Admittedly, I’ve always been focussed on casual so extra attention on it isn’t exactly helping me ;).

Totally agree on your point pi, I like how much Jason alt’s articles give attention to casual demand. It feels like casual players drive a lot of solid long term gains.

Agreed. Speculating on Modern staples is a major gamble given reprint risks. Modern Masters II will happen. If it happens before Modern PTQ season 2015 there may not be much opportunity to move copies acquired now for profit. I’m watching Standard and Vintage.

I agree with you. I also managed to trade into a few played Duals myself right before Duals spiked. It was very nice. I was even trading in Modern stuff to dealers at GP Cincinnati (SCG mainly) for HP Duals, which I’m now able to trade/sell for more than what I gave up in store credit. Sweet deal. A lost opportunity now.

Is there a need to get people into competitive play?

I am probably in the top 1% collection wise among casual players: I can build nearly every competitive Legacy deck without needing to get more than a few cheap cards (and not counting the Duals I can build most fully English black bordered too), same for Modern and besides 6 pieces of Power and 3 Shops I could even manage Vintage. I am a rare breed though in several ways, big collection, knowledgeable on prices, but still casual. Many casual players I know though do shell out for more expensive cards, up to Duals if they are priced well.

I really don’t see the need for people to always move towards competitive play. I built Standard legal decks in the beginning because those were all I could build with my collection (I liked equi-luren after my Dream Halls got banned, last I built was my own Madness variant back when invasion an Odyssey block made up Standard), but I always played them casually. I have played in a few small Legacy tournaments, but only because it beat twiddling my thumbs in an hotel room when I was in Germany for work and I played in a few pre-releases, I remember Unhinged most fondly. I would’ve been happy to skip any of those experiences for a nice free-for-all multiplayer game. I just don’t feel the need to play at the competitive level, it’s just not as enjoyable as playing casually. Many casual players share those feelings.

it’s fine if you get more enjoyment out of competitive play, but realize that it’s not the culmination of everybody’s Magic career. As long as people keep playing, whichever way they play, Magic’s healthy.

That makes sense, thanks.

This is very interesting. I agree that most players are casual. Also, my transition from casual into competitive player took a really long time and a lot of variables had to fall into place. The first variable was that I had a bit more time and a bit more cash to spend on Standard staples. My first standard deck was Naya Lightsaber in the Alara/Zendikar block. Although I had been collecting casually for years before that, I had never spent so much money on magic at once in order to build that deck. It felt weird to spend so much money on cards but great when I 4-0’d my first tourney. I was hooked after that. Having collected significantly more cards since I become competitive, I happened to own many of the most important modern staples, so the format was very attractive to me, much more so than legacy, for example.

I’m hoping that as modern stabilizes newer competitive players will be able to trade standard staples they don’t need for modern cards and be able to enter the format. I agree that modern will see growth over the next 2-5 years, but the question is where that growth is coming from.

Is it coming from Standard players who are sick of the planned obsolesence of standard, or from standard players who are able to break into the the format? Does someone need to move into standard before they can become a modern player? What motivations actually drive people from casual to competitive play? Can we expect that a larger casual player base will translate into a larger competitive player base? Is there a way to get a larger number of people directly into competitive play?

Its going to be interesting to see how this event affects the spec community as a whole. Hopefully all the people who got burned hard by this will just stop speculating, and then it wont drive this heavy boom-bust cycle we have seen. People getting burned by bad spec drives down spec demand, which should be overall good for the entire community. Basically its become clear that its not a kids game with free money anymore, and that should lead to more sane practices.

Re: legacy. I think that format is on the perfect cusp between playability and collectability to hold its prices forever. The duals have become iconic as well as the other reserved list legacy staples. The legacy staples are the new power, in some sense. I own an Esper Deathblade deck that I rarely play with because I know the cards aren’t coming down, and I want to have the ability to play the format in the future.

I really wish I would have been in the position to trade my modern into legacy before the dual land spike. That was definitely the optimal spec play of 2014 and I basically missed it. I was able to trade into 1 volcanic island and 1 tropical island before the spike ran away. I didn’t want to trade out of all my modern staples because I thought (with everyone else) that PTQ would see another big spike.

It’s looking like from a pure spec perspective you are gonna want to keep your funds available for standard. If you want staples to play modern, now seems as good a time as any to get in.

The general consensus seem to be that there are way more casual players than there are competitive players. The competitive players are more vocal and they have clear tournament results so they have more influence on prices, but that doesn’t mean there’s no influence from casual players, you just notice the influence slower as casual players tend to cause slow rises. I have to disagree that all these people need to become competitive players. Not to say that I’d mind if wizards did increase incentive to play competitively, but I don’t think it’s quite as important as incentivizing these new players to keep playing, regardless of how they play.

I feel Modern will continue to grow in popularity over time. The format is a TON of fun to play and although prices are inflated currently, the barrier to entry is still far below that of Legacy. An affordable, eternal format is exactly what MTG needs for players who came to the game in the last 1-5 years. Because Magic has been booming in popularity, there are MANY players in this category.

That being said, the newness of Modern will lead some a little bit of awkwardness. The older and more mature Modern gets the more broadly it will be embraced, IMO. Think 5 years out: Modern will be attracting all the newer players and will continue to grow in sophistication. I believe the long term enjoyability of Modern is bright.

That being said, Modern is no longer the cash cow it once was. Between over speculating and fear of reprints, money making from this format may be a much more gradual grind going forward.

Do you think Legacy was overbought too (the recent spike in Duals, Sneak Attack, Wasteland for example) or are these OK this expensive?

It’s becoming more and more apparent that your argument holds merit. I still think we should wait a few more months to confirm, but it definitely appears speculators and retailers overbought the market. We are now suffering the consequences by holding all these cards as they drift downward or horizontally in value.

I am actually more rosy about the growth of the player base than most. I have several friends who have bought boxes of magic cards in the last year without even really knowing how to play. The big question for me is: how many of these people will actually start playing competitively? This, after all, is where the real value of magic cards comes from. Sure, the movie may attract a large casual player base, but will the appeal of standard and modern attract more people to competitive play? I’m hoping that wizards will return to incentivizing competitive play with the player rewards club and the like. Real tournament magic is by far the funnest way to play the game in my opinion, but are people gonna get serious because they watched the movie? It’s not at all clear. Modern is both my greatest hope for the game and my greatest disappointment. I really thought we were going to have an eternal format with with Standard-level interest in the next few years, but now it seems like that was all an illusion. What do you think about this?

I have mentioned my concern about this on more than one occasion. I think its very important that we recognize our own affect on the market as speculators. People got so high on Modern after seeing what happened with the value of cards in legacy, we all thought that modern was the second coming of legacy. Well, the results are coming in, and it seems pretty clear that the value of modern cards was inflated by speculative hype, and that we have not reached the player base we needed to for modern because people are waiting for reprints to happen and card prices to drop. The fact that cards like the fetches hit $100 almost certainly priced many new players out of the format, thus causing demand to decrease even further. This phenomenon is the result of the expanding MTG speculation community in general. We need to be more careful in the future to temper people’s expectations. Although this site has been very good about telling people not to listen to the MTG finance subreddit, I think in general we need to be very clear about how speculation activities actually alter the market.

Thank you very much for the kind feedback, Chaz! I truly appreciate your comments. 🙂

Thanks for the kind words, Matt. I definitely agree with your thought process. More harshly put, we’re all getting old 🙂