Surprising level of transparency here when it’s very easy to just ignore these kinds of questions, even if it’s a bit roundabout.
“[W]e have to take into account numerous factors to make sure that boosters packs are equally desirable. One of the biggest factors is the overall average powerful level of the cards.”
Translation: no one would (theoretically) buy “under-powered” Standard boosters if they were the same price as “high-powered” masters boosters. This doesn’t really appreciate players who want to draft or want Standard cards (and would therefore buy Standard packs regardless) but I’m sure they have people there doing this all day every day.
The distributors and retailers need to know they won’t get stuck with unsold product. If there are different packs with different power levels at the same price, the worse one goes unsold. That makes the retailers order less in the future.
This is a commercially developed game that exists to sell packs. The job of Maro and the rest of the team is to make a game that consistently sells packs, so retailers will want to carry it. That’s how they pay the artists and playtesters and all.
That’s just what the game is. If you don’t like “gotta sell packs”, well, chess is a pretty neat game too.
There are some people in those comments who are not clear on how capitalism works. I’m not saying you have to like it, I certainly don’t, but raising the price on more sought-after items until they have a sustainable number of buyers is pretty basic supply-and-demand.
Unrelated to the topic, am I the only one who’s bothered by how Rosewater’s blog has no styling to distinguish the question from the answer? I realize that I’m a web developer picking on someone who isn’t, but it’s been like this for years and I can’t believe he hasn’t worked out a solution by now.
It does? I checked in Firefox and Brave and it doesn’t in either one for me. But I guess if everyone else is seeing a difference, that would explain why he hasn’t fixed it.
This is how it works:
- Go to the blog. No styling.
- Log in to tumblr 💔
- Go to the blog. Still no styling.
- Go to to your own dash.
- From there, click Maro’s face.
- Styling!
- But then the next time you go to the blog, no styling. Until you repeat steps four through six.
For peeps who hate logging in to tumblr, probably better known as everyone, you can also use the feed: https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/rss
It has the questions as the title and the answers as the content.
Thanks for the explanation! As you may have guessed, I don’t have a Tumblr account. Although as social media monoliths go, it actually seems like one of the better ones these days.
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I’m super grateful for the federation to save us from the monolith 🫡
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I can’t see a screen shot but I’ll take your word for it!
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I still have a lot to learn about how the Fediverse works.
But yeah, that looks great. I don’t know if it’ll work but I’m attempting to attach a screenshot of how it looks for me.
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It’s weird that people always seems blind-sided by the presence of the profit motive when it shows up in the production and distribution of something they enjoy. I’m not saying it’s good or rational, but something would have to be radically different about either WotC as an organization or the structure of the global economy for cards that are more desirable to not get increased pricing.
Blogatog isn’t even close to how bad custom Tumblr styles can get in terms of usability. But the majority of users and I suspect MaRo himself access Tumblr through the app, so such concerns have been forgotten.