Another major perk for the fetchlands: They don't say "Get a basic land." You can crack the arid mesa to go grab any land that has the "Mountain" or "Plains" sub type, including dual lands.
@@Kohdok Triomes are good assuming you don't need the mana right away, but it's really big for the original dual lands, or more likely for a lot of players, the Ravnica Shock lands in modern. 3 total Life isn't a bad deal for something that gives you options from out of your deck. especially since you can mix and match. Arid Mesa can grab a Plains or a Mountain. So it can grab a card like stomping ground, Which has the land types of Forest and Mountain. So this makes things like fetch lands very versitile, as they can open you up to more colours than it says if played right.
For clarity, Here is ALL the options for Arid Mesa, when you are limited to just Mountain or Plains in the type line: scryfall.com/search?as=grid&order=name&q=%28type%3Amountain+OR+type%3Aplains%29+commander%3AWR
It's worth noting that when TCC says "buy singles," it's usually in the context of "when you are looking for the specific cards you want." So, if you have already built much of a deck and are looking for specific cards to finish it out, don't crack packs to get those cards. However, booster boxes are great if you want to play a limited format, like draft or some sort of block constructed (like when my friends and I will each buy 6-10 packs and build decks from the cards we pull as a way to change it up from just playing the same decks all the time).
Not really. When people say "buy singles" they mean that the cost of the cards you would open is not close to worth it compared to the price of the sealed product. Even if you don't take into account the effort of selling the cards, some sets just suck and you end up with a lot of mediocre cards that you don't need and that nobody wants to pay much for.
@@fernandobanda5734 I mean, that's more or less what I said, except providing the full context specific to The Professor, whose content I regularly watch
@@Jay-yr9oi No, you said buy singles when you need a specific deck. I said buy singles everytime you're not going to get your money's worth with a box, even if you aren't looking for anything in particular. Some sets are terrible and buying a box is a net loss.
"They can't come to your house to rip up your fourth Blue Eyes White Dragon." So, kinda funny, since here in 2024, Wizards DID, send the Pinketons to a guy's house, over cards LOL.
@@Kohdok It is kind of interesting the only really thing where Konami arguably could be consered to be leaning into it would be Battles of Leged: Armageddon which was made before there was this crazy rush(where to celebrate 10,000 cards Ten Thousand Dragon was printed with there being only 10 000 copies printed in the TCG), Astral Glyph Utopia which was more of a celebration and a fan favourite. The real one that was aimed at nostalgia and maybe beanie babies was Ghosts from the Past bring a set advertised around Ghost Rares and including a bunch of reprints for cards that were part of a structure deck in the OCG.
@@Kohdok Magic leaning heavily into it now, pumping value of paper cards, just because very soon they'll announce that they will stop with paper Magic. I think Hasbro will decide before 2025 that they will make Magic a digital only card game, only played in MTGArena. And the only paper product they will release are the follow-up product of Secret Lairs, so paper players in the Modern/Legacy format can still get those big value stomper cards.
@@mindustrial luckily that failed, but instead they've just gone to pushing the gambling aspect far as possible and increasing prices as high as they can while dropping individual cardstock, foil, and print quality
When Wizards says that the Secret Lairs sold out, they mean that they sold to distributors all the copies that were produced. It doesn't mean that all of them sold at retail.
@@Hepabytes Well, that's really the only hard data they get on their end. But if individual shops buy product and it doesn't sell, they will be less likely to get the next one, or get less of it, so in time, the general popularity of a product on the consumer end will reach the creation end.
@@Stinkoman87 probably, although I've seen what's happened in comics when the customers start getting scarred off and stores get product forced on them.
I really appreciate this clarification. It's completely fair to point out that digital content that gets unlocked in video games is still not exactly "yours" - which is a meaningful difference. I think that booster packs still have some shadier aspects in common with lootboxes (and both are monetized, at least partly, in ways that prey on the same thrill of opening new things), and I feel those are major key similarities. From what I've seen, TCGs (Magic mainly, also PKMN to an extent) are hesitant to discuss the secondary market because there's some legal uncertainty with gambling. Even so, I can agree that gacha games have managed to push some of the existing problems in TCGs to a new level, while creating new problems of their own, by letting you "permanently rent" things, obfuscating your spending behind convenience, etc. Side note, for people new to MTG - fetchlands are also very strong because they can fetch dual lands or even tri-lands with multiple subtypes (such as the shocklands, or the triomes), allowing them to access a much wider range of colors - for example, Arid Mesa can search for a Cinder Glade - a Forest Mountain, allowing Arid Mesa to give access to Green as well as White/Red.
The big difference between gambling and loot boxes is that you always get *something* from a lootbox. In gambling, there's always a very prominent chance you'll get absolutely nothing. Odds depend on the game, obviously, but it wouldn't be profitable for the house if the odds weren't against the player. You may not get exactly what you want from a lootbox, but you're guaranteed *something* for your money, and it's the same thing with booster packs. The only reason loot boxes are a problem and booster packs aren't is because TCG's aren't promising you a "free game," nor do you have to pay $60 to start playing the TCG. As soon as you collect 60 cards, you can technically "play" Pokemon. Getting more packs just allows you to improve your deck. Loot Boxes are either used to squeeze more money out of the player after the initial purchase of the game, or lure you in with the promise of a free game but then hide the majority of the content behind lootboxes. Both of which are much shadier. Oh, and, as Kohdok mentions in the video, you can't really sell stuff you get form a Loot Box if you don't want it.
Adding to the "cards being your property" this talk has been brought up by players when it comes to magic area and other games that have an online version. A dude got his account banned but tried to sue for monetary value of his cards that he now lost
I recently quit Hearthstone after four years and unlike when I quit Yu-Gi-Oh, I got nothing for my time and money. All of the resources that I dumped into hearthstone are gone, and because they keep nerfing cards, a lot of my cards don't even exist in the same form that they did when I paid for them. I'm never playing another digital card game.
I remember playing hearthstone a few years back when they started retiring old sets. I loved the themeing of the first adventure(Curse of Naxxramas), but I was a F2P so I saved up my gold to buy 1 wing so I would partly own it. I was wanting to unlock all 5 wings, but that would cost about 3,500 gold and I also like the expansion, Goblins vs Gnomes, and wanted to get cards from that as well. I was making a pitiful amount of gold daily and realized I would either need to log on every day to grind a bit a gold or pay real money to ultimately get some JPEG's of spiders and robots that had limited use and would eventually be gone forever. I'm glad I stopped when I did. I had fun with it, but not enough to justify burning time nor money. Now if they sold physical collectible sets of the cards that had a code to unlock them in-game, I probably would have bought 'em. I'm surprised they haven't done that actually.
That is sad to hear. Lots of people who've played Hearthstone have jumped ship to Legends of Runeterra partly because of the reasons you've highlighted. It's not because it's digital that the game sucks to play, rather it's how they end up using it and the frankly anti-consumer way they monetise their game. In Runeterra the cards are periodically and rather frequently updated to fit well with the current meta their set on instead of focusing on pushing 1 card over the others. The game is build in a way where it is possible for you to play the game and get all of the cards for free. They can do that because they don't base their monetization on boosters and chase cards, instead all cards have an equal price based on their "rarity/level" and generally you get plenty of opportunity to both buy or get wid cards that let you unlock new cards you need for a specific deck. It's honestly the best monetization scheme ever done in any TCG in my opinion, exactly because they leverage the digital aspect of the game to the best of its strengths and shows that TCG's in general don't have to be as horribly pricy and exploitative as they tend to be. I urge you to try it out.
@@Daehpo they didnt retire the sets exactly. Just made a standard where sets rotate out and wild where all cards are legal. Of interest one of the wild meta decks that only change a card out maybe once or twice a year is secret mage.
@@water2770 I am aware of wild, that is partly why I said "limited use". I failed to mention that I left as wild and standard were separated (2016), but I thought it was a bit of unnecessary info. I also watched YT's play the game for a long time after quitting, but haven't kept any tabs on it since 2018 (Boomsday was the last set I saw). Point was Hearthstone was going thru some major changes and that made me realize I would need to waste my time and/or money on things I had no real ownership of. I'm sorry David here had to pay for that lesson, but I think Kohdok talking about it can help some people out.
23:20 magic is absolutely doing both of these things. no one has infinite money, and most people have pretty tight budgets, especially with frivolous things like games and collectibles. Secret Lairs, special rare card treatments, and unique cards like Universes Beyond are all printed by wotc in extremely limited runs, and due to the sheer scale of the market for them, after that initial period of direct sales (which are increasingly being included in or only available in random products), they're priced out of the budgets of most players. And to satisfy the Jimothys (Rudys), they have a policy to never reprint these things, meaning they'll *only get more expensive*. This compounds the FOMO: Oh, you missed the 40k decks? better get them now for a 1000% markup, or they'll only be available as $20-$200 singles in a year! The same goes for habituation. They've dramatically increased the rate of product release. They've exceeded one new unique print run product per week for over a year, each of which is timed in its availability. They are (usually) just special treatments of available cards, but if that doesn't keep your attention, they've also increased set releases so every spoiler season starts the moment the last one ends. Every day new cards are revealed to lust after, brew around, speculate on - if you don't keep up, you'll be behind the meta, and worse, behind the community culture. They do things that prompt discussion and disagreement in the community so frequently that everyone has an air of being burned out. Oh, they made tournament legal Transformers cards? They're in the packs of the new standard legal set, but aren't legal in that format? They have art that's just screenshots from the TV show? Oh they don't plan on making MTG universe versions of them despite promising they would for non-mtg properties because it's part of the set, even though they say it technically isn't? AND they have new limited numbered foils in the set, which is technically adding to the reserved list, but they BROKE the reserved list with a $1k random product that's all proxies, AND they probably aren't making 40k mtg universe cards either, AND Urza is a meld planeswalker in the new set AND they're reprinting old cards in the old border in it AND those cards won't be legal in standard either AND.... Magic is pulling out all the stops to get as much from their whales as possible, and relegating the rest of their players to pauper, online play, or (non-WotC-made) proxies. They are using every trick they can to print money as fast as possible, including exploiting their players who will gamble, speculate, or just overspend out of emotional attachment. It's worse than a casino, because a casino doesn't pretend to care about you.
The big reason why TCC harps on buying singles vs cracking packs is that playing limited (Draft/Sealed) is a well-supported way to play MTG already. The sets are usually built around drafting and sealed play, and there's not much of a point in *not* going that route. Unless it's stuff like being a big channel who can crack 30 boxes of collector boosters, or being a big channel who can open a pack of something like original Alpha that was never made with draft/sealed in mind, there's basically no reason not to go that route for the "building a collection by opening packs" method. Finding out purely on accident that Yugioh only really does draft/sealed in specific Battle Packs felt kinda horrifying, seeing how a lot of times my only real time experiencing full MTG sets is during draft.
