Carrying Capacity of Our Format

[Machinus]

With the surge in interest in Type 1 in the past two years, one of the primary foci has been the availability of power cards. The effect of such increased interest does motivate collectors to sell their cards to players willing to pay the prices they set, which does bring more of the total available print runs to market. However, this additional supply is very limited and it is my opinion that it either has already begun to decline or will do so in the near future, causing prices to rise faster than they already are. This then brings us to consider, then, how many players can our format realistically support? There are several factors which I think contribute to determing this number, and from it the kind of organization and order we wish to establish so that we can be assured that this hobby will exist in the future:

1) Number of power cards printed, namely Alpha, Beta, Unlimited. WotC assures us that this number will never change.

2) Number of cards lost or destroyed. This number will very slowly increase with time.

3) Number of cards held in private collections or by active players - this refers to cards not on the market. This number fluctuates with time, but the average has been increasing quickly and eventually the availability of cards on the market versus the number of players who wish to purchase them is going to cause problems more serious than inflation.

4) Dependence on power for player involvement and success of format. This could also be called the number of players who will play without power. Right now a significant chunk of the community is powerless. However, if the prospects for obtaining the necessary cards to compete at the highest level seem unlikely, I think the fraction of the community that plays without power will decrease, even if the actual number itself increases due to the building popularity of the format.


There are probably more factors which I have not listed here, but I want to focus on what these reasons mean, so the main reasons are sufficient for my discussion. Feel free to suggest additions to the above list.

The number of players that we will eventually have in our community is very important, I think. The carrying capacity of our format determines how much WotC will organize and support us, how much attention and respect we will get from the DCI, how dependable locally sanctioned tournaments will be and the significance of the Vintage rating, and most importantly I think, the stability of the format. Ideally, we will reach a stage where the format is somewhat 'closed,' that is, the majority of power is either in the hands of players or those who wish to sell it to players, and there are times and places for both playing and selling to occur on a regular basis. We all want more players, but new players all want to play with power; also, it is a big deal to many that in order to participate in a tournament, just to play against someone else with a deck in the same format, they have to drive many hours to ohio or connecticut. The majority of players do not live in NY, Boston, Chicago, etc., and thus do not have well established local metagames.

While despite these intimidating obstacles to playing Type 1, there is still a lot of interest - but the nature of these issues is going to change in the future, and I would like to consider what these changes will bring to us in the future. Keep in mind that WotC has done many crazy things in the past, and their involvement could potentially be important in the future {proxies}.

[Tha Gunslinga]

You missed #5:  Need for power.  If more and more tournaments are 5- or 10-proxy, then the need for power will be much less than it has been in the past.  Viable budget decks would help, too, but those don't seem to be forthcoming.

[brianb]

Point #4 is tied directly to the proxy issue.  As proxy tourneys proliferate, the number of players that can play without power (or with less of it) increases greatly.  Of course that means the format will drift away from sanctioning.  We will continue to rely on the DCI for banned/restricted lists, but the ratings have never meant a whole lot and probably never will.  The T1 ratings remind me of the extended ratings before they were merged.  Some of the best players in the world had only a few events.  A fairly good player could climb into the top rankings in the world by playing lots of matches against not-as-good players in some little backwater.  Ultimately, wizards will support T1 (by spending the time to update the lists, and developing cards for T1) as long as they think that T1 players are supporting current sales by buying packs or singles of recent sets.  They won't support T1 toooo much, because they don't want new players going straight into it, thereby skipping the stage where they get fleeced buying cards for T2 and limited.  They want T1 to be a format that keeps older players semi-active (and semi-profitable) rather than quitting---without drawing away too many players from T2 and limited, their big cash cows.

[Machinus]

[EDIT: @ brianb: I was composing my post when you replied...etc.]

