FreedomFrisbee
Member
Been waiting on that Naya Ajani for ages.
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Magic: the Gathering |OT13| Ixalan - Port to Sideboard
- Thread starter SigmasonicX
- Start date
Been waiting on that Naya Ajani for ages.
charlequin
Banned
There's some speculation that we'll see him surprise-appear in Rivals, which I definitely could believe.
Maro's said he's RB enough that I feel fairly confident it's because his next card will be BR.
Prepare for disappointment. Unless "Whenever a creature you control explores, put a +1/+1 counter on ~" is exciting for you.
The rare pirate ship is pretty cool though. Pirate tribal anthem to help with the crew cost + saboteur effect sounds fun.
I mean, he was never mono red. Right from the start he was a sadist who got off on inflicting pain on other people. That's not a red trait, it's a black trait through and through.
SigmasonicX
Member
Grasp of Darkness is rotating out, so not much of a choice there.
Oh? You got full stats?
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
Oh right. Scarab God control will definitely be a thing. I had 2 sideboarded today and sided them in a ton, never got much use out of them as people either exiled him or conceded right away though.
Ended up 3-1-1 at FNM conceded to my last opponent in extra turns and split the push (rolled who buys his half out). Good old collusion at FNM.
I agree with this. He never made sense as mono-red.
Which is why tying races to colours and forcing that no matter what doesn't make sense and is one of the reasons the colour pie doesn't work well if you extrapolate it beyond the very basic 'red is from mana that comes from mountains'.
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
Tibalt is also a lunatic which is red associated.
He fits into everything grixis.
He fits into everything grixis.
I'd buy a 1000 dollar card to kick your ass in Commander. ;-)
charlequin
Banned
SaffronOlive set off another RL debate on Twitter and I don't think I've ever disagreed with Corbin Hosler as strongly as I do with him today for suggesting that people just stop whining about it because it won't ever change.
A link to the start of the discussion, for those interested.
Reading the ensuing discussion, you can tell who has financial stakes in the RL remaining (James Chilcott), and who's more interested in growing the player base for Vintage and Legacy.
Apply the attitude to anything, especially things more important than cardboard and you will immediately realize what a dumb stance that is
charlequin
Banned
Just gonna keep this around as a reference point for every future time promissory estoppel comes up:
Not to say that promissory estoppel isn't the actual reason they won't get rid of the list. I am fully convinced that they aren't allowed to eliminate it because Hasbro's lawyers are afraid of this, but I also suspect the real downside risk is close to zero and Hasbro's lawyers just have a greatly excessive intolerance to risk.
Not to say that promissory estoppel isn't the actual reason they won't get rid of the list. I am fully convinced that they aren't allowed to eliminate it because Hasbro's lawyers are afraid of this, but I also suspect the real downside risk is close to zero and Hasbro's lawyers just have a greatly excessive intolerance to risk.
charlequin
Banned
...I'm gonna need more to follow that.
(I'm not a lawyer)
Both are parroted online as Hasbro/Nintendo's rationale, and generally accepted as true despite having no real precedent.
You're not gonna lose your trademark for failing to take down fan projects, and I'd be shocked to find an example of a company being successfully sued for reprinting a product that was advertised as "limited edition" or "one print run only."
I mean, both could definitely be correct, but they're weird theories for the internet to latch onto.
isn't he too chaotic and without plans to be blue?
Joe Molotov
Member
He has card draw, so he's probably a little bit green tbh.
every planeswalker is green, they provide card advantage over time from a permanent
Especially Urza
Familienoberhauptvogel
Banned
He's sadistic in execution but he's still conducting experiments to sate his curiousity.
He also literally started out among the UB faction on innistrad.
Izzet are pretty chaotic. Just look at this guy.
Angry Grimace
Two cannibals are eating a clown. One turns to the other and says "does something taste funny to you?"
It's a flimsy legal argument that some courts use to enforce imaginary contracts based on the idea of "detrimentally relying" on a promise.
The problem here is that WOTC couldn't ever realistically lose the case on the theory. The actual answer is there's someone in WOTC legal who doesn't want to test it.
charlequin
Banned
Even as a person who doesn't think PE has a real chance I don't think these are equivalent. The former is operating in very firmly established territory -- we know that these types of activities don't threaten trademark genericization and so no one consistently acts on that basis towards fan projects. It also tends to draw on a misunderstanding of how trademarks vs. copyrights are applied.
