It seems as though every few weeks someone goes on a brief rant about mythic rarity, and how the high prices of chase mythics is killing Magic. I wish to address that claim. In this article, I briefly summarize the literature that has been published concerning literature up to now. Then I address the primary complaints about mythics: that some cards are printed at mythic without “feeling” mythic, and that the secondary market value of some mythics is too high. I claim that the high value of chase mythics is driven by high demand rather than low supply and, as a corollary, that the high prices of mythics are a sign that Magic is doing well, i.e., that Wizards is succeeding at printing fun and desirable cards.
Mark Rosewater debuted mythic rarity to quite an uproar. Generally, people react negatively to change, and this reaction was pronounced due to the perception that mythic rarity was just an attempt by Wizards to gouge players. Dire warnings of skyrocketing costs of Magic circulated. Ben Bleiweiss came out as the Voice of Reason, writing an article about how the aggregate price of rares in Lorwyn would be almost unchanged if the most expensive rares in Lorwyn had been mythic. People went back to complaining about Faeries instead of complaining about mythics, and in the end it turned out that the mythics of Shards of Alara didn’t cause the end of the world. There was virtually no discussion about mythics when Conflux or Alara Reborn were released.
Then Magic 2010 brought Baneslayer Angel to the party. Baneslayer Angel was the first mythic to see significant tournament play.* (Actually, Ajani Vengeant was, but Ajani was a promotional card; many, many more Ajanis exist than its mythic rarity would suggest.) Over the course of the qualifying season for Pro Tour: Austin, Baneslayer rose into the $50 range, and people began grumbling about mythics again.
Then Zendikar previews began. Warren Instigator and Mindbreak Trap were spoiled relatively early, and people rose up in fury. It was believed that Warren Instigator would be a four-of in all Goblin decks, and if Goblin Chieftain and Siege-Gang Commander turned out to be the backbone of a Standard Goblin deck, prices on Instigator would hit the roof. Similarly, people fresh off a season where Great Sable Stag’s ability to not be countered was incredibly relevant believed that Mindbreak Trap would take the place of Cryptic Command in Blue control decks, and that if Cryptic was $20, the sky was the limit on Mindbreak Trap.
But the most egregious offender of all was Lotus Cobra. After Mike Flores previewed Lotus Cobra, Craig Jones wrote an article that he felt Wizards had gone too far, that making Lotus Cobra mythic could potentially make Standard so expensive that people would quit playing Magic. Popular consensus was that Cobra would be an automatic four-of in all base-Green aggressive decks. A couple of months later, Andre Coimbra won Worlds with a base-Green aggressive deck featuring zero Lotus Cobra; complaints about Cobra, which were already dropping off before Worlds, vanished.
This brings us to Worldwake. Jace, the Mind Sculptor started preselling at $25. Then $30. $40. Worldwake hit stores and Jace went to $50, then $60. Then, the Standard PTQ season kicked off and the price of Jace kept climbing, spurred by Lewis Laskin Super Friends deck at the Atlanta StarCityGames.com Standard Open. Jace is now sitting at $80. Five Jace decks made Top 8 in Washington D.C. last weekend; it is not inconceivable that Jace could hit triple digits. Bennie Smith wrote that after opening zero copies of Jace over multiple boxes, Bennie “shut the door on Blue” and that he felt locked out of playing Blue as long as Jace was in Standard and Bennie didn’t own any. The forum responses to Bennie’s article tended to echo Bennie’s complaints.
This brings us to Rise of the Eldrazi. Gideon Jura pretty quickly became friends with Jace, the Mind Sculptor, and Gideon’s price began to rise as UWx control decks began dominating Standard. Gideon debuted around $30, went up to $40 after the Atlanta Open, and is now sold out at $50. The other big mythic in Rise, Vengevine, was stable around $25 immediately after Rise was released. However, Gerry Thompson put Vengevine in Naya to great success, then Patrick Chapin put Vengevine into a Bant shell, and Jund players have begun adding Vengevine to their arsenal as well. StarCityGames.com is currently sold out of Vengevine at $45.
I should also note that Elspeth, Knight-Errant was mostly a casual card in the $30ish range for quite some time, but has begun to see significant play in Standard and has spiked to $50. Additionally, Lotus Cobra, while homeless for some time immediately after Zendikar’s release, has found a home in both Mythic and Naya; however, Cobra remains at $15.