I Lived though the "Are TCGs Gambling?" Argument twice. For those of you who were not old enough, back when Pokemon TCG in English was printed by WotC, It got a massive "Won't someone PLEASE think of the children?" backlash for having random cards in a booster pack. This was in between WotC buying TSR, and being sold to Hasbro. That time it took a good few months for the fervor to die down until Guess what showed up but Fortnite, Overwatch, and Battlefront 2 EA edition in 2016-17. So it felt really tone deaf that the "Booter Fun initiative" started happening in 2019 on the physical side.
There was also a debate back when baseball cards were tge hit thing abd the courts ruled no because you got something from it I highly disagree with this decision but it shows the courts aren’t really sure
I think we can take a critical look at boosters and analyse how they exploit gambling addictions, they are not perfectly moral, but that's not an excuse for how sh*tty loot box and gacha games are, and as you said the pulls are not your property which is a fundamental difference. And yeah I also have a tendency for gaming and gambling addiction so I have extra wariness for gacha games.
Could roguelike deckbuilders like Slay the Spire, or (mitigatable) randomness-driven self-contained card/board games quench/channel that addiction, at least partially?
The nature of booster packs legally doesn't stop them being gross, it's a controlled economy thing, a card becomes expensive or rare not because of some inherit value but rather because of the manufacturer's decision of how many to print at what rarity and how powerful/attractive those cards are to players, this means that it artificially creates a mechanism that exploits the exact same parts of the human brain as gambling. This isn't even a cost thing, if a booster pack is $0.01 or $100 it'd still be exploiting people's brains in a way that I'm not okay with.
@@kuribohgremlin5596 i mean i agree that xander should return but i would give ken priority, he's just too precious and cute and shy and well written and deep and relatable to be just gone by the frickin' first season, kyle was a kick to the balls for all ken fans and it hurted even more, ahhh!!! The pain!!!!!🥺🥺😢😢😢😭😭😭😭😭
Bruh, i had a friend that was addicted to cracking magic packs. Every day he would go to walmart and buy some packs to open. Every day. Always looking for things. Gotta get that rare or mythic. Im glad he stopped playing before project booster fun existed cause he would probably be living in a cardboard box made of cards.
if you know exactly what cards you want and only want those specific cards, then it's usually for the best to buy single. because in this case everything but those specific cards in that specific number is 'bad'. and I also think for the highest rarity cards its usually better to buy singles than boxes. if the card costs less than a box and a box only has a, like, 1/3 chance of giving you a single copy, then its worth it for your own finances if you have a lot of cards your interested in, or want options for the future, I'd say its more worth it to buy packs. taking into account the general value of cards in most sets means you shouldn't be too out of pocket - with a chance of being on the pluss - and it can mean you can make other decks or try other strategies just buying singles would make impossible tldr; singles are better value if you know exactly what you want, boxes are better value if you want a lot of options
Even if the company doesn't directly let you cash out your booster pack cards, they can control how valuable a card is on the secondary market through how much they print and how powerful they make it. Secret Lairs priced to be very close to the secondary market value of singles inside it show the company is very aware of how much these cards are worth. So whenever there are expensive chase cards in a booster, the company is implicitly telling you that you have some small odds of winning an expensive card that you can get money for, even if not directly from them. In terms of the tactics involved, a booster pack is capitalizing on the same gambling mentality (even if not legally so) as a loot box. Boosters are less predatory simply because they are physical, and that's not because of any benevolence on the company's part. Magic has been trying to get people onto its digital client, and surprise surprise, a digital Magic booster is just a loot box with a booster pack animation.
Not necessarily. The game companies can try to predict the market, but they can't set it. There are Secret Rare Pokemon card values lower than some Uncommons. Many season-defining Yugioh cards are found in Precon decks. And more than a few Magic seasons have been defined by common cards. And I give my thoughts on Secret Lairs in the followup to sin #1, "Ethical Product Design".
@@Kohdok First off, wow, thanks for replying on a video over a year old. I've been making a box-set card game with TCG like mechanics, and your videos have provided many insights. My comment about setting market prices applies more to reprints. Wizards didn't have to predict how much a fetchland was worth. Once the market set a high price, they can control how much they reprint it to drive sales of extra expensive boosters which capitalize on FOMO by being limited print run (so after the print ends, prices on the secondary market will spike), similar to a gacha banner. I like how Pokemon does it, making base versions of cards affordable and only having bling and alternate art be super rare and expensive. Once you start dangling expensive cards you need as an incentive for a randomized pull, it starts turning into gacha.
And price is usually only a TCG problem. OCG product prints cards at multiple rarities in the same set so you don't have to pay out the nose for staples
Also don’t forget konami doesn’t care about maintaining card value and will reprint the carrots into oblivion, and then even then they maintain value cause the carrots are that good
Loot boxes or anything you purchase in a digital game, legally and officially, are not your property, and neither goods, they're licenses You pay to aquire a license of use of that digital thing
The fact that every card printed after the Fetches gets compared to the Fetches is how Power Creep works. Fetches set a new bar which everything made later is compared to.
@@Kohdok Totally. It says something that they are arguably better than Original Duals, since they do a little bit of everything for free. Fixing, shuffling, fetching itself, even calibrating your life total.
to be fair fetches are all the way back from 2002. Back then, no one cared because they weren't as useful or relevant as they eventually were. I lived that format. Trust me, people threw fetches around like they were $5 garbage.
Ash Blossom is in fact a gauranteed pull in TWO different sets (the Souldburner structure deck and Duel Devastator) but is still incredibly pricey. Granted, both of those sets are now out of print, but it says a lot that that card is still so expensive despite getting reprinted so much (I've heard it's even like this in the OCG).
That's what happens when a company creates a card that becomes ubiquitous across almost every deck for years. Konami knew what they were doing when they printed Ash Blossom, and they'll continue to reprint it until they finally get bored enough to ban it.
@@davidbronstein2040 Ash Blossom won't be banned lmao. Also you're assuming that these creators have more control than they actually do, it can be really hard to determine the impact of something. You just sound salty.
Also, while Ash Blossom is a highly splashable generically powerful competitive card, it isn't a genuine STAPLE the same way the Fetch Lands are. There are tons of competitive decks that don't run Ash Blossom in the main deck or even the side deck, and there are TONS of other "hand traps" like Ash Blossom that are better at countering specific strategies than Ash Blossom, not to mention Kaijus and other popular cards designed to counter your opponent's strategies. The Fetch Lands are more like Pot of Greed, a card that (while it was legal) was a true staple card. If your deck lacks Pot of Greed, your deck is objectively worse than it would be WITH Pot of Greed, and this applies to EVERY deck ALL the time. That's what the Fetch Lands are. There is no reason not to play as many of them as possible, even if your deck is a "Mono" color (like a pure Red deck), you still want Fetch Lands, because you can search out whatever lands you ARE playing, even if you're only playing one kind (like Mountains) and thin your deck in the process. On the other hand, Ash Blossom is a lot more like one of the modern Pot cards, like Pot of Extravagance, which is a generically powerful competitive card, but unlike Pot of Greed not every deck is improved by it. Extravagance is much better in decks that don't rely on their extra deck than decks that do. In a "combo deck" a card like Extravagance is awful, especially when there are other modern Pot cards that fit much better in certain kinds of decks. This is important, because cards like Pot of Greed are banned while cards like Pot of Extravagance are not. Why? For the reasons I just mentioned. If a card appears in EVERY competitive deck, regardless of the deck, there's a good chance that card is OP and is a good candidate for the banlist. If a card appears in SOME competitive decks, but not others, then its good, but not necessarily ban worthy. I understand that MtG has set rotation, so the solution to this problem is different than it would be in Yu-Gi-Oh! so please take this suggestion with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, a company like WotC SHOULD be doing everything in their power to keep cards like the Fetch Lands out of their game, the way Konami has cracked down on OP staples like Pot of Greed. It would be one thing if WotC just ignored these cards altogether, but the fact that they are selling a box which only contains 1 of each Fetch Land for an absurd price tag is proof that they KNOW these lands are a big problem and are making the choice to EXPLOIT this problem to make a quick buck. That would be like if Konami printed a new card called "Box of Greed" that reads "Draw 2" as the highest rarity in a new set and short printed it, but allowed it to be legal for a long time, just to exploit the problem created by a card like this in order to sell product. When Wizards released the Fetch Lands product they REALLY screwed up in terms of their reputation. That single gesture caused a lot of their most dedicated supporters to turn on them.
Re:Genshin- I never hit a difficulty wall, I hit a CONTENT wall, where there was nothing to do because their game had finite content and little incentive to even log in outside of the daily rewards and banners. Agree with the rest of what you're saying here though.
These Fetch-Lands remind me of Terraforming from Yu-Gi-Oh. Field Spell cards have become so powerful that sometimes decks that do not naturally play two Field Spells play two so they can unse the card Setrotation just to get to their actual good field spell. Terraforming and Ancient Fairy Dragon created the Field Spell Format, where sometimes 25% of the entire deck consisted only of field spells. Even after the Ban of Ancient Fairy Dragon field spells like Union Hangar, Draconic Diagramm and Trickstar Lightstage remained relevant mainly because of Terraforming. Terraforming was seen in nearly every competitive deck because it essentially doubled the amount of your best field spell in your deck and all the field spells that I mentioned earlier also search your essential monsters from your Deck while doing something else in addition to that. Even the weaker version of Terraforming (Setrotation and Metaverse) are currently limited together with this card.
I think the biggest problem with the "House controls everything, therefore it's gambling" argument is that...most video games are like that these days even if they don't include loot boxes. If you have a digital collection on Steam or your console of choice, that can be revoked at any time. When you fire up Mario Odyssey, you don't have a 3d representation of Mario you can do whatever you want with, you have a specific scenario where you can do specific things and the publisher gets extremely Not Happy with people who try to make modifications to that product. Certainly some publishers are less concerned about modding than others, but for the most part if you have to play by the rules you're given, and if the game has any kind of online component (say, for playing the game with other people) then that gets even more stringent. In that context, the only difference between a game you pay $60 for, and a game that's free to start and has loot box transactions is the means by which money is being exchanged for entertainment. Either way you don't "own" anything and you have to play by the house's rules. And on the same note you're trying to say that TCG companies don't do anything at all to entice people to buy new packs because if they don't they'll be falling behind people who are? If I have a competitive Yugioh deck from 7 years ago, sure I still HAVE all the cards, but if I try to pick that up and bring it to a tournament I'm going to get stomped on and I'm going to need to buy more cards if I want to stand any kind of chance, and that's a game that would at least let me use those old cards in a competitive environment. Even if I'm buying the cards off the secondary market, someone had to buy the packs or structure decks that the cards came from, which the company have full control over. Said company also controls the rarity of the cards and can absolutely make certain cards more common than others within a given rarity if they so choose. The fact that they don't do that doesn't change the fact that they could, otherwise your argument that gacha games can do that isn't fair because there are certainly gacha games that are honest about their pull rates. You're basically putting Lootboxes/Gacha games in the worst possible light, while at the same time painting TCGs in the best possible light, and acting like that makes for a fair comparison. It comes off as extremely bad faith.
