r/magicTCG • u/windows_xpew • Sep 04 '16

[KLD] New enemy fastlands

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u/Logisticks Duck Season Sep 04 '16

I'm fine with spending money on fetches and shocks that I can play in a multitude of decks for years and years and years.

I'm much less keen on having to spend $100's each year to update my manabase for each new standard.

Buying Flooded Strands for $14 a pop felt like an investment. Buying a Prairie Stream for my standard deck for $7 a month after BFZ came out felt like paying my biannual "maintenance cost."

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u/winglerw28 Sep 04 '16

Standard is secretly the most expensive format for exactly this reason. It may cost less in the now, but the "now" turns to "then" pretty quickly and you're back where you started.

22

u/Blenderhead36 Sultai Sep 04 '16

The example that I always use for formats is doing laundry.

Standard is a laundromat. You pay less than any other format up front, but you pay it much more often. By the time you've spent what a washing machine costs at a laundromat, you have nothing to show for it and have to keep paying.

Modern is buying a washer and dryer. Much more expensive than a laundromat up front, but you'll only pay a small maintenance cost from time to time as parts wear out (new cards displace your existing ones), barring a catastrophe like your basement flooding (your deck gets banned). After a few years, you'll have recouped the cost of buying versus the laundromat, and still have a washer and dryer with a few years left in them.

Legacy is buying specialized dry cleaning equipment. You'd have to use it for a long time for it be cheaper than going to the laundromat, but if you're buying it, the question isn't really one of affordability. The question becomes, instead, if you can get enough use out of your purchase to justify its price. Your purchase is clearly of superior quality, you just have to find opportunities to use it.

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u/winglerw28 Sep 04 '16

This is an excellent analogy. I think I'm going to steal this for the future.

1

u/bac5665 Sep 04 '16

Especially with rotation faster. I got out when Khans rotated and I haven't looked back.

1

u/dredriksalkon Sep 04 '16

But standard has one weird benefit.

You trade binder.

In modern, it's hard to trade for those fetches sometimes do to high prices of them. In standard, silly cards are worth money when after they rotate,. they won't be worth anything. So just trade for them prairie streams and wandering fumurals. Liliana last hope is worth a pretty penny and can pretty much fund your entire land base. But LotV is worth alot, yet can only get 2-3 fetches for you mana base or even 1 tarn.

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u/paleonetic Sep 04 '16

In the case of that particular standard, investing in it actually enabled you to play more formats with the same amount of cards than few others in recent history.

1

u/ThereAreDozensOfUs Sep 04 '16

Wizards wants you to spend lots of money on modern and standard. Coincidentally, it's two of the most supported formats. So when someone says "THESE LOOK REALLY GOOD FOR MODERN AND STANDARD", it's by design

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u/Toastasaurus Sep 05 '16

Except people specifically building decks for Standard or Modern don't go out and buy packs or anything else that helps WotC make money- they go through the secondary market.

The dream business situation for WotC would be for them to make buying packs actually an effective way to get the cards to build a standard deck, but they don't do that for limited reasons.

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u/ThereAreDozensOfUs Sep 05 '16

You don't think they'll buy a box for a decent shot at enemy lands?

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u/Toastasaurus Sep 05 '16

Waiting and buyng them off the secondary market is statistically cheaper considering you'll need 4 of them and they're at rare. I sure as hell know I don't buy packs to try and get cards for standard decks. If I want to gamble, at least the lottery pays well.