The Spiteful Crow has a big grin on his face!

I like reading books about B F# E.

[markrosewater]

Could you explain why Secret Lair moved from print-to-demand to a limited-print-run model? I thought it was so that the cards could be preprinted to reduce time between ordering and shipping, but a decent number of recent Secret Lairs have had their distribution delayed due to "production issues", which implies that they're no longer being printed in advance of sale. Why are we using a worse sales model if it's not even solving the problem it was intended to solve?

I did a podcast with Lindsey Bartell, the senior director for Secret Lair where we talked about this.

We only did print to demand for the very early days of Secret Lair (like six months), and it was untenable from a business standpoint. We are now reserving printing time a year ahead of time. That’s far different than a product being delayed a month or two.

Most of the time you think of as “print to demand” actually wasn’t. We just printed way more than we needed to guarantee we had enough to mail out. And that resulted in us destroying a *lot* of product. It was also untenable from a business standpoint.

We are working to improve our ability to forecast, but the huge increase in players plus the experimental nature of Secret Lair makes it difficult. We are getting better at it, but slowly.

[thespitefulcrow]

Stuff like this is why I just simply can't trust anything MaRo says anymore (besides all the various promises that have been broken, like "UB will never be in Standard" and "all UB cards will get in-universe prints" and most importantly "we will never do functional erratas" when those have happened repeatedly these last few years). You can't truly expect me to believe that products you had available for sale for a whole month, that were advertised as print-to-demand, and whose items didn't ship until 3+ months after the sale ended, were not in fact printed to demand. Especially when we're supposedly not printing to demand anymore, despite the Back to School drop being delayed by a month for "production issues" - that just means the demand is being given an artificial cap to please investors when they see number run out.

Waiting 3 months and guaranteeing you get a Lair will always be better than this new, dogshit system where you still often wait 3 months to get it, but you had to be lucky enough to beat out all the scalpers who set up 30 bots to buy as much product as possible because WotC (unlike a good company like DataDiscs) doesn't properly enforce their per-person limits. DataDiscs keeps track of basically every part of a sale that has per-person limits, and if they catch someone trying to break those, they: cancel the orders, blacklist them, and put the stock back up for sale once they've finished the process. WotC and Hasbro only care about appeasing the shareholders, so they don't give a shit if John Scalperton buys 5 copies of every Lair on 6 different accounts, because they're getting their money anyways. Print-to-demand Lairs basically totally killed the scalper market, because they'd have to wait a year or two for them to gain enough value to recoup the cost of buying them - because that's usually how long it would take for people who missed out to realize they missed it or similar situations. Now they just buy a billion copies and immediately list them for presale on ebay and shit for 4x the price. "Oh you wanted Dandan but the queue lasted so long you missed out? You can buy one of my 20 copies for the low price of $300 :)"

[thespitefulcrow]

Actually, followup to this - https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/speeding-up-secret-lair-shipping in the official announcement at the start of 2024, the Secret Lair team says, (condensed and slightly paraphrased) "After 4 years, we're moving from a print-to-demand system to a limited stock system in order to speed up shipping times."

For starters, this means *someone* isn't telling the truth here. But more than that, MaRo's statement reads like a corporate-approved one meant to make us, the players, say "Oh! Well, if it was never print to demand, then I guess we shouldn't be mad about the current system!" In reality, the statement provided just raises more questions, because if it *is* true, both possible explanations just further cement Hasbro's incompetence: Either they were massively overprinting before the lairs released, which would beg the question of why it took 3+ months for them to ship; or, they were massively overprinting *after* the lairs finished their sales, which...huh? What do you mean? They got all the orders in and then overstocked by 50k-100k for no reason?

Like I'm not really directly mad at MaRo at this point, because it really just feels like he's unfortunately become a mouthpiece for Hasbro and everything he says about stuff like this has to be approved first so he doesn't spill the beans about how poorly they're handling Magic, now that it's literally the only profitable division in the company.

[markrosewater]

Could you explain why Secret Lair moved from print-to-demand to a limited-print-run model? I thought it was so that the cards could be preprinted to reduce time between ordering and shipping, but a decent number of recent Secret Lairs have had their distribution delayed due to "production issues", which implies that they're no longer being printed in advance of sale. Why are we using a worse sales model if it's not even solving the problem it was intended to solve?