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Mythic rarity exists because Wizards’ market research showed that they were printing too many cards each year. Time Spiral-Lorwyn Standard contained over two thousand cards. That is an overwhelming amount of cards for a new player to add to their cognitive framework. Recall that a player new to Magic tournaments is likely still a little shaky on the rules and is still having trouble evaluating which cards from the latest expansion belong in their deck. Now throw an extra thousand cards at them. It is simply too much to process; instead, players quit. I remember struggling to learn about all of the cards in Odyssey when I started playing during Onslaught; I was routinely getting blown out by cards I had never even heard of. It was frustrating, and I mostly stuck to drafting that year as a result.
So Wizards prints fewer cards per year. Newer players have an easier time learning Magic, getting into the tournament scene, and learning what has come before them. There is only one problem: when you print fewer cards, you sell fewer cards.
Wizards is a business. Wizards has to keep making money in order to keep making Magic. Mythic rares allowed Wizards to shrink set sizes without costing themselves money. Happily, mythics also allow Wizards to print rares that are interesting for Constructed play without totally ruining Limited formats. It is also very exciting for new players to open mythics. Established players are pretty blasé about opening packs, but do you recall how excited everyone was about Zendikar’s priceless treasures? For newer players, opening mythics is almost as exciting. Patrick Sullivan alluded to this in a forum post that I cannot find; Patrick is a developer for another game and said something to the effect of how much more special and exciting games feel when players draw a mythic they only own one or two of. For those people, mythics make Magic much more fun.
Complaints around mythics tend to cluster around one of two areas: either cards that don’t “feel” mythic are assigned mythic rarity, or that mythic rares are too expensive.
When Mark Rosewater introduced the mythic rarity, he said that:
We want the flavor of mythic rare to be something that feels very special and unique. Generally speaking we expect that to mean cards like Planeswalkers, most legends, and epic-feeling creatures and spells. [Mythics] will not just be a list of each set’s most powerful tournament-level cards. We’ve also decided that there are certain things we specifically do not want to be mythic rares. The largest category is utility cards, what I’ll define as cards that fill a universal function. Some examples of this category would be cycles of dual lands and cards like Mutavault or Char.
Periodically, debates rage over whether or not a particular card satisfies the flavor of something that “feels very special or unique.” I feel that the people who are most qualified to make that call all work in Renton, but there are no doubt some who consider that a fallacious appeal to authority. The cards that have their ‘mythic-ness’ most hotly contested are: Vengevine, Lotus Cobra, Mindbreak Trap, and Warren Instigator.
Briefly: Vengevine is a Green creature with haste. It attacks from the graveyard for zero mana. Both abilities are exceptionally rare things. Black Lotus is one of the most iconic cards in Magic; Lotus Cobra turns all of your fetchlands into Lotuses. Warren Instigator allows you to put two Siege-Gang Commanders into play on turn 3. Mindbreak Trap is a free counterspell that laughs at storm, defeats Emrakul, and trumps the cascading forces of Alara’s Maelstrom.
It is certainly true that Vengevine and Lotus Cobra are very strong cards. They do not fill a universal function. Neither card is an automatic four-of in Green aggressive decks. Meanwhile, they are very special and unique.
Look, the reality probably is that there are going to be mythics that get pushed and are good. I suspect some mythics are developed with an eye towards tournament play and are tweaked to have appropriate flavor later. That is not a bad thing. The alternative is that all of the mythics are stuff like Lich’s Tomb and Eternity Vessel and we would be complaining about how awful all of the mythic rares are.
(And no, Wizards is not going to print mythics that are designed to slot into existing Standard decks just to “get” people. I mentioned this before, but they want you to pick up a lot more than four cards from any new set.)
Instead, we have a few mythics that are seeing a lot of Standard play. Obviously, those cards are fetching a high price tag. Peter Jahn has pointed out that the chance of opening a particular mythic rare is 120:1. He infers that the high price of mythics is due to this high ratio.
However, during Onslaught block, the chance of opening a particular rare was 110:1. The Onslaught fetchlands went for about $15 when they were in Standard. Clearly, high mythic prices are being driven by factors other than simple rarity. It’s not inflation, either; the price level has only risen 20% or so since 2002.
Consider the Ravnica shocklands. Ravnica had eighty-eight rares. Guildpact had fifty-five. Dissension had sixty. All of the shocklands were more or less $20 while Ravnica was Standard-legal, though prices fluctuated with the metagame, and Dissension duals always commanded a slight premium because rares from third sets tend to be scarce. The shocklands were less rare than the Onslaught fetchlands, but were more expensive.
Accordingly, we can infer that supply is not the only determinant of a card’s secondary market value. Demand must play a significant role, as well. This makes considerable intuitive sense; even if a card is rare, it tends to not have significant secondary market value unless it is highly sought after. No one is going to make a fortune by selling a million copies of One With Nothing.
