MTG thread

ronne

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Got these masters sets trigger me so hard. Mana drain reprint is neat and all, but holy shit it shares a mythic slot with Thundermaw Hellkite? Those aren't even from the same fucking game they are so far apart, and that's not even getting in to the monetary end of shit.
 

ronne

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This list is pretty nuts, I wonder why they pulled out all the reprint stops? Flusterstorm, grove of burnwillows, cryptic, ancestral vision, thoughtseize, mana drain, nimbus maze, mishras bauble, elesh norn....

This is insane compared to the previous masters sets.
 

Leadsalad

Cis-XYite-Nationalist
5,963
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Yep, most of the EDH crowd here plays with chinese duals and no one cares. You can get a very passable set of all of them for peanuts these days, and I feel like it won't be too much longer where we're passed a tipping point where the fakes will be so good they will start passing in tournament play.
Got a source for these fake duals? Even the modern pain lands would be fine. Price is just outrageous for a casu-fag returning player trying to make EDH decks.
 

Necrath Evilcraft

Golden Knight of the Realm
576
146
Oh dont worry, they are gonna run half the print run of MMA1 just to balance the fact that they printed so much stuff and didnt push stuff to mythic needlessly knowing WOTC.
 

Mist

Eeyore Enthusiast
<Gold Donor>
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This list is pretty nuts, I wonder why they pulled out all the reprint stops? Flusterstorm, grove of burnwillows, cryptic, ancestral vision, thoughtseize, mana drain, nimbus maze, mishras bauble, elesh norn....

This is insane compared to the previous masters sets.
It's going to be an insanely broken draft format for sure.
 

Derpa

Trakanon Raider
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Got a source for these fake duals? Even the modern pain lands would be fine. Price is just outrageous for a casu-fag returning player trying to make EDH decks.
Check out the WIsh app on android/IOS, search for mtg proxy will pull up a bunch. Can get a full playset of every dual for like $10-12. But anyone worth a fuck can see they are fake.

I've yet to see a fake that was close to the real version.
 

ronne

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Check out the WIsh app on android/IOS, search for mtg proxy will pull up a bunch. Can get a full playset of every dual for like $10-12. But anyone worth a fuck can see they are fake.

I've yet to see a fake that was close to the real version.

Spot the fakes. Most veteran players can probably still pick out real vs fake here in a magnified side by side like this, but they are very much in the "close enough" territory now. You might get called on them if you make it do day 2 at a GP or something, but anything lower REL than that? Go nuts. Wouldn't be hard to trade off a lot these either to individuals if you were a real bastard, though most stores should/would catch them.

The issue is real. Super, super real. We're only a few revisions away from these things being basically perfect and the entire secondary market descending in to chaos as people have to start carrying loupes around with them to do any trading, and everyone stops buying anything remotely valuable off eBay or TCG etc.
MrVIFDP.jpg


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Liliana - bottom right is fake
Forces - Only top left is real
Fetches - All 3 fake
Tops - Top left is real, rest fake
 

Punko

Macho Ma'am
<Rickshaw Potatoes>
7,915
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the expansion icon on the bottom right liliana is off

the bottom right fow has the (betaish) white corners between the print and black border which it shouldn't have

if you play those kind of fakes against me in legacy, i'm going to have a good time
 

ronne

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Got a source for these fake duals? Even the modern pain lands would be fine. Price is just outrageous for a casu-fag returning player trying to make EDH decks.

Black Lotus - Small Orders Online Store, Hot Selling and more on Aliexpress.com | Alibaba Group

These will be 100% fine to casual EDH play unless your group is full of Haylels. I bought the p9/duals set from them over a year ago and they were fine, but took a while to ship. I've since given up any pretense though and just use custom art proxies for duals/power/whatever for EDH garbage.
 

ronne

Nǐ hǎo, yǒu jīn zi ma?
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the expansion icon on the bottom right liliana is off

the bottom right fow has the (betaish) white corners between the print and black border which it shouldn't have

if you play those kind of fakes against me in legacy, i'm going to have a good time

The only real Force is the top left one, thank you for so completely proving my point?
 

Heylel

Trakanon Raider
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Black Lotus - Small Orders Online Store, Hot Selling and more on Aliexpress.com | Alibaba Group

These will be 100% fine to casual EDH play unless your group is full of Haylels. I bought the p9/duals set from them over a year ago and they were fine, but took a while to ship. I've since given up any pretense though and just use custom art proxies for duals/power/whatever for EDH garbage.

There's really no reason to use these. If you're going to knowingly use a fake and you're NOT trying to fool anyone, just use basic lands and a sharpie.

The only reason to use a counterfeit is to deceive someone.
 

ronne

Nǐ hǎo, yǒu jīn zi ma?
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There's really no reason to use these. If you're going to knowingly use a fake and you're NOT trying to fool anyone, just use basic lands and a sharpie.