In this case, we're talking about a type of promise that has little or no direct precedent attached to it, with a plaintiff class whose constitution is unclear and a defendant who's maintained defensive positions about their relationship to the secondary market that are thus far untested.
I really, honestly believe that even if they eliminated it tomorrow the group of people interested in bringing suit would be small and unlikely to represent a serious threat, and that if they did a long-time-window rolling phase-out they could disarm even that, but I think if I'm Hasbro I'd want my lawyers to at least take this concept seriously in a way that wouldn't apply to the fan game thing.
Yeah, to be clear, I agree with both parts of this. And I want to say that the Facebook post mentioned (where someone does napkin math to say that there's a plausible multi-billion-dollar lawsuit here) is completely insipid.
FreedomFrisbee
Member
I feel like this is a point that has been made in this thread before. The requirement for damages is an easy weakpoint in any RL case that makes things break in WotC's favor. The abolishing of the RL itself would likely not do much to budge the price staples, and the reprinting of said staples would never occur in such a significant quantity as to completely wipe their value (arguments to be made that they'd gain value, really). So if someone were to claim damages it would almost certainly be for a not significant amount. You'd have to have hundreds of RL staples to make it even worth the lawsuit. Then, on top of that, anyone who tries to claim value on their cards would have to deal with the tax ramifications of their value, which would further diminish any gains you hope to accrue in a lawsuit. Plus the almost certain schlacking that you're going to get because you just tried to sue a large corporation to keep them from doing what they want with their proprietary IP.
I'm sure someone in the community is ludicrously stupid and would be willing to try, but it's such a dumb thing to attempt a lawsuit over from all fronts. This is why people suspect other reasons for the RL still being in place. I would not be surprised that WotC itself, or elements within WotC, are holding small fortunes worth of cardboard and are afraid of killing the RL. Or that WotC is afraid of the broader scrutiny that an RL lawsuit would bring. It would almost certainly involve acknowledging the secondary market value of cardboard, something WotC doesn't want to do. If they were forced to and it drew enough scrutiny they may be forced to change their business model, because boosters are essentially gambling. See Valve's recent CSGO issues.
This joke never gets old, does it.
To me it always felt like they didn't want to lose the goodwill of a very small but heavily invested (literally) that would probably cry out very loud and cause damage to the MTG brand. I still believe they need to find a solution for the RL because Legacy will probably be dead in 10 years if everything remains the same.
charlequin
Banned
No it would be one billion dollars!!!! (Yes I think this is basically correct.)
This is also why I cite a timed rollout. If you say you're starting to eliminate the RL a year from now with the final sets coming off seven years later, how much drop will actually be realized on expensive RL cards in the meantime? It's pretty unlikely that dual lands will tank given the actual-use value of playing with them over the next six years, and that time will give anyone who wants to plenty of time to get out with at most a small haircut.
I think people are mostly covered on this as unless they actually sell (at which point they'd need to pay taxes anyway) it's all an inventory profit and therefore basically illusory.
Yeah, but what would those reasons be? The biggest reason everyone's settled on PE is that the absolute insistence that the list can't even be discussed really only fits the pattern of a legal restraint, and given that there's no contractual basis it's hard to even imagine what other legal restraint could exist. If it's not PE and not internal corruption, what else even makes sense?
There's basically three reasons I don't think it's selfish WotC employees:
- Hasbro clearly has a dramatically greater level of influence than they did in the past and just installed a new CEO, so any kind of patronage deal from before would assuredly be scaled back.
- The front-line employees of WotC have consistently and pretty much unanimously been in favor of eliminating the list, so I think the dynamics would be different if it's just a few old-timers being resistant.
- Anyone who's been there long enough to have gotten significant RL collections on the company dime has also made out like a bandit on stock.
I don't know for certain what the reason for the Reserved List is but I do know that it 100% is not this.
FreedomFrisbee
Member
I want to see who is claiming this lmao
I legit think that they're terrified of drawing any legal attention to their business model and the secondary market. MTGO itself has a huge hilarious disclaimer at the front of it saying that playing it is basically illegal in the majority of states, offloading legal responsibility to the user (dubiously). No such thing to be done with the paper game, not that they'd be running afoul of the same things.
