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"Ticket scalpers sue venue for adding more seating capacity, says it erodes their profitability"
this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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I feel like people here may be missing the point. The headline is poorly-worded.
The problem is not that they are printing too many duplicates of a card set, and lowering the price. The problem is that they are making too many card sets!
Their MO here lately has been to push some wild new exciting Universes Beyond set, like Final Fantasy, or Doctor Who, or Lord of the Rings, or whatever. They hype this thing up, it comes out to big fanfare, and then it's immediately on to the next one in the next quarter.
They are pumping these out as fast as possible, and it's pissing everybody off. Steamers are sick of it. Players are sick of it. Investors are sick of it. Tolarian Community College has been very vocal about how this shit has been ruining the game and diluting the game into a random soup of somebody else's lore. Their own teams have a hard time balancing the game because of the dizzying pace, and there's been so many cases of standard being left with some broken card fucking up the format for months.
This lawsuit is a good thing.
Steamers? 😂 Like pressure cookers?
I was wondering if it was a misspelling of Streamer....
...why dont they just buy/play something else?
Magic is unique and already has decades of history with set game modes, metas and very well thought out card pools people already enjoy. With how the cards are structured, people have also made other game modes from the cards, which adds a level of sandbox-iness that doesn't exist in most other games.
Cards aren't also typically power scaled to irrelevance, so people's history with the game usually carries forward to eternal formats.
Also, the community is already overwhelmingly pro-proxy for certain formats / game modes, and being pro-proxy is seeping into other formats too. Everytime shit like this happens with WotC/Hasbro, the default reaction from a lot of people is "I'll just proxy the cards".
I’ve tried a few TCGs (Pokémon, Yu Gi Oh, Magic, and virtual ones like Gwent, Hearthstone, and Runeterra).
Magic remains my favorite by far and is the one I keep coming back to most consistently.
First of all, play what? Uno?
Secondly, don't you ever get tired of picking up your life and moving somewhere else every time some idiot decides to shit in your living room?
Sorry if you're asking this in earnest, by the way. I just find this unwillingness to believe in a better world infuriating. I don't play magic, but I will stand up for people standing up for themselves.
[edit]
which they say risked saturating the market and reducing the value of existing cards on the secondary market.
@p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com, is it that this lawsuit is a good thing in spite of it being filed by weirdos? I feel like I've scarcely heard of that ever paying off.
I've been playing Sorcery, it's really good!
yea the amount of sets are insane
For the first time ever, I opened a bundle to realize the dice straight up hadn't been included. I opened a ticket after showing proof of purchase and was told Wizards was experiencing a higher than normal volume for returns and issues, so it'd be while before I saw it.
I wonder if others are experiencing a decrease in quality or if I was just unlucky?
its because of UB IP,
What's UB?
"Universes Beyond". It's the collection of sets where they feature other companies' IP (e.g. Lord of the Rings, Avatar, Fortnite, etc.)
Oh no! My speculative buying of shitloads of MTG cards to make money selling the good ones is failing! People might have access to the best cards without spending copious amounts of money to middlemen! It’s very dangerous to the game if people can be good at it without it being rich!
i heard its quite expensive now to get into physical MTG, because of the chase cards of UB. they also dont have easy physical to online mtg pipeline either.
It's not the card speculators suing, it's the corpo investors.
The way I read the article, the plaintiff is both, but it doesn't explicitly say that. It just makes sense that plaintiff is both a player, using the scarcity to their advantage, and also an investor in the company -- i.e. losing $$$ in both cases. I'll be curious to see if this suit goes anywhere.
To be fair, the reserve list's existence has set the precedent that WotC approves of this behavior at least a little.
To also be fair, the last time the reserve list was updated was 2010, and the newest card that's on the reserve list is from 1999.
People might have access to the best cards without spending copious amounts of money to middlemen!
I mean, you joke, but this isn't an unreasonable critique. A big component of the MTG popularity boom was the regular distribution chain, necessitating a huge constellation of second-hand collectors and traders. Overproducing deck-specific cards that flood the market destroys the baseload of people buying cards from the retailer.
Hasbro is effectively eating its own seed corn. It's fucking over the people who will buy a thousand boxes of crap looking for half a dozen copies of the card that sells secondhand for a profitable margin.
It’s very dangerous to the game if people can be good at it without it being rich!
Outside a few niche vintage and legacy tournaments, you can be very good at the game without needing to own the highest end cards. Plenty of people run pauper decks that can outperform the high end decks when played with a working knowledge of what those high end decks try to do (ie, The Meta). Mono-green elves and mono-red goblins have dominated the game space practically since its inception. You'll rarely find a release year where you struggle to build one of these decks for less than $50. And that's assuming you and a few friends don't draft regularly and luck into the right cards, then trade among yourselves to build a winning board.
What Hasbro is doing is more akin to the Louvre coming out with identical print copies of high end auctioned paintings. I'd say the bigger complaint isn't that they're doing this so much as that they're getting in on a game third-party forgers have been playing for decades.
