Thanks

Yes, I think so.

It’s quite possible! WoTC is learning that they are essentially the central bank of the MTGO economy. The central bank should be concerned with price stability and the smooth functioning of the economy. When speculators notice an obvious opportunity due to payout imbalances or what not, then this is an area that WotC can tweak. So, the fact that it feels like WotC is after speculators is not paranoid! Any good opportunities that crop up due to payout imbalances should be easy targets for WotC to make changes to.

I think the best practice would be to examine payout structures of all queues after a set release, and repeat the analysis I’ve done here. I know I will do this again as soon as JOU is released. This will give us a good insight into booster price movements in the weeks following.

Yes, there is some possibility of them altering the payout structure. If prices get too out of whack and players stop playing in 2 man queues, I could see them switching to paying out BNG in those queues.

I think they’ve done something like this last year, where the pauper queues were paying out core set packs that were sub 3 tix. So, they switched to paying out RTR boosters.

So now we have a good way to see how the system works with this payout-structure (congratz on that !), but will we ever see that structure again ? Very well possible if next years sets are LSS also they move payout for second set tournaments to second set boosters only, just to mess with us :p !

This new payout structure is an experiment for them, so I wonder if they are willing to tweak.

Sometimes it just takes a little foot work to figure out what is going on. I think I took a pretty good stab at it. Thanks for reading, and commenting.

Thanks! It was my pleasure to write it as it felt like solving a puzzle.