The Technomancer
card-carrying scientician
This is actually quite possibly the real reason
charlequin
Banned
This is the same as the PE reason, because the only reason they have not to acknowledge it is the worry of being held accountable for people's secondary-market losses. "Gambling laws" aren't so broad as to actually cover things like buying randomized products with a non-guaranteed value and the only serious regulatory issue similar products have faced is having to publish odds (which WotC already does for Magic.) Valve's issue was that CS:GO was literally being used as a proxy cash market for sports booking, which is totally unrelated to anything that would come up for WotC.
FreedomFrisbee
Member
The problem is cards being used as a proxy for cash, which would incur all kinds of printed currency blowback. Using magic cards as payment was actually something WotC was doing up until a couple years ago. The Judge Promo program was exactly that and was curtailed for exactly that reason. WotC, and other companies, get away with a lot of shit because games fly under the radar.
Remembrance
Member
If we're going to think about all the scenarios, lawyers have to be cautious about not only people with legitimate cases but also cranks with too much free time who know how to self-represent in court.
If you're independently wealthy, don't need a lawyer to take your case, and know how court filings work, you can drag out a bogus case for ages if it's a weird case about obscure topics that most people don't know about and you can fudge the facts a little in your favor.
You could imagine that someone sitting on a mountain of reserved list cards might fit that description. The reserved list definitely does.
If you're independently wealthy, don't need a lawyer to take your case, and know how court filings work, you can drag out a bogus case for ages if it's a weird case about obscure topics that most people don't know about and you can fudge the facts a little in your favor.
You could imagine that someone sitting on a mountain of reserved list cards might fit that description. The reserved list definitely does.
charlequin
Banned
Sure, but that doesn't really change what I was saying. They aren't giving out cards in a context that can be read as payment anymore, and they don't manage any venue where paper cards can become a proxy currency for illegal activity. They don't have anything particularly risky anymore about acknowledging secondary-market value except the RL.
blindrocket
Member
Saying something is not bad in commander at this point is like saying the card exists
FreedomFrisbee
Member
I'm not strictly disagreeing or anything here. There's just a lot of facets to this.
The exemplar program did not start until 2014. I would not be surprised for judge promos to be brought up in the Judges suit against WotC, since they are alleging that they were effectively employed. Just because they changed the practice doesn't mean they can't catch shit for it. Valve also made changes, but Valve could still be held liable for stuff from before those changes were made, that suit is still ongoing as far as I know.
We can obviously tell that WotC is manipulating the secondary market to its advantage. As in, taking it into account when releasing product. But there's no strict evidence of them doing this because they have Maro replace the word 'value' with 'cool'. The RL remains because doing anything at all with it is WotC admitting that the RL is a value mechanism, of which they claim to not be deploying.
The whole promissory estoppel thing is a non-starter for the reasons we've discussed. The fallout from admitting cards have value is what WotC wants to avoid.
GregLombardi
Member
I dont get why people are talking about the reserve list again lol. I will never understand the need to return to this discussion every year, every half decade that nothing happens with it.
When do you think the high point for that card is?
Played HOU draft for FNM this week. Got passed quite a few ambuscades and ended up red green beatdown with a splash of black removal and two curses. Worked out really well, had no Mana problems, and was witness to other people realizing how strong ambuscade is. Lost the last match 1-2 against a U/R deck but the opponent was super cool. Got a Fatal Push which is what I was most excited for. Also got to play some casual standard games. B/W servo deck went much better than I was keeping my expectations at and got some practice in with a pummeler deck.
RL so no idea.
charlequin
Banned
Right, but, again: what fallout? The judge lawsuit is going to hinge more on the nature of work expectations for "volunteers" than anything about the exact value of the card packs. There's no general-purpose law against a company selling randomized goods and acknowledging that there's a secondhand market for them, or even making decisions based on that secondhand market. I just don't see the evidence that there's an actual legal threat (rather than a general-purpose "well something, somewhere could be a problem somehow") that arises from this.
Because in the last few months like fifty cards (not Legacy or Vintage staples, just random shit) have been bought out online and seen massive price increases, so the actual direct downsides of this on regular players are much more significant and visible.
As long as it's still a stupid shitty decision people will continue to be mad about it, shock of shocks.