Because the whole Reserve List kefuffle is all really about Dual Lands, right? Anyway, this discussion/debate/argument spans many forums and threads. I've been weighing in here and there, but I've been mostly winging it so far, and I think I'd like to be a little more informed on the subject.

What I'm looking for primarily here, is links to Rosewater articles, or any of the columns from Fridays (Forsyth, LaPille etc) where they talk about the limitations of reprinting Dual Lands and the like.

But then why limit this thread to just that? If you find links to the contrary, something that helps prove that they should be reprinted, post/quote them here too, and we can continue/get our discussions on in one happy, fun-loving place.
:pmohappy:

Screw the reserve list. Give duals out as promos.

Edit: I guess I should sell the 40 duals in my closet about now, right?

Yes, to me.
:trey:

ok. send me monies.

Monies sent. Send cards.

While this article may be a little dated at 2003, here is a quote from it:

So I guess maybe they could have changed or might one day their mind on this, but it seems unlikely. I think everyone knows this, and knows this is why we won't see Dual Lands in a base set or expansion. Getting further original Dual Lands into the market is probably a different argument, but this shows why that argument exists, I think.

When people say "Reprint the duals!" is the goal to try to lower the price of duals?

I'm pretty sure this is their goal. They say it's so more and more people can play Legacy competitively, but I think it's just because they're complaining about the price of Dual Lands.

This article from 2002 shows that the CMU guys now or previously in RnD (Turian, Forsythe and Buehler, but I don't know about Lauer) are pretty much all behind reprinting the Dual Lands.

Forsythe said as much on twitter last night:

The stated argument is to increase the availability of the dual lands to allow people to have a wider selection of playable decks in Legacy, but increasing availability will of course correspond to a decrease in price.

Perhaps if they released a "From the Vaults: Dual Lands" box set that had 10 dual lands for $400 (or whatever 10 dual lands sells for these days) they could satisfy the increase of availability without decreasing price, but I can already hear the cries of "Wizards are just trying to print money"

I'm open to certain arguments, but reprinting dual lands to make Legacy more accessible is not one of them.

Didn't we just have the biggest constructed tournament EVER less than a month ago... in Legacy? Doesn't sound like accessibility is a problem, to me.
Yes, I own 75 dual lands, so my opinion doesn't count.

I think the argument, though, is that many people playing in that Legacy tournament were only able to play one of a small section of decks - that is, those with only one colour (hence so many Merfolk decks). As I understand it, the popularity of Legacy is an argument to reprint duals so that more people can play it with a wider variety of available decks.

In KL I spoke to a level 3 judge who was at Madrid. 1600 of the players were local. His estimate was no more than 400-500 players had fully functioning Legacy decks.

I think all the crying is coming from people who want in to Legacy, but don't have the cards (Dual Lands) yet.

Had GP: Madrid been Standard, we would have had the largest tournament ever... in Standard. (all right, perhaps not, but I would have bet any amount of money in advance of the tournament that it would have at least tied Paris)

Over at SCG today the judge that writes the judge column was like "Madrid beat Paris in attendance. This record will be hard to break."

No it will not. Hold a GP in Europe again. GPs in Europe are always goddamn huge.

Yes, Legacy does produce unexpectedly large turnouts, but jeez.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but Even Erwin put it quite well this week why the Reserve List should go, and I find myself asking, seriously, what dealer would really lose confidence if they scrapped it? Part of me knows this isn't as simplistic as he's put it, but oh well.

I mean seriously, it looks like R&D hosted some kind of get together to discuss this, and no doubt then further tendered a proposal based on the outcomes to whoever would make the final decision (Brand? Legal?) and they were turned down flatly, which would - to me - indicate factors R&D beyond their scope. I'm not really sure there's much more than can be said about it.

So for those of us who are half-paying-attention to this, is this indicating that it is likely or unlikely that dual lands will be reprinted, and based on what?

Completely impossible based on them revising the RL to exclude ever breaking it ever and announcing every card that will ever do so again, i.e. this year, to the point of spoiling a third of From the Vault: Relics, which doesn't come out until late August.

For them to reprint duals now, they would have to explicitly rewrite policy in exactly the opposite manner from the one they just did yesterday.

I think (hope) that it's clear that if the reserved list didn't exist, it would be the most asinine decision ever made to create one today.

I've followed the debates VERY extensively, and no one, not even among the most hardcore pro-list people, has suggested expanding the list to cover the valuable cards that aren't on the list already (Goyf, power uncommons like Mana Drain and Force of Will, P3K cards). I think that's testament to just how backwards and retarded the concept of a reserved list is.

