The Reserve List is a Lie (RESPONSE VIDEO 1)

I have been playing Magic since 25 years ago and what I see is: there are rarely new players because of cards price (mainly on almost extinct legacy or modern tournaments) . This reserved list is not just a lie, is a CAPS BULLSHIT. It is a miracle a company like WOC, with this poor administration, is still alive. Reprint, and print and reprint... People like good cards, people want to experience old formats, let they be happy (and spend money as you want WOC)... Reserved list is good for a minor group of collectors, not for the rest 99% of players...

The point prof was making is that an old version can be very expensive and another copy can be cheap. Black lotus would drop some if reprinted but an alpha version will still be very expensive because of the rareity

In 2022 Pokemon collectors are loving the 25th anniversary celebrations set and the Charizard reprints, while the original is still worth 1000's. In Yu-Gi-Oh, you can buy a Blue Eyes White Dragon reprint and enjoy the art and the card for a few dollars, while the original is still worth 1000's. Why are MTG people so paranoid about reprints of original artwork? I mean, you can proxy an alpha card and it's worth nothing... I would love to buy proxies from Wizards since my printer sux ass. If I could buy high-quality prints of the expensive cards It would motivate me even more to try to obtain an original one day.

The argument that legacy/vintage work "when wotc supports them", doesn't really make sense to me, because by your own admission, the issue that makes wotc not want to support them is the fact that they don't sell packs of new product, but the reserve list is precisely what makes it so that supporting legacy/vintage doesn't help them sell packs. If they could put legacy/vintage staples in premium packs/products, how does this not kill 2 birds with 1 stone of revitalizing old formats, making the game more accessible, and moving expensive premium cardboard at the same time?

my 2 cents, under the law Wizards owns the rights to reprint their property. They never sold those cards at 1000's dollars, and they are not considered securities. I don't see why anyone would sue, and under what legal classification. It's like suing Nike for selling a new release of their Air Jordan 1 cuz you are a "collector/investor" and your original sneakers took a price hit. I mean, tough shit if you're mad cuz you invested/speculated on an item you don't own the rights to print, nor do you have any legal contract that prohibits Wizards to do so. Get real, we are all speculating on cardboard and ink.

Duel lands are a special case and should never have been on the reverse list as they are game pieces and only pose as collector items because of scarcity so using them as the example for why the proff is wrong is unfair.

……I don’t give a fuck whether or not they “promised” whether or not they would reprint old and expensive cards, such as those on the reserved list. The Playerbase needs easier accessibility to cards they want without having to shell hundreds to sometimes thousands of dollars. If cards are become more accessible and easier to obtain, players are going to feel more comfortable investing in this game. Yu-Gi-Oh despite being a drastically different game, knows Reprints are a good idea, because they help the Casual Playerbase a ton and they help the Compettive Playerbase a ton. I agree the Reserve List is not holding back the game. The biggest thing holding back the Game is the Secondary Market and WOTC not reprinting cards people need reprinted that haven’t been reprinted.

Thoughts on implementing complete proxy use by official Legacy and Vintage events? If the goal of the event is to determine player skill, then an uncompetitive factor such as player wealth should have no bearing on competitive gameplay. I'm not sure I can name any other competitive game in which the players are required to purchase distinct game pieces. It's always confused me.

Vintage, Old School, and Legacy "thriving" is a misnomer by modern standards. It is not the same as playing T1 or T1.5 in 1996. The prices are outside of playability for the average human. Basically, unless you have a lot of money or kept your collection from 1993, then you probably aren't ever going to have a chance for top8 at Vintage Worlds. Current value of a Beta Black Lotus is roughly $50k USD on eBay right now. As for reprint prices, Grim Tutor and Mana Drain are prime examples of price effects from the reprinting of useful old cards.

Original yugioh printings are still worth a ton, despite being reprinted a ton. The reserve list does nothing but handicap vintage and Legacy.

I don't think it would have any effect. That's like saying first edition cards still won't hold more value than any reprint.