That topic is addressed mostly in #4, but also somewhat in relevance to WotC involvement. Currently proxy tournaments serve to soften the harsh demand, but they are scarce and obscure, and really just looking at ebay histories, the price of power has increased continuously, so proxies really don't affect the demand because most players want power anyway, even if they can play their decks without them (which, truthfully, is not the case very often, because you still need expensive drains, workshops, etc.). Proxies do allow more players to play without power, and while this does marginally increase #4, the number of players that can play without power, there are two reasons why I don't feel like this will be a major factor. The first, is that five proxies, without power cards, is not enough to support the top tier. The decks which can function well on only five proxies are for the most part, improved versions of more budget decks, which can't consistenty beat the best decks. The second reason is that if we get what we want(?), WotC will take more control and host sanctioned tournaments without proxies more frequently. Proxies are really just an incentive and placeholder for our tournament structure until things get organized, and I think that its important to keep in mind that this is just a transitional period, not a structure that will be modified, but one that will be replaced.

[InsaneScrub]

Power cards are in abundance in big cities at shops, and the rise of prices is really based up on the demand more or less, so your article is correct, and tho I don't like the rise in price, it's a fact jack.

[Ephraim]

InsaneScrub, you respond as though Machinus' comments are complaints about the rising cost of power. I don't think this is the case. I think that Machinus is merely stating 'the cost of power is rising,' 'the need for power may either increase or decrease, but it is inversely proportional to Wizards' best interests in maintaining the format,' and 'there are more players than there is power.'

With that data in hand, it is possible and perhaps important to draw conclusions about what these facts mean for the future of Type 1 Magic. How does the community feel about losing Wizards' support by increasing the use of proxies in tournaments? How does the community feel about a format in which all of the players who wish to play a particular deck literally cannot play an optimal build, because the cards are unavailable? Most importantly, how do the answers to these questions hinder or promote the maturation of Type 1 Magic?  I'm not really part of the Type 1 community, so I can't answer these questions, myself, but they're things that the community probably should be looking at.

[Ric_Flair]

Power is not that hard to get.  Just pay attention.  Here is my little guide on getting Power.

http://www.themanadrain.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=15605&highlight=

[M]

Instead of reprinting (which is not going to happen) or proxying up (only a temporary band aid solution) those cards that cause the largest drop in the format's carrying capacity, just ban them. Contrary to popular belief those cards are not what makes T1 so great, it's the critical mass of the card pool and, ironically, the fact that it isn't designed by R&D (instead it creates itself and evolves).

I am not saying that everyone should be playing T1½ (that format doesn't make any sense). Just ban the cards that prevent 90% of magic players from playing competitive T1. The format would be slowed down a little, but most of the format's inherent brokenness would be intact (and some of the inexpensive cards currently on the restricted list could even be unrestricted as a result of the bannings). Most decks archtypes would survive this transistion. With the possible exception of illusionary mask, none of the expensive cards have ever defined any deck or deck archtype. They (the power cards) only make any deck faster, they don't define any decks.

In short, move 10 cards from the current restricted list to the banned list. Add 3 currently unrestricted cards to the banned list. Then unrestrict 15-20 cards. Result: Same game, same level of brokenness, but with 1000% more players. Of course some owners of expensive cards (myself included) are going to be very unhappy with the bannings. I leave that as a problem for others to solve.

[swooop]

Thats the worst suggestion ive heard yet and would cause more problems than it would fix look at pre banning extended.

[jpmeyer]

Correct.  Someone suggested this in the casual format as a sort of exercise and it was hard to tell what the best deck would be.  I mean, there's 4 LED/4 Mind's Desire/4 Will Long.dec, there's 4 everything GAT, there's 4 Academy Academy, 4 Necro Trix, 4 Jar Jar, 4 Dream Halls Dream Halls, and so on.

[Dante]

I think the real capacity is determined by the playsets of things like Mana Drains, Bazaars, and Workshops since there are fewer playsets of those than there are of power....then again every deck needs power, each deck usually only uses one of those playsets.

E.G the print run of Antiquities was ~15 million.  Looking at the distribution of cards from the print sheets (i.e. C4 means that card was on each print sheet 4 times, U1 means it was on once).  Each print sheet had ~ 245 cards.  So 15million/245 = ~ 61,000 Workshops.  Divide by 4 for a playset, and there are  15,000 playsets of Workshops.  

Bazaars will have a lower number since the print run of Arabian Nights was around 5 million.  Mana Drains will have a higher number of playsets because of the higher print run of legends and the second (Italian) print run.

Bill

[Jacob Orlove]

Proxy tournaments > carrying capacity.