It's a counter arguement for why loot boxes aren't like a tcg. As for tcgs I'd put them in the same camp as stocks. With a fairly higher risk factor, any speculative play you make can back fire pretty hard but if you take a more passive position, buying sealed product and keeping it for instance, you're all but guaranteed to make money over time.
I mean that experience that you describe in the last half of the 7 minutes mark sounds fun, but is so rare to happen, it's not feasible for most people.
A lootbox is like a one armed bandit with a blocked up payout tray and a screen that just shows a picture of your prize you get to look at when you want. A pack of trading cards is like one of those candy crane games that're made to give out at least some prize. (and while crane games have a small skill element they are made to always have some luck element)
Huh, I think you're the first person I've seen to form an argument around the distinction between "a gamble" and "gambling" to differentiate trading card games from gatcha games and/or other loot boxes. It's definitely interesting, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't pretty convinced. I guess the biggest reservations I have against saying that boosters *are* meaningfully different from lootboxes in how much like gambling they are concern whether having control over the use of the product is relevant when you still don't have control over what the product is. Just because a trading card game doesn't exert control over participants to the same degree as a gatcha game doesn't mean the activity isn't the same. It might be less severe, but it is of the same qualifiers, or at least it's the same if you only derive value from what you open and the experience of opening it. For those people, a gatcha game is equivalent to a trading card game. If you're someone who's interested in the secondary market, the value of what you receive is still out of your control. In the one case of trading cards, it's random, in the other case of lootboxes, it's... functionally zero, or at least it's supposed to be, which isn't random, but still completely out of your control. Even if you do go over the game provider's head on that, the value is still at least random. I think you hit the nail on the head with the "stingy casino" comparison, but that doesn't make TCGs less of one. Just a much better one. There are a lot of ways in which the two products aren't the same, but in the way that you're essentially gambling in either case, I don't think it's worth making a distinction between them. It's fair to say that lootboxes are worse, but I think that permanence and control are much stronger arguments than insisting that boosters aren't gambling, because they still very much are.
Very sound argument. I have to recommend them this video because the breakdown was just neatly done. It didn't sound condescending, no weaves and bobbing. Just straight as it is.
@@renzallen8251 Yeah, Kohdok seems a very honest, respectful guy. He gives honest, respectful responses, and it's cogent. I think it goes without saying that lootboxes are worse than TCGs, anyone who says otherwise has a hard fight justifying that, but all the same, this addresses that handily. I just don't think TCGs being better than lootboxes necessarily makes them any less gambling, and I'm still not convinced that it does, but everything he said was very true. Even if they are both gambling in the common sense, which they might be, and I tend to think they are, there's definitely a difference between "a gamble" and "gambling" in the way you'd see in a casino.
Nearly everything we do is a gamble because very few outcomes are deterministic. The sun will come out tomorrow but that doesn't mean either of us will live to see it cause we could be victims of the 5.0 murder rate, the 11.0 fatal car accident rate or succumb to an illness we didn't know we had. That doesn't mean we're gambling by being alive. Gambling has a legal definition both were it's legal and where it's not, and TCGs really aren't it. Everything in a booster has value, even if the metagame the company tries to build within the product muddies the player's perception of value, you'll be hard pressed to have a hardcore Rebecca Guay collector trade their signed promo Wood Elves for a fetchland.
@@Stroggoii Being subject to a random outcome against your will isn't the same as gambling, at least not how I'm meaning here, and I'm not concerned with the legal definition. The legal definition is just what it is, an "is" not an "ought be". When I, and I think when most people, think of what qualifies gambling, it looks something like this... An action is gambling if it... 1. Requires an investment of something of value to the agent, usually money. 2. Has the potential to yield a number of goods to the agent what's values to the agent are known to the agent and what's values to the agent are not identical. The most critical elements there are that it should require an investment and it should yield a good, the outcome not being deterministic is only relevant contingent upon those two things. Like you say, life is unpredictable in general. As an example of what I mean, say that I buy a ticket to a movie. The value of the *experience* of the movie to me is unknown. It could be terrible for all I know, but I wouldn't say that I gambled on the ticket, because the *good* that I am receiving, and its value to me, are fixed. I know how much I value the opportunity to see the movie, and I'm going to get exactly that when I purchase it. It's not a gamble. Compare this to if I paid to receive one of three movie tickets. I know how much I value each of those tickets, but I don't know which one I will receive. If I value them differently, I would call that a gamble. To address the things you brought up, I, and I'd imagine most people, wouldn't call those gambles, because they concern an experience, not a good. If you make an investment expecting to receive a *good* , and that good is random, that's gambling, but if you invest in something expecting to receive an *experience* that's as you say, just life. I get in my car, and drive to work, investing time and effort expecting to receive an experience, ideally me getting to work. Just because I don't know the outcome of that investment doesn't make it a gamble, because I'm expecting an experience, not a good. If experiences were included, like you say, everything would be a gamble. I would call both TCGs and lootboxes gambling, because you make an investment of money with the potential to receive a number of goods with variable value. In the case of TCGs, the goods are cards, in the case of lootboxes, the goods are access to use or view features of the game. Of course traditional gambling would also apply, again, you invest money with the potential to receive a number of goods with varying value, those goods being differening amounts of money, or possibly none at all.
@@SaberToothPortilla I will argue that TCG are on a completely different league on being better simply due to the fact it’s easier to punish TCG for doing manipulative practices, because people don’t generally stick around when they start doing these practices, but gotcha games have an easier time acquiring “whale” and when they do it Harder
Great video, you know I like discussion of the secondary market, thanks for going through everything with loot boxes, booster packs, and alternate currency. Looking forward to the next!
While it's not really related and is the most corner of corner cases there was one case where peoples cards were litterally taken away and that's the famous Upper Deck Konami break up where Upper Deck Employees had to give back their printed for fun versions of Seal of Orichalcos since Konami didn't want that to be a collectors item hanging around.
I had to quit playing Pokémon go because of the insane frequent and repetitive FOMO They continuously pushed on players week after week and month after month. It nearly eat me alive to the point where any time I wasn’t at work I had to be out walking around my town playing or I was wasting my time.
That's a great point you made, with physical cards you can have fun many different ways, you can experiment the game with different rules, like what if you were allowed to play 4 copies of a card instead of 3, or what if you had a deck master like in one arc of the Yugioh anime, heck, I used to come up with my own games as a kid to be able to play alone.
That whole rant about singles and casinos is really off the mark. No one would call singles gambling as there is no random chance involved. You are exchanging money for goods with no other components. People call booster packs gambling because you buy a ticket (Booster), your chance at winning (pulling what you want) is randomised with a low percentage. Buying a single is more the equivalent of just working for your wages. When using the casino argument, a more apt comparison would be the end result; I cashed out with 100 dollars, I can then exchange that 100 dollars for goods and services vs I pulled with a 100 dollar card. I can exchange that for goods or currency. The entire 'house' is covered by the booster pack itself. The booster pack is the game and the house. You exchange real currency for the booster pack, play it's little game with the odds stacked firmly against you, and if you win, you can use that card for whatever purpose you wish. The card is the money after you cash in this comparison. Frankly, I think a lottery ticket is the better comparison.
I really enjoyed this video (actually in my top 5 videos you've ever put out). Good job and also AMEN to the bubble burst (still can't find Digimon for under 200$ in Canada). Wanted to add one more thing about the gotcha games and that's the sunk cost fallacy's effect on players. Because you're unable to cash out, and this is a conscious and apparent point of theirs, when players might want to finally put down a game because they hit a wall, they realize that they've spent a ton of money and can't get it back so they might as well keep playing. And that continual play leads to more spending and - oops! - the gambling cycle just gets worse. Even if a player manages to put the game down for a few months, even the thought of how much money they've spent on it will drag them right back in and now they have months of power creep to catch up on! Of all of the card games I've ever played, Magic is definitely the one most likely to cause this reaction, as well, especially with all of the power creep in the last 3 years.
Obviously this video isn't supposed to go over all the benefits of fetch lands - but there's so many more benefits to fetch lands. They can fill up your graveyard, shuffle, grab 3+ typed lands in addition to grabbing an off color, you can run way more than 4 copies of fetchlands for your colors as you only need the fetch land to match one of your colors, they also can be reused with cards like crucible of worlds and wrenn and six in addition to what is said in the video.
4:10 Yu-Gi-Oh's mainline sanctioned format, called Advanced, works in a way that is comparable to Vintage, where you can use virtually every card ever released. If Yu-Gi-Oh didn't do regular reprints it would slowly kill the game.
There are walls in certain gacha games that are more idle games, but most of the gacha games I play tend to be relatively easy. Genshin for instance doesnt have any real walls. You just got to get a build together, and not play like an idiot. And idiots not understanding game mechanics isnt necessarily a problem with the game. Where most of the challenge comes in the event challenges.
Great video! Yeah, I love MTG and about all else Modern. But I'm not made out of money. I don't care for the secondary market and investment and I would love for WotC to just print the expensive cards into oblivion. Everyone needs them to play! Format staples shouldn't be 50+ bucks. Super special rare cards or bling, ok. But not fetchlands you need to even build a deck
MtG Secret Lair pushes that FOMO. Bit of a nitpick, but fetches have been around since 2002, so it kind of doesn't make sense to say that they're a power creep of a land cycle printed 20 years later. Fetches are a power creep of slow fetches from Mirage maybe, but those were unplayably bad anyway. All of the lootbox comparison sounds right though.
Card games do have fomo for casuals and kids who dont have game stores. For the longest time Id have no way to get a box of legend of the blue eyes for the longest time. Most yugioh products id have to buy online and if I dont have the option to do that there very much is a timer on how long booster packs or structure decks are available.
"...I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business." -Henry David Thoreau
I gotta say Digimon boxes are pretty hype. I had an omnimon in my first pack(only TCG related video on my channel) and it kinda stole the thunder out of the rest of the box but overall was great lmao.
modern horizons 2 and MM17 are not "regular" draft boosters though. they are a premium set, and priced as such. to qualify as a "regular" draft booster, your price needs to be that of an average Booster pack at release. Khans of Tarkir, Which reprinted the Allied Fetch lands, were such a product. And as a result of that printing, the market Gained a greater supply of the Allied fetch lands, to the point where Despite the Enemy fetches being reprinted more recently in 2017, allied fetch lands are still less valuable on average, although they have gone up in price over time. the type of product they are released in matters greatly.
I use to play a gotcha game. One of the pressure moves that it did was selling a card or variety pack for a percentage off for limited time. But I always thought it was funny to see because how can they sell something for a percentage off if you're never able to buy the so called item for the full price, ever.
So Kohdok what was the symbolism of having the plushie behind you fall over at 14:39? ;) Your videos are amazing, genuine, and a bright spot in my week, so thank you!
I always assumed buying boxes and boosters were ways to beef up someone's trade binder, I remembered how I used to see tons of players trade binders be full of the hottest and shiniest new cards and question how they got so many of them.
Yes and no, while it forces only the newest set on tournaments (the same way Mario "died" march 31st), it prevents issues like older cards getting overpowered ovenigth, then banned, then nerfed (fuck you needlefiber). It's like a hammer, it can build a house or kill someone, depend on who's using it and why.
