Back in my high school days I had way too much disposable income and absolutely no sense of responsibility; as a result I blew hundreds (thousands?!?) of dollars on Magic: The Gathering cards.... and became a pretty darned good player. It wasn't long before reality hit and I needed to pay for higher education, and so my M:TG collection was sold off for way less cash than it was worth. I never got back into the game; the price tag is far too prohibitive with inconvenient real life commitments like a student loan and a mortgage, not to mentiopn all of the other day to day bills.
So excuse me while I hold my breath in the desperate hope that Magic: The Gathering Tactics is not simply another way to milk cash out of addicted consumers, and is instead a wonderful blend of PC gaming and collectible card game play. Not that Wizards of the Coast are saying anything yet... the best information we have is contained in a teaser trailer over on Shack News. But a man can dream, can't he?!?
Insta-update:
Noooooooooooooo!!!! That sound is a little piece of my soul dying. From Wired.com:
Unlike the recent (and excellent) Xbox Live Arcade game Duels of the Planeswalkers, Tactics will incorporate the collectible mechanics that make the card game tick: Players will expand their teams by purchasing booster packs and starters, then use their new acquisitions to customize their spellbooks.
The pay-as-you-go model should be familiar to those who played Magic on table tops, or the online PC game. And the gameplay will likely feel something like Dungeons & Dragons: Miniatures Game, the tabletop war game also published by Wizards of the Coast.
Tactics will feature characters and spells from the universe of the popular collectible card game. Players will be able to take their customized team of creatures to battle through solo scenarios or take them online to compete against others.
Regular expansions, tournaments, achievements and rankings are also forthcoming.
Money-grubbing bastards. Is it too much to ask for a version of Magic: The Gathering that won't put a person into the poor house?
21 comments:
It's sad, really :(
I've got a pretty much identical story; thousands spent on M:TG cards in my teen years, but after stopping playing and all these years... I've thought a few times about giving it a go again, but there's a constant power creep. Even if you kept all your old cards, you couldn't really be competitive with new decks (barring, perhaps, a few very rare misprints and such).
It's evil, it really is. It's a fun, fun game, but milks an astounding amount of money out of you. Looking back, between M:TG and various Games Workshop tabletop games, I've probably spent enough to buy a new car outright, no kidding.
Alas, any game they release will have a similar model, simply because it's disgustingly profitable.
I sold all my GW miniatures during a particularly poor part of my life, but I've still got my old M:TG cards... I think I'm gonna need to dig em out and play some with the lady now :) It's funny, while my cards wouldn't be at all competitive anymore, they're probably worth a lot. I've got thousands, and all of them are from the very first couple sets.
I've contemplated, on and off for years, making a "Collectible" card game that plays in a similar manner; but with an open-source sort of licensing. Rather than "collecting" cards, then, you can print your own from the library. Game design in this case is much more interesting than normal M:TG design because cards need to be balanced if players have the full set to choose from.
Modern printers are easily capable of printing high quality images on card stock. Unfortunately, the images for the cards themselves (an important part of that style of game!) are a little fiddly to come by in terms of copyright issues. Would have to spend a lot of time chatting with folks on DeviantArt.
I dunno if people beyond my geeky game loving self would really appreciate it though - the collectible part, as expensive and sucky as it is at first glance - is really a major part of the appeal for M:TG.
Some people play with a rule that only common cards are allowed. Since common cards are dirt cheap comparatively speaking, looking for games of that sort would be a good way to play a competitive MtG game on a budget. IIRC, it's becoming a fairly popular tournament mode and the current computer versions of the game may support the setting.
If you don't want money to be an object, you may be very interested in the XBLA game "Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers."
I don't see why that hasn't been ported to PC yet. I guess they don't want to lose people playing the magic online game.
I don't know if you know about apprentice and Magic Workshop but they allow you to import the card databases and play with essentially any card online. They are used most heavily by people wanting to play test deck styles but you could use them to get some play out of the game for free. As someone else said many people are willing to play odd formats to reduce prices A large new trend is Cube Drafting. It does require a significant investment at first but once you make your cube its not expensive to maintain and allows you to experience set creation.
