What would happen if WotC ran a Magic Online NFT edition and shut it down? Do you think they'd let a third party use their IP? Would Magic cards you can't play with or view the art of and are just urls pointing to a dead server have real value?

Have you read the list of restrictions Ubisoft has for their NFTs? Do people really own those?

Magic card art has very little value. The value is in the interactions between different cards.

Even today, there are 3rd party websites that let you play Magic online with other people, but you get to play with any cards you want which removes a certain aspect of the meta game.

As long as I owned the NFT on a decentralized blockchain, any 3rd party could verify my ownership and let me use those cards.

The same thing that happens if you have an NFT that's just a URL. If the URL target goes down, the NFT is broken.

Or if the game that accepted those NFT as in-game items shuts down, then these items cease to exist as well in any meaningful way, at least for the reasons it might be valuable in the beginning when I purchased it (stats in game, rarity, etc.). If the game ceases to exist then the NFT is just, what, a trading card that shows some scarcity/rarity?

I really don't get this argument at all. I bought an in-game mount for World of Warcraft as a NFT, WoW shuts down, where the hell am I going to use the in-game mount again? A shitty game that tells me "your WoW mount works here as well!"?

It really feels it's all a preparation for the "metaverse" bullshit.

No game is going to do the "your X game items work here", since it cuts off any revenue stream they have, and the NFT itself is almost definitely not going to include a functioning asset, just a token that you own mount with an ID of XYZ. It would be on the game developers to create art and code for every single NFT they want to support.

Exactly what I assume, hence why I don't see the value on the argument of "owning an in-game item", there is nothing to own, everything is on the hands of the platform that enables whatever I own to exist.

NFTs != images. Art NFTs are one implementation of NFTs (and not one I’m a fan of).

A token representing a Magic card doesn’t need any association with the art on that card, it just needs to exist so anyone can verify that I purchased that card (and therefore the ability to use its mechanics) from WoTC. A 3rd party game that allows me to play Magic can verify the NFT card ownership and can use it’s own art or no art at all, just like they do today.

The only difference is that today’s 3rd party Magic sites don’t have verified ownership of cards so everyone uses the most expensive cards.

Only in a superficial way. A lot of the early NFTs pre the 721 standard did not bother with an URL; the Cryptopunks don't. The catalogue of what exactly each token represents can work perfectly well off-chain. If people care to trade Bored Ape tokens, they will do so even if the URLs are broken; whatever marketplace they are using will manually make sure the right images are shown etc.

If the game that is using the NFTs I bought is shutdown, what the hell is the value of these in-game items that I bought if the game for them doesn't exist anymore?

Yeah, someone else can create a new game and say "we accept the NFT items from Defunct Game X", you are still completely under the control of whomever is providing you the platform for these in-game items to actually exist. If that platform is taken away you just have some bits of data pointing to other bits of data with no meaning and no value at all...

> If that platform is taken away you just have some bits of data pointing to other bits of data with no meaning and no value at all..

They can still have meaning (we know what item it was); whether there are people who would value the pure notion of owning such a digital item in the absence of concrete functionality is indeed the question that NFTs explore/raise.

Either way, you're trusting the owners of Magic the Gathering Online. With a purchase from them they're actually holding the records, but even with a NFT there's nothing stopping them from no longer supporting or honouring those NFTs, or not honouring them if they've been transferred or sold or whatever.

I’m not trusting them. If they choose to ban a card, that’s fine since it’s an accepted part of the meta game, but there have been 3rd party services for playing Magic online with people for years. Those third party sites suffer from not having verified card ownership and NFTs would enable that.