26:34 only case i heard about a guy ruining his life with trading card games is someone getting a credit card, purchasing the nekroz deck when it was a $1000 at its prime, and then closing the account afterwards.
Ok... I wouldn't necessarily say that Arid Mesa is power creep per-say. It's definitely a more powerful card than Xverge Pathway, but fetch lands have been around in various formats for quite a while. In fact, they date as far back as Mirage, with cards like Flood Plain, Bad River, Rocky Tar Pit, Mountain Valley and Grasslands. If anything, this is just the power fluctuation cycle you see in games with set rotation. The bigger problem is the secret lair box, but honestly I'd just buy the Zendikar versions of the cards, the non-foils go for a quarter of what the foils go for.
Talking about Power Creep when the Mesas, the one stated to be more powerful, are older than the Pathways. A bit backwards there. But the strength of them is why fetchlands are not printed as often any more. Oh, people have _totally_ ruined themselves by buying card games. Just like any other hobby you'll get the outliers that, very literally, can't control themselves and will put themselves into debt to chase their obsession if allowed to do so. And society is not set up in a way to prevent that from happening. The companies selling these products sure don't care, too much in that it will lose them a customer, if someone buys _so much_ of their product they can't buy anything else. Like food. But they are the exceptions, not the rule.
Yes you can get an Amen Also, fetchland is good if you got cards that says you can play extra lands and cards that can play lands from your graveyard. That Arid Mesa can get you 2 mountains and 1 plains with Azusa and Crucible of worlds. And can get you 6 landfall trigger
2:50 This isn't "Power Creep," WOTC printed Plataeu in Alpha, which is strictly better than basic plains/mountains (99.9+% of the time). The problem is WOTC realized Plataeu is too good and pulled back. Pathways are also strictly better than basic lands (99+% of the time), and see substantive play. Why is Arid Mesa $60 and Pathways $5? The answer is simple - Fetchlands see more constructed play (in part because they can fetch dual lands, in part because of landfall, in part because of graveyard recusion/resource..), but more importantly there are less of them. "Enemy" fetchlands had one standard printing (legal in a standard legal set) ~ a decade ago, and have not been reprinted meaningfully since. Contrast this with Ravnica "shock" lands, which are reprinted every time they go back to Ravnica; they've had 3 standard releases. Ravnica shocks see play in practically all the decks that run Fetchlands, but they go for ~$10-20 because they've been competently reprinted. (Note: I understand you're tailoring this for a more general audience, and WOTC's fetchland incompetence is a special kind of stupid - don't even get me started on "Secret Lair Ultimate Edition...")
In a way magic lands are the opposite of power creep, which is in a way worse if they don't reprint frequently enough. The originals duals are the best (and they refuse to reprint them) and with the exception of fetches and sort of shocks nothing has really come close.
Has any game married the rarity system with deck building limitations to alleviate box chaff? i.e. card copy limits at 1x Ultra Rare, 2x Rare, 3x Uncommon and 4x Common. And Magic got very close to the FOMO Hot State bs with the Walking Dead Secret Lair. Thankfully the general reception was brutally negative and you cannot make bank scalping a product nobody actually wants, so even if that product did sell out their next foray into that territory will hopefully have those same scalpers remember they haven't made their money back on the last "now or never" dud from WotC.
The deck thinning offered by fetch lands has been mathematically proven to be inconsequential. It takes 3 of them to roughly equivocate to a 5% increase in drawing a non-land card, and that 1/20 chance for more gas is FAR outweighed by the odds that trading away over 1/7 of your life results in a loss.
Usually gacha games "license" you the stuff you get. I don't remember the long paragraph but that's basically what the gist of it was. For example, I play genshin impact and in one of their ToS states it.
@@Kohdok I was writing the comment just moments before you went on it haha. But basically you're essentially right. I don't really understand why some people say it isn't gambling when it just is. Perhaps denial? That's whole another can of worms to unpack. Really appreciate how you break down these things.
Imo, if you are likely to get the same value in cards as the price of the pack, I have no issue with buying sealed products. If you have to pull one of the 5ish alternate rarity money cards to have a chance of getting the same value in cards as the price of the pack, that is when I skip sealed and go for singles.
3:10 - Again, the problem isn't that WOTC can't print good cards - Pathways are good and will see play in most formats. The problem is people want Fetchlands for formats they play - Commander, Modern - and WOTC doesn't want to put Fetchlands through standard. They offer reasons for this - Fetchlands + Triomes, for example, would lead to a uniform metagame with 5 color decks running all over the place. Fetchlands + Ravnica Duals did this in Khans (well, and morph and blah blah wasn't playing, but the general consensus was bad idea). The problem? It's easy to schedule Ravnica and Fetchland sets 2 years apart, and they've preemptively banned (ally) fetchlands in "Pioneer," their "Modern Light" format. However, recent bullshit - like the Secret Lair Ultimate Edition - suggests WOTC (a) knows people want/need them for Commander, their most popular format (which, oddly, most of the designers don't like in general, not the least of which because it's not rotating and singleton), and Modern, a format that was very popular until they messed up their competitive tournament coverage and stopped featuring it... and (b) thinks they can get more money if they put them in $30 collector Boosters, $15 Modern Horizon 2 boosters, or $250... I mean $500... Secret Lair boxes with 5 ... that's right only 5... cards. Long story short? Either there is some conspiracy to leverage fetchlands in particular to sell expensive products, intentionally underprinting them, or the vast majority of WOTC has their head so far up their ass (figuratively or otherwise) that they don't understand how their players play the game. Given how poorly they've managed Standard for... coming on 3 years now... it might very well be the latter, or some combination of the 2.
"[Konami] tends to at least print them at a decent or respectable rarity... one rarity rung down, or put in in a starter deck or something." oh, that's a kneeslpper
Loot boxes aren't gambling in the same way that Pachinko parlors aren't gambling, except of course that online games don't give you little tokens that you take to the completely unrelated prize store next door to exchange for actual physical goods.
It's funny how the power and combo potential of a card changes so greatly based on the context a card is in and the rules of the game. The concept of a card like Arid Mesa being a secret rare $60 card sounds absurd to a Pokemon TCG player because the concept of card speed, counters, or the stack doesn't really exist. Cards which let you search for basic pokemon or energy are a dime a dozen in Pokemon TCG, like open any random booster pack and you'll probably find something with a Call For Family move in the common slot.
It would be like if there was an energy card, where you put a damage counter on the Pokemon it's attached to and discard it to search your deck for another Energy card (Doesn't have to be basic) and attach it, and there were also lots of Pokemon that benefit from having damage counters or getting energy attached to them.
On the part about hot states I thought to myself, "It would be be kind of ridiculous if in yugioh I could just pay money when I lose a duel to get all my life points back to try and win the duel. Oh wait, you technically can. It's called bribing the judge."
Another difference between loot boxes and card packs is that loot boxes tend to have a 90%+ chance of something that is worthless to pretty much any buyer. The "rares" of loot boxes are basically the only value you will get from them. In most cases you are just buying for the one mythic rare equivalent. Of course the lack of reselling is also a major factor. MTG cards also won't cease to exist if hasbro decides to stop printing them. I would be a lot more favorable towards loot boxes if they were set up to ensure you get something of value with every roll even if you don't know what that value is. Like for example in Genshin you have a 90%is chance of complete worthless garbage. Every 10th roll you will get a four star which may be of some value to you but odds are that isn't what you are looking for especially if you are a regular player you probably already have them. There is a roughly 1% odds of a 5 star which is what you actually want and even then it is a 50% chance it is a random 5 star and not the one you are rolling for but at least it is still probably good.
Shame singles market is inflated to hell in collectors cases. UPR lillie spiking to 400 from 80 overnight when others from the same set even *cough* Cynthia and of all things Lisia spiking. LISIA didn’t raise at all still hurts. Great video as always thanks Logan Paul for bringing investment into Pokémon in the mainstream
Also thankfully FGO as infamous as it’s rates are. Which genshins worse and others are equal. It’s not P2W and unless you’re grinding hard you’ll generally go through AP quickly not taking up the whole day. FGO is P2W but W is waifu instead of win
If you really want to support your LGS, buy singles, as their profit margin is higher. Boxes and packs are usually priced to break even, whereas singles provide the funds to pay for the rest of the store.
Another major perk for the fetchlands: They don't say "Get a basic land." You can crack the arid mesa to go grab any land that has the "Mountain" or "Plains" sub type, including dual lands.
If there's one thing better than a search, it's a search that can get different things based on the situation
Or a Triome. Yet another way Fetches are so powerful.
@@Kohdok Triomes are good assuming you don't need the mana right away, but it's really big for the original dual lands, or more likely for a lot of players, the Ravnica Shock lands in modern. 3 total Life isn't a bad deal for something that gives you options from out of your deck. especially since you can mix and match.
Arid Mesa can grab a Plains or a Mountain. So it can grab a card like stomping ground, Which has the land types of Forest and Mountain. So this makes things like fetch lands very versitile, as they can open you up to more colours than it says if played right.
@@Kohdok Yeah, the triomes are beginning to creep back up in price too, thanks to some new cards.
For clarity, Here is ALL the options for Arid Mesa, when you are limited to just Mountain or Plains in the type line: scryfall.com/search?as=grid&order=name&q=%28type%3Amountain+OR+type%3Aplains%29+commander%3AWR
11:45 "they cannot, for example, come to your house to confiscate your collection"
Wizards of the Coast: "Oh yea? Just watch me."
Come and try, everything is so expensive here, you'll leave my country poorer than me.
It's worth noting that when TCC says "buy singles," it's usually in the context of "when you are looking for the specific cards you want." So, if you have already built much of a deck and are looking for specific cards to finish it out, don't crack packs to get those cards. However, booster boxes are great if you want to play a limited format, like draft or some sort of block constructed (like when my friends and I will each buy 6-10 packs and build decks from the cards we pull as a way to change it up from just playing the same decks all the time).
Not really. When people say "buy singles" they mean that the cost of the cards you would open is not close to worth it compared to the price of the sealed product. Even if you don't take into account the effort of selling the cards, some sets just suck and you end up with a lot of mediocre cards that you don't need and that nobody wants to pay much for.
@@fernandobanda5734 I mean, that's more or less what I said, except providing the full context specific to The Professor, whose content I regularly watch
@@Jay-yr9oi No, you said buy singles when you need a specific deck. I said buy singles everytime you're not going to get your money's worth with a box, even if you aren't looking for anything in particular. Some sets are terrible and buying a box is a net loss.
"They can't come to your house to rip up your fourth Blue Eyes White Dragon." So, kinda funny, since here in 2024, Wizards DID, send the Pinketons to a guy's house, over cards LOL.
Amen!
People treating TCGs like beanie babies, and companies leaning into that, is such an awful thing and makes it so hard to actually play the game.
It really seems like only Magic is leaning into it so heavily. Pokemon and Yugioh seem content to just watch them burn twice as brightly.