Gonna chime in with the Revised dual lands argument. That claim is assuming that those dual lands will drop to $0, which will not happen. No card from Revised currently costs $0 nor ever will. So just as your assumption for WotC making a 25% increase in revenue over reprinted dual lands was admittedly a hyperbole, so was investors losing a collective total of over $1B just on Revised dual lands. Also, all Revised dual lands aren't accounted for. Many collectors invest in sealed boxes so there isn't a tally either of where all of them are; it's just speculation at that point over how much would be lost. Not arguing that money wouldn't be lost, just pointing out that it's not going to be over $1B and much less proven to be so, since condition is also a factor in a card's value. Something else I want to point out over WotC's decisions decreasing the value of cards is with their recent campaign of eliminating racism from the game. Invoke Prejudice is a card on the Reserved List and was around $400 the highest before the ultra ban. The card can no longer be sold on tcgplayer (the example you used as a market to gauge the behavior of card prices) nor bought by any other store due to the stigma. So the card is essentially "worthless" unless you find someone to sell to on eBay. So a card that can only be sold between person to person isn't really a good way to gauge how prices can fluctuate in a market. WotC's decision has essentially made this card incredibly difficult to sell (when compared to others on the Reserved List). So whoever decided to invest in this card some time ago - even if they bought into $5-10k worth of Invoke Prejudice, will have a way more difficult time selling their "share of the market" of this card than others. Whether they can remake their investment or not remains to be seen. While I'm on the topic of searching for card averages on online markets, it's still possible to manipulate the market as far prices for cards with low supply are concerned since many times sellers have given an astronomically large price for cards and this artificially inflates the average of cards. So while it is a good measurement in most cases, it's not as faithful a valuation tool as stock prices on financial markets are, for example. Another thing to keep in mind is that all of those collections are only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Someone can claim they have $10M invested in Reserved List cards and can actually have people value their collections, etc. But at the end of the day, that collection is only ever worth what someone is willing to pay for it. This is inherent risk of the commodities market. I remember when the comic book market dove so low that people were deathly scared of bankruptcy. The same thing can happen with MtG. Rather than worry about WotC ever abolishing the Reserved List, another thing to worry about is what happens when WotC drops the ball to such an extent that the game dies. Will this game be as strong as it is 40 years from now when those MtG investors plan on liquidating their investment? Will their Reserved List collection continue accruing value up and up and up? How popular with MtG be or its nostalgia when the big RL players want to cash out? That's something to be equally worried over, in my opinion.

Magic cards arent stocks and dont deserve to be treated like it, truth be told i dont care if people lose money for sitting on 5,000 dollar cards you shouldnt use cardboard toys as your life's savings

6:10 This is entirely untrue. It's not simple supply and demand because you have to factor in the various versions of the card. The simplest way to show this is to reference the countless examples of reprints of older cards that aren't on the reserve list. There is historical evidence to suggest that the ABU dual lands would not move, or if they did, it wouldn't be much and they would rise back up later. If you can give me one example of an old card going for thousands of dollars in its old version that lost value when it was reprinted and the original version of the card hasn't come back up, I will retract this statement, but unless someone can show me that, I'm not budging on this issue. This "Our old cards are going to take a nose-dive in value" is just flat out wrong.

Random question: Do you think Repercussion and Varchild's War-Riders are solid Reserved List cards to invest in? I find they have great synergy with each other and I think are both powerful cards in their own right.

The reserved list went away for me because plenty of people in china are perfectly willing to print them for my cube and commander decks

Why do a lot of these responses sound...gate keeperish? Print cards= get more players pretty simple. Old school will not last forever we are a finite number of players all aging. The legacy community was hit hard due players not being able to get into the format do to cost of duel lands unless they were lucky enough to purchase them prior to 2005. Also the whole "sue" blah blah would never hold up in court...the judge would laugh it out. A promise, by itself, is not legally enforceable—that is, a court won't award damages for a broken promise. ... The Reserved List is a promise, but it's not enforceable as a contract because it lacks consideration. Wizards didn't promise to forego reprinting certain cards in exchange for something.

Okay several things on this video: The formats can thrive even with the reserve list: While sure they "can" there is a maximum amount of players that can afford this, and removing the reserve list would massively increase the accessibility. Especially considering the other formats that want to use these cards like commander. Looking at MTGO where they print these cards a lot, legacy and vintage are significantly more popular. Everything about pricing: This doesn't matter to WOTC's bottom line, they don't get any money from the value of their cards on there, what's more, any reprinting of these cards will create a massive sales boon. Everyone would want them. The only thing that could hurt their monetary value would be the lawsuits, and those are suspect as to whether they would succeed, this would be consumers against a company, Hasbro to be specific (and those historically go poorly)

Just a question. So if the broke the reserve list, and the cost of older reserve list cards drops because people sell out of the older more expensive versions is that not the price of the card being affected by the actions of the community and not necessarily the actions of wotc? Also if someone that had a large position of a specific reserve list card lets say 1000+ copies and they dumped them all too market would most of the arguments not apply to this situation as well? Could other collectors sue this person? Also I know nobody would sue for them tightening the reserve list in the past, but could wotc not use that as an example of them making modifications to it in the past in order to justify making modifications to it in the future?

As a business analyst, I am quite sad to see such a sad state of affairs in this wonderful game. Although, of course, it's all about making money, I'm quite disappointed that investors just couldn't leave this one alone. It's such a shame.