First and foremost, I am so sorry to anyone who lost value after the Commander bans today, especially those who saved up for a banned card and those who just purchased one. It sucks to lose money that way.
I wanted to create a thread for discussion because I have seen lots of discourse about the monetary impact, how bad this is for Wizards, and how this decision will (and should) be reversed because of the monetary losses.
Being totally honest, Magic is a card game. It was not made to be a financial funding tool, and while many people (myself included) buy/sell cards to financial the hobby and to make money, I think it would be really upsetting if Wizards decided to make investing in cards their focus. Also, they are not losing “millions of dollars” off of this decision, as I’ve seen over and over today.
All of the cards that were banned had a negative impact on Commander. I’ve been in many matches where an explosive start left 3 of us unable to deal with the person who has their commander out and access to 5+ mana on turn two. Or games where someone creates 20+ treasure tokens with Dockside extortionist. Obviously that’s anecdotal, but these cards are unhealthy in a fundamental way, and even if I disagree with the logic re: Sol Ring, or the fact that Jeweled Lotus was designed exclusively for Commander, I’m happy that the RC has taken a stand and are attempting to positively influence the meta game.
IMO, the worst thing that could happen right now would be for WotC to rescind their decision and cite the financial impact. That would signal that they explicitly condone powerful cards costing $40+, $100+, even $200+ dollars. There are already enough problems with Magic’s prohibitive costs.
I’d love to hear other thoughts on this decision, but I am really happy they banned some borderline (or outright) broken cards, and I hope they continue to make decisions based around game health above all else. Feel free to go invest in equities or a high-yield savings account if you want to make money, but I want Magic to be a game that’s accessible for all and focused on healthy and fun expressions of skill.
After how many times we’ve seen expensive non RL cards just utterly collapse in value, it’s shocking that people expect their expensive non RL cards to always maintain a high value.
I don’t disagree. I owned Jeweled Lotus and Dockside, and frankly, regardless of whether it was a good idea to ban them, it’s a good idea to keep them banned. Unbanning them now would signal to the community that the market dictates the game, not the rules committee. Nothing would shred faith in the game’s future faster
As harsh as the sudden banning is, if they’re signaling that they’re willing to stick to their guns to preserve the format, I can accept a small loss or two
It wasnt WotC’s decision. It was the commander rule committee’s.
Commander started as a fan format, which built its own body to manage the format and wotc have decided to be nice and let them continue to run it even though they officially recognize the format and make product for it now.
The RC would have to fuck up pretty bad for people to respond positively to wotc deciding not to be nice and stepping in.
Don’t apologize, grieve, mourn, or otherwise feel bad for people who treat the game as an investment vehicle. Fuck them, they’re part of the problem and actively make things more expensive and harder for the casual player.
Putting money into magic cards is like taking money to a casino. It’s not a gamble or an investment, it’s money spent for enjoyment, and you shouldn’t have expectations of keeping or increasing your money.
I understand that the cards were overpowered to a degree, but the bans should have happened much much earlier for crypt, jeweled lotus, and dockside.
They’ve been around forever, and have always been insanely strong. They’ve had multiple chances to ban them and choose not to, why are they suddenly a problem now?
Not to mention their reasoning for banning these for fast mana yet keeping Sol ring in the format makes zero sense.
Yurrp. The only POTENTIAL excpetion is the RL. Even then if those cards got banned in commander their value could tank a bit, and if the card game goes under they’d be worthless anyway.
TCG, sports cards, video games…..all are speculative where the only ones making the money ones who have the influence to make a market explode because they make it so.
Look at video games. First it was rare games to collect, next it was certain games with a label difference, then it was a complete in box, then sealed, then sealed and graded.
It never ends.
If everyone knew the cards were going to be banned today they would have jettisoned them beforehand in preparation.
First time?
You can say that, but when WOTC makes a card specifically for commander that is very powerful and impactful and an auto include in basically every deck and then it gets banned i think it’s fair people get upset. I think it’s a little ridiculous that the end all be all rules committee are big proponents of extremely casual commander that make decisions arbitrarily and with almost no explanation. Mana crypt has been legal for over a decade but now it’s an issue? None of it makes sense.