Fair, I probably should have said WotC since they're the only examples I could think of off the top of my head.
@@Kohdok It is kind of interesting the only really thing where Konami arguably could be consered to be leaning into it would be Battles of Leged: Armageddon which was made before there was this crazy rush(where to celebrate 10,000 cards Ten Thousand Dragon was printed with there being only 10 000 copies printed in the TCG), Astral Glyph Utopia which was more of a celebration and a fan favourite. The real one that was aimed at nostalgia and maybe beanie babies was Ghosts from the Past bring a set advertised around Ghost Rares and including a bunch of reprints for cards that were part of a structure deck in the OCG.
@@Kohdok Magic leaning heavily into it now, pumping value of paper cards, just because very soon they'll announce that they will stop with paper Magic. I think Hasbro will decide before 2025 that they will make Magic a digital only card game, only played in MTGArena. And the only paper product they will release are the follow-up product of Secret Lairs, so paper players in the Modern/Legacy format can still get those big value stomper cards.
@@mindustrial luckily that failed, but instead they've just gone to pushing the gambling aspect far as possible and increasing prices as high as they can while dropping individual cardstock, foil, and print quality
When Wizards says that the Secret Lairs sold out, they mean that they sold to distributors all the copies that were produced. It doesn't mean that all of them sold at retail.
As far as hasbro cares that's good enough.
@@Hepabytes Well, that's really the only hard data they get on their end. But if individual shops buy product and it doesn't sell, they will be less likely to get the next one, or get less of it, so in time, the general popularity of a product on the consumer end will reach the creation end.
@@Stinkoman87 probably, although I've seen what's happened in comics when the customers start getting scarred off and stores get product forced on them.
That’s just misleading
@@fluffyfre It's obvious to anyone who knows how distribution to shops work. Inluding you, from now on.
I really appreciate this clarification. It's completely fair to point out that digital content that gets unlocked in video games is still not exactly "yours" - which is a meaningful difference. I think that booster packs still have some shadier aspects in common with lootboxes (and both are monetized, at least partly, in ways that prey on the same thrill of opening new things), and I feel those are major key similarities.
From what I've seen, TCGs (Magic mainly, also PKMN to an extent) are hesitant to discuss the secondary market because there's some legal uncertainty with gambling. Even so, I can agree that gacha games have managed to push some of the existing problems in TCGs to a new level, while creating new problems of their own, by letting you "permanently rent" things, obfuscating your spending behind convenience, etc.
Side note, for people new to MTG - fetchlands are also very strong because they can fetch dual lands or even tri-lands with multiple subtypes (such as the shocklands, or the triomes), allowing them to access a much wider range of colors - for example, Arid Mesa can search for a Cinder Glade - a Forest Mountain, allowing Arid Mesa to give access to Green as well as White/Red.
The big difference between gambling and loot boxes is that you always get *something* from a lootbox. In gambling, there's always a very prominent chance you'll get absolutely nothing. Odds depend on the game, obviously, but it wouldn't be profitable for the house if the odds weren't against the player. You may not get exactly what you want from a lootbox, but you're guaranteed *something* for your money, and it's the same thing with booster packs.
The only reason loot boxes are a problem and booster packs aren't is because TCG's aren't promising you a "free game," nor do you have to pay $60 to start playing the TCG. As soon as you collect 60 cards, you can technically "play" Pokemon. Getting more packs just allows you to improve your deck. Loot Boxes are either used to squeeze more money out of the player after the initial purchase of the game, or lure you in with the promise of a free game but then hide the majority of the content behind lootboxes. Both of which are much shadier. Oh, and, as Kohdok mentions in the video, you can't really sell stuff you get form a Loot Box if you don't want it.
Adding to the "cards being your property" this talk has been brought up by players when it comes to magic area and other games that have an online version. A dude got his account banned but tried to sue for monetary value of his cards that he now lost
I recently quit Hearthstone after four years and unlike when I quit Yu-Gi-Oh, I got nothing for my time and money. All of the resources that I dumped into hearthstone are gone, and because they keep nerfing cards, a lot of my cards don't even exist in the same form that they did when I paid for them. I'm never playing another digital card game.
I remember playing hearthstone a few years back when they started retiring old sets. I loved the themeing of the first adventure(Curse of Naxxramas), but I was a F2P so I saved up my gold to buy 1 wing so I would partly own it. I was wanting to unlock all 5 wings, but that would cost about 3,500 gold and I also like the expansion, Goblins vs Gnomes, and wanted to get cards from that as well. I was making a pitiful amount of gold daily and realized I would either need to log on every day to grind a bit a gold or pay real money to ultimately get some JPEG's of spiders and robots that had limited use and would eventually be gone forever.
I'm glad I stopped when I did. I had fun with it, but not enough to justify burning time nor money. Now if they sold physical collectible sets of the cards that had a code to unlock them in-game, I probably would have bought 'em. I'm surprised they haven't done that actually.
That is sad to hear. Lots of people who've played Hearthstone have jumped ship to Legends of Runeterra partly because of the reasons you've highlighted. It's not because it's digital that the game sucks to play, rather it's how they end up using it and the frankly anti-consumer way they monetise their game. In Runeterra the cards are periodically and rather frequently updated to fit well with the current meta their set on instead of focusing on pushing 1 card over the others. The game is build in a way where it is possible for you to play the game and get all of the cards for free. They can do that because they don't base their monetization on boosters and chase cards, instead all cards have an equal price based on their "rarity/level" and generally you get plenty of opportunity to both buy or get wid cards that let you unlock new cards you need for a specific deck. It's honestly the best monetization scheme ever done in any TCG in my opinion, exactly because they leverage the digital aspect of the game to the best of its strengths and shows that TCG's in general don't have to be as horribly pricy and exploitative as they tend to be. I urge you to try it out.
Technically you could have just sold your Hearthstone account which might be not allowed but is definitely something that is done.
@@Daehpo they didnt retire the sets exactly. Just made a standard where sets rotate out and wild where all cards are legal. Of interest one of the wild meta decks that only change a card out maybe once or twice a year is secret mage.
@@water2770 I am aware of wild, that is partly why I said "limited use". I failed to mention that I left as wild and standard were separated (2016), but I thought it was a bit of unnecessary info. I also watched YT's play the game for a long time after quitting, but haven't kept any tabs on it since 2018 (Boomsday was the last set I saw). Point was Hearthstone was going thru some major changes and that made me realize I would need to waste my time and/or money on things I had no real ownership of.
I'm sorry David here had to pay for that lesson, but I think Kohdok talking about it can help some people out.
Regarding physical permanence: I come from the future, Wizards of the coast indeed sent thugs to a customer’s house to take away his magic cards 😂😂😂
Waiting INTENTLY on that bubble to pop, hahaha.
You got an "Amen" from me!
Same here!
The bubble is made of 6-inch steel. It will never pop.
23:20 magic is absolutely doing both of these things. no one has infinite money, and most people have pretty tight budgets, especially with frivolous things like games and collectibles. Secret Lairs, special rare card treatments, and unique cards like Universes Beyond are all printed by wotc in extremely limited runs, and due to the sheer scale of the market for them, after that initial period of direct sales (which are increasingly being included in or only available in random products), they're priced out of the budgets of most players. And to satisfy the Jimothys (Rudys), they have a policy to never reprint these things, meaning they'll *only get more expensive*. This compounds the FOMO: Oh, you missed the 40k decks? better get them now for a 1000% markup, or they'll only be available as $20-$200 singles in a year!
The same goes for habituation. They've dramatically increased the rate of product release. They've exceeded one new unique print run product per week for over a year, each of which is timed in its availability. They are (usually) just special treatments of available cards, but if that doesn't keep your attention, they've also increased set releases so every spoiler season starts the moment the last one ends. Every day new cards are revealed to lust after, brew around, speculate on - if you don't keep up, you'll be behind the meta, and worse, behind the community culture. They do things that prompt discussion and disagreement in the community so frequently that everyone has an air of being burned out. Oh, they made tournament legal Transformers cards? They're in the packs of the new standard legal set, but aren't legal in that format? They have art that's just screenshots from the TV show? Oh they don't plan on making MTG universe versions of them despite promising they would for non-mtg properties because it's part of the set, even though they say it technically isn't? AND they have new limited numbered foils in the set, which is technically adding to the reserved list, but they BROKE the reserved list with a $1k random product that's all proxies, AND they probably aren't making 40k mtg universe cards either, AND Urza is a meld planeswalker in the new set AND they're reprinting old cards in the old border in it AND those cards won't be legal in standard either AND....
Magic is pulling out all the stops to get as much from their whales as possible, and relegating the rest of their players to pauper, online play, or (non-WotC-made) proxies. They are using every trick they can to print money as fast as possible, including exploiting their players who will gamble, speculate, or just overspend out of emotional attachment. It's worse than a casino, because a casino doesn't pretend to care about you.
Yeah, WotC greed is amazing
11:45 Don't let Wizards and The Pinkertons hear that
Man I have to agree with you on waiting for the bubble to pop! I can't wait for all of this to blow over and things can return to somewhat normalcy!
Agreed
The big reason why TCC harps on buying singles vs cracking packs is that playing limited (Draft/Sealed) is a well-supported way to play MTG already. The sets are usually built around drafting and sealed play, and there's not much of a point in *not* going that route. Unless it's stuff like being a big channel who can crack 30 boxes of collector boosters, or being a big channel who can open a pack of something like original Alpha that was never made with draft/sealed in mind, there's basically no reason not to go that route for the "building a collection by opening packs" method. Finding out purely on accident that Yugioh only really does draft/sealed in specific Battle Packs felt kinda horrifying, seeing how a lot of times my only real time experiencing full MTG sets is during draft.
I Lived though the "Are TCGs Gambling?" Argument twice. For those of you who were not old enough, back when Pokemon TCG in English was printed by WotC, It got a massive "Won't someone PLEASE think of the children?" backlash for having random cards in a booster pack. This was in between WotC buying TSR, and being sold to Hasbro. That time it took a good few months for the fervor to die down until Guess what showed up but Fortnite, Overwatch, and Battlefront 2 EA edition in 2016-17. So it felt really tone deaf that the "Booter Fun initiative" started happening in 2019 on the physical side.
There was also a debate back when baseball cards were tge hit thing abd the courts ruled no because you got something from it
I highly disagree with this decision but it shows the courts aren’t really sure
I think we can take a critical look at boosters and analyse how they exploit gambling addictions, they are not perfectly moral, but that's not an excuse for how sh*tty loot box and gacha games are, and as you said the pulls are not your property which is a fundamental difference.
And yeah I also have a tendency for gaming and gambling addiction so I have extra wariness for gacha games.
Could roguelike deckbuilders like Slay the Spire, or (mitigatable) randomness-driven self-contained card/board games quench/channel that addiction, at least partially?
The nature of booster packs legally doesn't stop them being gross, it's a controlled economy thing, a card becomes expensive or rare not because of some inherit value but rather because of the manufacturer's decision of how many to print at what rarity and how powerful/attractive those cards are to players, this means that it artificially creates a mechanism that exploits the exact same parts of the human brain as gambling. This isn't even a cost thing, if a booster pack is $0.01 or $100 it'd still be exploiting people's brains in a way that I'm not okay with.
