Why HS being a CCG instead of TCG is actually awesome, and if it wasnt it would be horrible

General Discussion
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Disclaimer, dis gunna be long!

So, many times here on the forums and in reddit ppl were asking why tehy can’t trade cards. Between their own accounts, regions and between themselves. The most common answer is - because nothing will stop them, to abuse it, creating multiple accounts, getting the free legs, and boosting one acc with full colection and dust, but there is so much behind that. So, why not being able to trade cards is awesome:

Short answer: Because of Diablo AH and the The Power Nine

The Power Nine were/are set of 9 cards in MTG, that pretty much define “broken” and “OP” in card games. Like 0 mana - add 3 mana, 2 mana take another turn, 1 mana draw 3, 3 mana reshuffle your hand and graveyard into your deck and draw 7 cards etc. Probably the most famous of them is the black Lotus. A mint condition, never played one, sells for up to 64 000 USD on ebay, and you can check it yourself - there are ppl bidding on it.

In a set where everyone can trade their cards, they can also sell them. But here comes an interesting story. After ppl grasped what treasure is to have any of those they started pooring money into MTG. And at some point (i believe it was after the beta reprints) someone thought - w8, if they start reprinting all those valuable cards, they will stop being so rare, so my investment will be bad, an started making lawsuits against the MTG publisher Wizards of the Coast. In respond they had to settle with a reprint rule, that will guarantee people will have their investment protected.

Right now a booster box of the 2nd reprint of the original MTG set (306 cards) the Beta, containing 36 booster packs (360 cards in totall) sells for literaly hundreds of thousands of dollars, 76 000 being the lowest that puts a single unsealed booster at 2191 usd, or 220 dollars per card. the chance to get any of the power nine is from 0 to 10 cards in it. So you are looking to loose 100k or win half a mill.

And thats only the tip of it. Counterfeits is a thing, resealing packs is a thing, scams are a thing, 3rd party resselers and gambling sites too. People trade cards in huge quantities, as now they are perceived as investment, like stocks or bitcoin, and whenever a new set is predicted to rise in value, actually those traders can lock out whole regions (continents, not countries) out of stock as they buyout everything, leaving casual and even pro players to w8 for weeks before they can even open a single booster from that set.

This is going to happen and is happening to any didgital game, that has item trade economy. Best examples being skins traded for CS and Doto.

And after the fail that Diablo 3 real money AH was, I’m sure Blizz or any game dev wants to have anything to do with such implications (at best you’re looking at pissed crowd, at worst - wave of lawsuits). Pretty much part of Artifact failing so gloriously bad is exactly because they made it a TCG, and not a CCG.

So, let’s see what would be the implications if by any chance, blizz would have made it a TCG.

  • Double, probably quintiple price on packs. (keep in mind, a pack of MTG, containing 10 cards, 4 of which lands (mana) is ~4 to 5 euros each, current set)

  • Removing the option to earn gold and buy packs with it.

  • removing the promotions and bundle discounts

  • furious watchdoging over the market as each transition has to bring a percent.

  • wave of bans for scammers, and those who bought from them, taking many innocent with it (GTA 5 still suffers from trolls, who hack in currency, put it in ppl inventory and laugh as they and their targets gets banned for cheating)

  • Removing all free cards, the pitty timer, the free legendaries, and the rule of legendary dupes (go back to having 4 millhouses in a 150 packs)

  • gap will be created between whales and casuals. Even if you open a strong card, you will probably never play with it, as it will be much more worthy to resell it as a mint condition one for couple of hundreds/thousands or more. And tournaments and T1, probably T2 decks as well will be locked to 1% of the players who can afford to expand their collection. If you play for years and have talent in trading, you’ll probably be able to craft 1 t3 - t4 deck in a year, after trowing no less then 150 euros/m.

  • real p2w. Consider that - your turn 2 is play a 3/2, his turn 2 is playing 4 cards, costing 240k giving him 12 mana, and blasting your face with an OTK. Yeah, you feel bad for having only 2 legs in your deck? Imagine how would you feel if your enemy deck, costs as much as 5 times your country lifetime average salary?

and that’s again - the tip of it.

Underneath will be all the bad practices of scammers, hacking, counterfeiting, 3rd party sites, etc that are plaguing the doto/lol/cs skin markets. The only difference being, that those games you can pick and play and try to not care about the fancy stuff (been there, tried it, failed miserably, Doto costed me as much as a 2nd hand Audi Quatro 2012 in a 5 years period)

So, as you can see, HS being a CCG, instead of a tradable card game is one of the most awesome parts of it.

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yawn got bored reading 1/3 of the way through, why waste your time on this lmao

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Yeah youre right Azra.

Except for the content in a Mtg Booster

The last time i played it was 15 cards

10 commons 4 uncommons 1 rare/mythicrare and by chance a land.

But else, decent text.

He wrote it because once in a while people coming to complain about not beeing a tcg which is a good thing.

If youre not interested just pass on :slight_smile:

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Excellent post, Azra.
I could, if I wanted to be a nitpicker, comment on minor details where I disagree with some assumptions. But none of those disagreements invalidates your actual point, so I won’t even start to pit any nicks - I don’t want to post anything that casual readers might perceive as disagreement.

And yet you took the time to post a reply. A reply that tells the whole world a lot about you, while making no valuable comment on this discussion at all.
Thanks!

