Mirror Mirror (Part 3 of 3)

Last time I speculated that the Wizards of the Coast will be making Legends and Planewalkers in the uncommon and possibly the common rarity.  The reason being that the folks in the Ivory Tower tweaked the highlander aspect of the Legends Rule and one of the consequences of this tweak is that it will allow for the printing of more Legends and more Planeswalkers.  This will allow for more interesting games and interesting games are what the casual player desires and that is good for the game as a whole.

But the 64,000 ticket question is this: how does all of this affect us?  Let me postulate a guess by asking this question: Why did WotC change the Legends Rule anyway?

The people who have “Chief” in their titles looked at the income stream and noticed that Magic was not bringing in as much income as they would have liked.  Meetings were called and studies were conducted to ascertain what the problem is.

Part of the answer lies in the available gaming options these days.  There are a plethora of first rate free-to-play games available to the gamer who is unwilling or unable to spend scarce free cash.  If one is willing to allow for micro-transaction-based games, the list grows even larger.

I suspect this research also revealed that the un-fun aspects of Legends was on par with Counterspell and Armageddon.  The Chiefs then requested that the Legends rule be changed to eliminate the un-fun aspects.  The Chiefs are banking that these changes will attract players back to the game when these changes start being reflected in new sets.

So how does this affect us? 

These future Legends and Planewalkers will be printed in the non-rare rarity slot.  These Legends and Planeswalkers will have a heavy mana cost, minimally 4 or more mana.  When players are pondering their deck ideas, they are not going to put four (4) copies of these cards in their decks.  So when these minimalist players are buying their decks, they will only be taking a copy or two and not the full four copies.  This would mean that more customers could be served with the same amount of inventory.  This would be true if a bot has 4 copies or 40 copies in its inventory.  A fully-stocked bot brings in more business than a sparsely populated one.