Thread by @mathiasrah

Since I spent like, 30 minutes writing this to comment @Spice8Rack's new video. I'll bring the debate to public:

(... cont)

Magic the Gathering has been a great way for me to enjoy socializing and exercise my mind for as long as the original Mirrodin block started. (+)

As I started to radicalize and understand better the implications of my trade, the consumption of my hobby and what it means to invest my hard earned money in one of the, if not the, most expensive hobby evers (still, less than warhammer) (+)

It began to down on me that part of the enjoyment came from the ability of being able to pay and showoff expensive decks and participate in extremely pricey metas.

This dawned on me in the middle of the last year, when I was, without blinking, spending 1000 Brazilian Reals on cards, mind you, our minimum wage is about 1200 monthly. I am fortunate enough to have a well paying job, but not enough that 1000 bucks would mean nothing.

As I started to wander away from investing in the hobby and keep myself competitive, the opportunity of getting high-quality proxies arose from one of the players at the local LGS.

I was able to get a full CMD deck printed in amazing quallity for about 200 Reals, which is about a quarter of the price of a competitive, yet fair, deck.

What I was not prepared for was how people were treating proxies in local circuits. Basically shaking their heads and feeling 'cheated' when a player would show up with a printed deck.

A sentiment of "You're not worth it, since you have not destroyed your monthly budget to play with the big kids". I have heard even from professionals, and people who play and talk about magic for a living that "proxies are disrespectful towards those who have bought the cards".

People play against wallets, not other people.

Which again, kinda makes the point of the playerbase being one of the most important cornerstones on the hyperreality that makes up the hobby of magic. They're now enforcing company policies and preferences, even though the company itself is retracting their business from Brazil

As a trading card game, trading is on it's name, it's part of the process and I think is neat that people are engaging with each other in an 'open market' to get what their want. Except the open market is controlled by partners of the distributors and stores that own the sites.

We are already seeing how distributors (at least in brazil) are pressuring local game stores more and more, demanding upfront payment of an absurdly marked-up product, without time for consumers to consume, leading to overpriced products that will never see the light of day (+)

until they're opened up by big stores to be sold as singles. MH3 marks a record on price, making so that pre-release events are economically unviable for both the players and stores.

Stores that have pre-release kits and are selling them for low prices, are getting free prize boosters from wizards, opening them, and selling the singles, without ever getting the prizes to the consumer's hands.

With the upcoming "Pokemonification" (the Fortnitefication but with cute characters) with Bloomburrow. We can only wonder the steps that will continue making competitive play unaccessible, absurdely more complicated and, with licenses probably falling through, (+)

we're creating a new, unnoficial (yet official) reserved list that will make magic investors and speculators shit their pants in excitement.

I don't think there's such a thing as a 'death' for magic, specially with such an engaged community. We're seeing a rebirth of Legacy as a format in Brazil, mostly due to the possibility of proxying cards in the reserved list and some, proxying a set number of cards.

Fans and Hasbro should be more open to new players, we should have more open houses, if we wait for new and exciting crossovers to bring attention back to magic, there will be only so much crossovering left until cards are unavailable, formats are dead and the lore gone.

It's like waiting for capitalism to fix capitalism.

Please come to Brazil @Spice8Rack

@threadreaderapp unroll