The Prof explores the accelerating power creep in Commander sets and increasing cost of pre-constructed decks, particularly CMM’s new $80 price. He asks why the price is so high on these though, considering they’re not premium products.
His roundup of the historical prices on commander decks is pretty eye-opening. The original Commander Legends precons were $15-20 each, as was the case for many of the Commander decks after that. Even recently the top end was $34-45 per deck. CMM, however, is one of the most expensive masters sets ever, let alone among all sets.
Similarly, $240 for a Collector Booster box gets us only 4 boosters now, when originally a box had 12.
What happens when the product made for the format made for everyone is priced so high, it’s only available for those with the most cash and most means?
The Prof’s answer is that the community pays this price in many ways:
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WOTC is incentivized to keep prices high in general, and thereby also increase reprint equity. This is obvious given how terrible the mana bases are in the CMM precons ([[Sliver Hive]] being a notable absence), and how many of the CMM reprints could have been in many precons last year.
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Regular Commander decks get worse. [[Fierce Guardianship]] and [[Dockside Extortionist]] a great example of a reprint that could have appeared in any previous deck, but the highest priced reprints only go into high priced sets. Regular decks are underpowered and worse.
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“Everyone’s format” is no longer for everyone. When Commander precons now “aren’t for you,” then the format becomes not for us too. New price floors harm the ability for many to access Commander, which for the Prof is the format of “just jam cards in a deck.”
I’ve kinda quit playing commander for most of the reasons Prof outlined: it feels like it’s a never-ending arms race, and the way to win is to spend the most money at the table, fully aided and abetted by WotC’s pricing on everything commander related these days.
Combined with the ‘every deck is a 7’ problem, it went from being fun, to being less fun, to being pretty sure I’m just going to get stomped.
So no more commander, and the last remaining bastion of MTG in my life lately is just pauper, because well, it’s got a grand total of no $100+ cards in it.
I feel the same way. It used to be so fun to make junky decks that kinda work. There were some great cards, but you didn’t need them. It was awesome to see the creativity some people came up with.
Now it’s just the same cards. The new hot card.
I agree, they print “must have” chase cards that you kind of need now because the competitiveness has increased so much. I loved the idea of jamming your 100 cards together and playing it out. Now it’s turned into a constructed min/max format where you kind of start with these X cards that every deck sort of needs.