# Is "Magic: The Gathering" pay-to-win? **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Tags:** board-card-word-game\ **Created:** [February 8, 2021, 12:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-magic-the-gathering-pay-to-win/932452 "2021-02-08T12:56:33Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2021, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-magic-the-gathering-pay-to-win/932452/41 "2021-03-08T17:22:34Z")
> [@Jophiel](#): > > Looking at the secondary market for the most recent expansion, the most expensive card (not counting foil variants since you don’t need foils to play/win) is $25 [Vorinclex is about $40](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/price/Kaldheim/Vorinclex+Monstrous+Raider#paper), which is fairly standard for a set these days. There’s usually a card or a handful in the $40-50 range. > [@Jophiel](#): > > If people view randomized boosters as a “lottery”, it’s one where you can maybe make $15 profit at best if you “win”, not one where you make $15,000. Well, you can win $hundreds in some cases. Even though no one needs the alt-art foil cards to play, you can still sell them for that much. So $15 is definitely not the max payout from opening a pack. The gambling is real. I think gambling and loot boxes are a different issue than pay-to-win, though. Arguably, since the excess gambling value comes in the form of something that makes no difference in your ability to win, they are opposing forces. The more that opening a pack is gambling on opening a rare and expensive version of a card that exists in common and cheap versions, the less you have to pay to play the game. If video game lootboxes all just had cool hats for the video game characters to wear with a thriving secondary market, and not actual items that made it easier to win the game, there’d still potentially be issues with them as gambling, but they wouldn’t be pay-to-win. > [@Chronos](#): > > But WotC does actually sell some products of known composition, as well, which usually contain one or two specific known-valuable cards (as well as a bunch of other, lower-value cards), and anyone who wants one of those valuable cards can buy such a pack directly from WotC. An interesting aspect of this is that these known-composition packs have the result of _reducing_ the secondary market price of valuable cards. To the extent that Magic is pay to win, it’s worth looking at the lowest-cost version of a card, since they’re all equally good. When WotC sells specific valuable cards, they sell a version with special art at a price higher than the current market price. Some people want to spend more for bling, but then they don’t need their copies of the less-expensive version of the card and those cards enter the secondary market and the price drops. So, just like foils and alternate art and other relatively recent innovations, they reduce the price floor or playing Magic competitively by extracting more money from people who want the bling. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2021, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-magic-the-gathering-pay-to-win/932452/42 "2021-03-08T17:49:44Z")
> [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > [Vorinclex is about $40](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/price/Kaldheim/Vorinclex+Monstrous+Raider#paper), which is fairly standard for a set these days. Missed that one. Ok, so one $40 card, one $30 and the rest dropping as noted. > [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > Well, you can win $hundreds in some cases. Even though no one needs the alt-art foil cards to play, you can still sell them for that much. Max priced card from the set is $45 for the foil Vorinclex (at least off Star City Games). Amusingly, it’s on sale right now for cheaper (by a few cents) than the standard version. > [@iamthewalrus\_3](#): > > The gambling is real. The gambling is overstated (in my opinion), often conflated by people amazed by the prices for long out of print cards. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2021, 5:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-magic-the-gathering-pay-to-win/932452/43 "2021-03-08T17:57:52Z")
> [@Jophiel](#): > > Max priced card from the set is $45 for the foil Vorinclex (at least off Star City Games). Amusingly, it’s on sale right now for cheaper (by a few cents) than the standard version. Foil is not the only bling offered. Max priced card that I can find from Kaldheim is [Foil Phyrexian-text Vorinclex](https://www.mtggoldfish.com/price/Kaldheim:Foil/Vorinclex+Monstrous+Raider-phyrexian#paper), at $340. That’s ~85x the retail price of the booster it comes in. I have opened cards worth \> $100 from a $3 booster, and obviously it’s not the same as winning millions in the lottery, but it definitely scratches the gambling itch. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2021, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-magic-the-gathering-pay-to-win/932452/44 "2021-03-08T18:23:58Z")
Ah, Star City splits the cosmetic variants onto another page/search category it seems. ---
**Author:** ![glowacks](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/glowacks/32/5548_2.png) [@glowacks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glowacks)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2021, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-magic-the-gathering-pay-to-win/932452/45 "2021-03-09T02:26:29Z")
In the past, common cards used to be only marginally worse than rare cards, such that good commons were typically played just as much as rares. In the past decade, it’s become increasingly the case that, especially for creatures, rarity dictates power level. The common creatures printed today don’t seem all that great compared to those of previous years, but the power level of rare and mythic rare creatures is absolutely off the charts compared to the past. But this is mostly the conception of someone who has been out of the game for 5 years complaining about some of the things that made him stop playing. ---
**Author:** ![Darth\_Sensitive](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/58956e/32.png) [@Darth\_Sensitive](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darth_Sensitive)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2021, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-magic-the-gathering-pay-to-win/932452/46 "2021-03-09T21:24:02Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > In other words, every manufacturer of game equipment tries to make the game as P2W as they can. It feels like the best example of that might be the 2008 Speedo racing suits that (almost) everyone who medaled at the Olympics swam in. You don’t get to the Olympics without being great at what you do, but if you were sponsored by a different gear company who didn’t have the same tech as the LZR got beat by a 2% improvement in performance from the tech. Which lead to the swimming rules makers banning the tech and full body suits starting in 2010. Quite a few of those records from 08/09 stand on the men’s side, not quite as many with the women. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-magic-the-gathering-pay-to-win/932452.md?page=2)