1. Its time for ticket decimalization and pay outs in fully convertible fractional tickets. Problem solved.

  2. @Mike, that will be a great solution that would cost Wizards a lot of money. The kind of system that MODO uses is all about hiding money behind as money layers as possible – so you have to trade with tix, boosters and cards in MODO, which hides well the amount of money you pour in. Making fractions of Tix would make them more like dollars, thus breaking some of the effect. I do not anticipate this will happen any time soon.

  3. I also believe that making fractions of tickets will push MTGO further into the “online gambling” territory, which is the farthest things from what WotC would want to do. We’re stuck with whole tix for the foreseeable future, unfortunately.

  4. One thing they could do is create a new ticket. Lets call it Ticket++ and have a trade in system to give out 100 Ticket++’s for 1 event ticket. Change cost of everything ticket related to x100 and then sell 100 tickets for a $1. Still do everything in whole amounts.

    Draft for 1600 ticket++ or product plus 200

    Bots would have to be rewritten.

    I am not an online law expert or anything thing like that. I am just an unfrozen caveman who barely understands your complex law system.

  5. I am very happy to have a 7:30PM EST Legacy Daily, but as you say the value for playing is worse than Standard, which makes no sense. WotC is not rewarding me for wanting to play Legacy. I feel like now I have to root for other people to get suckered into Eternal formats so that I can sell them the staples I own. I think that WotC has a very clear bias to favoring limited formats over constructed. What will happen when we switch to the new client? If you have tried to play a match where the graveyard matters, the new UI is horrible, this will make the Legacy playing experience even worse.

  6. I’m not sure why they didn’t just do 3 packs for 3-1 in a Legacy/Vintage DE to keep it close to Standard/Modern DE payouts. It makes everybody that does 3-1 feel bad if its just 2 packs, which is the majority of what people who prize will get.

    I understand the push for PE’s, but PE’s are not popular to begin with. The only reason people play in tournaments of that length IRL is because there is also value in playing with a real person. When I bomb out in an IRL event, I don’t feel bad. I hung out with friends and played games. When I bomb out in Magic Online, I feel like I wasted my time. Online play is much more miserable and at times feels like work rather than play.

    Given the fact that Vintage will have a much smaller player base than Standard/Modern, they’re better served giving the Vintage DE better prize support, eliminating Vintage PE’s, then restore Vintage PE’s when the format is popular enough to have PE’s fire regularly. At that point you could reduce the DE prizes and pump them back into PE’s.

    That said, I don’t play Vintage/Legacy so that’s about as an unbaised opinion you might get.

  7. @Satan Herself Tickets are only worth anything because they can be used to transact with Wizards itself. The “greater fool” theory of money has been thoroughly debunked. As long as wizards essentially “taxes” by charging a few tickets to draft (on top of the product), and charges entry fees in tickets, tickets will be a de facto currency. Basically, to enjoy magic online other than just playing casual matches, one MUST obtain tickets.

    Wizards has a full monopoly on tickets, and that’s okay. The US government has a full monopoly on the US dollar, and the Japanese government has full monopoly on the Yen. What I take issue with is that Wizards chooses not to supply an easy way to decimilize tickets. It would make the event ticket a more attractive medium of exchange and thus make wizards money in the long run. (Imagine if the US government refused to issue coins but forced everyone to use the dollar anyway with its legal tender laws and taxing powers) Convertibility is another issue. While I would like to see limited convertibility, its not essential as the MODO economy is healthy, and tickets continue to hold value precisely beacuse people want to play in tournaments and draft and thus must obtain tickets.

  8. You guys realize 2 VMA Boosters are worth the same as 6 Standard Boosters right now? They are just super cheap at the moment.

  9. Sorry, I would log in, but the site appears to be in maintenance or something.

    @Cinderspirit: We can’t evaluate aftermarket prices in relation to decisions that WotC makes because they have always claimed that they do not care about after market prices. The point is, they deal only in MSRP. There are never any sales and there are never any fluctuations in entry fee resulting from aftermarket prices. We are thus only left with judging their decision on the MSRP; it is only a mere coincidence that Standard packs are nearly worthless. In previous years (where the $25 redemption fee did not exist) the prices were generally well over 3 tix per pack, and VM will not be $7 for much longer when draft prizes are being pushed so hard)

    Speaking to that, it is WotC’s own fault for that.that Standard pack prices are junk. The Theros block was not nearly as good as previous years, from what little I have gathered on the subject. Even that has had a fraction of the impact that the 250% increase of redemption fees have had. There is no doubt that the $25 fee was not eaten by the redeemers, but the players. It’s yet another in a long line of terrible decisions that WotC has made over the last couple of years. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if the redemption fee was still $5.