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This is the way the world ends.
Not with a bang but a whimper.
We've all talked about the "end times" in Magic, the "Armageddon" if you will.
Funny thing happened when starting this article--I looked up the German translation for Armageddon and it wasn't actually "Götterdämmerung," which actually means "twilight of the Gods"... who knew? But I'm going to roll with it because that German Portal Armageddon I had as a kid sure as hell said Götterdämmerung, and that just sounds cool.
But what do the end times for Magic look like? I doubt we're going to get the Revelations style Apocalypse that the rest of the world gets. No Trumpet Blast or Desolation Angels are going to show up to herald the end times. No, it's going to be very subtle, but still happen very fast.
The thing to keep in mind is that Magic will always continue to exist, but like the machines in those terrible Matrix sequels, we might have to settle for a diminished state of existence.
Declining Interests
The most important thing to keep in mind about Magic is that the cards were never intended to be worth money.
The secondary market is almost purely the work of the players. Wizards of the Coast is in the business of slapping 15 pieces of cardboard inside a foil wrapper and getting you to give them money for it. They've done a lot to market that to players, including introducing the Pro Tour as the end-all-be-all-defacto premier event.
You also have to keep it in mind that before there were professional Magic players, the "Pro" in Pro Tour really meant promotional. As the game of Magic has grown, especially over the last few years, Wizards has been pushing a lot of the legwork into the stores. A store's allocations are based on their level, and those levels are based on recruiting new players and running events at certain thresholds a number of times a year. The big payoff for running a good show has been the PTQ, and stores fought over them.
Enter the Preliminary Pro Tour Qualifier or "Pre-TQ" as we've named them in power couple fashion. BrAngelina eat your heart out.
Who gets to run these? EVERYONE! Every store that is capable of finding a level 2 judge and isn't a complete heap will receive a PreTQ. You win a PreTQ, you get to play in a PTQ! Who wouldn't get excited about that? Instead of getting lucky and winning ten rounds of Magic to attend to earn a Pro Tour invite, you get to do it in twelve to fourteen! What's the format going to be? Predominantly Standard, unfortunately, so all those Modern cards that we all fought for and scrambled to obtain, they just became pretty trivial.
Ultimately, the PreTQs are a test. Can the stores create compelling tournaments on their own? How many people do you know that frequently played in PTQs hoping to get lucky and make it to the big times will no longer bother? How many PreTQs will you play after it really sinks in that you have to win twice as many rounds to make the Pro Tour as before?
How about the combined effect of hundreds of stores running sub-par events? There are already a number of tournament organizers that I want absolutely nothing to do with. What's the percentage required to make you quit playing competitive Magic all together? 50%? 60%?
The other loss with these PreTQs is any competition to buy your cards. Go to a PTQ now and there will be a number of vendors clamoring and competing to buy your cards. Who's going to pay big bucks to set up shop at a 35 man tournament? Who's going to allow outside vendors inside their shops, where most of these events will occur?
Legacy Costs
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains, a little company by the name of StarCit Games has introduced Modern as an alternative to the traditional Sunday Legacy tournament. While this doesn't have the immediate effect of killing Legacy, the effects are noticeable as prices for Legacy cards have pretty much stopped their climb, with some beginning to retract from their record highs.
If you've never considered it before now, you should know that SCG is Legacy. All of those cards with all of those extra 0's at the end of their price tags are worth that much only because StarCity runs near-weekly Legacy tournaments.
Are people quitting Legacy to play Modern? God no. Have you even played Modern? Playing Modern versus playing Legacy is like comparing a Little Debbie Fudge Round to a slice of moist chocolate cake, with sprinkles. They aren't even in the same ballpark.
But there is another effect that will slowly but surely dwindle those Legacy numbers until StarCity is forced to choose which child it wants to kill:
PLAYERS DON'T HAVE TO BUY INTO LEGACY ANYMORE.
Nobody wanted to sit around doing nothing while their friends slung Brainstorms, so they bought into Legacy too. But now they can just split a hotel and play Modern instead. No need to buy into Legacy! The great news is that once you obtain a deck, Modern doesn't change much, so you don't have to really worry about acquiring new cards very often. So much for those high Modern prices.
The Third Horseman
MTGO.