That description is comedy gold
The person that liked my comment agrees with me... probably
I bet you wish kerbeus had a new evolution
@@kuribohgremlin5596 yes, kensuke boy deserves some love
@@Liliana_the_ghost_cat not as much as zander
@@kuribohgremlin5596 i mean i agree that xander should return but i would give ken priority, he's just too precious and cute and shy and well written and deep and relatable to be just gone by the frickin' first season, kyle was a kick to the balls for all ken fans and it hurted even more, ahhh!!! The pain!!!!!🥺🥺😢😢😢😭😭😭😭😭
Bruh, i had a friend that was addicted to cracking magic packs. Every day he would go to walmart and buy some packs to open. Every day. Always looking for things. Gotta get that rare or mythic. Im glad he stopped playing before project booster fun existed cause he would probably be living in a cardboard box made of cards.
if you know exactly what cards you want and only want those specific cards, then it's usually for the best to buy single. because in this case everything but those specific cards in that specific number is 'bad'. and I also think for the highest rarity cards its usually better to buy singles than boxes. if the card costs less than a box and a box only has a, like, 1/3 chance of giving you a single copy, then its worth it for your own finances
if you have a lot of cards your interested in, or want options for the future, I'd say its more worth it to buy packs. taking into account the general value of cards in most sets means you shouldn't be too out of pocket - with a chance of being on the pluss - and it can mean you can make other decks or try other strategies just buying singles would make impossible
tldr; singles are better value if you know exactly what you want, boxes are better value if you want a lot of options
I usually buy packs with the intent of supporting my local stores.
Even if the company doesn't directly let you cash out your booster pack cards, they can control how valuable a card is on the secondary market through how much they print and how powerful they make it. Secret Lairs priced to be very close to the secondary market value of singles inside it show the company is very aware of how much these cards are worth. So whenever there are expensive chase cards in a booster, the company is implicitly telling you that you have some small odds of winning an expensive card that you can get money for, even if not directly from them. In terms of the tactics involved, a booster pack is capitalizing on the same gambling mentality (even if not legally so) as a loot box. Boosters are less predatory simply because they are physical, and that's not because of any benevolence on the company's part. Magic has been trying to get people onto its digital client, and surprise surprise, a digital Magic booster is just a loot box with a booster pack animation.
Not necessarily. The game companies can try to predict the market, but they can't set it.
There are Secret Rare Pokemon card values lower than some Uncommons. Many season-defining Yugioh cards are found in Precon decks. And more than a few Magic seasons have been defined by common cards.
And I give my thoughts on Secret Lairs in the followup to sin #1, "Ethical Product Design".
@@Kohdok First off, wow, thanks for replying on a video over a year old. I've been making a box-set card game with TCG like mechanics, and your videos have provided many insights. My comment about setting market prices applies more to reprints. Wizards didn't have to predict how much a fetchland was worth. Once the market set a high price, they can control how much they reprint it to drive sales of extra expensive boosters which capitalize on FOMO by being limited print run (so after the print ends, prices on the secondary market will spike), similar to a gacha banner. I like how Pokemon does it, making base versions of cards affordable and only having bling and alternate art be super rare and expensive. Once you start dangling expensive cards you need as an incentive for a randomized pull, it starts turning into gacha.
Konami might not go to your house and take your cards, but WotC will
I know people complain about Yugioh's prices, but at least the carrot on a stick is just a shinier version of another card
And price is usually only a TCG problem. OCG product prints cards at multiple rarities in the same set so you don't have to pay out the nose for staples
Also don’t forget konami doesn’t care about maintaining card value and will reprint the carrots into oblivion, and then even then they maintain value cause the carrots are that good
Loot boxes or anything you purchase in a digital game, legally and officially, are not your property, and neither goods, they're licenses
You pay to aquire a license of use of that digital thing
The powercreep argument rings really weird when you compare an old card to a new, weaker card.
The fact that every card printed after the Fetches gets compared to the Fetches is how Power Creep works. Fetches set a new bar which everything made later is compared to.
@@Kohdok Yeah, it's not wrong, but it's still weird to see the card of last year be powercrept by a card 11 years older.
@@Alikaoz That's how bad they messed up when designing the Fetches.
@@Kohdok Totally. It says something that they are arguably better than Original Duals, since they do a little bit of everything for free. Fixing, shuffling, fetching itself, even calibrating your life total.
to be fair fetches are all the way back from 2002. Back then, no one cared because they weren't as useful or relevant as they eventually were. I lived that format. Trust me, people threw fetches around like they were $5 garbage.
What a professional he knocks down one of his background pieces at 5:18 and doesn't miss a beat bravo sir 👏👏👏
Ash Blossom is in fact a gauranteed pull in TWO different sets (the Souldburner structure deck and Duel Devastator) but is still incredibly pricey. Granted, both of those sets are now out of print, but it says a lot that that card is still so expensive despite getting reprinted so much (I've heard it's even like this in the OCG).
That's what happens when a company creates a card that becomes ubiquitous across almost every deck for years. Konami knew what they were doing when they printed Ash Blossom, and they'll continue to reprint it until they finally get bored enough to ban it.
good thing ash is shit this format
@@davidbronstein2040 Ash Blossom won't be banned lmao. Also you're assuming that these creators have more control than they actually do, it can be really hard to determine the impact of something. You just sound salty.
Also, while Ash Blossom is a highly splashable generically powerful competitive card, it isn't a genuine STAPLE the same way the Fetch Lands are. There are tons of competitive decks that don't run Ash Blossom in the main deck or even the side deck, and there are TONS of other "hand traps" like Ash Blossom that are better at countering specific strategies than Ash Blossom, not to mention Kaijus and other popular cards designed to counter your opponent's strategies. The Fetch Lands are more like Pot of Greed, a card that (while it was legal) was a true staple card. If your deck lacks Pot of Greed, your deck is objectively worse than it would be WITH Pot of Greed, and this applies to EVERY deck ALL the time. That's what the Fetch Lands are. There is no reason not to play as many of them as possible, even if your deck is a "Mono" color (like a pure Red deck), you still want Fetch Lands, because you can search out whatever lands you ARE playing, even if you're only playing one kind (like Mountains) and thin your deck in the process. On the other hand, Ash Blossom is a lot more like one of the modern Pot cards, like Pot of Extravagance, which is a generically powerful competitive card, but unlike Pot of Greed not every deck is improved by it. Extravagance is much better in decks that don't rely on their extra deck than decks that do. In a "combo deck" a card like Extravagance is awful, especially when there are other modern Pot cards that fit much better in certain kinds of decks.
This is important, because cards like Pot of Greed are banned while cards like Pot of Extravagance are not. Why? For the reasons I just mentioned. If a card appears in EVERY competitive deck, regardless of the deck, there's a good chance that card is OP and is a good candidate for the banlist. If a card appears in SOME competitive decks, but not others, then its good, but not necessarily ban worthy. I understand that MtG has set rotation, so the solution to this problem is different than it would be in Yu-Gi-Oh! so please take this suggestion with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, a company like WotC SHOULD be doing everything in their power to keep cards like the Fetch Lands out of their game, the way Konami has cracked down on OP staples like Pot of Greed. It would be one thing if WotC just ignored these cards altogether, but the fact that they are selling a box which only contains 1 of each Fetch Land for an absurd price tag is proof that they KNOW these lands are a big problem and are making the choice to EXPLOIT this problem to make a quick buck. That would be like if Konami printed a new card called "Box of Greed" that reads "Draw 2" as the highest rarity in a new set and short printed it, but allowed it to be legal for a long time, just to exploit the problem created by a card like this in order to sell product. When Wizards released the Fetch Lands product they REALLY screwed up in terms of their reputation. That single gesture caused a lot of their most dedicated supporters to turn on them.
Re:Genshin- I never hit a difficulty wall, I hit a CONTENT wall, where there was nothing to do because their game had finite content and little incentive to even log in outside of the daily rewards and banners. Agree with the rest of what you're saying here though.
I mean I can gamble for a car or I can take a loan out for a car. If I gamble for it it's still gambling.
Thank you so much for this video! You always have so much interesting things to say and you keep changing my opinions on things I was entrentched in.
These Fetch-Lands remind me of Terraforming from Yu-Gi-Oh.
Field Spell cards have become so powerful that sometimes decks that do not naturally play two Field Spells play two so they can unse the card Setrotation just to get to their actual good field spell.
Terraforming and Ancient Fairy Dragon created the Field Spell Format, where sometimes 25% of the entire deck consisted only of field spells. Even after the Ban of Ancient Fairy Dragon field spells like Union Hangar, Draconic Diagramm and Trickstar Lightstage remained relevant mainly because of Terraforming. Terraforming was seen in nearly every competitive deck because it essentially doubled the amount of your best field spell in your deck and all the field spells that I mentioned earlier also search your essential monsters from your Deck while doing something else in addition to that. Even the weaker version of Terraforming (Setrotation and Metaverse) are currently limited together with this card.
I think the biggest problem with the "House controls everything, therefore it's gambling" argument is that...most video games are like that these days even if they don't include loot boxes. If you have a digital collection on Steam or your console of choice, that can be revoked at any time. When you fire up Mario Odyssey, you don't have a 3d representation of Mario you can do whatever you want with, you have a specific scenario where you can do specific things and the publisher gets extremely Not Happy with people who try to make modifications to that product. Certainly some publishers are less concerned about modding than others, but for the most part if you have to play by the rules you're given, and if the game has any kind of online component (say, for playing the game with other people) then that gets even more stringent. In that context, the only difference between a game you pay $60 for, and a game that's free to start and has loot box transactions is the means by which money is being exchanged for entertainment. Either way you don't "own" anything and you have to play by the house's rules.
And on the same note you're trying to say that TCG companies don't do anything at all to entice people to buy new packs because if they don't they'll be falling behind people who are? If I have a competitive Yugioh deck from 7 years ago, sure I still HAVE all the cards, but if I try to pick that up and bring it to a tournament I'm going to get stomped on and I'm going to need to buy more cards if I want to stand any kind of chance, and that's a game that would at least let me use those old cards in a competitive environment. Even if I'm buying the cards off the secondary market, someone had to buy the packs or structure decks that the cards came from, which the company have full control over. Said company also controls the rarity of the cards and can absolutely make certain cards more common than others within a given rarity if they so choose. The fact that they don't do that doesn't change the fact that they could, otherwise your argument that gacha games can do that isn't fair because there are certainly gacha games that are honest about their pull rates.
You're basically putting Lootboxes/Gacha games in the worst possible light, while at the same time painting TCGs in the best possible light, and acting like that makes for a fair comparison. It comes off as extremely bad faith.
It's a counter arguement for why loot boxes aren't like a tcg. As for tcgs I'd put them in the same camp as stocks. With a fairly higher risk factor, any speculative play you make can back fire pretty hard but if you take a more passive position, buying sealed product and keeping it for instance, you're all but guaranteed to make money over time.