I thought you liked micropayment models? Magic is just a really effective one.
Hehe it is, indeed. That doesn't matter if you can't afford it though :). The same would apply you couldn't afford any other payment models either
I'm not surprised about the money aspect of M:TG Tactics. The whole TCG concept revolves around spending cash and buying booster packs of cards so it's no surprise they want a similar model online.
I loved TCGs/CCGs when I was a teen. I especially loved the original SW game by Decipher but WotC bought it over, dumbed it down and made it awful.
It's so strange how card games are practically dead now and yet were huge in the mid/late 90s.
@Derrick:
Sounds like you played during the same era that I did. I came in in time for revised edition, and stuck around until the end of Ice Age.
I also played a tonne of Warhammer 40k for a few years there (Dark Eldar, Tau), but got out when prices started to get silly. Looking back now those "silly" prices are astounding deals by today's prices!!!
I started to code an online CCG at one point, but stopped doing i because it's a tonne of work for one guy to do, and problems like artwork (as you mention) are difficult to get around.
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@Zed:
I've heard of the pauper rule set. I have to image that a decent collection of commons is still pretty expensive to put together though, isn't it? Or are commons dirt cheap to buy single of. (i.e. avoid buying booster/starter packs)
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@Xabbott:
The second they port that to the PC I'm all over it.
@Phillip:
No, I'd not heard about Apprentice. I'll track that down - thank you!
Regarding Cube Drafting: do you have a link that explains the concept in more detail?
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@Nelson:
I like well done and fair micropayment models.
M:TG fails on numerous levels:
1. There is no free to play unlimited trial.
2. Booster packs are completely random, and thus you are gambling when you spend money.
3. Once you have a certain amount of them, booster packs become worse and worse value for money. i.e. you can only use so many land & common cards, but they make up 90% of a booster.
4. The way the game is designed newer content obsoletes old stuff, thus rendering direct purchases useless in the long run. Especially at the competitive level.
M:TG's payment model is akin to an MMO RMT shop where every time you slap down $5 the game randomly spits out an item or two that you may or may not actually need or even be able to use.
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@Spitfires:
Are CCGs dead?
Whenever I go into a comic shop I see a huge number of different games out there, and the kids in my neighborhood are always playing CCGs on the streets in the summer.
I have no direct experience to rule one way or the other, but they don't seem to have vanished yet.
Maybe I should go hunting for CCG blogs :P I'll bet there is a community out there to rival the MMO blogosphere!
@Andrew Yeah, that sounds about right. I can't remember which edition was the last I played, but I'd started right about a month before Revised was released. I know I've got Ice Age cards, maybe another edition after that too but I'm not sure.
I was more a fantasy player than 40k - I had a truly massive, heavily customized Orc and Goblin army with over 20,000pts painted (I could dig up photos of my 10k pure-goblin tourney army) and a 10k pt Dark Elf army (which was vastly smaller given the points differences).
As to the commons, last time I was in a game shop (just a few months ago), they still sell MTG cards, commons from a huge box for $0.10/each, mixed in with equivilant cards from other CCG's.
I've often wondered about other CCG's, but the frustratingly expensive collecting part (you nailed it; that booster packs become worth less and less the more you buy as you collect ever more unusable amounts of common cards) stopped me from playing any other ones... I knew if I tried them, I'd get sucked in instantly. I'm a sucker for a fun game :)
Agree with a lot of you on pretty much everything. I started up around Ice age and played into Urzas. That was when they just started the 3 releases a year and I had to say screw this. It became almost impossible to keep up with. As for old decks being suckered by old ones- eh, not really true.
I played the online version while I was in Iraq and although i spent way too much money- many off the old decks were still viable. It is all about your ability to know what is new and how to avoid it. The problem is with heavy mechanics such as something with shadow allowing it only to be blocked by another shadow creature (old sets dont have such) but you can counter it with direct dmg and creature kill. There are a lot of combinations that can still be effective. As a matter of fact a lot of those old great cards are worth a bit to collectors wanting them for fun decks.