Magic: The Gathering Online has become the butt of countless jokes. Wizards decided that a Beta client most players didn't like was a preferable alternative to a client that was riddled with problems, but still got the job done.
At this point, rewriting Magic Online is the equivalent of recoding the Obamacare website except healthcare.gov was probably a lot simpler. MTGO's user interface problems are the tip of the iceberg, and you have to keep in mind that there are 16,000 cards that have to be coded in. Magic's rules are liquid and sometimes illogical, so one does not simply code a new MTG framework. Every single card has to be coded in a way that will make it work within the new framework as well.
Remember when MTGO was first released and they skipped over those first (fill in the blank) years of sets? Why do you think that was?
This is the Way Magic Ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. Legacy prices have stagnated, Modern prices have stagnated, and competitive Standard slowly becomes more and more undesirable. But we can still play Standard, right? Oh, you forgot the Fourth Horseman now, didn't you?
Behold a pale Horse, and he who sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.
That Fourth Horseman doesn't bring his own problems to the table, it's simply the culmination of those before him. We're getting pretty convoluted in our expanded metaphor, so lets take a step back and explain this last predicament... with another metaphor that's not really a metaphor at all. Confused? Good, that means you're learning, kid!
Take a man and give him the foundation of a business. This man builds that business up from there and achieves towering success. Then you creep into the basement and start pulling out a few bricks from the foundation here and there. What's going to happen to that tower? It will slump, sink, tip, and crumble until one day it collapses.
- Foundation: Magic cards are worth $$$.
- Tower: Acquire inventory that will be sellable for $$$$$.
- Bricks: Modern and Legacy prices drop and the secondary market retracts.
- Collapse: Store can't sell singles profitably and Boosters alone can't pay for game rooms.
Pretty doomsdayesque, right?
Why This is (Hopefully) Fiction
A true panic has to occur. Like with the Recession, a number of talking heads would say "get out while you still can" and people would have to listen.
Chicken Littles everywhere would be panicking to sell their collections before they hit rock bottom. That "race to the bottom" term we always hear being kicked around with TCGplayer stores would become a real thing, except with one difference: Magic cards are not stocks.
Stocks represent a fractional percentage of ownership in a company, companies that have physical assets and provide services to make money. Magic cards represent you pretending to summon a Shivan Dragon and commanding it to attack your foes with its fiery breath. So, as you can imagine in this unlikely scenario, Magic cards don't hold much value.
Even after the apocalypse, life goes on. Sure, society as a whole is gone, but people will always survive. Magic will live on as well. It will just be in a reduced nature. Game stores that don't have diverse revenue streams might buckle, but diverse game stores would continue to thrive. You'll still be able to buy Magic packs and such, but you'd probably have to dig through boxes for any singles you might want. It just wouldn't be profitable to sort that sort of thing out.
Hasbro has already gotten much more aggressive with reprints, and at a certain point they'll realize that simply printing cards people want to buy will net them more money than maintaining the secondary market.
If they "kill" the game, Hasbro could accept reduced revenue streams and just keep rehashing Magic sets with shiny new gimmicks and box sets and Commander decks and any number of products that would still sell but require less resources to produce. Eventually competitive Magic would recover, like a Phoenix or Sapling of Colfenor (bonus points if you get that reference), but for a long time it would only exist as a shadow of it's former self.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
So what should you do to avoid the Magic apocalypse?
Nothing, I'm sure everything's going to work out fine, kid. Just fine.
But on a completely unrelated note, if you have any Black Lotus that you're looking to get rid of, I'll gladly pay you $500 each for them.
I like the theme of the article alot; too many times have I heard different decisions leading to the end of Magic as we know it.
Also makes me glad that I’m getting into the whole speculation thing as a way to make Modern more affordable for me instead of for investments. I would never want that much money tied into something I can’t do anything with.
As long as cards change unpredictably in price over time, speculation will have its place. The market for Blue Mauritius and Honus Wagners is pretty set, but those don’t have much active play. Some of the most collectible Magic cards are also some of the most fun to play, so I expect many years of speculation!
Yes there will always be speculation but will there be enough profit to make it worth it. Reprints come in, destroy value, people stop filling spec binders. My question was what happens to sites like this when paying subscribers are making pennies off the collections they once thought were great investments, and get frustrated enough to stop speculating? Yes the articles are nice but the majority of us here pay for the speculation forums for single cards and the financial articles.