The only reason to use a counterfeit is to deceive someone.

Maybe people don't want crayon drawings in their EDH decks? Maybe people want to play modern or legacy tournaments and can't afford it? Maybe the prices the secondary market demands for some cards is fucking insanity and buying 95% approximation fakes is the only logical solution for some people?

The point is the fakes exist, and are good enough, and will only get better. Once they are "perfect" the market will implode and it will force wotc's hand on either reprinting things even more/removing the reserve list or just moving to a new "modern" that starts at Origins.
 

a_skeleton_03

<Banned>
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There's really no reason to use these. If you're going to knowingly use a fake and you're NOT trying to fool anyone, just use basic lands and a sharpie.

The only reason to use a counterfeit is to deceive someone.
Even if I was just playing kitchen table with my kids I wouldn't do sharpie or paper printed proxies.
 

Heylel

Trakanon Raider
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Maybe people don't want crayon drawings in their EDH decks? Maybe people want to play modern or legacy tournaments and can't afford it? Maybe the prices the secondary market demands for some cards is fucking insanity and buying 95% approximation fakes is the only logical solution for some people?

That fake is the same as a crayon drawing. You're not fooling yourself that it's real, and if you're fooling other people with it then the "proxy" argument goes out the window and you're just being deceptive. People aren't gonna stop, but let's at least be honest about what's going on. This isn't nerd class struggle. I don't actually care when people show up with proxies to play anything non-competitive. The danger is when people start becoming tempted to pass off a fake as the real thing.

I don't really understand the argument that a hobby is too expensive either. There are LOTS of hobbies that cost a ton more, and don't leave people with the same sense of entitlement. If you want to start homebrewing beer, you can cobble up a DIY kit for under $100 or spend thousands on the highest end automatic system. I never see homebrewers complaining over the guys with better kit. They all just love beer.

If you can't afford vintage or old school, no big deal. You get a ton more support from local stores and WotC playing standard anyway. I personally think they're a lot more fun, but there's a big cost barrier. That's life. Some people have 50k to spend on golf memberships or drive a nicer car than I do. I don't go all Berkeley riot over it.
 

Heylel

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Even if I was just playing kitchen table with my kids I wouldn't do sharpie or paper printed proxies.

Paper proxies are great for testing, actually. There are really good proxy generators that you can use to sleeve up several decks at once. They basically just print shorthand of cards in little color blocks with 3 to 5 on each card. It's super helpful if you want to have a gauntlet on hand for casual play.

FWIW, the price spikes are really annoying even for people who have everything (I have a lot of cards, but it pales next to some of the guys who show up to play old school every other Monday out here in the bay). Guys with 40x beta duals still get irritated when Flying Men jumps to 15 bucks, or Nether Void suddenly tops $400. It means new people can't show up to play, and that sucks.

Daniel Chang is behind a LOT of these buyouts. He brags about it on Instagram all the time. If he didn't take it down, there's a cocky as hell video he made while drunk basically deriding anyone who complains about prices on cards. I hope it backfires on him severely. I also think there's likely a small handful of alt-coin traders who have cashed out some bitcoin earnings and stuck it somewhere slightly less volatile. The rise in card prices seems to track with the recent coin earnings.

There's also probably some money laundering going on. It's really not hard to hide value in cardboard and shuffle it around in an untraceable way. That worries me even more than counterfeits.
 
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a_skeleton_03

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Heylel Heylel don't get me wrong I spent $800 on an affinity deck having never played it ever and I like it. I have yet to buy any fakes but I did look into it. I even thought about buying an affinity deck in fakes and one for real to play the shit out of the one at work and then bring the less beat up one to shops. Only thing that stopped me is I don't play enough to "need" it.
 

Heylel

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And to be honest, even $800 for a modern deck is probably higher than it should be for a format that is intended to be reprintable. It's apparently what market forces allow, but it seems high.

Really old stuff like power, arabian cards, or even duals to some extent, carry higher price tags because they're genuinely collectible. Some of the butthurt over the price tag is probably related to the huge deltas between something like vintage prices vs standard. They're all cards, so they're seen as the same when they're really not. A beta Lotus is closer to jewelry than a chase card out of a recent pack. It has no use whatsoever and is entirely a luxury item, but it's scarce and desirable for enough people to have some intrinsic value.

Some (not all) of the recent jump in old card prices are from people waking up to the scarcity of old cards. Several things probably *were* underpriced, but now it's gone crazy. It's absurdly easy to buy out the Internet of something like All Hallow's Eve when there are maybe 3 or 4 dozen copies in circulation at any given time. People like Chang have realized they can move the market really fast and increase the paper value of their collection by setting arbitrary prices and letting them fall to whatever the market will bear.

I wish they'd just kill the reserved list entirely and take the MODO model into paper. It might cost me some notional value, but I'm not selling things and never have. It's all on paper. I'm not even convinced the value of original prints would drop by very much if they started reprinting things.