Proxy Discussion

[TR]

First off (since it seems to be important): I don't own power (yet).

The subject of proxies is interesting but there are some elemental considerations that have gone unmentioned, also no-one has yet listed hard facts about the neccessity of proxies, where neccessity would be defined by needing to proxy because, regardless of finacial affluence, there are no power cards to be had.

The print run of Limited and Unlimited combined is 50.4 million cards (www.crystalkeep.com) the sets size is 302 cards (alpha was a little bit smaller) so we can definetly say that there are at most 166887 complete power9 sets in existence.

At a population of 6 billion, this means circa one set of power cards per 36000 capita. If you assume that about thirty percent of all the power cards ever printed have been destroyed or lost, this number is much easier; one set per 50000. Now you can calculate how many power sets there should be in you local metagame. Here in Helsinki (Finland) pop:1mill. there should be 20 full power sets. I'd estimate that our local metagame has about a quarter of that.

Another interesting comparison is drawn when you look up the total amount of (sanctioned)magic players: 142866 (www.thedci.com). Even if 15 percent of all power cards had been destroyed or lost (which I would find very hard to believe), there would be a p9 set for every single registered player in the world...  Now let that sink in.

What I'm trying to say is that people, who say that proxying should be allowed because card are too rare, don't really have an argument here.
This can also be empirically proven by going to eBay; there is virtually no card that you cannot aquire within a couple of days.

So that leaves the money argument which many try to portrait as a metagame argument: "The meta game will improve when everybody gets to proxy!" Do you think the metagame will improve if everybody is powered up? I should think that it would get just a bit retarded, I mean the wellspring of innovation has always been limited resources. I think that an environment, where you need to think hard about how to beat up more power with less, creates very interesting decks.

Anyway, the standard metagame will always need some aggro, the traditionaly cheap(ish) deck, to keep control in check. So why, with this natural demand for cheap(ish) decks, is there all this clamouring for proxies?

Oh, I forgot: it's more fun to play Stax/Keeper. Well why not play casually with friends, I'm sure they don't mind proxies.

Oh, I forgot: you want to take part in tournaments. Well why not have one with your friends, four is already enough for a mini tourney.

Oh, I forgot: you want the big cash/card prizes. Well this is starting to sound fishy...

And so on and so on. All this seems to boil down to the all too human trait of wanting a free lunch, which, as any economist will gladly tell you, don't exist.

Just so you all have it easier when you rip this article apart, I'll summarize my main points up till now:

1) There are enought power cards for everyone who wants them. There are enough now and there will be enough for a loooong time.

2) The metagame doesn't need everybody to be fully powered in order to be healthy and versatile, in fact the opposite is probably true.

3) The people who want to play big money tournaments with proxies are looking for a free lunch, whether they admit it or not (I would love to have a free lunch, but sadly the stores around here only have sanctioned T1 play).

Now what strikes me most about the proxy proponents is their faith that this could actually be sanctioned by WotC et al. Of course shops are always going to have proxy tournaments and the more the better I say, but the arguments about it not being against WotC's financial interests to allow proxying of some very old sets are full of gigantic holes.

Lets take a little tour in happy-land where proxies are allowed. Who makes these proxies? You can print them yourself, or for your friends too, actually you could sell good ones on eBay, why not make a couple thousand at a quality printers shop and bring the to genCon? At what stage do think WotC would step in?

Take a close look at a magic card, right on the bottom where it says TM & C WotC. Now WotC could be lenient on not sue you for copyright infringement. But they _have_ to sue you for trademark infringment because if they don't then under US law they lose the trademark (www.law.wayne.edu/litman/). Do you honestly, really, really believe that WotC would let that happen?

Now the crafty of you might argue that WotC could sell licences for making proxies. Which would actually be only one insignificant step away from WotC actually making these proxies themselves. But wait! Those proxies would be functionally identical tournament legal versions of cards WotC said they will _never_ reprint. Of course they could just eat their word on that and... oh yes we were talking about financial damage to WotC?

So point four:

4) WotC cannot sanction proxies without loosing the trademark or drastically renewing its reprint policy.

So now that I have meticulously taken apart the pro-proxy arguments and shown the actual impossibility of any proxy sanctioning, I will give some constructive thoughts:

Since WotC doesn't really sponsor type 1 anyway, why not set up a "second DCI"? I mean the pro boxers have several associations, heck even beauty paegants culminate annually in separate Miss Universe and Miss World competitions.

We have the right of free association, why not use it? We may not be able to provide a plastic membership card or send everyone free cards for playing in our series, but with a lot of people who have some spare time to arrange local tourneys, some space on a web server (TMD ?) and a couple of people willing to organize membership numbers, a result database and the official paperwork, we could have ourselves a bonafide T1 ProTour all of our own (travel expenses not payed, prizes subject to membership fees/donations and sponsors).

