is 65. 65 out of 260 (I'm not counting the Urzatron as 12, or it'd actually be 74 of 269), or exactly one quarter of this set contains cards you can already get. Yes some of them were only available in single releases, but that doesn't take away from the fact they are still reprints. Some of them are nice alternate arts, but that doesn't take away from the fact they are still reprints. If the point of Master's Edition was to bring you cards we don't have, it is no longer. Folks, Master's Edition has left the building. If there was any doubt in your head about what cards are in MED5 (if there is an MED5), let me ease those doubts by telling you that it will be chalk full of reprints from any set that's probably not in print. Quite literally, MED5 could be a redux of Kamigawa. I'm exaggerating to make a point there the reason MED4 is so chalk full of repints is because it is hard to make a draftable set without them. Or at least, a draft set where you throw a truckload of rares in a mostly transparent attempt to sell more packs containing dual lands. Make no mistake when you are cracking packs to buy or re-buy your Underground Seas, and you happen to open crap like a Sedge Troll or Deathgrip, or a reprint like Mahamoti Djinn or Savannah Lions (wasn't Steppe Lynx a common?) and wonder why the card is in the set at all at RARE, know that the only reason you opened of what can only be described as a chump rare is because Wizards dumped them in there to make sure the rare ratio for duals was 10.5/1. I mean, they simply sell less packs of this set if people were opening cards they actually wanted more of the time, so why not dump another 20-30 completely unnecessary rares into the set, quite a few of which you can already get or already have? Don't get me wrong. At with 10 duals in 105 cards (1:10.5), it's much easier to get a dual land than it was in MED2 (1:16) or MED3 (1:14). So Imagine if you are looking for dual lands, MED4 is the set for you. But as I write this article, a poll on our forums is showing around 60% of you already had all the dual lands you needed, and another ~25% only needed a few. Leaving ~15% of people who actually need dual lands. Of course, any poll on classicquarter.com is likely to contain a high % of people who were already immersed in the format but I'm not trying to make the point that a large % of the online population doesn't need dual lands- but that it's possible a large % of people actually interested in Legacy do. It's also possible there might be tones of people who would play Legacy or maybe even Classic if only they could have access to cheap dual lands, right? Wrong Sorry folks, but it is a total fallacy to think constructed formats are based on only a small subset of cards, or even a larger subset of cards, like your mana base. There are plenty of barriers to entry in eternal formats that have nothing to do with the price of duals. Just because someone could maybe get Savannah for $10 now instead of $20 isn't going to lower the price of Tarmogoyf it's going to raise it. Tundra sinking down to $15 dollars is not going to make people who think Survival of the Fittest and other cards aren't fun. And just because Taiga isn't close to $30 isn't going to mean someone who has already invested hundred if not thousands of dollars on paper Legacy cards suddenly has the large amount of money it will take to play Legacy online. Across the board, fixing dual land prices simply isn't going to undo all the other problems WoTC has created for themselves with respect to making Legacy online a vibrant community. Those problems go beyond the scarcity of cards. And now I think I'm going to get a little nasty. You want to know what MED4 is? MED4 is an attempt to make up for the mistake of unleashing Legacy online too early. You heard me. Too. Early. You think the classic folk are impatient with their desire to see Power 9? That pales in comparison to the impatience WoTC showed with wanting to jump into the deep end of the pool and swim with sharks by putting Legacy out, obstensibly with the release of Urza's Saga. First consider that as late as November of 2009, the decision was not to release Legacy in 2010. Then, on March 10, suddenly the decision was to launch it at the end of the month. I can come to no other conclusion that WoTC saw the chunk of change Star City Games (and to a lesser extent, other Tournament Organizers) were making off Legacy at the time and wanted their piece of the pie online as well, and when they found the reserved list was a wall they couldn't bust through, they back-pedaled on "no Legacy online in 2010" and threw it out there. This despite the fact that if they knew that all three MEDs were highly undersold for the Legacy potential, as was the entire Mirage and especially Tempest Block. It's no wonder that Force of Will nearly immediately jumped up over $100 