I miss magic, I really do- but there was a point where Wizards of the Coast became more about the money than they were about there fans. Yes you can say that for all companies, but they used to treat their fans like blizzard and now they do not. Like when they killed all RPGA for dungeons and dragons using the 3.5 rules in order to force sales of 4.0...
@Andrew: I like that someone noted that TCG are like micropayments. You still seem unable to understand that micropayments can spiral out of control, in MMOs just like in TCGs. "Fair" has no meaning in this context. As for your points:
1) there most definitely is a way to play for free: print out the cards yourself (they are called "proxies"). This is not accepted at tournaments, but it's fine with friends to have fun and test new decks.
2-3) this is where trading comes into play: as soon as your collection starts expanding, trading cards you don't need/have in double for cards you miss is the right way to go. This makes boosters a lot less random, since when you don't get exactly the card you want, you can still get stuff to trade for it. It also ends up working as in microtransaction MMOs: you have tons of time and little cash: you can work on trades and get good deals; you have little time and more money: less trading and more buying.
4) this is true and by design, but it's not really different from MMO content becoming obsolete. I remember you were arguing for payments to access new content. This is just the same.
@IShark:
"I like that someone noted that TCG are like micropayments. You still seem unable to understand that micropayments can spiral out of control, in MMOs just like in TCGs."
I have never said that I support micropayments carte blache - I supports free to play games that offer a choice in payment schemes which include some form of RMT.
That "choice" word is hugely important to my position, and is the main reason that I point to Wizard101 and DDO as to shining examples as RMT done right. (They both offer RMT and subscriptions concurrently.)
""Fair" has no meaning in this context."
You could not be more wrong. "Fair" has absolutely everything to do with whether or not I support an RMT scheme. Only recently have games started to come out with fair RMT schemes that are not solely designed to pillage your wallet. Asian games started the micropayment ballgame and they are examples of completely brutal (almost MtG-like) payment models that do everything in their power to suck players dry. I have never supported this flavour of RMT.
Let me turn this around: Assuming that you support subscription-based games, does that also immediately mean that you support a game that costs $30/month to play, plus has $50 expansions three times a year that are required to continue playing? Why or why not?
"there most definitely is a way to play for free: print out the cards yourself (they are called "proxies"). "
While I agree that you could do this, it's not something I'd be interested in doing. For starters you lose out on the collectible portion of the CCG (which is important and enforces things like the scarcity of rares), and secondly it would just feel cheap (and not in the good way). I submit that both of these are personal problems with me.
@Lewis:
Off topic, but if you get a chance could you shoot me an email (address on the blog's sidebar). I have a request I was hoping that you'd hear out.
@Andrew: your definition of "Fair" is exactly that: your personal definition. The fact that tons of players actually play TCG games means that they find it "fair" (depending on how much you play the cost/hour of TGC games can be very very low, actually negative if you spend enough time doing trades).
And by the way, ALL schemes are designed to empty your wallet, which ones are worth it is completely dependent on how you value it.
In the example you mention: $30/month, +$150/year can be a great deal or a complete theft depending on the point of view of the buyer (= how much they feel they get from the game). It's definitely less than what I spend on restaurants, for example, and I find those perfectly "fair" (even with the very high $/hour ratio). If this is a "hidden" way to ask if I would pay that amount for WoW, the answer is: right now yes, because I get enough fun out of it. Next month? I don't know, ask again.... :)
Thanks for the thoughtful response to my micropayments jab. I forgot how emotional people get about that issue, didn't mean to stir up the ants.
Andrew, to your points 2 and 3, I think the gambling / worthless card aspects of booster packs are already solvable in the Magic framework. Either buy individual cards on the secondary market, or buy booster packs and trade / sell the stuff you don't want. It's not a perfect solution, particularly since the secondary market is outside WotC's official game, but doesn't it more or less work? Do actual Magic players do this?
I think the real complaint you're making isn't that it costs money, but rather that it costs too much money. And I'd agree 100% with that. What the WotC folks figured out was that if you let people gamble to collect rare items that make you more powerful, some people will spend all their spare lunch money on it. It's not that unlike how people bust their asses in Warcraft completing holiday events to get the 1% special mount drop. Except the Magic model takes money from people and the thing you buy makes it easier for you to beat other people.