Oh the memories, that's how two friends and me bought a lot of Helénica and i made a Titans deck, another friend a heroes and other the Olimpians
I mean that experience that you describe in the last half of the 7 minutes mark sounds fun, but is so rare to happen, it's not feasible for most people.
A lootbox is like a one armed bandit with a blocked up payout tray and a screen that just shows a picture of your prize you get to look at when you want.
A pack of trading cards is like one of those candy crane games that're made to give out at least some prize. (and while crane games have a small skill element they are made to always have some luck element)
Huh, I think you're the first person I've seen to form an argument around the distinction between "a gamble" and "gambling" to differentiate trading card games from gatcha games and/or other loot boxes.
It's definitely interesting, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't pretty convinced. I guess the biggest reservations I have against saying that boosters *are* meaningfully different from lootboxes in how much like gambling they are concern whether having control over the use of the product is relevant when you still don't have control over what the product is.
Just because a trading card game doesn't exert control over participants to the same degree as a gatcha game doesn't mean the activity isn't the same. It might be less severe, but it is of the same qualifiers, or at least it's the same if you only derive value from what you open and the experience of opening it. For those people, a gatcha game is equivalent to a trading card game.
If you're someone who's interested in the secondary market, the value of what you receive is still out of your control. In the one case of trading cards, it's random, in the other case of lootboxes, it's... functionally zero, or at least it's supposed to be, which isn't random, but still completely out of your control. Even if you do go over the game provider's head on that, the value is still at least random. I think you hit the nail on the head with the "stingy casino" comparison, but that doesn't make TCGs less of one. Just a much better one.
There are a lot of ways in which the two products aren't the same, but in the way that you're essentially gambling in either case, I don't think it's worth making a distinction between them. It's fair to say that lootboxes are worse, but I think that permanence and control are much stronger arguments than insisting that boosters aren't gambling, because they still very much are.
Very sound argument. I have to recommend them this video because the breakdown was just neatly done. It didn't sound condescending, no weaves and bobbing. Just straight as it is.
@@renzallen8251 Yeah, Kohdok seems a very honest, respectful guy. He gives honest, respectful responses, and it's cogent.
I think it goes without saying that lootboxes are worse than TCGs, anyone who says otherwise has a hard fight justifying that, but all the same, this addresses that handily.
I just don't think TCGs being better than lootboxes necessarily makes them any less gambling, and I'm still not convinced that it does, but everything he said was very true. Even if they are both gambling in the common sense, which they might be, and I tend to think they are, there's definitely a difference between "a gamble" and "gambling" in the way you'd see in a casino.
Nearly everything we do is a gamble because very few outcomes are deterministic. The sun will come out tomorrow but that doesn't mean either of us will live to see it cause we could be victims of the 5.0 murder rate, the 11.0 fatal car accident rate or succumb to an illness we didn't know we had.
That doesn't mean we're gambling by being alive. Gambling has a legal definition both were it's legal and where it's not, and TCGs really aren't it. Everything in a booster has value, even if the metagame the company tries to build within the product muddies the player's perception of value, you'll be hard pressed to have a hardcore Rebecca Guay collector trade their signed promo Wood Elves for a fetchland.
@@Stroggoii Being subject to a random outcome against your will isn't the same as gambling, at least not how I'm meaning here, and I'm not concerned with the legal definition. The legal definition is just what it is, an "is" not an "ought be".
When I, and I think when most people, think of what qualifies gambling, it looks something like this...
An action is gambling if it...
1. Requires an investment of something of value to the agent, usually money.
2. Has the potential to yield a number of goods to the agent what's values to the agent are known to the agent and what's values to the agent are not identical.
The most critical elements there are that it should require an investment and it should yield a good, the outcome not being deterministic is only relevant contingent upon those two things. Like you say, life is unpredictable in general.
As an example of what I mean, say that I buy a ticket to a movie. The value of the *experience* of the movie to me is unknown. It could be terrible for all I know, but I wouldn't say that I gambled on the ticket, because the *good* that I am receiving, and its value to me, are fixed. I know how much I value the opportunity to see the movie, and I'm going to get exactly that when I purchase it. It's not a gamble.
Compare this to if I paid to receive one of three movie tickets. I know how much I value each of those tickets, but I don't know which one I will receive. If I value them differently, I would call that a gamble.
To address the things you brought up, I, and I'd imagine most people, wouldn't call those gambles, because they concern an experience, not a good. If you make an investment expecting to receive a *good* , and that good is random, that's gambling, but if you invest in something expecting to receive an *experience* that's as you say, just life. I get in my car, and drive to work, investing time and effort expecting to receive an experience, ideally me getting to work. Just because I don't know the outcome of that investment doesn't make it a gamble, because I'm expecting an experience, not a good. If experiences were included, like you say, everything would be a gamble.
I would call both TCGs and lootboxes gambling, because you make an investment of money with the potential to receive a number of goods with variable value. In the case of TCGs, the goods are cards, in the case of lootboxes, the goods are access to use or view features of the game. Of course traditional gambling would also apply, again, you invest money with the potential to receive a number of goods with varying value, those goods being differening amounts of money, or possibly none at all.
@@SaberToothPortilla I will argue that TCG are on a completely different league on being better simply due to the fact it’s easier to punish TCG for doing manipulative practices, because people don’t generally stick around when they start doing these practices, but gotcha games have an easier time acquiring “whale” and when they do it Harder
Great video, you know I like discussion of the secondary market, thanks for going through everything with loot boxes, booster packs, and alternate currency. Looking forward to the next!
While it's not really related and is the most corner of corner cases there was one case where peoples cards were litterally taken away and that's the famous Upper Deck Konami break up where Upper Deck Employees had to give back their printed for fun versions of Seal of Orichalcos since Konami didn't want that to be a collectors item hanging around.
You doing great rants with sublimal J.S.Sterling makes me very happy, gamers need to get way more angry at hostile game design.
You cover property right and roasted loot boxes in the same episode...Nice!
I had to quit playing Pokémon go because of the insane frequent and repetitive FOMO They continuously pushed on players week after week and month after month. It nearly eat me alive to the point where any time I wasn’t at work I had to be out walking around my town playing or I was wasting my time.
That's a great point you made, with physical cards you can have fun many different ways, you can experiment the game with different rules, like what if you were allowed to play 4 copies of a card instead of 3, or what if you had a deck master like in one arc of the Yugioh anime, heck, I used to come up with my own games as a kid to be able to play alone.
That whole rant about singles and casinos is really off the mark. No one would call singles gambling as there is no random chance involved. You are exchanging money for goods with no other components.
People call booster packs gambling because you buy a ticket (Booster), your chance at winning (pulling what you want) is randomised with a low percentage. Buying a single is more the equivalent of just working for your wages.
When using the casino argument, a more apt comparison would be the end result; I cashed out with 100 dollars, I can then exchange that 100 dollars for goods and services vs I pulled with a 100 dollar card. I can exchange that for goods or currency. The entire 'house' is covered by the booster pack itself. The booster pack is the game and the house. You exchange real currency for the booster pack, play it's little game with the odds stacked firmly against you, and if you win, you can use that card for whatever purpose you wish. The card is the money after you cash in this comparison.
Frankly, I think a lottery ticket is the better comparison.
27:08 Couldn’t have said it any better myself.
I really love this new format for the playlist
the Yugimon quote got a solid chuckle out of me! XD
I really enjoyed this video (actually in my top 5 videos you've ever put out). Good job and also AMEN to the bubble burst (still can't find Digimon for under 200$ in Canada). Wanted to add one more thing about the gotcha games and that's the sunk cost fallacy's effect on players. Because you're unable to cash out, and this is a conscious and apparent point of theirs, when players might want to finally put down a game because they hit a wall, they realize that they've spent a ton of money and can't get it back so they might as well keep playing. And that continual play leads to more spending and - oops! - the gambling cycle just gets worse. Even if a player manages to put the game down for a few months, even the thought of how much money they've spent on it will drag them right back in and now they have months of power creep to catch up on! Of all of the card games I've ever played, Magic is definitely the one most likely to cause this reaction, as well, especially with all of the power creep in the last 3 years.
I would like to see a Video about the importance of the minimum and maximum amount of cards you can play in your deck.
It would be the perfect topic to bring up that one guy who brought a deck with 2222 cards to an event.
Obviously this video isn't supposed to go over all the benefits of fetch lands - but there's so many more benefits to fetch lands. They can fill up your graveyard, shuffle, grab 3+ typed lands in addition to grabbing an off color, you can run way more than 4 copies of fetchlands for your colors as you only need the fetch land to match one of your colors, they also can be reused with cards like crucible of worlds and wrenn and six in addition to what is said in the video.
11:44 that didn't age well after Wizards Pinkerton incident lol
9:50 no, I am not defending loot boxes but opposint booster packs
4:10
Yu-Gi-Oh's mainline sanctioned format, called Advanced, works in a way that is comparable to Vintage, where you can use virtually every card ever released. If Yu-Gi-Oh didn't do regular reprints it would slowly kill the game.
There are walls in certain gacha games that are more idle games, but most of the gacha games I play tend to be relatively easy. Genshin for instance doesnt have any real walls. You just got to get a build together, and not play like an idiot. And idiots not understanding game mechanics isnt necessarily a problem with the game. Where most of the challenge comes in the event challenges.
I may not have been able to say Amen at the end, but I did wave my hands around in a very exuberant fashion
Great video! Yeah, I love MTG and about all else Modern. But I'm not made out of money. I don't care for the secondary market and investment and I would love for WotC to just print the expensive cards into oblivion. Everyone needs them to play! Format staples shouldn't be 50+ bucks. Super special rare cards or bling, ok. But not fetchlands you need to even build a deck
This is a great video with wonderful insight. Now excuse me while I go play Genshin.
MtG Secret Lair pushes that FOMO.
Bit of a nitpick, but fetches have been around since 2002, so it kind of doesn't make sense to say that they're a power creep of a land cycle printed 20 years later. Fetches are a power creep of slow fetches from Mirage maybe, but those were unplayably bad anyway.
All of the lootbox comparison sounds right though.
Who knew a video about trading card games.
Culd serve as a great example, for business, gambling and a private property rights discussion?
The power of the fetch lands is why they were banned outright in pioneer
14:39 that synced falling doll in the background is perfect lol
Card games do have fomo for casuals and kids who dont have game stores. For the longest time Id have no way to get a box of legend of the blue eyes for the longest time. Most yugioh products id have to buy online and if I dont have the option to do that there very much is a timer on how long booster packs or structure decks are available.
"...I have since learned that trade curses everything it handles; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to the business."
-Henry David Thoreau
I gotta say Digimon boxes are pretty hype. I had an omnimon in my first pack(only TCG related video on my channel) and it kinda stole the thunder out of the rest of the box but overall was great lmao.
Modern Horizons 2 is printing the enemy fetches again, and they were in MM17 - both in regular draft boosters. At rare, no less!
modern horizons 2 and MM17 are not "regular" draft boosters though. they are a premium set, and priced as such. to qualify as a "regular" draft booster, your price needs to be that of an average Booster pack at release.