Yeah, and it’s crazy to spend $1000 just to play some commander. Hence why everyone should be all for using proxies outside of wotc tournaments.
Because the cards aren’t an investment, so spending $1000 on a deck is just silly (and buying singles doesn’t even support WoTC)
The money is neither here nor there, I’m upset because I think this will kill format diversity in cEDH. So many interesting commanders were only viable because of crypt and lotus. I can understand the dockside ban, and Nadu was of course justified, but I just think I’ll have less fun playing the game after these bans.
I mean… It was designed as a *collectible* card game. And magic came right after the huge boon years of Baseball cards in the mid to late 80s. Let’s not pretend that value and collection werent in the mix of ideas.
I agree that a card game is not a sound financial investment. I do think, however, that it isn’t great that so many bans happen due to power creep. WoTC prints more chase cards every set that becomes staples not only in commander, but other formats, and those staples are necessary to compete, and then they get banned. There are going to be fewer and fewer people wanting to play the game.
Either print less product or give us more meaningful reprints, so a card is never +$100.
The beautiful thing about commander is if one person goes off, there are 3 people that can work together to slow down/stop them. People prob dont run enough counters/removal though……
I dont have any of the banned cards, so I have no skin in the game, but we need to stop assuming that all the people who are upset about this banwave bought these cards as investments, rather than to play with in a deck they are building.
If I had saved up and spent over a hundred dollars on a card for one of my decks only for it to be banned, I would be furious, and not because the card lost its resale value, but because I had spent all this money to play this card, and am now being denied the pleasure of doing so.
Then reprint black lotus and the power nine
I 100% agree that as far as individual players go, too bad, it happens. However, definitely thousands if not millions of dollars just evaporated for the secondary market dealers like LGSs collectively
There are people that do make money with this game though as a financial investment, but yes overall it’s not for sure.
This is a game first and foremost and even Richard Garfield, thinks that these days too many people care about that financial side and WotC themselves play into that. What’s hilarious is the game itself has actually made them more stable financially, the cards have value because of their play typically especially when talking about normal versions. Meanwhile you see boom and bust stuff with other collectibles like say Beanie Babies or other flash in the pan stuff.
I’ve used mana crypt in my decks since I got it from the book. So I guess I got it for a stamp and a 4.99 book. It’s been in most of my commander decks, it’s rarely won me the game, it usually accelerates me a bit and then it becomes arch enemy and everything I do gets removed. I played commander with rofellos and fastbond still legal in the format and sometimes for fun, I still do.
I’ll keep playing it at home because it’s commander and I can do what I want in it. The rules committee is just a suggestion and most shops choose to follow it. It sucks that a card that could create an epic experience for someone to talk about that one time I played this this and this on turn one and then got arch enemied and lost gets banned because…. I don’t really know.
Mana crypt has been in the format the whole time. I’ve lost plenty of games with an early mana crypt, an early sol ring and many other fast mana cards. I’ve lost to all sorts of other ealry game shananigans and it was awesome.
I’ve had my mana crypt kill me before, it was hilarious.
Commander is not competitive, it should be to create stories and fun.
Jeweled lotus? Are we banning pyretic ritual? Are we banning mox diamond? Chrome mox? Mana vault? I just don’t understand the line now.
If they banned sol ring I might feel like this wasn’t as emotional of a decision of the rc, but my question is, why now? It’s been over a decade of being fine.
Here’s a quote from the rc philosophy in 2011 off mtgsalvation forums “We’d like the Banned List to be as small as possible to make it easily understandable for the players, meaning we’re not going to ban every card that someone finds unpleasant to play against. It is not a problem that some cards are strong.”
Also, free Leovold! He was so much fun for like 3 days…. 🙁
I think that if they had banned sol ring and black lotus as well I wouldn’t have minded much. I have copies of all the banned cards and don’t play them because they lead to non fun games. Sol ring is on the same boat where usually a turn 1 sol ring means a win unless that player gets horribly mana screwed or did something dumb like keeping a one lander with the sol ring. Besides Nadu the rest of the ban just felt wrong. Especially when they had to justify how their reason for banning those didn’t apply to sol ring.
On the contrary, sol ring would be the easiest to remove.
