Re:How Success Almost Killed a Game, and How Its Creators Sa...
by plorkyeran on Sunday April 19, 2015 @09:34AM
(#9403067)
If your net expense of drafting is $13/week then you're either getting ripped off or losing every game and going out of your way to avoid picking any valuable cards. It's been a few years since I last played, but when I did draft weekly I averaged well over $5 of cards per draft without explicitly money-drafting anything that didn't pay for the draft by itself. The median draft leaves you with a few $1 rares, but there's enough high outliers to pull the mean up quite a bit.
Re:How Success Almost Killed a Game, and How Its Creators Sa...
by thaumasiotes on Tuesday April 21, 2015 @04:12AM
(#9412771)
It's pretty dishonest to discount the cost of drafting because you get some high-value cards while refusing to discount the cost of constructed... the entire cost of constructed is obtaining high-value cards. If you buy a $400 deck, do $200 of maintenance on it over one year, and then sell your cards at a 50% loss, you're still way ahead of a drafter who averaged $6 of money cards per week. And on top of all that, you had the option of playing more than once a week if you wanted to, and you never deliberately sabotaged yourself in the attempt to cut costs on your hobby ("explicitly money-drafting anything that [paid] for the draft").
I might also note that on Magic Online, it's definitely not true that the median draft leaves you with a few $1 rares, as the residual value that bad rares used to have has been cannibalized by mythic rares. A bad rare in MTGO can be purchased for $0.10; obviously you can sell it for less than that. Are paper rares that much more valuable?
Looking purely at costs, the obviously correct thing to do is proxy your cards. Proxies are free.