Khans of Tarkir, Which reprinted the Allied Fetch lands, were such a product. And as a result of that printing, the market Gained a greater supply of the Allied fetch lands, to the point where Despite the Enemy fetches being reprinted more recently in 2017, allied fetch lands are still less valuable on average, although they have gone up in price over time.
the type of product they are released in matters greatly.
I use to play a gotcha game. One of the pressure moves that it did was selling a card or variety pack for a percentage off for limited time. But I always thought it was funny to see because how can they sell something for a percentage off if you're never able to buy the so called item for the full price, ever.
So Kohdok what was the symbolism of having the plushie behind you fall over at 14:39? ;) Your videos are amazing, genuine, and a bright spot in my week, so thank you!
I always assumed buying boxes and boosters were ways to beef up someone's trade binder, I remembered how I used to see tons of players trade binders be full of the hottest and shiniest new cards and question how they got so many of them.
One way of inducing FOMO in TCG games: set rotation
Even then, you can still play the product casually, making it a smaller FOMO
Yes and no, while it forces only the newest set on tournaments (the same way Mario "died" march 31st), it prevents issues like older cards getting overpowered ovenigth, then banned, then nerfed (fuck you needlefiber). It's like a hammer, it can build a house or kill someone, depend on who's using it and why.
26:34 only case i heard about a guy ruining his life with trading card games is someone getting a credit card, purchasing the nekroz deck when it was a $1000 at its prime, and then closing the account afterwards.
Ok... I wouldn't necessarily say that Arid Mesa is power creep per-say. It's definitely a more powerful card than Xverge Pathway, but fetch lands have been around in various formats for quite a while. In fact, they date as far back as Mirage, with cards like Flood Plain, Bad River, Rocky Tar Pit, Mountain Valley and Grasslands. If anything, this is just the power fluctuation cycle you see in games with set rotation.
The bigger problem is the secret lair box, but honestly I'd just buy the Zendikar versions of the cards, the non-foils go for a quarter of what the foils go for.
Talking about Power Creep when the Mesas, the one stated to be more powerful, are older than the Pathways. A bit backwards there.
But the strength of them is why fetchlands are not printed as often any more.
Oh, people have _totally_ ruined themselves by buying card games. Just like any other hobby you'll get the outliers that, very literally, can't control themselves and will put themselves into debt to chase their obsession if allowed to do so. And society is not set up in a way to prevent that from happening. The companies selling these products sure don't care, too much in that it will lose them a customer, if someone buys _so much_ of their product they can't buy anything else. Like food. But they are the exceptions, not the rule.
Yes you can get an Amen
Also, fetchland is good if you got cards that says you can play extra lands and cards that can play lands from your graveyard. That Arid Mesa can get you 2 mountains and 1 plains with Azusa and Crucible of worlds. And can get you 6 landfall trigger
2:50 This isn't "Power Creep," WOTC printed Plataeu in Alpha, which is strictly better than basic plains/mountains (99.9+% of the time). The problem is WOTC realized Plataeu is too good and pulled back. Pathways are also strictly better than basic lands (99+% of the time), and see substantive play.
Why is Arid Mesa $60 and Pathways $5? The answer is simple - Fetchlands see more constructed play (in part because they can fetch dual lands, in part because of landfall, in part because of graveyard recusion/resource..), but more importantly there are less of them. "Enemy" fetchlands had one standard printing (legal in a standard legal set) ~ a decade ago, and have not been reprinted meaningfully since.
Contrast this with Ravnica "shock" lands, which are reprinted every time they go back to Ravnica; they've had 3 standard releases. Ravnica shocks see play in practically all the decks that run Fetchlands, but they go for ~$10-20 because they've been competently reprinted.
(Note: I understand you're tailoring this for a more general audience, and WOTC's fetchland incompetence is a special kind of stupid - don't even get me started on "Secret Lair Ultimate Edition...")
Knowing every gacha game you showed, including Super Monster League, and playing everything except TF2, scares me
In a way magic lands are the opposite of power creep, which is in a way worse if they don't reprint frequently enough. The originals duals are the best (and they refuse to reprint them) and with the exception of fetches and sort of shocks nothing has really come close.
shadow era uses block chain which makes the digital cards the account owners actual property even though it's stored on the server
11:40 This did not age well...
Lmao
Hey Kohdok, what are your thoughts on Legends of Runeterra?
Has any game married the rarity system with deck building limitations to alleviate box chaff? i.e. card copy limits at 1x Ultra Rare, 2x Rare, 3x Uncommon and 4x Common.
And Magic got very close to the FOMO Hot State bs with the Walking Dead Secret Lair. Thankfully the general reception was brutally negative and you cannot make bank scalping a product nobody actually wants, so even if that product did sell out their next foray into that territory will hopefully have those same scalpers remember they haven't made their money back on the last "now or never" dud from WotC.
Hmm. I know Flesh and Blood makes any cards above Majestic rare a max 1-of.
Exodus plays with rarity as a game component.
Back when magic made PC games that were only one standard environment on an annual release schedule, that was the deck building restriction.
The deck thinning offered by fetch lands has been mathematically proven to be inconsequential. It takes 3 of them to roughly equivocate to a 5% increase in drawing a non-land card, and that 1/20 chance for more gas is FAR outweighed by the odds that trading away over 1/7 of your life results in a loss.
Usually gacha games "license" you the stuff you get. I don't remember the long paragraph but that's basically what the gist of it was.
For example, I play genshin impact and in one of their ToS states it.
So you pay for the privilege to borrow their property.
@@Kohdok yup pretty much spot on
@@Kohdok I was writing the comment just moments before you went on it haha. But basically you're essentially right.
I don't really understand why some people say it isn't gambling when it just is.
Perhaps denial?
That's whole another can of worms to unpack.
Really appreciate how you break down these things.
Came back to this video just to comment that Wizards reprinted fetch lands on Modern Horizons II. You viewed the future :P
Imo, if you are likely to get the same value in cards as the price of the pack, I have no issue with buying sealed products. If you have to pull one of the 5ish alternate rarity money cards to have a chance of getting the same value in cards as the price of the pack, that is when I skip sealed and go for singles.
Amen, mr Kohdok.
3:10 - Again, the problem isn't that WOTC can't print good cards - Pathways are good and will see play in most formats. The problem is people want Fetchlands for formats they play - Commander, Modern - and WOTC doesn't want to put Fetchlands through standard.
They offer reasons for this - Fetchlands + Triomes, for example, would lead to a uniform metagame with 5 color decks running all over the place. Fetchlands + Ravnica Duals did this in Khans (well, and morph and blah blah wasn't playing, but the general consensus was bad idea). The problem? It's easy to schedule Ravnica and Fetchland sets 2 years apart, and they've preemptively banned (ally) fetchlands in "Pioneer," their "Modern Light" format.
However, recent bullshit - like the Secret Lair Ultimate Edition - suggests WOTC (a) knows people want/need them for Commander, their most popular format (which, oddly, most of the designers don't like in general, not the least of which because it's not rotating and singleton), and Modern, a format that was very popular until they messed up their competitive tournament coverage and stopped featuring it... and (b) thinks they can get more money if they put them in $30 collector Boosters, $15 Modern Horizon 2 boosters, or $250... I mean $500... Secret Lair boxes with 5 ... that's right only 5... cards.
Long story short? Either there is some conspiracy to leverage fetchlands in particular to sell expensive products, intentionally underprinting them, or the vast majority of WOTC has their head so far up their ass (figuratively or otherwise) that they don't understand how their players play the game. Given how poorly they've managed Standard for... coming on 3 years now... it might very well be the latter, or some combination of the 2.
"[Konami] tends to at least print them at a decent or respectable rarity... one rarity rung down, or put in in a starter deck or something."
oh, that's a kneeslpper
Reprints. Not the way they arbitrarily bump first print commons to Secret Rare. That's its own kettle of fish.
@@Kohdok No, I'm talking about reprints. Rarity bumping is also terrible, though.
Is there a chance you can do a video on rebooting/revitalizing games? (E.g. Overdress and Rush Duel)
Tbh Habition is present even outside of gacha games. Gacha games just show it fairly obviously.
Loot boxes aren't gambling in the same way that Pachinko parlors aren't gambling, except of course that online games don't give you little tokens that you take to the completely unrelated prize store next door to exchange for actual physical goods.
Amen! If you can't love the card games how can you love someone else?!
You are a treasure to the hobby!
It's funny how the power and combo potential of a card changes so greatly based on the context a card is in and the rules of the game. The concept of a card like Arid Mesa being a secret rare $60 card sounds absurd to a Pokemon TCG player because the concept of card speed, counters, or the stack doesn't really exist. Cards which let you search for basic pokemon or energy are a dime a dozen in Pokemon TCG, like open any random booster pack and you'll probably find something with a Call For Family move in the common slot.
It would be like if there was an energy card, where you put a damage counter on the Pokemon it's attached to and discard it to search your deck for another Energy card (Doesn't have to be basic) and attach it, and there were also lots of Pokemon that benefit from having damage counters or getting energy attached to them.
Watching this after the WotC Pinkerton's incident was funny
I'm really dissapointed of Kohdok not uploading this thumbnail as >[]
On the part about hot states I thought to myself, "It would be be kind of ridiculous if in yugioh I could just pay money when I lose a duel to get all my life points back to try and win the duel. Oh wait, you technically can. It's called bribing the judge."
Another difference between loot boxes and card packs is that loot boxes tend to have a 90%+ chance of something that is worthless to pretty much any buyer. The "rares" of loot boxes are basically the only value you will get from them. In most cases you are just buying for the one mythic rare equivalent. Of course the lack of reselling is also a major factor. MTG cards also won't cease to exist if hasbro decides to stop printing them. I would be a lot more favorable towards loot boxes if they were set up to ensure you get something of value with every roll even if you don't know what that value is. Like for example in Genshin you have a 90%is chance of complete worthless garbage. Every 10th roll you will get a four star which may be of some value to you but odds are that isn't what you are looking for especially if you are a regular player you probably already have them. There is a roughly 1% odds of a 5 star which is what you actually want and even then it is a 50% chance it is a random 5 star and not the one you are rolling for but at least it is still probably good.
The difference between gambling and investing is that investing is legal everywhere and you are encouraged to "count cards"
Shame singles market is inflated to hell in collectors cases. UPR lillie spiking to 400 from 80 overnight when others from the same set even *cough* Cynthia and of all things Lisia spiking. LISIA didn’t raise at all still hurts. Great video as always thanks Logan Paul for bringing investment into Pokémon in the mainstream
Also thankfully FGO as infamous as it’s rates are. Which genshins worse and others are equal. It’s not P2W and unless you’re grinding hard you’ll generally go through AP quickly not taking up the whole day. FGO is P2W but W is waifu instead of win
If you really want to support your LGS, buy singles, as their profit margin is higher. Boxes and packs are usually priced to break even, whereas singles provide the funds to pay for the rest of the store.