Well so much for that, I hope you enjoyed this rant. I actually only wanted to give you the numbers above but then I got somehow carried away.

[st00mie]

Even if 15 percent of all power cards had been destroyed or lost (which I would find very hard to believe), there would be a p9 set for every single registered player in the world...

...There are enought power cards for everyone who wants them. There are enough now and there will be enough for a loooong time.

To assert that a minimum of 85% of the cards printed during Magic's infancy are still in circulation is absurd.  Alpha started selling in August of 1993 at GenCon and Unlimited was sold out by March of 1994.  That means you could buy packs  and have a shot at power for only 8 months, and during that time, power was worth very little.  Additionally, Magic had very poor exposure, and the number of gamers aware of the game was a tiny percentage compared to that of today.  Of the players that had access to those cards, inevitably a huge number of players quit playing the game, and their collections became lost to attics, basements, and closets around the world.  Combine that with the reality that a very large number of power cards rest in the hands of collectors who own multiple copies of each peice of power, and the illusion of 'a set for every player' is far less realistic.  On top of all of this, your presentation of the number of 'registered players' as evidence of the number of Vintage players in the world is completely unreliable.  People who are not registered play the game; and not all registered people actively play the game.

EDIT: Your bad math only compounds things even more.

The metagame doesn't need everybody to be fully powered in order to be healthy and versatile, in fact the opposite is probably true.

This is a difference of opinions, and objectives.  You desire a metagame where timmy can play with his Llanowar Elves and Mold Demons.  I want the metagame to be closer to ideal, much in the same way as the Standard environment.

The people who want to play big money tournaments with proxies are looking for a free lunch, whether they admit it or not (I would love to have a free lunch, but sadly the stores around here only have sanctioned T1 play)...

...WotC cannot sanction proxies without loosing the trademark or drastically renewing its reprint policy.

You are losing focus.  The issue at hand has nothing to do with Sanctioning.  If people want sanctioned tournaments, let them go spend the required money to do so.  We understand that by using proxies, we are forfeiting any kind of sanctioning, and we are ok with that.  When Wizards made the decision that Vintage will never be a serious format in their eyes, they dictated that we take matters, including the availability of key cards, into our own hands. Running n-proxy tournaments has been our solution.

[Gradek]

@ Timodiili:

I just had to reply to your poor math.  While there were indeed 50.4 million A/B/U cards printed, there were never 166000 sets of power, this is because rares were only 1/15 of the print run (it is actually slightly less than 1/15, as starter decks had a 1/30 rare ratio).  Thus, your math should read 50.4 million/15/117(number of different rares), which would leave us with 28717 sets of power.  I will not assume any percent that are destroyed/in collections (and thus not in play), but I think we can all agree this is a significant number (if we use your 30% [i would bet the number is much higher] figure it would leave us with 20000 sets of power).  Finally, remember that power was not equally distributed, which leaves us with many metas that have very little outside of ebay.  Also, no one is saying proxies should be used in a sanctioned tourney, just local ones tom improve competition.  But, I am glad that your meticulous argument (and 3rd grade math skills) put this issue to rest.

[Ivantheterrible]

expansion or contraction of the proxy list, like the B&R list does not. With a card neutral proxy policy we will have the stability and predictibility desired

Woah lets slow things down a moment and realize what you are saying Ric-Flair.  You are comparing the B&R list to the possible "proxy list"  
Remember on thing though Wizards anounces the changes to the B&R list.
Now comeon do you really think that Wizards is going to make any kind of porxy list. No they have said many times that they would not allow proxies.

Why then do you compare them? Who will make the proxy list for t1. Zherbus is the head of this sight but he is not the leader of T1 or anything. Is he going to tell every store owner how many porxies they can run. No, you being in law school must know that that is against the law.

Now that I think of it what really is the point of this whole thread. We are all arguing with each other which is great because arguments are a great help intelectually but we aren't going to make much progress on the task at hand partiially because we cant agree but moreover becuase it isn't really possible to agree.

Sure Zherbus could say 10 proxies, 5 proxies, unlimited proxies,  pre-ledgends only proxies(which dosent allow drains cant understand that idea really) but we arn't going to all agree and thats what has to happen. This isn't Nazi Germany(sorry I know this was used in a post some weeks ago but it is the best example) we arn' t under some curshing dictatorship(well the country is but the magic world dosen't have to be) where Zherbus or some other Steve(semmen man) gets up and says all stores in the country maybe even the world that play non-santicound t1 MUST play with this set proxy rule.
Stores should set there own rules some will say 10(my store dose, Team Hadly [we are the best])  some will say 5 and some wil say X rule but what ever it is there isn't much this thread will achieve anymore. We are now wasting our time I like 10 myslef but others dont in the end each store has to make their own desicion.

