I'm both a player and a collector of Magic the Gathering and I love this game. My goal is to share some of my passion with you all. Whether it is to provide knowledge, advice, opinions or just to have a few laughs, you can find it here.
I like when the EV is organic. When a company short prints or has gimmicks like serialized cards it forces a shift in the secondary market that has to actual value or benefit. Organic value is what matters.
Hey there! Creator of Nostalgix here. Some great points on the industry overall here but a LOT of gaps in knowledge about our game. Would love to hop on a call or video together and Q&A through these thoughts. Our game is capturing the hearts of Pokemon, YGO and Hearthstone players worldwide and keeping them engaged with deeper mechanics than any of these individually. We’ve got lore across heroes and a whole continent of races and intersecting stories. We’ve got 3 diverse sets and over 500 unique cards between them creating some of the wildest TCG interactions we’ve ever seen. Fundamentally our game is a game for fans of TCGs past. Cosmic Collision printed a day zero set, which was preorder, and now people want more so we’re back to offer another print run. Also Kickstarter does not charge unless funding is 100% backed. That’s just how it works. (Oh and we’re the first TCG to be approached and accepted into the SHEIN marketplace which was cool to see.) Let me know if you’d like to chat :) I’ve got some general thoughts on the industry and our game too to share. Whatever you’re playing, play on!
One day, we'll all look back on nostalgix fondly. You can absolutely do "who is this game for?" thematics well. That's exactly what Yugioh does, and it's brilliant - I don't have to like Purrely because I can play Witchcraft, while my friend who doesn't particularly like anime but does like mascot animals gets to enjoy Yugioh through Purrely, while the yugiboomer enjoys the blue-eyes deck that reminds him of his childhood, the lore guy can obsess about the religious themes in Dogmatika, and 11-year-old Timmy can show off how cool his level 10 trains look. Those are all people in my local scene. Completely different tastes, sharing the same game. Weiss Schwarz does the same thing within a smaller niche. I don't like One-Piece, so I'll never play the One-Piece card game, but in Weiss Schwarz, I have the ability to play with the guy who does like One-Piece using my unrelated Angel Beats deck. Nostalgix fails to do this because it goes too wide too fast, it's not committing to any theme for long enough to build a deck around that theme, and it's often not even committing to the same concept or art style within a single evolutionary line, which means to play the game, you don't just have to find one theme you like, you have to find somewhere between five and ten. I just looked through all evolutionary lines and found four I like - and I wouldn't want to put them in the same deck. What Nostalgix should have done was start with a smaller number of multiple-character archetypes, so that if I like the look of their "gardevoir but valhalla" card, I can make a valhalla deck full of creatures in the same art style and with similar concepts, and thereby become engaged with Nostalgix through identifying with that piece of the game, and potentially joining a "valhalla mains" subreddit, or being "the valhalla guy" at my locals. The other thing I think new card games really need to be doing is lowering the minimum deck size. The standard should be 30, maybe even 25 for some games. The higher the deck size, the more cards that a player needs to like before they have enough to build a deck. With a 30 card minimum, my hypothetical valhalla deck would only have 18 slots to fill after putting in 4 copies of the 3 evolutionary stages of the existing valhalla card, which might be satisfied by having as little as two 2-stage valhalla lines; the rest can be filled in with low-thematic-burden staple cards if necessary. With a 50 card minimum and 7 monster slots on the board to fill, I need to find 38 more cards after maxing out the cards I want to use. A lower minimum also means higher consistency, meaning you don't need to print as many of the search and draw cards that will one day break your game, and a higher proportion of matches that new players play will be ones where they got to do the thing they made their deck to do, and therefore a more satisfying new player experience.
I think new cardgames cant support itself mainly do to the fact consumers demand many sets, look at Sorcery for example they try to do stuff slow and people constantly complain about new sets, new games just cant throw out many release cycles a year and be wel designed and supported. All these parameters do not align due to the amount of money that is involved. A couple of million is nothing if you want to achieve this with a TCG that is way to little budget to pay for all of this.
Hi Ricardo. Haven’t seen you around in a while. Hope you are doing well. Are you saying you think Sorcery is doing well? Do you not think it is thriving right now, despite some people complaining?
@@CollectorArthouse Thanks, been kinda low key. Yeah I think Sorcery does it the only way possible cant rapidly expand a game with sets and new cards you will break everything and be in a split between money and playability. Many people lose interest because it takes time and most people nowadays are goldfishes that want instant gratification on a daily basis. So better to use the break and lose some players and money for the long term value of the game but you need an owner / shareholders that are prepared to take less money now for more money later.
9:41 This is just not true. KS doesn't charge you (the backer) unless the fundraising goal is met. Regardless, great points on how Nostalgix is floundering. Sad, how it does not try anything new or innovate on an existing TCG's idea. Instead, it's an assortment of pieces to different puzzles in cardboard form.
