A proposal for a special release Farewell Set

[Matt]

I had an idea. What if, each Extended rotation, Wizards released a special set consisting of the rares departing for Eternal land? It would be sold in random packs, and white-bordered of course.

Immediately I realized this wouldn't really help the supply of certain chase rares, since there's so many crap rares you'd still be pulling. Also, the set would be huge - the next extended rotation is going to move some 595 rares out (between Invasion, Odyssey, and Onslaught blocks). This needs to be cut down somewhat. My first instinct was to cut it down to only the rotatiing rares that made T8 at an extended PT during their 1.x tenure.

I think this would be a great gift for the casual and Eternal communities. It shouldn't cut into their normal sales - anyone who plays both Eternal and rotating formats is gonna get their Jittes early to play them in Standard.

The only issue I can think of is reprints. If there's already a supply of WB Polluted Deltas floating around, in five or ten years when they want to put Deltas back in Fourteenth Edition, there's going to be a collective shrug.

One way to solve that would be to just selectively choose certain cards to not include in the Farewell Release. It kind of gives away the surprise that they're planning to reprint them for Standard one day, but w/e.

What do you guys think about this? Good idea or not? What other obstacles might there be to them doing a Farewell Set, and how could they be avoided? How should the contents of the Farewell Set be determined?

[Komatteru]

I don't think its necessary.  Card access is not a problem for anything past The Dark, and there's plenty of singles available at cheap prices for pretty much everything forward.  Opening packs is hardly necessary.  No one ever really thinks "I want Invasion cards now, so I'll get Invasion packs."  You can buy foreign packs of a lot of those sets cheaper than the current sets, and they still don't sell.

Special box sets such as Anthologies, Battle Royale, etc. never really sold well in the past.

It would be for casual players, since they're the ones who buy product anyway.  Do they really care?  I doubt it.

[Matt]

But what it would do is alleviate some of the problems caused by sought-after cards in unpopular sets. Part of the reason Pithing Needle is so expensive is that it's in a set that has basically bupkiss, so few SoK packs got opened, so that artificially restricts the supply of Needles.

[Komatteru]

I'm not an economist (*Huge invitation for Steve to enlighten us all*), but I was under the impression that Pithing Needle is so high more so because dealers need to recoup money put into Saviors product somehow, and that's the only card they can command the money for.

Consider Guildpact (we need a small set to make sure the quantity of packs opened stays the same for drafts).  The Duals in there haven't come close to reaching Needle's price. SCG sells Stomping Ground for $17.50 and has 40 of them in stock, while they have Needles at $25 and have 0. You could say that more Guidpact was opened, but let's come to grips with reality: the amount of product opened is so high that the supply is not the restricting point of the set.  Tournament players are not the ones buying packs.  Casual players are.  Casual players tend to find cards they want in all sets, regardless of how good the actual set is, and thus buy whatever product is out at the time.  Maybe they buy a few more packs of Guildpact, but the difference is not significant enough to cause a squeeze in supply.

From Guildpact, the following cards are all over $8 on SCG: Burning Tree Shaman ($15), Ghost Council of Orzhova ($9), Godless Shrine ($18), Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind ($8), Rumbling Slum ($8), Steam Vents ($18), Stomping Ground ($18).  Meanwhile, Saviors has the following $8 cards: Kagemaro, First to Suffer ($8), Twincast ($16), Pithing Needle ($25).

With more money cards, dealers need to get less for each money card to make the same profit (there's a limit on how much people will pay for cards, after all).  Why on earth is Twincast $16?!?  No one plays it in tournaments.  Casual players usually don't drive the price of a card to more than $10.  Before she found a home in winning tournament decks, Akroma was around $10.

Chrome Mox was only $12-15 despite being a hot casual and tournament card from Mirrodin.  However, Mirrodin had a slew of tournament cards.  Arc Slogger was $4, despite being one of the best cards in the set.  Put that card into Saviors, and the price probably instantly doubles.

[Jacob Orlove]

You could say that more Guidpact was opened, but let's come to grips with reality: the amount of product opened is so high that the supply is not the restricting point of the set. 

Not at all true. Pretty much every store I have spoken to has anywhere from a few to a dozen or more boxes of saviors that they just could not sell (it mostly depends on how much they initially ordered). Ravnica block not only sold much much better than Saviors, but Ravnica itself removed much of the demand for Saviors packs--both by being a more attractive purchase once it was available, and by getting people to save money to buy Rav stuff (most of those savings came in the form of less Saviors product purchased). Plus, 9th edition, with painlands and everything, came out right after Saviors did. Basically, supply actually IS an issue for Saviors cards.

The price dealers charge for cards has nothing to do with "recouping money from Saviors packs". That's illogical. They figure out how much they can charge for any given card in order to move it as fast as they want, and then sell it for that amount. Essentially, they charge as much as the market will bear.