That's not to say that Wizards should print everything all the time, but to highlight how foolish it is to promise NOT to reprint certain cards, ever.

--------------

It's also pretty obvious that R&D did not make this decision (Forsythe: "Sometimes the desires of the individual (me, others) and the needs of the corporation do not align. Won't be much more of an explanation."). Maro and others have repeatedly said, "We hate this old promise, it already fucked up the Slivers box set, we can tell it hurts Eternal formats, but we don't know how to get around it or out of it" and now it's harder than ever. Forsythe tweeted that "Hasbro was not a factor in anything" (http://twitter.com/mtgaaron/status/10660373048) so it pretty much had to be another department of WotC - probably Brand, as noted.

Forsythe also said, "Why would we stop pushing a format that has given us our largest attendance ever? Is there a better metric I don't know about?" (http://twitter.com/mtgaaron/status/10656906946) I do not know what this means for the future of (paper) Legacy. R&D are not stupid, they know that duals (and other cards, but chiefly duals) are a huge upper limit on how big Legacy can be.

Are they planning on banning the duals and printing new, slightly-different versions in a not-Standard-legal set? Just the ban? Nothing? Who can tell. It seems almost impossible that they could decrease demand for duals except by such rules changes. I can't imagine them printing hate cards so severe that it caused people to NOT run duals in their multicolor decks, or any lands so good they obsoleted the A/B/U/R duals.

I also heard that someone once said that FoW would never be reprinted on MTGO, but that's hearsay and I don't know much about MTGO policies. Wizards are apparently big on pushing MTGO legacy; the new policy explicitly makes a loophole for digital cards, and a good thing too, because MTGO Legacy staples are currently at or above their paper counterparts (I read that FOW online is like $75, LED is $50, etc.) and prices are set to rise steeply there.

So in other words they're trying to send Legacy completely online?

That is the tinfoil-hat position, certainly. If so, I think they've badly miscalculated. I would be shocked if even 1/10 of the current paper legacy playerbase transitioned to online. In my experience, Legacy players HATE mtgo. I guess some of the online players might pick up online legacy, but that would only make the paper situation worse, as some portion of those players will likely want to play the format in paper, too.

EErwin tweets: "Thought: Is WotC Legal responsible for the Reprint Policy change? The key may be in something called Estoppel http://bit.ly/da3hTm"

Also, for reference: Maro's tweet: "RE: The Reserved List - It's hard to defend a decision I can't talk about. It's just something we're going to have to live with. :(" (http://twitter.com/maro254/status/10660474717)

Not just duals, but yes, the immediate issue is that Legacy is very expensive, and many people would like it to be cheaper. Not just have-nots, though! Many, many people who have all or most of their $taples are/were in favor of reprints of some kind. Most people who 'got theirs' still want reprints, even if their own collection devalues some (the specific amount of loss people are willing to take varies obviously).

The secondary issue is that Legacy is getting more expensive, and worryingly so. One issue is that once prices rise so high that people cash out and quit, even if prices fall back, it will be too late. These things have inertia; people tend to move on to other formats (or other hobbies), and won't return even at a lower price once they've quit. I don't know the fancy economic term for the phenomenon, but the idea is that the minimum price it takes to get someone to cash out is higher than the maximum price the same person is willing to pay to buy in.

Just to clarify, it's my tongue-in-cheek position. I'm solely an online player these days, but used to like Legacy before I gave up the physical cardboard. I really have no vested interest in this either way as I don't get time to get out and play in a physical tournament.

The people will cash out and quit theory holds no water with me. Sure, they may do it, but I don't think that will devalue Dual Lands (or Force of Will) lower than they are now.

The prices went up SIGNIFICANTLY as a result. There is a supply problem. There were enough dual lands for that one tournament, but now some of them are 90 dollars.

I frankly doubt the sway of dual lands alone addressing the barrier of entry problem. It helps, sure, but I don't see Standard-only players busting an Underground Sea in draft and then going off to trade for Forces, LED, Mox Diamond, etc. Let's keep our fingers crossed for From the Vault: Playsets of Legacy Staples?

Well Mox Diamond is stated to be in the next FTV: Relics. Force of will is a problem, but since it was an uncommon in a set with a decent print run, it's availability isn't as drastic. Before the Legacy spike they were $30. Now they're $45-50. Compare Underground Sea which went from $30 to $65-70 in the same time.

I think that's the biggest indicator just how few Duals we have. FoW and Tropical Island were the same price a few years ago. They see similar use, but one has gone up $15 and one has gone up $25. Also while all the graphs on findmagiccards.com claim each card is worth much less than the price they're selling for, you can see that FoW plateau'd between 2005 and a few months ago, while the duals are just climbing.