You can go online and find an Unlimited series duplicate Mox Emerald for maybe $20. And it'll pass muster at any game table in America that doesn't have a professional on staff to check its print number.
Talking budget decks and then quoting a budget format is misleading when talking about price to pay magic. So is using proxy prices when talking about the prices wizards is setting.
The standard budget deck right now is 500$ (Izzet Lessons)
(Standard) Sultai Reanimator is 850$
(Standard) Bant Airbending is 800$
(Standard) Simic Ouroboroid is 900$
(Modern) Boris Energy is 850$
(Modern) Belcher is 350-450$
(Modern) Amulet Titan is 950$
Vivi cauldron led to a one deck standard and cost about 1000$
Wizards pricing and printing policy has led to only proxy/casual formats and budget formats being affordable to play. It’s why formats like Pioneer are basically dead and standard is nearly on life support at local most LGS. My metro area has dropped standard night from all but one game store.
Talking budget decks and then quoting a budget format is misleading
The standard budget deck right now is 500$ (Izzet Lessons)
You can build Black/Red Blight Goblins for $21 or a Mono-Blue Towns deck for $20. Both play competitively.
Vivi cauldron led to a one deck standard and cost about 1000$
That's because Vivi Ornitier runs $100/ea and Agatha's Soul Cauldron runs another $130/ea. Don't build a deck where a single card is going to run you three figures. Problem solved.
It’s why formats like Pioneer are basically dead and standard is nearly on life support at local most LGS.
Well, that and the online scene cutting into the physical game's player base, sure.
Competitive where? At the LGS the weaker end of decks you are going to run into for standard are things like bunnies, boros burn, collectors cage, landfall, temur combo, roots, dimir tempo, mono white tokens, esper control, sultai control, and esper/dimir self bounce.
Most of these decks are still expensive because any mythic play piece right now is expensive and deck defining.
Many playable uncommons like stock up and boltwave are multiple dollars a pop.
Most of these decks are using play pieces that are printed for commander or other eternal formats that keep prices high.
The land base in standard is crazy expensive. All of the uncommon lands are tap lands that cause you to die on the spot to aggro decks since standard is a turn 3-4 format and the land base is largely coming from either shock lands that are expensive as they are good in nearly every format, verges that are underprinted, and starting town/multiversal that are underprinted.
For me it was the combination of burn-out from trying to get "good" at MTG while best results being top eight in GPQs, PTQs, and perhaps day two in GPs, and the focus on EDH. Tried dipping my toe in last year and just being overwhelmed by the insane amount of product. Even within the same set. For me part of the fun was "solving" the limited formats for each set. But now draft is its own boosters?
I've never noticed a print number on my mox or lotus. And I got them in 92 from flow-packs.
Ah, my mistake. They didn't even do collector numbers until Exodus. God damn, that's crazy in hindsight. Makes counterfeiting almost trivial.
We regularly planed the face off cards - like forests - and glued on a colour copy of a pricey card in its place.
But since we were good people, and even though the fakes would fool a kid or a noob, and even shuffle and cut the same, we intentionally sprinkled the copier with yellow confetti so each fake would have some obvious yellow dots.
And we'd ensure everyone knew: "these 6 cards are proxies for these other 6 cards, and in an ante game you win the real card with the proxy. Fair?" It was usually cool.
Our white-hat counterfeiting game was on point. And card sleeves were lame. ;-)
I mean, I played with people who would just scrawl the name of the card over the top of another card in sharpie. Some of them even had a real copy of a card (bricked up in some two inch thick display case), but others would just be - like - "This is a card I wish I had" and we'd have fun playing because it's fun to be across the table from someone with Power Nine tech.
Last time I was active was 10 years ago just as EDH was taking off. Buying the expensive early cards necessitated quite a lot of knowledge and a decent jewelers loupe. I can just imagine how hard it is today with the counterfeiters getting better.
“We’re selling a game. You treat it like an investment when we just want more people to play. Please, accept our invitation to go fuck yourselves.”
Not what's happening. Hasbro isn't making rare cards more available, it's printing too many sets. Each new set comes with new keywords and mechanics, meaning the strongest decks always have cards from the latest set. As a result, Hasbro has essentially required players to spend more each year in order to stay competitive.
Hasbro is the anti-player party in this, not the plaintiff.
glances at Pokemon
pokemon's problem is scalpers, and them not increasing the pull rates, or printing enough. pokemon also has pretty severe limitations in STANDARD, everytime a rotation happens whole decks strategy gets wiped out. they rarely reprint old cards to stabalize the format. pokemon has problems of thier own.
Yeah, right. I dare you to find a Pokemon vending machine that's not out of stock...
“Once I got all the rare cards, you were suppose to stop! Now I’m losing my edge!”
So if they win, it becomes illegal in the US to make fun games with investor money?
Of course anyone can sue anyone for anything. So just because the lawsuit exists, doesn't mean much
So they want Hasbro to print less MtG cards to prop up the secondary market because profits were not high enough?
If you're still playing this game and not using proxies you're part of the problem.
Also consider: Buying used from (ex) players
Where can I get decent proxies?
mpcfill is pretty widely used