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5 months ago ::
Feb 05, 2013 - 5:25PM
#1
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Date Joined:
Jan 21, 2004
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www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.a...I'm very unhappy with the change as a business that depends a lot on redemption but I would like to hear what the average MTGO player thinks of this change?
 Cape Fear Games located in Wilmington, NC. Get 20% extra MTGO credit for your paper cards.
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5 months ago ::
Feb 05, 2013 - 5:31PM
#2
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I'm not smart enough to form an opinion because I don't know what will be the impact.
Will this drive down the demand for (online) singles, causing drafters to get less re-sale value and therefore draft less? If they draft less, will supply be less, driving prices back up? Will things just even out?
Won't this change benefit sellers of paper cards?
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5 months ago ::
Feb 05, 2013 - 5:47PM
#3
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Don't care. My cards are of zero value if I can't use them online. I've still got a redeemed set of Ravnica sitting unsold in a box, never been opened. Redemption could be $500 a set and it wouldn't matter to me.
This space intentionally left blank.
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5 months ago ::
Feb 05, 2013 - 5:56PM
#4
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Date Joined:
Jan 21, 2004
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I'm not smart enough to form an opinion because I don't know what will be the impact.
Will this drive down the demand for (online) singles, causing drafters to get less re-sale value and therefore draft less? If they draft less, will supply be less, driving prices back up? Will things just even out?
Won't this change benefit sellers of paper cards?
It will greatly benefit the old school paper sellers that have been around for ages and do not use redemption.(Not saying any names) If I was them I would be jumping for joy right now.
Honestly I thought prices were at a pretty good spot on both MTGO and paper but this is going to really hurt MTGO prices and resell value for sealed while increasing paper prices by more than I think WOTC realizes.
Cape Fear Games located in Wilmington, NC. Get 20% extra MTGO credit for your paper cards.
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5 months ago ::
Feb 05, 2013 - 5:59PM
#5
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Date Joined:
Mar 25, 2009
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I get that $5 is pretty low. But it seems bad that they are increasing the price by this much with virtually no lead up time. A business has to make decisions based on things like redemption well in advance, but we're hearing about this just a few days before the Gatecrash prerelease. A sudden 400% increase just seems really extreme.
 Check out Ars Arcanum, my stat based series on Magic Limited, over at PureMTGO. Here is a link to the archive: http://goo.gl/Zvh6Q
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5 months ago ::
Feb 05, 2013 - 6:02PM
#6
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@heath: Stealing my thunder. I can comment as a player. Once upon a time, I redeemed 4x Ravnica: City of Guilds sets to kickstart my paper Magic collection. Without card prices becoming less, I would've been very apprehensive to redeem at almost an additional 100$. Coincidentally, I was considering redeeming 4x every Standard-legal set come Gatecrash to have paper cards handy, and under this new plan ( if it were retroactive, which it isn't so please do not think I am saying it is) it would cost 300$ handling (versus $60 under the old method) + 3$ shipping + $3120 value to acquire the 24 sets of Magic Online cards (appx 130$ a set using a popular value indicator, which is a bit low considering GTC should pump up values a bit). A 10 percent bump in cost is quite substantial (but probably still better than buying from paper vendors), and I would decide that my usage of the physical cards (2-3 times a month) would not make redeeming them a viable option. This increase also turns the only WotC-supported, secure way to cash out of Magic Online (contact individual and agree to rates for paper cards, turn collection into Standard sets, have protected exchange of goods for money) into a less attractive option. Now, Wizards has taken a decent chunk of value from the chain. I hope that this change makes the Magic Online economy healthier, but I cannot fathom how all of the variables will interact. I imagine we will see over a year from now (and also have compounding variables from new Magic sets and a new Magic Online client... hopefully  ).
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5 months ago ::
Feb 05, 2013 - 6:15PM
#7
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Date Joined:
Apr 30, 2004
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While $5 to $25 may seem like a lot, I would think the price of digital cards would lower a bit while paper rises a bit and easily make up the $20. Mythics alone could easily absorb that. So I don't see this being that big a deal in the long run for sellers.
It does suck if you were redeeming just to keep the sets though.
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5 months ago ::
Feb 05, 2013 - 6:34PM
#8
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Date Joined:
Jun 28, 2006
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So let me get this straight --
We pay 100% MSRP on packs from the MTGO Store, have no gaurantee that we will have access to our cards if MTGO goes belly up, have to assemble a full Set of each release in order to "liquidate" into the bonafide version, and now we're being charged $20 more for all that trouble?
If this isn't the very definition of a cash grab, then I'm certainly at a loss for meaning of words.
PS: If there's exhibited growth in redemption, then costs should go down. Otherwise, fire your ****ing production manager and get someone who can negotiate Economies of Scale.
EDIT: This move will also ruin two MTG economies --
In MTGO, the prices of digital cards will be so depressed that users won't be able to sell their draft winnings to keep drafting. This will reduce the consumption of tix and packs as cards becomes worthless zeros and ones.
In paper, the prices of cards will skyrocket to unimagineable new highs. A huge source of keeping paper card prices low is the constant and continual influx of redemption sets to dealers at a local level. Removing the influx of cards will push the price of singles in the market way high.
$20 might not seem like a big deal, but we're talking about an estimated 15% increase in the cost of redemption for a typical "set value" of 130 tix/$.
Fire the chimpanzee who came up with this decision, then fire his boss too for good measure.
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5 months ago ::
Feb 05, 2013 - 6:49PM
#9
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As someone who makes my living selling MTG cards, and has a huge base in standard, I am obviously quite interested in this discussion (full disclosure, I redeem probably 600 plus copies of each set during its release cycle to sell at my business). I believe that the net result of this is higher prices for paper cards, and more than likely extremely depressed values of non-playable cards on MTGO. Many of the Mythics on MTGO have value ONLY as a means to redeem an MTGO set, when a lot less people want to redeem the sets, and the bots have too many Utvara Hellkites and simply can't keep buying them because nobody wants them, well, you have a worthless card, sorry about that. Ultimately, the prices on MTGO for heavily drafted sets are propped up by the number of people redeeming the sets and taking copies of the cards off of the system, in greatly fewer numbers or in extreme cases when people are just straight up unwilling to redeem these sets, the supply will overflow. Net result: Higher paper prices, lower MTGO prices until an equilibrium is found, and WOTC makes WAY WAY more on every set redeemed. One thing for sure, this cannot be viewed as a positive for players in either paper or MTGO. A sophisticated market will sort itself out, I believe that MTGO is sophisticated enough to survive to figure out how to exist with this in place. Still not good 
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5 months ago ::
Feb 05, 2013 - 7:55PM
#10
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Date Joined:
Sep 24, 2006
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Redeeming multiple sets at once was already ridiculous, this is just obscene. After some recent changes that really disappointed me (removal of 4-pack sealed, changes to monthly promo cards, reduced prize payouts...) I was going to give Wizards the year of 2013 to retain or lose my business. It took them just over a month to break this camel's back. I see awful trends in how MTGO is being run (not that it has ever been run particularly well,) and I will not continue to spend my money on it. Thanks for making it worse for me to legitimately cash out, though I presume that is the reason behind this change. EDIT: I realize that my redemption costs have not actually increased as I won't be redeeming any Gatecrash.
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