I did a podcast with Lindsey Bartell, the senior director for Secret Lair where we talked about this.

We only did print to demand for the very early days of Secret Lair (like six months), and it was untenable from a business standpoint. We are now reserving printing time a year ahead of time. That’s far different than a product being delayed a month or two.

Most of the time you think of as “print to demand” actually wasn’t. We just printed way more than we needed to guarantee we had enough to mail out. And that resulted in us destroying a *lot* of product. It was also untenable from a business standpoint.

We are working to improve our ability to forecast, but the huge increase in players plus the experimental nature of Secret Lair makes it difficult. We are getting better at it, but slowly.

[thespitefulcrow]

Stuff like this is why I just simply can't trust anything MaRo says anymore (besides all the various promises that have been broken, like "UB will never be in Standard" and "all UB cards will get in-universe prints" and most importantly "we will never do functional erratas" when those have happened repeatedly these last few years). You can't truly expect me to believe that products you had available for sale for a whole month, that were advertised as print-to-demand, and whose items didn't ship until 3+ months after the sale ended, were not in fact printed to demand. Especially when we're supposedly not printing to demand anymore, despite the Back to School drop being delayed by a month for "production issues" - that just means the demand is being given an artificial cap to please investors when they see number run out.

Waiting 3 months and guaranteeing you get a Lair will always be better than this new, dogshit system where you still often wait 3 months to get it, but you had to be lucky enough to beat out all the scalpers who set up 30 bots to buy as much product as possible because WotC (unlike a good company like DataDiscs) doesn't properly enforce their per-person limits. DataDiscs keeps track of basically every part of a sale that has per-person limits, and if they catch someone trying to break those, they: cancel the orders, blacklist them, and put the stock back up for sale once they've finished the process. WotC and Hasbro only care about appeasing the shareholders, so they don't give a shit if John Scalperton buys 5 copies of every Lair on 6 different accounts, because they're getting their money anyways. Print-to-demand Lairs basically totally killed the scalper market, because they'd have to wait a year or two for them to gain enough value to recoup the cost of buying them - because that's usually how long it would take for people who missed out to realize they missed it or similar situations. Now they just buy a billion copies and immediately list them for presale on ebay and shit for 4x the price. "Oh you wanted Dandan but the queue lasted so long you missed out? You can buy one of my 20 copies for the low price of $300 :)"

[markrosewater]

Now that you've figured out how to force cards into boosters together, are you flush with ideas how to use that "technology" other than alternative reality?

Let’s wait until I explain how we solved the problem.

[thespitefulcrow]

"now" when Battlebond already did this - every time I've opened Battlebond, if I've gotten a Partner With card, the other half has always been included. Honestly really disappointing that this was the "thing we never knew we could do" that was so hyped up and it's existed for ages

[markrosewater]

Here are two statements you made recently when talking about the release schedule changes which appear to contradict each other:

1: "The things you love are not going away"

2: "part of cutting back on the number of releases was finding things to trim"

The contradiction is that for many of us, the things we love (such as Masters sets, Horizons sets, and un-sets) are on the list of things being trimmed. And you were explicit was the trimming was due to lack of room in the release schedule, not insufficient interest in these products. If you hadn't decided to make 3-4 UB sets per year, there would still be room for these products.

How do you reconcile these statements?

You took the first statement out of context. “The things you love” was in a post talking about Magic’s in-Multiverse creative.

[thespitefulcrow]

Strong disagree on this. The post in question (https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/795827104599179264/hi-mark-i-work-at-an-lgs-and-im-a-vocal#notes) wasn't just about Magic's worlds, but about the game as a whole.

The fear wasn't "New York will replace Ravnica," it was "Universes Beyond will replace things we like in general." We're seeing that real time with the statement that Masters sets and other ancillary products are going away in favor of clogging the release year with 7 Standard sets, of which 4 are UB and only 3 are UW. I'd like to note too that we'd be seeing FIVE UB sets and only 2 UW sers next year if not for the schedule shift swapping Avatar and Lorwyn around. abelzumi's fear that UB was smothering Magic as a whole is becoming more and more true - even in Secret Lair, where UB is actually completely OK, almost every announcement for upcoming drops was a UB product.