I can see where you're coming from; I don't really think think it will happen, either. But even if not, it doesn't actually fix the problem - if people just quit without cashing out, that removes even more copies of staple cards from the usable supply, so prices still don't come down under that scenario either.

Also, as someone pointed out, there are "network effects" - to play legacy, you need a legacy deck, and somebody else with a legacy deck. Even if you have all your duals etc., if you're the only guy in town that does, you can't play legacy. That's the (another) problem with the "so what if it's a rich man's format?" attitude: to actually have a legacy scene, legacy can't be priced such that the players are too isolated from each other. This is true of Magic as a whole, but it's just not a relevant issue for standard, or extended, or draft, or whatever.

Coincidentally, this problem pretty much goes away on MTGO, although it can still happen (some draft queues of unpopular sets have difficulty firing because while there may be enough players, if they don't share available hours, they can't get to 8 at once).

Right, but duals are a good proxy (heh) for all the relevant cards, because they're the most widely-used. As Menendian put it, Tropical Island is about as relevant to Legacy as basic Island is to standard.

BBleiweiss made (I thought) a good arguement that just reprinting the non-reserved list cards isn't a real fix either. If reprints make Goyf and FoW cheap enough for anyone to reasonably acquire (say $20-30 each), a player with both now has additional incentive to get that Tropical Island - increasing demand for it, and driving the price higher. (I guess it could also drive the price of FoW and Goyf lower if there's a sizable pile of them in people's hands that they can't use without the missing piece, but that seems less likely to me.)

I have to disagree with this somewhat. I guess I'm not doing daily events or premiere events often, but if I have to wait more than 10 minutes for any queue to fire, I have to love that format to stay in it. I would guess others share this and don't always play what they love but what will fire soon.

I'm basing that off of some articles I read (I think Peter Jahn's on SCG) where he tries to draft MED1/2 or Mirage block and gives up after an hour of waiting. Does anyone here who plays Classic run into this problem?

I do get that that's a problem, I just don't feel that duals alone are the panacea. Tarmogoyf, a card that saw print fairly recently, is now selling for than every Revised dual on FindMagicCards (Underground Sea at $70, Goyf for $80) and more than all of them except Underground Sea on Star City (at $85, Goyf at $80). At $50 on Star City, Force of Will is pretty much the 11th Dual, beaten only by Tundra, Underground Sea, and Tropical Island, and tied with Bayou, Taiga, and Volcanic Island.

Considering that both of the sites I went to have these cards for sale, I don't know how large of an issue availability is in regards to the duals: Star City has duals and Tarmogoyfs but no Force of Wills. This argues either a spike in demand based on deck results (and I'm no Legacy pundit so I can't comment to this, beyond saying spikes in prices usually affect single cards integral to the deck: see Flash) or that the prices are being set based on expected demand and utility rather than actual scarcity. Worst-case scenario eBay exists.

All I'm trying to get across is that the cards are there and that the internet exists, and that price based on "value" of the card in regards to playability instead of demand on individual units is what's driving prices. It's a different set of predictions: people know what their cards are "worth" as opposed to "what I could get for it on eBay with an open auction". Here's an example: Reprinting Oath of Druids would have zero effect on its value because there's 67 of them on Star City for $10 now. It doesn't sell for $10 because of supply and demand, quite opposite that actually, considering that the price on that card has been $10 since it was still legal in Extended (not accounting for large gulfs of time where I wasn't analyzing Oath's value, so please spare me temporary spikes).

I guess the argument goes something like this: reprinting dual lands and Legacy staples only makes acquiring them easier, not cheaper. You'll find kids at your local store that busted one in a pack and trade him for a Nocturnus or something and then you're still faced with finding three more. Is the lesson here, then, that if you want to see staples reprinted, draft more? I think I'd be willing to accept that offer.

gpr, you have two really good points and I'll try to tackle them

Tarmogoyf: Tarmogoyf will probably never again go below $50 and for that it's the 12th dual or whatever we want to call it. I think a large part of it's price above $50 is the fact that it's extremely useful in extended, a format which transformed a junk legendary land from Coldsnap into a $30 card. But also, since Tarmogoyf is "future-printed" as well as a modern rare, there's a possibility Wizards can reprint it, promotional or not, to increase the pool of available Tarmogoyfs. Goyf I would say is in the position the Dual Lands were a week ago: It's a problem wizards needs to solve eventually if people are still going to play Legacy but they have a number of options open to them to do so (same with FoW, actually). Wizards doesn't have any contract that they can't/won't print more FoWs or Tarmogoyfs, and I think everyone would love FoW judge foils. Also, I would guess there's probably as many Goyfs in the available card pool as there are all the dual lands.