So how would this equate with say GA FTC? Going forward into the future, the cases will have at least 1 CSR and the boxes will be considered most likely definitely dead
FTC is interesting. My theory is that it is still undervalued. Like Merlin is still a top tier deck 3 sets later. That does say something about the cards from the set. Fracturize is still a strong card along with the Quicksilver Grail.
I can tell you are very passionate about Grand Archive. My wife told me about The Three Kingdoms a long time ago. I like some of the artwork. I am a bit rusty but I took one semester of Mandarin back in 1986. Jiao an, ni hao ma? Wo da tai tai shi Zhongguo ren. My wife is from Taiwan and I really like the Chinese culture. I have been there 3 times but I never made it to China. My youngest son taught English for 2 years in Taipei. Thank you for the video Mark.
@@SolarGamesllc I used to be able to write using the traditional Chinese Chinese characters but it has been 38 years since I have written them. I do not like the shortened Ping Ling characters. I play lead guitar, keyboards, bass, and mandolin in a band. My keyboards have over 200 Asian instruments programmed into it. I have composed 4 traditional Chinese instrumentals using the Guzheng. My youngest son is a really good guitar player. He picked up the Erhu for the first time and played it with feeling. He can do that for a lot of instruments. Looking forward to your next video.
Needed to comment because I really love this. I’ve always been interested in Three Kingdoms but didn’t know where to start. Looking forward to the next episode!
Rarest dice were the 10 sided spindowns made in the early 1990s. Company got threatened by WotC so they had to stop production. So yeah, the first spindowns were actually 10 sided die pairs.
I think Hasbro is eating away the MTG brand to quickly cash out on it before it eventually flops altogether and stops getting enough attention and therefore income
When a card they need became expensive overnight while they are trying to be competitive despite having low budget, Is it fine to say to them they have: "skill issue in managing their life issues"?
Great vid also great advice. From monetary stand point, if you're a player you should always buy singles, unless you are like building a completely new deck and need 40-50 cards or something, since most sealed product has gambler's premium.
I've been playing magic online for years. I recently decided I wanted to start my actual physical collection. When I saw all the different boxes draft jumpstart set play I was like the fuck is all this bullshit. so you nailed it. yugioh just sells you the fucking set and that's it.
Inverted EV is when the box value when opened is often higher than the price of the box sealed. Tends to happen with newer product, especially ones that don't get mass opened as much and had poor sealed product sales and then start to go on sale from shops and distributors that have too much product.
Good explanation, Marc! Sad thing with current Magic is just there are so few cards of value and most of it is just bulk that any inverted EV seems more and more unlikely to happen again. Boxes are just too expensive and singles too cheap to get there again - with the few exceptions that are.
Which is honestly really cool for casual players. Magic is expensive enough. The downside is of course, that if you're just pack gambling or hoping to open big money during a draft its boom or bust and mostly it's a bust. But the upside is that so many banger rares and even mythics are like a dollar/euro/whatever or less on any third party market (e.g. cardmarket in europe) and if you're not clamouring to mindleslly mash any "auto-includes" in every deck, you can build more or less anything for well under a 100 bucks.
This part is super sad for stores. Due to this problem, most stores must sell their cards quick or else they take a huge hit. Other games are a lot more friendly to the stores.
I'd argue that MTG can solve this problem by making their product cheaper. There is no improvement with their printing, quality or packaging, yet they have given the consumers 4 price increases Since 2020.... Booster boxes went from around $90 -> $130 now... What the Actual fuck? This is not a problem with stores, this is completely on WOTC.
The problem with the new Play Booster boxes are that they are too expensive. Wizards has reprinted so many good cards so often now that the prices have spiraled down dramatically on the secondary market. So Wizards wants it both ways where you pay more and get less value out of a box. The EV is getting lower because of the reprints and higher prices. If you bought sealed boxes, you would need to sit on them for a very long time. I am buying a lot more singles now. There have been too many increases this year for Magic products and expect more in 2025. These constant increases are getting out of hand. Wizards will continue to raise prices as long as the whales and players keep buying sealed boxes. Amazon's Magic products are always overpriced. I only buy sealed boxes when there is a really good sale from my LGS or an Amazon Dump. Thank you for the video Marc.
So your sensitive about every single thing rudy says and then you say “im not gaining anything from this video”, thats bullshit, your using his name and brand in your title to get clicks…? You have everything in the world to talk about whatever you want and get clicks but you’re using his brand.😂
Chisler on Chisler crime. Buying MTG from Amazon to save a buck has impacted the game and stores since Amazon sold their first box of MTG. Opportunists scamming opportunists. Gross.
Amazon products are like 15% more than anywhere else anyways, overall, so they're not losing money and this is something that has been happening for a decade now with them. Clearly not a single person from Amazon cares about any of this.
Well if you want to know the truth all sealed magic is a scam and is legal gambling so if ask me waste of money. Just proxy the cards you want and play some games at home do not support the scumbag stores and wizards of the cost
Glad to have many LGS’s around me. Never bought MTG from Amazon because I’ve seen horror stories on RU-vid. I buy a lot of items from Amazon that take 1-2 days.