Someone should start selling proxy booster packs for pennies so we can have the fun of cracking packs without monetary investment
I’m honestly just a little upset I didn’t get more enjoyment out of my Dockside. And that I didn’t sell my mana crypt.
But I also wouldn’t have sold my mana crypt yet anyway. And I probably wouldn’t have drawn my Dockside at an opportune time either
It is what it is. It’s nice to be able to make back some of the money I spent, but I get more enjoyment out of playing
Magic is only a financial investment for Wizards/Hasbro. They’ll happily leverage the secondhand market to sell you collector’s packs and limited print cards at exorbitant prices.
I’m more just confused about wizards philosophy about collectibility and that aspect of the card game
Normal people do not invest, but as with any hobbies i could calculate an estimate of how much i put into it and how much to get back from it when im done. If I wanted to go golfing and buy some decent clubs but they are a bit expensive, if I know i can get something back from it if needed, that’s ok. If some random force decided golf clubs no longer is worth anything, and some dude on reddit told me golf clubs should be free, that would be a bigger problem. And it sure as hell wouldn’t benefit the people who love the sports but had to work hard to get the equipment.
Magic cards will as long as it’s popular be worth money. And if I as a new player was told i could collect some cool cards with value, but the next day it could have non. I would stay away.
I believe the primary frustration is on the principle of “I have these cards, I should be able to play them.”
I feel this to a slight extent. I’ve got like four copies of the freaking bird and I can play exactly none of them.
Now – that’s a card that I unintentionally got while getting MH3 stuff, and all things considered it’s pretty cheap. Imagine if it was one of those other cards. A card I’d have to intentionally seek out. Explicitly designed “chase” cards with specialized variants, all things considered, in *very* recent sets – Commander Masters was a year ago. LCI came a few months after. I’m not going to claim malicious intent or anything, but it’d really suck if I bought/pulled explicitly for one of these cards
it’s not really about it being an investment, but these cards WERE worth money and people spent that money on them
and now they are worth nothing. I think that’s a little fucked up, lmao
I do agree on your statement that magic SHOULDN’T be a money investment. But the reserve list is your enemy on that statement. If they didn’t want to consider it a financial investment then why does the reserve list exist? Why is black lotus a $3000+ card even in “official” proxy form? They should do away with the reserve list. Also, I’m not mad about the ban. Honestly Mana crypt, dockside, and Nadu had it coming. The new ulamog also should’ve been on that list but that’s probably just me. But jeweled lotus? A commander only card? That was unrealistic. If they didn’t want it to be an issue then they would have printed it in every single Commander precon like sol ring, that way either everyone had it or at least everyone knowsnthat people have it, but they didn’t. They just up and banned it.
It’s not about it being a financial investment it’s about how inaccessible it is even as a card game given how much it costs to build a deck only for it to become irrelevant.
I mean, I have no dog in this fight since I don’t own any of the cards banned today, but I do understand how people who owned Crypt, Dockside and Jeweled Lotus are feeling like the rug was yanked out from under them. For YEARS the commander rules committee’s banning philosophy has always been to discuss it with your playgroup and, if collectively they find its too strong, house ban it.
For them to come out and ban not one, but *three* very expensive fast mana cards (one of which has been around for damn near the whole games life and would’ve been a pillar of the format a la sol ring if wotc would’ve just reprinted it more) at once with no peep from them that they were even looking at these cards in the first place… I get it. I understand why people who bought those cards are mad. That is a massive shift in banning philosophy, and frankly there needs to be some kind of companion article released in the next week either explaining this new philosophy or assuring people that they’ll be returning to the previous “minimal bans” and promising to be more transparent when bans are being discussed in the future.
No more fears of “Yeah my deck is power level 4 or 5” into turn one crypt lotus commander.
I agree it’s wrong to think of it as an investment, but that doesn’t mean the value of the cards is meaningless. WotC literally financially benefitted from printing overpowered cards to get us to buy products that were more expensive and now that they’ve made their money, now they say they’re overpowered? The value of the sets that these cards are in has dropped significantly, but Wizards took full advantage of selling them before that value drop and left the players as the ones taking the financial loss while they count stacks.
Me shrugging as my 20 cent docksides get banned. Proxy is the way.
It was made to generate money by selling cardboard to gambling addicts.