Frankly, it also doesn't help that in the wake of Spider-Man's failure as a set, I've seen more and more people who only like Magic because of UB having sentiments that amount to "I hope everyone who doesn't like UB quits the game." Once again, abelzumi's statements are ringing true - Magic doesn't want players like us in the game anymore. It wants the players who only care about seeing their favorite pop culture character on a card and will blindly toss money at anything and everything that even remotely connects to an outside IP they like.

It's getting harder every day to keep finding things to enjoy in Magic. I was in the boat of "pass on UB products you don't like, find joy in the ones you do, and accept that this is our new life," but after seeing the UB turbofans wish everyone who disagrees with them would quit, I'm having to rethink my stance. Universes Beyond isn't fostering a healthy community in any direction whatsoever - not when it's as uncurated as it currently is. No one's complaining about Lord of the Rings (besides racists), Final Fantasy, The Hobbit, or ATLA, because these are all appropriate fits for the game. The more you put Marvel, TMNT, The Walking Dead, and whatever other Excessively Real World IPs you could in, the worse it's gonna get.

UB is causing a divide in the Magic community that didn't really exist before the announcement of 3 years of Marvel sets. The things we love are, in fact, going away, regardless of how Mark Rosewater tries to twist the narrative.

[markrosewater]

What are the chances of returning to Homelands some day?

Homelands biggest creative issue is it’s creative cohesion is “things people liked in Alpha”. That doesn’t have a creative core the way something like Kamigawa does where it’s drawing its creative cohesion from a rich real world culture.

[thespitefulcrow]

It's sad that even the guy who's been at the company since Forever doesn't understand Ulgrotha's world and lore enough to think it's anything more than "Things people liked from Alpha"

On Twitter I saw people thinking it was just Proto Innistrad because the only part they ever talk about these days is the Barony. Then again, they sure have just retconned the shit out of the original lore bible for the plane anyways, including erasing Angus Mackenzine protecting Serra in her dying moments when she planeswalked to Dominaria (replacing him with some random new guy also named Angus)

Ulgrotha is a barren wasteland - 90% of the plane is devoid of mana and completely uninhabitable, due to the planeswalker war that forced Ravi (now Grandmother Sengir) to use the Apocalypse Chime. The one corner of the world that remains habitable does so because of a rift to another, mana-rich, plane that was so far under the ocean that the chime wasn't able to close it. Already, you have a solid reason to return to the world, and it's what Thunder Junction should have been about instead - with Feroz's Ban having weakened so much over the years, Phyrexia was finally able to tear its way into the plane, meaning there was surely an influx of mana pouring into the world once more. That mana-less hellscape should be seeing a slow return to life, and the denizens of Ulgrotha should be venturing out to explore it.

Even without that though, here's some other highlights:

Serra (yes, that Serra) spent most of her life on Ulgrotha, until her husband Feroz died and she got chased around the multiverse by a Walker who thought her wedding ring was a powerful artifact (it wasn't, but Feroz was known for collecting such things)

Baron Sengir may have (apparently) left the plane in the past, but he seemingly left Ravi (a walker he saved from his dad when they were both children, who sealed herself in a faultu Stasis Coffin after ringing the Apocalypse Chime, driving her mad and turning her into Grandmother Sengir after the Baron found her in there hundreds of years later) behind *and* he sold the Apocalypse Chime to the Dwarves, knowing if they accidentally rang it, it would be so far underground that it should have little effect on the world.

Speaking of the Dwarves, there's a whole clan of sea-faring Dwarves. The mountain-dwelling dwarves hate them because...they live on the sea. Most interest Dwarves in Magic really

Eron the Relentless. The Goblin King. Eron is a master thief who was once tasked with stealing Ravi's spellbook, with his payment being that the guy who hired him would cast any spell in the book on him. He succeeded, and without even looking, asked for the last spell in the book. That spell was an immortality spell, but think like Deadpool style - one time he escaped prison by chopping himself up into little pieces and throwing them out the window, then reforming on the other side. He became the Goblin King in order to fight Baron Sengir - the goblins were constantly attacking supply carts heading to human settlements the Baron had assaulted, so Eron decided he could solve this by being their King. That being said, the Goblins determine their new king by killing the old one - they tried to kill Eron 15 times before giving up. Every almost-death he's suffered, however, has deteriorated his mental state, to the point that he is an excessively violent ruler to the goblins. Eron is, by all accounts, the main character of Ulgrotha with how much he does to fight against the Barony.