and Wasteland climbed to the heights of the most ridiculously priced uncommon since paper Mana Drains. And despite many attempts to convince paper players that Legacy online is much cheaper, and more readily available, Legacy hasn't fired a PE in months and months. And now here come dual lands to the rescue, right? Now that people will have access to cheap duals, they'll finally manage to consistently fire off Legacy PEs, right? Sorry, I don't see it. As I said Legacy's problems are not confined merely to the issue of the cost to acquire a mana base. There is the the issue of the cost of acquiring a player-base, WoTC. You have spent next to nothing promoting Legacy online, and can't even use the crutch of "using MTGO as a testing grounds" because we are still 4 sets away from Legacy catching up (and yes, I realize how little those sets matter in the grand scheme of playable cards). You still haven't figured out that Legacy players are simply not willing to pay $10 to win a box of (now standard) cards after spending a thousand dollars acquiring a collection. Legacy is going to continue to be an expensive place to play, especially to start up, and the paper players are winning $5,000. Overall, there are still many people who refuse to play online because of the poor quality of the system (PS if you think Power 9 is not a good idea to being into the system before fixing the client, so is trying to cater to your Legacy player base) And you missed the boat by not getting people to buy in to MED1, MED2, and to a lesser extent MED3, and launching Legacy when not nearly enough people had the cards to make up a core format. Now you want to fix it by starting reprints already? If WoTC wanted more Dual Lands in the system, there seems to be nothing wrong with continually offering MED2/MED3 drafts. A lot of the people I talk to will admit that the prices on MED3 duals weren't really a big concern even lots of them were in the system. The drafts were slowly pulling down the price of dual lands, and while I don't have the data to prove it (where's Hamtastic when you need him?), I'm pretty sure that Underground Sea sold for more than $40 at one point and was sitting down around $35. They were doing their job they also took all the speculative value out of Force of Will, which had reached a high well over $100 and now sits at around $70-75. This is what is disappointing to me the fact that the set is based on getting more dual lands on MTGO tells me WoTC is losing their patience with Legacy, all the while still trying to maximize profits by tossing in many unnecessary reprints. The Legacy decks (the ones that aren't at all competitive) are another sign of this same stretch. To boot, I'm not sure either attempts will even work in any way to increase Legacy participation online. Legacy players in paper have lots of opportunities to play, and $50 duals lands aren't stopping them from doing so. Why then are we struggling so hard with Legacy online to bring the price down? Getting more duals into the system, I get, but using them as the means to sell MED4, I don't. MED4 didn't have to be a means to getting more duals lands into the system, and it didn't need duals lands and 55 other reprints to sell the set. Meanwhile, Classic lingers in limbo. It's not even Classic anymore. It's simply Not-Vintage. It's a format missing none but 9 cards (which I personally find ridiculous, and I don't think I'm alone), which if those nine cards were online, would instantly be far cheaper than the paper alternative and provide a place to play constantly, in stark contrast to the paper players who sometimes have to travel 100 miles for match. Let me make this clear to anyone who is reading: I know a LOT of classic players. I'm talking a very, very large % of them and I don't know anyone not a single one who wouldn't give up Classic in a half-a-heartbeat if it meant the restricted list quadrupled on the spot and we had Vintage online. So yes, I'm really disappointed that WoTC has shown such poor patience with respect to Legacy, while asking Classic players to show astonishing patience with respect to Vintage. That's why I'm disappointed in the construction of MED4 If it didn't have 10 duals lands and 30 less rares, I'd probably be happy with the direction. I can wait longer for power (just watch me). Instead they wasted the best opportunity to bring us Vintage in what looks to me like an impatient (and possibly futile) effort to prop up Legacy, and/or make quick bucks off dual lands while throwing token new cards under the guise of a Master's Edition which used to be about getting new cards on MTGO. If WoTC really wanted to show patience, the kind we're being asked to show with respect to power, we'd still have just Classic - right up until the moment we had both Legacy and Vintage. |
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