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Correct, most sets boosters contain 15 cards, but there were also sets with 6, 8, 10, 12 and 20 packs. So averaged it down. Godd to know for non MTG players - in HS you can take the game and start playing it, getting a bunch of core cards. In MTG you can buy a prebuild deck, with potato quality cards, probably couple of valuable rares, but in general to craft initial semi decent deck you need to pour a s-load of money into boosters, as even your mana comes from them.

go ahead, I’ve been off magic for more then 10 years now, so sum of da detailsare fuzzy as hell :slight_smile:

Would love to expand the point in conversation, and bring up some other topics, as what happened when Artifact prices tanked and how enraged were the initial backers of the game, who’ve spent thousands into it, and how boring and repetitive it was for the casuals, who pretty much used the same deck, as they couldn’t afford a different one (not even a better one)

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I’ve never played magic. My nitpicking are actually about your predictions on what would happen if HS because a TCG.

“Double, probably quintiple price on packs” - not truly necessary as Blizzard still makes their money of the primary sale. But since trading will probably reduce the amount of packs bought directly, a price increase is indeed very likely.
“removing the promotions and bundle discounts” - unlikely, such promotions and discounts are huge sale boosters and can also help get new players interested. It’ll still be commercially interesting to offer e.g. a pre-release bundle with a discount.
“Removing all free cards , the pitty timer, the free legendaries, and the rule of legendary dupes” - probable, but not necessarily. Obviously trading free cards would be useless, probably even dangerous, and should be forbidden
“Even if you open a strong card, you will probably never play with it” - the cards in HS are digital goods, they’ll always be in mint condition whether you play with them or not.

One thing you forgot to mention is that, since HS cards are digital goods tracked on Blizzard servers, Blizzard will need to set up and maintain the infrastructure to enable trading / selling. That is a huge investment that they’ll need to earn back which makes it even more likely that your prediction of increasing prices comes true. However, it might enable some alleviation of the other issues. For instance, it is much harder to deliver something other than was promised if the sale is done through a Blizzard server rather then when a sale is done by sending money and then sending a package by postal mail.

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Good nitpicking, and agree with it, the parts that you highlighted are poorly explained by me in the OP.

It comes with the “customer percieved value” principles. The situation is theorycraft. E.g. not something that might be implemented to the current one, but what would it be if it was so from the begining.

Right now you know a pack costs 1.99, as that was the price from the begining, and you are used to it. You percieve the value of a pack as a 1.99. If I tell you - buy 50, and get them for 1.20, because of their percieved value you know that getting em for 1.20 is a good deal, and you are more inclined for a purchase. But if I say - ok, here is a pack for 2.99 you would be outraged at my greed, as I’m clearly trying to take more then what it’s worth. But if the initial price was 4.99, then a 2.99 would be a great deal to take, and 1.20 would be insane… and so on on.

For refference, when I was trying to figure out a viable pricing on the current booster packs in HS, I considered the prices for MTG Arena, the digital Yu-Gi-Oh and Artifact. Price should double with pitty timer off, and quintiple if they keep the no dupes rule. As those would be higly sought cards that will inflate the game economy.

Also consider this. For MTG, if you want to play a red-blue-black deck (abomination of high roll controll/agro/combo hybrid) you need the coresponding lands (isles, swamps) as mana. 1/3rd of each booster is mana. In HS mana is given per turn, you don’t need to buy it in booster packs. After you open let say 40 packs, you’ll have enough mana cards for the rest of your HS career (~160 of different colour) after that those are filler cards (hence the number 10 per pack in the OP) with value next to nothing, that increases the avg cost of the other cards.

So, we are looking at mot probable pricing of 4.99/single pack withouth pitty timer and probably 14.99 or even 19.99 if pity timer is on and no dupes rule is applied (legs are finite, and only 1 per deck can be used, so 1 leg = 4 mtg cards. you can spend half a mil on boosters and still don’t get all of the cards from a set. Timer and no dupes rule set a sealing on sells per customer. X ammount of money (ranged) would allways give you a full set of legs per expansion - hence, they’ll charge you more)…

oh and something that I’ve missed in initial post - no more dust and card drafting, t stop people from abusing it and dust entire collections just to craft a single super expensive card, to keep the game economy inflated. Why - because percent of each transaction, that’s why.

Sure, bad phrasing from my part. Bundles and seasonal promotions will still be a thing as main market principal - buy more-pay less. I’ve ment the “1 leg guaranteed in the first 10 packs”, “free leg at each exp for login” etc.

About the mint condition - yep, correct, but when 1 cards = hundreds or more new packs, it’s really hard to stop someone considering selling them because a) way to return the investment
b) more chances to increase them
it’s sickness, once you get hooked in trading. YOu stop percieve cards as something to play with, but how you can turn them into even more profit.

It’s allready here on macro and micro lvl

  • macro: The Blizz app launcher with it’s store / Blizz wallet
  • Micro (making ingame items tradable): WoW gold into token conversion/tokens sold on AH, and the remains of Diablo 3 AH. The infrastructure is there. And the way to do it is perfected by Valve - let ppl do what they want and take a cut of any transaction between them.

In the Valve ecosystem transactions stay in it. You can put real money in it, but you can’t pull it out. This is ok for the casuals, as they will make what - 100-200 bugs from trading and reinvest it in games. But for big deals (a courier skin was selled for 45k in doto, rares cs skin gravitate around ~2k) the scene is overtaken by third parties (websites and recognised traders). That make it possible for the transactions to happen outside the Steam ecosystem, and people can cash out on their skins. IN this case, those 3rd parties take the cut instead of Valve. And Valve, with all it’s know-how and pure financial might can’t deal with theam. So unlikely Blizz or any other gaming company could.

Here comes the dark side of trading - the scaming, gabmling and counterfeiting. The accaunt hacking and stripping (happened to my doto once, luckily got rolled back) and even assault and stealing. Yes, the trades would happen trough blizz system, but the actual deal making and money transfer could be done on so many levels, that I doubt anyone could predict and exempt controll over them.