Chandler and Joven are there. Both master thieves in their own rights, they love to harass Eron by stealing from him, especially the Ebony Rhino.

Ulgrotha was home to the first Minotaur planeswalker, predating Angrath by quite a long time. Sandruu was a pupil of Feroz, being taught the art of non-violence. However, when an evil Walker arrived on the plane, Sandruu tried (and failed) to stop them as he was still too weak. The walker flung him into the far reaches of the Blind Eternities, still looking for a way home, though he did make it to Dominaria for its planeswalker war.

There's yet more, but the whole point here is that Ulgrotha is a rich vein of narrative to play with that Wizards is just too cowardly to tap because of how poorly the original set sold. I've also seen the excuse "it doesn't have a mechanical identity" as if each new set doesn't come with 5-10 new mechanics that won't see the light of day for at least 3 years - and that's if they ever come back ever again.

[caythis]

This is the sort of stuff I really enjoy as a new player. The potential of things thrown to the wayside by Wizards for lack of marketability or in favour of outside IP.

I would suggest, if you have the time and inclination, to make some fan cards, post them and try to get other people interested in Ulgrotha as you are.

[thespitefulcrow]

The only real issue with this is that you run into the "we can't make this now because you might sue us" thing

I made a Mardu Planeswalker for Eron some time ago based on my idea for a return to Homelands being based in roughly the modern day, with Eron and Baron Sengir being CEOs of competing corporations; more of a silly than anything, but between Kamigawa going to the far future and Thunder Junction going to the Wild West, I feel like something nestled in the late 20th century would be a fun way to give Homelands its own identity of sorts.

Mardu because Eron, per the lore bible, has a strong sense of justice (rules the goblins to protect the towns ravaged by the Barony, very white) but it's been twisted by his many deaths (he's judge, jury, and executioner to the goblins - one time he made a deal with a guilty goblin that he'd let him go free if he made his wife take his death sentence, only to reveal his wife was there the whole time after he agreed. and then he killed the goblin anyways so his wife would have to live with the knowledge. very much in line with what black mana used to be in magic, directly representing evil vs the more nuanced meaning it's evolved to have)

[markrosewater]

What are the chances of returning to Homelands some day?

Homelands biggest creative issue is it’s creative cohesion is “things people liked in Alpha”. That doesn’t have a creative core the way something like Kamigawa does where it’s drawing its creative cohesion from a rich real world culture.

[thespitefulcrow]

It's sad that even the guy who's been at the company since Forever doesn't understand Ulgrotha's world and lore enough to think it's anything more than "Things people liked from Alpha"

On Twitter I saw people thinking it was just Proto Innistrad because the only part they ever talk about these days is the Barony. Then again, they sure have just retconned the shit out of the original lore bible for the plane anyways, including erasing Angus Mackenzine protecting Serra in her dying moments when she planeswalked to Dominaria (replacing him with some random new guy also named Angus)

Ulgrotha is a barren wasteland - 90% of the plane is devoid of mana and completely uninhabitable, due to the planeswalker war that forced Ravi (now Grandmother Sengir) to use the Apocalypse Chime. The one corner of the world that remains habitable does so because of a rift to another, mana-rich, plane that was so far under the ocean that the chime wasn't able to close it. Already, you have a solid reason to return to the world, and it's what Thunder Junction should have been about instead - with Feroz's Ban having weakened so much over the years, Phyrexia was finally able to tear its way into the plane, meaning there was surely an influx of mana pouring into the world once more. That mana-less hellscape should be seeing a slow return to life, and the denizens of Ulgrotha should be venturing out to explore it.

Even without that though, here's some other highlights:

Serra (yes, that Serra) spent most of her life on Ulgrotha, until her husband Feroz died and she got chased around the multiverse by a Walker who thought her wedding ring was a powerful artifact (it wasn't, but Feroz was known for collecting such things)

Baron Sengir may have (apparently) left the plane in the past, but he seemingly left Ravi (a walker he saved from his dad when they were both children, who sealed herself in a faultu Stasis Coffin after ringing the Apocalypse Chime, driving her mad and turning her into Grandmother Sengir after the Baron found her in there hundreds of years later) behind *and* he sold the Apocalypse Chime to the Dwarves, knowing if they accidentally rang it, it would be so far underground that it should have little effect on the world.

