Tabletop Games

[Psychotime]

I love magic the gathering, but I hate how trecherous they are when it comes to business. It's not only about the price of the cards as you mentioned and I get that they must keep the money flowing, but sometimes it is just ridiculous.

You can spend $200-$500 to build a top notch deck one year, and find that 6 months later, it SUCKS, because of the new mechanics that have been introduced recently that are waaay better than the ones your deck uses. Also, if your deck is fairly old, you can't use it for standard tournaments (or even modern sometimes) which are, as you might guess, the vast majority of them.

It's not directly the company's fault that this stuff happens. In fact, they don't get ANY of that money. Believe it or not, the secondary market that jacks up card prices does NOTHING on their end. When those people are the only ones buying Magic, the company LOSES money.

It's all a side effect of the way trading card games work.

The existence of formats and old cards rotating out is a necessary evil, for the life and balance of the game. It has to happen, lest the game turn into what Yugioh has become.

Rotating sets does multiple things that all result in positives for the game. The most obvious is that the new cards automatically become relevant, but it's deeper than that. It forces variety in tournaments and changes the metagame each time. It gives them the freedom to experiment (with design styles, mechanics, and the metagame itself) without worrying about being locked down to previous cards. It prevents mistakenly broken cards (like the original power 9) from dominating for too long. And it prevents the need for power creep in order to make the new cards relevant.

The fact of the matter is, new cards must be relevant in order for people to have incentive to buy them, and rotating older sets out of tournaments is a much better way of doing it than the alternative, and has added bonuses.

Look at the metagame to the Vintage/Legacy format and you'll understand what Magic would be like if sets never rotated. It'd be a nightmare if the new cards had to make themselves relevant in that format.

This is where Modern comes in, as a bit of a compromise between Vintange and Standard. It's a pool of the last 10 years of Magic, with all the cards largely balanced against each other because of the time period they were designed. By and large, the new cards aren't stronger than the old cards. (Though some cards are banned for good reason. Sometimes it's how an old card combos with a newer card.) Looking at the way they police certain old cards in Modern should be eye opening, and you'll see the kind of problems that arise from a larger and larger pool of cards completely by accident.

Yugioh decided NOT to rotate sets, making all cards legal in every format (outside of the constantly changing banlist). And because of that, they have to make each new set stronger than the last in order to make people buy them, and it's disgusting. It's the exact reason I stopped playing. Outside of that, it's an adequate game with a few design problems.

You can have a perfectly viable deck one year, maybe two; and then the next year the new cards are so overpowered that you can't even compete in a casual setting against the new archetypes they want you to buy. I LIKED my zombie recursion deck, Konami. I LIKED my Gradius deck. I would have given the Maldoche a chance, but now you want to FORCE me to buy them in order to play even a casual setting because my previous decks are suddenly weak? Hell no. The second I do that, you'll just make THAT obsolete and force me to buy new cards again!