If I could close this thread I would because it is way to long people are just repeating themselves and wasting their own time. I cant close this though so instead I will just have to sit back relaz sit in my bliss of enlightenment and watch as the flameing towrads me for this post pour in.

So just listen to me stop wasting your time and let everyone make their own proxy list.  [/quote]

[Cthulhu]

The ideal number of proxies is whatever can bring T1's level of metagame development and competitive play up to t2 levels?

This seems to be the goal for proxies in my opinion, and they aim to achieve this by A) Reducing the entry level cost for a budget t1 deck, and B) Increasing the number of players that can play a fully powered tier one deck like long in it's heyday.

From this it would seem that the ideal number of proxies is whatever method brings down the cost of a tier one t1 deck,  (Picked by looking at tournment winning deck, or whatever analysis you want to propose.) cost down to the price of the most expensive type two decks. The ones that are mostly rares (Wake would have been a good example packing several very expensive rares.)

I have no idea how many proxies this would require, it's a big chuck of work to caculate it.

This makes the game much more accesable because it increases the number of players that can build tier one decks (Now equal to the number of players that can afford to build tier one t2 decks. Which seems to be a heck of alot.)

Also, this could have the side effect of increasing accessability by bringing the cost of decks like fish and mono black mask right down. Mono black mask runs 4 illusionary masks and a few peices of power, ad the rest of the deck doesn't seem very expensive.

(This is speculation based on the fact that a wake deck most cost 200 dollars? To build. Getting Tier one keeper prices down to that would would, at a guess 7 proxies or more.)

Of course, for everyone saying that making the game more accessable (Via proxies) is going to eliminate bad sligh has the wrong end of the stick. Reading  type two tourment reports, espically for a big event, and people comment that you still encounter "Shitty whatever type two deck is making the rounds at the moment" in the early rounds. I think tournment play is stuck with this as a fact of life.

But more potential to play tier one decks, and more accessability to the good budget decks should (Hopefully) inject some non-idiots into the game, increase the quality of the "bad/scrub/budget/whatever decks" dramatically, as well as increasing the potential playerbase that can generate top notch players (Defined as people who can afford to make a tier 1 deck.)

Just my 2 cents. [/i]

[st00mie]

@Ivantheterriblemagicplayer: You, too, are missing the point.  We're not trying to 'lay down the law' or tell everybody how many proxies they have to run, we are just trying to agree on what would be a good general rule of thumb.  If you are so opposed to the open discussion of what a good generally accepted number of proxies should be, get out of the thread.

[TR]

I stand corrected on the bad math. I did indeed forget about rarity issues.
This still leaves the empirical proof about the abundance of power though. You definitely can go on ebay and get any power card you like inside a week.

-T

[Magi]

I stand corrected on the bad math. I did indeed forget about rarity issues.
This still leaves the empirical proof about the abundance of power though. You definitely can go on ebay and get any power card you like inside a week.

-T

if you had several hundred dollars just randomly laying around, yes.

hell I'm sure that almost all of us here, if utterly necessary can get a full set within a month.

but then there's that problem of having to eat, get gas, take the girlie out for a few drinks, buy some porn etc. etc.

[TR]

@Magi Yeah, but then again that (girlies, gas etc.) is just real life and this (mtg) is an addiction. You have to set priorities .

[Ivantheterrible]

buy some porn

Magi this is not a proiority it is a waste of time and money to go out and buy porn when you can get it for free at home on your computer. Besides if you buy it then so many people know you look at porn and that whould feel a little strange.

[iamfishman]

Alright, lemme' put it this way. Can anybody actually show me some real results that using 5 proxies or so actually improves the metagame and player turnout somehow?

@ Nameless-  I'd say Waterbury's 5 proxy tournament with 191 people can be considered an improvement in the average player turnout.  IMHO there was a pretty diverse metagame as well.

[Magi]

buy some porn

then so many people know you look at porn and that whould feel a little strange.

uhh I think everyone here looks at porn. it's a guy thing.


besides, there are some things out there that you just can't get unless you spend a few $$$. Not alot, but it's still necessary.

[Ivantheterrible]

uhh I think everyone here looks at porn.  it's a guy thing.

I agree. I was just saying that online its free and you dont have to worry about being in the store and purchasing it while the grandma behind you with the two little 4 and 6 year olds gets shocked or that female cleak you though was hot wants nothing to do with you now because porno addiction isn't a turn-on for females exactly.

Besides the internet can have better stuff the playboy and you dont have to be 18 like you do with playboy, penthouse or X magazine.

[Zherbus]

Closed - Dead topic that is also getting derailed.