Speaking of the Dwarves, there's a whole clan of sea-faring Dwarves. The mountain-dwelling dwarves hate them because...they live on the sea. Most interest Dwarves in Magic really

Eron the Relentless. The Goblin King. Eron is a master thief who was once tasked with stealing Ravi's spellbook, with his payment being that the guy who hired him would cast any spell in the book on him. He succeeded, and without even looking, asked for the last spell in the book. That spell was an immortality spell, but think like Deadpool style - one time he escaped prison by chopping himself up into little pieces and throwing them out the window, then reforming on the other side. He became the Goblin King in order to fight Baron Sengir - the goblins were constantly attacking supply carts heading to human settlements the Baron had assaulted, so Eron decided he could solve this by being their King. That being said, the Goblins determine their new king by killing the old one - they tried to kill Eron 15 times before giving up. Every almost-death he's suffered, however, has deteriorated his mental state, to the point that he is an excessively violent ruler to the goblins. Eron is, by all accounts, the main character of Ulgrotha with how much he does to fight against the Barony.

Chandler and Joven are there. Both master thieves in their own rights, they love to harass Eron by stealing from him, especially the Ebony Rhino.

Ulgrotha was home to the first Minotaur planeswalker, predating Angrath by quite a long time. Sandruu was a pupil of Feroz, being taught the art of non-violence. However, when an evil Walker arrived on the plane, Sandruu tried (and failed) to stop them as he was still too weak. The walker flung him into the far reaches of the Blind Eternities, still looking for a way home, though he did make it to Dominaria for its planeswalker war.

There's yet more, but the whole point here is that Ulgrotha is a rich vein of narrative to play with that Wizards is just too cowardly to tap because of how poorly the original set sold. I've also seen the excuse "it doesn't have a mechanical identity" as if each new set doesn't come with 5-10 new mechanics that won't see the light of day for at least 3 years - and that's if they ever come back ever again.

[markrosewater]

You often say something akin to "If you don't like something Magic has done, don't build a deck with it", but that ignores the actual problem. If I don't like something in the game, I don't want to PLAY against it either. I can't control what other people play but if the things I detest keep getting made, and at a higher and higher power level, the idea of just not putting them in my own personal deck doesn't solve anything. This is doubly true with things that are competitive or exclusively with strangers, ie Arena or FNM.

Let’s me try to approach this from a slightly different vantage point. One of the core things about Magic is that it constantly reinvents itself. Much like how we design the game, it iteratively adapts.

That means we try something and then the audience, the collective whole of all the players, gives us feedback. Note, for the rest of this answer, I’m going to use the word “players”, but I’m using that word to mean the totality of everyone playing. If it’s something players like, we make more of it. If it’s something players dislike, we make less of it. If players despise it, we don’t do it again.

My example for the last point was ante. For those unfamiliar, ante made you play an extra card exiled from the game which the winner permanently took from the other player if they won. The game started with ante as a core part of the rules. Originally, it was the default. You had to opt out of it.

Players hated it. Hated, hated, hated it. I remember, whenever you would meet a stranger, you had to start by saying “no ante”. It didn’t take long for the game to reject ante. Eventually, we even banned all the ante cards in every tournament format.

Part of the social contract of playing Magic is agreeing to experience what the players want in the game. Yes, you can build your deck however you wish, but other people get to do the same.

This means if something exist in any volume, it exists because the players want it to exist. If the players didn’t want it, like ante, the will of the players would force it from the game.

A common note I get on Blogatog is “I don’t like thing X. Can we please remove thing X from Magic? Thank you.”

My answer is always some form of this: The players (again the totality of the players) have said that this is something they want in the game. It’s now part of the game because people want it to be.

This means being part of Magic means to signing up to anything the players have said they wanted. I keep focusing on how you can control what you play with, but yes, part of being in the Magic ecosystem is the agreement that each player gets to play with the parts of the game they enjoy most.

