I like the random full art foils idea. Also, making them “tournament playable” for one event seems like a nice idea. I am also of a like mind that using the ultra rare for P9 and maybe duals could be a way to go. I have also contemplated if maybe it is the future of Modern Masters. Print past Mythics as “Ultra” rare while introducing newer reprints in each set. They might also decide they can introduce some of the Commander or supplemental products such as Conspiracy into the Modern Masters products as well.

They could call it “Masters of Modern” and update it every year or two. Genius!

Cube is a great format, and a bad investment for WOTC. The only supplemental cube products we will ever get are the supplemental reprint sets that come out during summer and winter. Furthermore, as a cube designer, I don’t care if I have the real card, and I favor proxy artists when they can deliver excellent renditions of great cube cards. It just makes my building materials that much cheaper. The overlap of expensive cards and cube is purely coincidental, as expensive cards tend to overlap with several formats (furthermore, many expensive cards are bad in cube, and some of these are power 9). Cube is and should be the cheapest format to play.

gold bordered cards have a different back. its not just the borders.

Given that the price of vintage staples has done nothing but climb, it’s not fair to say that a loss of a small percentage on a card equals a loss for the player.

First, unless you’re actually selling the cards, it’s not a loss in potential revenue gained — and most people hold onto their power.

Second, if you bought a random mox a year ago, it’s probably worth close to 2x what you paid. Even if that mox “loses” 10% of its current value, you’re still coming out way ahead of the game. This sort of “loss” that you’re speaking of only affects people that are buying and flipping in relatively short periods of time.

We, as a community, have a really nasty habit of assigning a value to a card the max that card may have been able to sell for at any given point in time and considering anything below that “a loss”. It’s a really foolish way to approach MTG finance IMO.

One of the problems here is that a lot of people like to alter cards already.

I know a few people that got bargain bin power because it’s in horrible shape, paid a good alterer to clean it up and then it’s suddenly both sleeve-playable and looks great.

Gold bordered cards without any other meaningful difference opens up this realm of possibility in a big way.

…and the answer to the problem is *not* to disallow alters.

As far as what it would do to the value of cards on the reserved list, I actually think it would have far less impact than everyone’s gut reaction tells them. Twenty plus years means that we have multiple generations invested in Magic. While the original Power 9 and some of the rest of the reserved list definitely have value because of play value; don’t most of those same cards hold their value because of collectibility and nostalgia? Sure, there may be a short term drop, but I don’t think it would tank the whole market.

Kill two birds with one stone by creating a sweet supplemental product and also injecting more cards into Modern’s supply.

A lot of what drives Vintage is the resale quality of the decks. While the initial investment in your Power Nine is massive, those cards hold their value exceptionally well. Since most Vintage tournaments offer significant prizes (often Power Nine cards in and of themselves), you can reasonably pour out the initial investment, play in a few Vintage tournaments, win one for a Mox Emerald, and then sell the original Vintage deck. If you’re heavy into the Vintage scene, you can even just keep the deck and sell the proceeds to recoup your cost.

Reprinting these cards destroys that, because even a 1% drop in the value of these cards is a loss of a hundred dollars or more for serious Vintage players. That’s the real issue. The issue of forging cards in tournaments is something that is already a much bigger issue with photo-quality printing.

As for the possibility of a Cube product, I would prefer to see something outside of the standard Cube box. While powered Cubes are fun, they’re also the first Cube anyone makes, because Black Lotuses. Instead, I would like to see a Cube product which combines the Ravnica or Mirrodin blocks, or picks a number of blocks throughout history and mashes them together, reprinting a number of the cards that could use a reprint, while providing a standalone experience different than most.

Why not a Cube centered around their returning mechanics? Odyssey and Innistrad have a tie with Flashback, Onslaught and Khans have a tie in Morph. A selection of a couple thousand cards is enough to make a viable Cube, and presents a product which ties into Magic’s greatest untapped resource: It’s history.

I doubt the value proposition of selling a $200+ product to casual gamers though. Only fairly hard core table top gamers will fork over $70+ for higher end board games. It wouldn’t even need to be nearly that expensive. Many packaged card games came sell with several hundred cards for $40-50 and still make tons of money.