Then I start writing (more) fiction!
I did enjoy this article, but I found it a little ironic that it came out the Monday after the biggest Legacy event as well as the 3rd largest magic event ever.
Yeah, that thought was definitely in my mind last night while watching coverage … wrote most of this early last week without thinking much about the GP.
The point of this article is to start the discussion that maybe Magic can’t continue like it has for the last few years … Wizards wants as many people playing and buying Magic as they can, we have to recognize that what’s best for Wizards (and other entities in the industry) is not always going to be best for us as collectors and speculators.
As Wizards pulls levers, turns dials, and tweaks their processes, there is a chance that the wheels just fall off the bus. With the advent of Modern we were given notice: nothing in this format is sacred and reprints will occur, all it takes is a couple rough quarters for Hasbro to push a directive down the line to make up some of the income lost in other struggling brands. With Modern Masters, Wizards saw that as consumers we would gladly gobble up reprints at $7 a pack. They have a very large incentive to make more cards available for Modern and bring those prices down to the same levels we see in a typical Standard deck.
Ultimately Wizards is a subsidiary of Hasbro and Hasbro is beholden to stockholders; we’ve enjoyed a good run of what’s good for Wizards coinciding with what’s good for us but that can change at any time.
If magic collapse, its partly also because of numerous posts like this. Inciting fear and uncertainty causing a wave of panics making speculators dump their stocks all at once.
within 10 years, they will go 100% for MTGO.
Cards are not infinite, it’s a huge waste of resources, and cheaters and fake cards will ruin everything 😉 (It seems recent news about cheaters inspires others, many cheaters were caught in GP Madrid this weekend!).
WOTC will realize that MTGO has a very low cost and a high profit. They will focus on a decent client.
They will start a program to turn your paper cards into digital cards.
And for those who want to play commander on a kitchen table, you can order any card from WOTC for a standard price (0,5 for a card, 1 for a foil card). They print it and send it to you.
wow. No
Nah, I can’t agree with this.
totally wrong ! most people i know are playing more paper magic than ever !
and the day Wotc start selling any card for the same price will be game over for their business model !
Chas Andres wrote an article extremely similar to this a year ago, and I’ll say the same thing I did then: the half serious/half fictional tone of this article is a really weird rhetorical approach. If we look at the situation as a clear risk/reward system, rather than throwing in the amateur theatrics, I think we get a much better picture of the situation.
As long as the player base is growing and Hasbro making money they have no reason to reprint cards in a way that will collapse the secondary market. I think Corbin’s frequent analyses of the Hasbro stockholder report is WAAAAY better for predicting the future of magic than these silly fictionalized accounts of what might happen if & if & if & if.
Look at the numbers. Magic is growing pretty steadily. Demand for cards, especially reserved list cards, will not collapse as long as the player base grows. I think we are many millions of players away from market saturation.
As with any collection/investment: weight your risks and rewards with math and logic, not fairy tails.
I appreciate what you’re saying, but I’m not the detailed analysis guy … it’s just not what I do and is probably not going to be something I ever really delve into.
This article was as much about trying something different and storytelling as it was about finance. I admit it didn’t come out as well as I’d hoped, but it was fun to write, and hopefully for some people to read.
Wizards is and will always be at the mercy of their parent company, so far they’ve been given a long leash and run with it but corporate restructuring happens all the time and even the strongest brands in history have made massive mistakes, see “the new Coke” debacle. The other thing that I pointed out in the article is that the secondary market (driven heavily by tournament players) is a secondary concern to Wizards. They’ve said time and time again that tournament players are a smaller population than casual players. If a greater portion of the customer base spends an increased amount of money over time because of reprints, what do you think Wizards is going to do to respond?
Even outside of the casual base, a growing portion of the player base wants greater access to tournament caliber cards for Modern and Legacy and that base is well on it’s way to outweighing the voices wishing for card prices to go up.
And if those completely valid discussion points were not enough, maybe you should read the end of the article again:
“So what should you do to avoid the Magic apocalypse?
Nothing, I’m sure everything’s going to work out fine, kid. Just fine.
But on a completely unrelated note, if you have any Black Lotus that you’re looking to get rid of, I’ll gladly pay you $500 each for them.”
I think that makes it fairly clear that I don’t actually think there’s going to be a Magic collapse.