12/17/20
tank – verb : fail completely, especially at great financial cost
Anyone who follows baseball knows that if a guy hits .450 for the first month of the season, there’s still no chance he finishes the season with a batting average over .400. No one’s hit over .400 since Ted Williams did it…in 1941. It’s unlikely anyone will ever do it again.
I was hitting about .600 in the first 9 packs of my Magic advent calendar. If all of my boosters were from a single booster box, I’d assuredly expect to get a whole lot of diddly over squat for the remainder of my packs. But these are all packs from different sets, chosen randomly by a random person and thrown in one of dozens of random boxes and shipped to me. There was a chance I’d continue to open good(ish) stuff. I had reason to entertain a little optimism, right?
Wrong.
My hopefulness didn’t account for the fact that a lot of my remaining packs were from sets with notoriously bad play and financial value. Shadows over Innistrad. Fate Reforged. Dragons of Tarkir. There’s a reason people don’t speak those names in hushed tones of reverence and bewildered awe. In fact, most people don’t talk about these sets at all, forgettable as they are.
Considering how universally awful the rares in Core Set 2019 are – the set garnered a reputation of “mythic or bust” shortly after release – my 10th advent pack coughing up this dude was quite fortuitous:
Though worth $3.90 – less than the retail price of a pack – Sai is still the second most valuable rare in M19, behind Goreclaw, Terror of Qal Sisma (worth a healthy 5 cents more than Sai.) That an uncommon in M19, Stitcher’s Supplier, is more valuable than every single rare in that set, is pathetic.
So yeah…Sai was a perfectly cromulent pull.
Since then, things have gone…poorly.
Six packs, and only one card I’d consider playable:
Like Sai, Crux of Fate is the second most valuable rare in its set – at $1.55. And also like M19, Fate Reforged is a set in which an uncommon is more valuable than every rare you can open. Shockingly, that uncommon, Temur Sabertooth, is worth more than every card in the set, save three mythic rares.
If you’re opening a booster and rooting for an uncommon over most of the set’s mythics, something went terribly awry in the development of that set. Players love to moan about power creep in recent years, but look at the alternative!
Just to prolong my pity party, here’s a few other wondrous pulls from recent days:
A blob? Really? Who is ever happy to open a card depicting a blob?
You know what? “Blob” is so much fun to say, I’ll forgive that one.
For that matter, is ooze tribal a thing in Commander? Because my glorious extended art Biowaste Blob – in foil! – from Commander Legends is begging to be played. Somehow, in a matter of a few days, I opened copies of the only two Magic cards with the word “blob” in them.
(Every time I type “blob” I say the word in my head, and chuckle. What am I, 5 years old?)
What’s that? I brought up Commander Legends, after mentioning last post about having CMR collector boosters I couldn’t bring myself to open?
Why, yes, I’ve been opening my Commander Legends collector boosters. Like my advent packs, I’m opening one a day until Christmas. And also like the advent packs, a strong opening act has given way to vast despondency. But…BUT…there are eight more CMR collector boosters to go. Surely it’s only a matter of days before I open that inexorable pack with my foil extended art Jeweled Lotus. Because…2020. Seriously…2020 owes all of us foil extended art Loti.
Next time – Commander plans start to blossom. Or Kaldheim hype. Or more grousing about 30-cent rares. I have no idea.
Casual Magicking 