= Magic: The Gathering is too expensive
Ciro thinks this is idiotic, and that Wizards should sell all cards individually with unlimited supply and all with the same prices, especially online where there are no printing costs. But because Wizards made the silly promise never to reprint certain cards with the https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Reserved_List[reserved list] in 1994, they can't even correct this mistake <legally>! (TODO maybe, see further discussion at: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/contract-from-below-promissory-estoppel-and-the-reserved-list[]). There is however one simple solution: create and promote a new no reserve list format, and let reserve list formats rot away:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIq0NWSLAJA Magic TV - A Look at Non Reserve List Legacy by ChannelFireball (2015). Notably, they suggest the workaround of printing very slightly differently functional reprints, e.g. "Snow covered duals". Genius.
* https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/8gtoj4/no_reserve_list_legacy/
One interesting outcome of this would be to have card cost limited formats. https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Penny_Dreadful[Penny Dreadful] puts a super low limit, on individual cards, but it would be cool to have a max cost per deck version of it.
A cool thing is when they printed http://www.magicspoiler.com/mtg-spoiler/garth-one-eye/[Garth One-Eye], which allows you to make imaginary copies of some of those restricted list cards during play. This is the type of "flirting with the rules", that <Ciro Santilli> admires. The introduction of online-only cards such as XXX has pushed that even further as of 2021.
This was especially insane when Ciro was young and the Internet was not very widely available in <Brazil> yet, and Ciro did not know how to check the values of cards on online markets, and would trade cards with older much more knowledgable teenagers, based solely on his appraisal of a card's strength! Can you imagine how many young https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Timmy[Timmys] got ripped off in this manner, trading useless one million mana spells for ultra expensive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Nine[black lotuses]?
Another option we could pursue would be to make governments consider TCG pack opening a form of gambling, which it obviously is:
* https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Pokémon-card-collecting-not-considered-gambling-when-the-pack-of-cards-one-purchases-is-a-game-of-chance
* https://www.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/7fx3no/are_trading_card_games_gambling/
There is however one good solution to Magic's insane cost: watch people who have nothing better to do in their lives play on <YouTube>.
And as Internet formats dominate more and more, if they have any brains at will they will migrate to a subscription model where you pay to play for a given period of time, and have immediate access to all cards. It could even be a tiered access, with older formats being more expensive (more bugs to fix on different cards), but you must get access to all cards of a format at once.
\Video[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtqraRFcG9M]
{title=The Tarmogoyf Scandal by Nikachu MTG (2021)}
Back to article page