Oath of Druids: I'm conceding this point to you because you're absolutely right on this one. I look at Oath, conjure up a few decks I remember it being in, and say "yeah, that seems like a $10 card." I traded for 4 when Vintage was on the upswing and it was $10 back then. But I guess for me and many others, when we look at duals we say "This is a $40 card" and we go back and find out it's jumped up to $60.

The most popular deck was 3 color Zoo by a LARGE margin, and this is a very common occurence in the US events as well. If you needed to build a cheap deck, Zoo is NOT it. All the Duals, all the fetches, and oh yeah - Tarmogoyfs.
If you want to build EVERY deck in Legacy, it's going to cost more than if you wanted to build every deck in Standard. There's more cards in the pool, it's practically a tautology. But the same is true for Vintage, and I don't think there's any good arguments to reprint Moxes.

I think if they held more than one Legacy GP per continent per year, you'd see lower turnout. I'm very curious what the SCG 5K series will do to GP Columbus' attendance.

Makes sense. I'd argue the same thing happens in Standard (Baneslayer, Jace) but I know it's not to the same degree. I feel this is not only a money issue though - when FNM is usually Standard (and CAN'T be Legacy), more people buy Standard cards.

"Nowadays, reprints bolster older cards' value and remind players of their awesomeness."
Evan Erwin showed a picture of Timeshifted Akroma during this quote. I facepalmed. Akroma nearly halved in value thanks to the reprint. Psionic Blast got DESTROYED in value.
You want to reprint Underground Sea for non-Standard use? You're right, it won't affect Beta's price. Nobody is buying $800 Beta Seas just so they can tap for blue and black. But it sure as Hell will affect Revised's price.

IAWTC.

I didn't know that Oath was that valuable... I think I might sell mine if I can remember where I put my cards in storage.

You'd probably only get $6-7 on eBay, but hey, money is money.

I read $60 from some mook in this thread. <_<

Oh well. I think I have some Wastelands.

The only way I see Revised/Unlimited duals taking a hit in price by a reprinted duals set would be if the reprints were black-bordered. Even then I'd bet the Alpha and Beta versions would see the larger hit, because of the premium people are willing to pay to have black-bordered cards, etc. There's a larger reason that Alpha and Beta duals command a higher price, and it's not the lack of them floating around, because the internet removes most marketplace scarcity.

There's eight listings for Beta Underground Seas on eBay right now, the American one anyway. How many of them do you think will go unsold because of their price, or some other factor (lack of information in the listing, etc)?

Regarding your examples of Akroma and Psionic Blast, they're fair points in that reprints killed the original value, but their prices after the fact indicate that they were previously overpriced and that the demand simply wasn't there. They were collector's pieces and casual fodder, not actual playable cards (in their respective formats -- this is obviously ignoring their Standard incarnations). Players all suddenly realized that there was no real reason for Psionic Blast to be $40+ (or however much it was). I imagine if Ice Storm were reprinted you'd see the same phenomena, or Juzam Djinn, or any other card that is priced "because that's what it's worth", not because of how good the card is.

First point, I would be interested to see what proportion of those Zoo players were using a mix of dual land and shockland due to availability. Second, fetches are in-print, which reduces that aspect of the cost considerably. Thirdly, they may well have Tarmogoyfs already given their extensive play in Block, Standard and Extended. Sure, in a vacuum Tarmogoyf costs the same as Underground Sea, but far fewer people will have Seas sitting around that they've needed for other things. If you have Zendikar fetches, Ravnica duals and Tarmogoyfs, building Zoo is not really going to be that expensive, and you can substitute in any duals you can find/borrow/whatever if you can get them.

Second point, just unsure about Psionic Blast - did the value tank when Time Spiral was released, or when it was reprinted -again- as a Player Rewards textless spell and sent out in huge quantities for free? For a quick and recent contrast, see Reflecting Pool.

In general, I would say that Grand Prix are not necessarily a great indicator for another reason - a local area that had a Grand Prix Trial for Madrid will have sent someone to the Grand Prix with a travel award, three byes, and very likely a deck built from the accumulated duals and other Legacy cards from their entire circle of friends. That is not a sustainable situation if you want to build the format beyond small, not-very-competitive Grand Prix Trials and 1-2 Grand Prix a year.

WotC should reprint duals so I can get some of them for cheap :pmoteach:

I'm glad someone touched this point because I forgot to. Last time I heard giving things away for free tends to tank what you can sell them for later.