Also, most dealers don't get their singles by opening packs, except when a set first comes out. Usually, they buy cards from players.

[Matt]

Casual players usually don't drive the price of a card to more than $10.

I can think of a couple counterexamples to this. Serra Avatar (like $22) is one, as is Reya Dawnbringer, which is completely and unexplicably like $15 on SCG. Sneak Attack has always been way overpriced compared to its tournament use - even now, after leaving Extended, it's a $15 card. Traumatize is for some reason 12 too.

[jpmeyer]

Casual players usually don't drive the price of a card to more than $10.

I can think of a couple counterexamples to this. Serra Avatar (like $22) is one, as is Reya Dawnbringer, which is completely and unexplicably like $15 on SCG. Sneak Attack has always been way overpriced compared to its tournament use - even now, after leaving Extended, it's a $15 card. Traumatize is for some reason 12 too.

Also Sliver Queen and Coat of Arms

[Komatteru]

usually

20/8314 would technically qualify as not very often (maybe "rarely"), but I'll settle for usually. 

[Matt]

I call fallacy on that. You need to compare the casual cards driven above $10 to the casual cards driven between $5 and $10 (taking $5 as being your baseline for a rare, i.e., for a rare to make it above $5 SOMEONE has to want it, either for casual or tournament use). You don't get to claim every card ever printed as "casual" by default!

It's also not fair to inlcude commons and uncommons.

Lifelace isn't a casual rare, it's just garbage (which is why I put the $5 minimum - it makes sure that we're looking at cards which are truly driven by casual-lust instead of cards that just aren't driven at all [hello Suleiman's Legacy]).

We're looking for the intersection of the following sets:

• rare cards
• cards whose price is driven by demand (cards people want to own, instead of "want to unload")
• cards which have little or no highly-competetive tournament use right now

And then we're seeing what fraction of that intersection is priced above $10.

[Godder]

Gaea's Cradle is another card that sells for well above its constructed value, and the major reason older cards held their value despite rotating out of Extended in 2002 (Duals and Force of Will in particular) was Casual players continuing to buy the cards. At that time, there really wasn't enough Eternal being played to justify what were realistically quite high prices, but they held up surprisingly well, which indicates that Casual players have some influence on prices.

The price dealers charge for cards has nothing to do with "recouping money from Saviors packs". That's illogical. They figure out how much they can charge for any given card in order to move it as fast as they want, and then sell it for that amount. Essentially, they charge as much as the market will bear.

Also, most dealers don't get their singles by opening packs, except when a set first comes out. Usually, they buy cards from players.

While later prices are based on what the market will pay, which amounts to demand for singles, that's not true for the prices of a new set, because demand for those singles isn't known until the market has had a chance to evaluate the cards. Until demand becomes known, prices are set based on the number of boxes/packs opened by the shop and the number of playable and chase cards, which in turn is governed by the dealer's best guesses.

A small set generally has 165 cards, being 55 of each rarity, so if a dealer opens 110 boosters (about 3 boxes or $225 worth of product), a perfect distribution* would give that dealer 2 of each rare (110 total), 6 of each uncommon (330 total) and 16 of each common (880 total). One of things about Magic is that most of the cards won't sell for much, or won't sell at all, so the bulk of that $225 has to be made off the good cards. If there are, say, 2 exceptional uncommons (of which we have 6) and 5 good or better rares (of which we have 10), they have to be priced to make that $225 back, plus enough additional to make it worth someone's time to open and sort the cards (the concept of opportunity cost - without additional sales above the $225, the dealer may as well just sell the boxes and not open them). We'll be kind, and assume that the chaff will sell for enough, eventually, to make the additional money required, and we'll only aim for the $225, which values these 16 'money cards' at, say, $4 for the uncommons ($40 total) and $18.50 for the rares ($185 total). When there are more good rares, the prices can be less, so if there were, say, 10 good ones, making 20 in our pool of singles, we could sell them for an average of $9.25.

*Admittedly unlikely, but I'm assuming a perfect distribution for simplicity's sake, particularly since large dealers open much more than 3 boxes. I'm also ignoring pack sales, since they usually involve opening boxes which sit around for a while and require someone's time/effort to manage.

[Jacob Orlove]

First of all, dealers will overprice almost every single card from the new set (barring breakout cards like Ravager for which demand surges insanely), not only because they had to open packs, but also because supply is so constrained at that time. There may be no other players who have card X for trade, so you'll pay the dealer $6 for it, even if it's clearly going to be worth $3 once the set settles out.

Obviously dealers have to make guesses about prices, but with pre-sales on ebay and the like, they can make surprisingly well-informed guesses, and in fact open fewer packs if the set looks less valuable.

[Godder]

If you've been told once, you've been told a thousand times: stop using hyperbole .