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Collecting - The Disease
An anonymous reader writes "Gamers With Jobs has an interesting piece this morning on the nature of collectibility in games. While primarily a personal account of one man's journey into the hell that is Magic: the Gathering, it raises interesting questions about the difference between real-world and virtual-world collecting, and the economic motivations behind both." From the article: "I sit down. I play. I get schooled by a 12-year-old for two hours as he teaches me the ropes with a condescension reserved for teenagers with grownups by the throat. Each game is a bet — loser gives the winner the top card off his deck: Ante. I leave a dozen cards short. I had discovered a great game, and people to play it against. But that's not why the night sits burned into my brain with razor sharp clarity. No, it's because that Tuesday night in San Francisco, I became a collector."
once you realize that the value of your collection doesn't lay in it's internal value (they're just cards or china or whatever) or your enjoyment using the collection (most collections are sealed away. Even if you do use them, how could you possibly get real use out of 100 cars or 1000 beanie babies?), then the only thing you have left is monetary value and bragging rights. And you only have monetary value and bragging rights, really, with other collectors. Did you tell your aunt polly about your Star Wars figure collection? What did she say? "Bad-ass"? Sure she did.
I have been caught up in the collecting bug in the past and as soon as I'm done, I just wonder where all my time/money/space/soul has gone.
Where are you Pogs now?
TW
I would say gamers with rich parents, because that game requires one to invest a lot of time in it as well as money. The cards are constantly changing and what may be a decent deck one year will get smashed the next(provided you aren't playing with the uber-powerful, uber expensive cards)
Money and time are the reasons I gave it up.
Monstar L
I may lose a few, but I build my decks myself, from cards I get either from lots, pre-built decks from WotC (which I buy to get used to new mechanics, and usually rip apart after a few games) or booster packs. When I beat someone, it's with a deck I built, not one I copied from someone else.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Magic world championship
It looks likes it's only 50,000 - but that's understandable given the somewhat smaller player base/television exposure/connections to real-money-gambling/etc...
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I thought this article was a bit... light. It gives you a good sort of back-of-the-cereal box review of collecting, but it doesn't go any deeper. I won't be expanding on the article, but I had a few thoughts relationg to the topic.
Collecting is here to stay. It will never go away. That's pretty much a given; it is important, however, to differentiate between two types. First, monetary collecting: your Magic cards, Warhammer figures, etc. Second, non-monetary collecting: "earned" items in MMOs, unlockable costumes/endings/characters, etc.
The good news with monetary collecting is that the internet helped implode a lot of markets. With Magic: the Gathering, I remember in the late 90's one card, a Juzam Djinn, carried a pretty hefty price, upwards of $150 if I recall correctly. It should be $175 or $200 now, if we're to believe increasing returns on collectibles and inflation (or eBay sellers with 0 bids). But quick look on eBay shows prices in the $100 area, per card. The most expensive card, the Black Lotus, also goes for about half of its previous price ($1000+).
(Now, some Magic player is going to rebut about how the changing of tournament rules is affecting cards. That might be true to a point. But in the past ten years we've seen the same thing happen with sports collectibles, comic books, term life insurance, and countless other markets; opening a market will have the effect of reducing prices since it reduces scarcity).
Now, monetary collecting in gaming is pretty bad in my eyes, especially for games kids play, since it puts kids without well-off parents at a distinct disadvantage over equaly skilled kids whose parents give them huge allowances or equally skilled working professionals with large discretionary budgets.
Thankfully, in non-monetary collecting, time and skill are the real investment. Most "collectibles" in these games require no money: unique armor for your MMO character, unlockable costumes for your fighters/adventurers, or hats for your Nintendogs, etc. Still, there's some inequality, as people with time but not money constraints pay for training, gold, etc.
Collecting, be it virtual or real, is intrinsic to gaming, video and otherwise. What's a sports player always work for? A Super Bowl ring. Or the Stanley Cup. Or a gold medal. Or any number of physical objects that represent victory. There's a reason there are physical things attached to these victories. It's not that the jewelry is more important than the championship, it's just that it's an object. In MMOs where items serve (usually) a useful purpose it's nice to get a trinket to show you defeated some boss. But it's nicer to get Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Why MTG sucks?
Because the one with most money wins.
You can build an uber deck and pwn everyone with a common deck. You can build unbeatable machines. Some rules have been adjusted to prevent heavy abuse but... I got a taste of this playing the computer version of MTG with older ruleset. A deck consisting of LOTS of black lotuses (now forbidden), +3 mana), some gravedigging cards costing less mana to restore used cards than the black lotuses produce (so you have a perpeetum mobile, produce mana over and over), then more cards for pulling cards from library to hand (never run out of them) and finally a few that deal immediate damage to the enemy proportional to mana used.
Such deck would cost some $2000 or so.
So the gameplay looks like this: I use up all the black lotuses producing lots of mana. Dig more cards from library, some more from graveyard, then keep producing mana. Then in one or two blasts (two in case the enemy drew some "reflect" instant, one if I know he doesn't have any) I kill the enemy. In one round. Sometimes just for fun hitting for 60 damage. They don't get to use anything other than an interrupt if any.
Now if someone designs similar InstaGib deck, what fun is playing it?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Ante decks were made specifically to school other people. You can make a deck of all commons and cards that double the ante to steal uncommons and rares off of chumps. Ante in MTG is dumb.
God spoke to me.
You certainly don't give up as easily if a valuable card is drawn for your ante.
But thinking about that is exactly why I never played ante.
The valuable cards were usually the more powerful cards, since even the rarest of cards wasn't worth much if it was crap. Often these valuable cards would form the foundation of a deck. So not only did you turn over a valuable card for your ante, you are now deprived of that powerful, pivotal card in the game that follows, increasing the odds that you'll lose, and potentially weakening the deck forever. No way was I going to lose a card I may have spent weeks up-trading for only to lose it due to random chance.
If I want to play a card game with real stakes, I play poker. At least if I lose at poker, I haven't hurt my odds at the next poker match. Every poker deck has four aces.
That's just me though. I mostly played in high school and based on my part-time job could justify buying boosters every week, but not replacing lost cards. My friends were all in the same boat, so at least we were all of like mind.
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