For a long time, cards that appealed to the casual market tended not to appeal to most tournament players, and rares that appealed to both crowds tended to be among the most expensive rares in their respective sets. Birds of Paradise, Wrath of God, rare lands, and powerful creatures along the lines of Exalted Angel are good examples of cards that both tournament players and casual players valued highly and were very expensive when they were Standard-legal.
Now, we have planeswalkers. Wizards wants planeswalkers to be powerful, and they are. Every planeswalker has seen Constructed play. Wizards also wants planeswalkers to be fun, and they are an absolute blast. All of the planeswalkers are incredibly fun to play, and they are in high demand among casual players. It is no surprise that planeswalkers are so expensive on the secondary market. Wizards designed planeswalkers to be iconic, desirable, and fun. They succeeded. Players want them. All players.
And all planeswalkers are mythic. This means that planeswalkers are expensive.
But they aren’t expensive because Wizards has artificially limited the supply; planeswalkers are only slightly rarer than Flooded Strand. Planeswalkers are expensive because everyone wants them. You can extend this argument to the rest of the high-priced mythics. Look at Baneslayer Angel. Baneslayer goes into more or less every casual White deck. It has powerful abilities and incredible art. Casual players love angels and lifegain. Baneslayer is also one of the best creatures in Standard, so tournament players want it as well. So Baneslayer is $50.
This is a measure of Magic’s success.
I want to repeat that, because there appears to be this general belief that high-priced mythics are going to kill Magic. That belief is wrong. The high prices of mythics are evidence that Magic is doing well. Wizards has been printing cards that are loads of fun and that everyone wants to play with. High demand is driving mythic prices, not low supply.
And, crucially, demand for mythics isn’t high because you need a ton of mythics to compete in Standard; Owen Turtenwald showed us that last weekend by making it to the finals of GP: DC with Jund. Demand is high because lots of people have fun playing Magic with those mythics.
Obviously, there are some negatives associated with high mythic prices. When people believe that they have to have expensive mythics to compete in Standard or have fun with their friends, they are more likely to get frustrated and quit Magic altogether. This is bad, and it’s difficult to address because even if a person with those perceptions is incorrect, their frustration still exists. Still, you can infer that this is not currently a huge issue, because if enough people quit Magic due to high singles prices, singles prices would gradually decline as demand dropped. You can also infer that this problem is self-correcting; as people become priced out of the game, the price of the game falls.
There are occasional complaints that, occasionally, mythics cannot be found in a given area at any price. In his article, above, Peter Jahn mentions that he didn’t think he would be able to obtain Vengevines at any price in his local area to play them in U.S. National Qualifiers. This is actually further evidence that Wizards is hitting home runs with mythics; the people who have them want to play with them, not trade them away.
Others, mostly in various forums, have demonized people who speculate in mythics, buying a bunch of mythics they believe will go up and stockpiling them for some time until they sell them off at a profit. The argument is that speculators are artificially increasing demand (and thus prices) and are doing so for selfish reasons. This argument is flawed. First, shortages occur because prices are too low. Speculators move prices to equilibrium more quickly. Second, speculators actually provide liquidity, because they are willing to sell their mythics when many players would prefer to keep them in their decks. Speculators actually help to obviate shortages.
Some have mentioned that it’s hard for players who acquire most of their collection by opening packs or drafting to obtain mythics via trading because the non-mythic rares in a set are worth so little compared to the chase mythics. This complaint is mostly unique to Rise of the Eldrazi, and has been dropping off as Rise rares (Consuming Vapors, Awakening Zone, et al) have begun to see more tournament play and their prices have risen. These complaints are not totally without merit; it is difficult to acquire enough cards to trade up to the expensive mythics. The problem is that it’s hard for Wizards to just push the power level on a few rares without causing power creep. It’s true that, with high-price mythics, opening packs can resemble a lottery to some extent. However, a lot of people really enjoy playing the lottery. I also feel obligated to point out that while we’re talking about rares, for all of the vilification of mythics, no one ever stops and thanks mythics for making fetchlands and Worldwake duals so cheap.
Also, just by observing the sales of M10, Zendikar, Worldwake, and (presumably) Rise of the Eldrazi, as well as recent tournament attendance in Washington, D.C., it becomes pretty apparent that mythics are not actively bad for Magic, because Magic is doing better than ever. Indeed, mythics acquire their high price tags because they are in such high demand. This would be a cause for concern if they were in high demand because players could not compete in tournaments or have fun without mythics, but they most certainly can. High prices on mythics are proof of Magic’s success.
Max McCall
max dot mccall at gmail dot com
*Elspeth, Knight-Errant is seeing a lot of Standard play now, but she was mostly on the bench while Lorwyn was in Standard.