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Penny Arcade - Comic - Warmongers
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Warmongers
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Instead it was Magic The Gathering tournaments in the barracks. Much more portable but just as savage on the bank account.
There's a lot more esoteric stuff to it once you do come in range, a whole grid of damage/defense advantages and mechanical synergies that can force multiply a combined group of units, and you generally can't flip through the book during the game so if you depend on the old Magical Brain Phone in your pocket you're going to be making a certain number of optimistic guesses.
There's also the size of the armies to consider. A small game might be completely decided in one critical turn, with everything before being mind games and everything after being a march to the inevitable, but the larger the game the less you can get an army-wide opening like that, and that crucial moments plays out multiple times and again between remnants (meaning even a fight you know you'll lose can still be spent removing the pieces that will threaten the clean up crew who will fight what you can't).
And in turn that's why these games can so easily become a matter of thousands of dollars.
I remember, a couple of decades and change ago, when I moved into a friends place after he split up with his partner and was as needy for cash*, and also someone to listen while he lamented his proclivity for fucking his life up, as I was for a place to Not Be Homeless in. He showed me his MtG collection.
"Mate you've got a hell of a lot of those card things", I said "How much have you spent on this?"
"About sixteen grand"
Are 20+ year old cards worth more now or have they been force-obsoleted? IDK how these things work.
*Luckily they had no kids but he had to buy her out of the house, and interest rates were a different thing in 2001.
Old cards are generally out of print so they're worth more. A lot haven't been force obsoleted so much as replaced with mechanically equivalent newer cards or in rare cases phased out from the rules (see: Black Lotus in all it's various forms from the years - I think my old squirrel deck has several now-banned cards as well), so the old ones mostly have collector value rather than gameplay value (so you're not spending hundreds on a rare card and then depreciating it by putting your mortal fingers on its unblemished surface).
They've started putting back catalog extras in regular packs as bonuses, which might reduce their value a bit but isn't being done on a scale that will kill the market.
They’re also still abiding by the Reserve List, a promise from back in the 90s to not reprint certain old rare cards. So some of the Old Ones (eg original dual lands) having been steadily creeping up in price. My older brother had a fair number of them from back in the day and we just found an old box of his collection recently - he’s not interested in selling but on paper there was at least $10k in that box.
Back when 3rd edition came out, a squad of tac marines was $28.99 CAD. Now, almost the exact same box is $65 CAD.
I'd love to get some of the character models like Abaddon or Ghazgkhull but I cant justify $80 for a single plastic model.
I cant imagine how much it would cost to start a 2000-3000 point army.
For the USD:
$28.99 in 1998 is $52.70 in 2022
$35.75 in 1998 is $64.99 in 2022
Canada is not quite as bad:
28.99 CAD in 1998 is 48.50 CAD in 2022
38.85 CAD in 1998 is 64.99 CAD in 2022
Another way to say that would be "About half the increase is from inflation". It's 54% inflation and 46% "other".
So it's not so much that they have arbitrarily increased their prices with no justification whatsoever. It's more that they have made the unfortunate decision to become a very premium product that has priced out all but the most committed whales: people in an income bracket that would typically spend that money on things like cars or dune buggies.