Are the economics significantly different for a CCG aimed at younger kids, say Pokemon?
@Nelson
That's it exactly. It just costs too much! I realize it doesn't have to, but it ends up costing that regardless. The frustrating part is that the cost doesn't have garaunteed returns - you don't know what you'll get in your booster pack. All the common cards after your first few packs are worthless (everyone has all the commons they need) so you're just spending more on a single random rare that may or may not be useful.
Further, due to that design, it really is pay-to-win. Yes, strategy matters, but unless there's a huge skill gap, Bob who spent thousands collecting the most powerful cards will dominate Joe, with his deck of dated commons.
This is a serious concern in microtransaction MMO's, but unlike CCG's the goal is to make those payments convenience items, not things required for a competitive edge in a pvp setting.
Oh, and... There's no ants nest, personally I'm intrigued by the similarities between ccg's and MMO payment schemes, and I'm interested in where that could go.
@IShark:
"your definition of "Fair" is exactly that: your personal definition."
Yes - I agree with that. We all have personal ideas on what makes a "fair" pricing scheme for a product. The word "Fair" is actually pretty crappy - what I'm getting at is "value for money".
More generally though, market acceptance can be used to gauge the overall sense of whether or not a product is priced according to its value. I would assert that M:TG could have MORE players and make MORE revenue if they changed up their payment model substantially. If this comment thread is any indication there is a healthy segment of gamers who would love to play the game but will not pay what they're asking.
"And by the way, ALL schemes are designed to empty your wallet..."
No - I don't think that's true, and in fact it feels like a cynical position to take. All payment schemes are designed to make a profit; the truly good ones do so without making too many people feel like they have to "spend too much" in order to have a good time.
". If this is a "hidden" way to ask if I would pay that amount for WoW, the answer is: right now yes, because I get enough fun out of it. Next month? I don't know, ask again.... :) "
I actually didn't know what game you were a fan of. =) It was a way of asking how you value your games, however, and you answered it just fine. Personally I'd never pay the amount I proposed for ANY game no matter how much I loved it. But as you point out, we all have different circumstances and thoughts on value.
@Nelson:
Buying individual cards on the secondary market is still a viable way to go.... at least for commons/uncommons. It can still be awfully expensive for rares.... unless the market has massively devalued since I last looked at the prices. When a single rare is $10-20 and you want four of them for a deck concept the price spirals out of control in a hurry.
"I think the real complaint you're making isn't that it costs money, but rather that it costs too much money."
Yes. In my opinion M:TG is an example of a poorly crafted micropayment system.
"Are the economics significantly different for a CCG aimed at younger kids, say Pokemon? "
My wife and I bought some Yugioh cards a few years ago and the prices were comparable to M:TG. Likewise, I picked up some Free Realms CCG cards and they cost "market standard". I'd say kids get as screwed as players of the "adult" CCGs.
Thanks for clarifying things. I'd say that $10-$20 price for rare cards is the true market price, the $6 or whatever for a booster deck is more of a synthetic price for gamblers. It's interesting that WotC only controls the booster deck price and the game rules; the market price for rare cards emerges from the game community.
I'm sad to hear even Yu-Gi-Oh is expensive; I'd hoped that a game aimed at 10 year olds would be priced for 10 year olds. All luxury goods have multiple price tiers. There's $100/person restaurants that only a few people go to on special occasions, $30/person restaurants people go to for a nice date, and $10/person restaurants for a quick meal. What's odd about TGCs is (from what you say) they're all expensive games, extracting a lot of money from just a few people. Is there no inexpensive TCG for the common man?
MMOs are more on the cheap end: the market has stabilized on $15/month which is a pretty good value as far as games go. Micropayment-based MMOs allow the possibility of a single game being playable at multiple price-points. I wonder how much public data there is on the distribution of what people pay to play? I seem to remember seeing something about Maple Story, about a few people blowing $100/month and a lot of people spending nothing.
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