So, let’s talk Universes Beyond. The reason we tried it in the first place was because we had data that made us think players would like it. That’s what R&D does. We extrapolate based on player feedback and try new things.

The players will embrace or reject it. If they embrace it, we’ll make more. If they reject it, we make less of it. If they reject strongly, we might never make it again. Look at March of the Machine Aftermath. The players hated it, and we excised it from our future plans (surprisingly quickly, by the way).

Why are we making more Universes Beyond? Because the players are saying loudly that they want it to be part of the game. The best selling Secret Lairs of all time are Universes Beyond. The best selling Commander decks of all time are Universes Beyond. The best selling large booster release of all time is Universes Beyond. It’s not “sets” because we’ve only ever released one.

It’s not just sales. We do market research. Market research also strongly says players want Universes Beyond. Note, each individual player wants specific ones, but the collective data is they want it.

We also look at data about what creates the biggest online discussions. Universes Beyond rules supreme there as well.

I could go on and on. There are many metrics we look at to reflect the will of the people, and Universes Beyond is crushing it in (almost) every metric.

My point is Universes Beyond follows the pattern of every new thing we’ve tried. We try it in small samples and then increase its usage as the players show acceptance.

Why do you have to play against it? Because, by being a Magic player, you accept the will of the people. You accept that part of being a member of the community is allowing the community, as a whole, to dictate what the game is.

It doesn’t want ante, but it definitely wants Universes Beyond.

That’s why you have to play against it.

[thespitefulcrow]

Justifying the decision with "The best selling Secret Lairs, Commander Decks, and booster product of all time are UB" sure is a way to do it, I suppose.

Especially when you ignore the fact that a) the best selling UB lairs are almost certainly the ones with power mechanically unique cards and/or the ones with the best reprints b) the UB commander decks are consistently loaded up with better reprints and more new designs than regular set decks (even premium decks like MH3 and CMM) and c) LotR not only had a one-of-a-kind chase card and the entire Realms and Relics sheet, but is also very much seated in the same fantasy that classic Magic was, meaning it was a return to form for a lot of players

I can put out a blue jar and a red jar, and both have the option for you to put $1 in - the blue jar always dispenses 50 cents in return, and the red jar always dispenses $5 in return. Both jars tell you what you'll get, and a sign above says "Put $1 in the jar whose color your like more." The data would show that more people like red than blue, but when you've also blatantly stacked the metrics used to determine that, the data means nothing.

[oak23]

Guys I'm crying at this interaction

[thespitefulcrow]

YOOOO MY SILLY LITTLE OMANYTE STILL LIVES

i love yuka morii's little clay models and she's always been my favorite artist for the cards so this interaction was huge for me

also don't worry about me being suspended guys, it was for telling an anti-vaxx right-wing checkmark "then perish, dumbass"

[oak23]

[thespitefulcrow]

I'd take a new pic of the lil guy to prove my validity but I'm in finland and he's still back in the States so...maybe later this year

[oak23]

Guys I'm crying at this interaction

[thespitefulcrow]

YOOOO MY SILLY LITTLE OMANYTE STILL LIVES

i love yuka morii's little clay models and she's always been my favorite artist for the cards so this interaction was huge for me

also don't worry about me being suspended guys, it was for telling an anti-vaxx right-wing checkmark "then perish, dumbass"

[oak23]

[oak23]

Guys I'm crying at this interaction

[thespitefulcrow]

YOOOO MY SILLY LITTLE OMANYTE STILL LIVES

i love yuka morii's little clay models and she's always been my favorite artist for the cards so this interaction was huge for me

also don't worry about me being suspended guys, it was for telling an anti-vaxx right-wing checkmark "then perish, dumbass"

[rachy-chel]

Whenever I have artblock I just do this

[sonichedgeblog]

A Big The Cat Tape Dispenser, developed by Toy Island, though unknown if it was officially released anywhere. Photo from a catalog scanned by @abelmunizj

[silphwave]

🎀 ポリゴン 🎀

[tqumi-deactivated20190920]

a baby

[jerryle3]

Hirohiko Araki’s response to being asked who was the most attractive character he has ever made

[leesh]

THIS IS IT. THIS IS THE BEST TIKTOK EVER MADE

[fuzzyby]

Every beginning of a harry styles fanfic ever

[kugurii]