Time To Get Better At Mulligans! Check out our new guide here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rN9-eNCqnLvDiKs.html Watch me play with Secret Lair Heads I Win, Tales You Lose on Shuffle Up here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ibN3lLR20Jatl58.html

They need to get rid of the ad card. They put ads on the back of tokens, there's ZERO reason to have double sided ad cards wasting cardboard.

“Took 3 years, but the effect finally resolved.” Sounds like a commander game of 8 people all playing mono blue

From a previous store owner: These new packs are going to be a huge problem for Limited events at stores. 1) Cost is too high; drafts/sealed were aready creeping up in price to where many could not afford it. Now it will be totally out of reach for some and cause others to not play Limited as often. 2) Too many rares; in sealed events in particular you are going have some people open a pool of rares that will increase their odds of winning by quite a bit. Does that make for a fun experience for all the opponents they will face 3) Too many rares again, in draft what will happen when someone opens a booster with so much value they don't want to pass and draft the pack. In the store I used to own we had a rule where if you opened two cards with real dollar value $15 or higher you could purchase a new pack to replace that one so you were not passing too much value. This was only incorporated because some people would just leave the draft table and the entire draft experience was ruined if we did not. This happened with such infrequency that it was not really an issue. But now, you are going to see this more often. If I am drafting do I really want to pass value that is going to help me pay for the cost of the draft? Probably not. But am I also going to want to pay the increased price of replacing that one pack, if your LGS allows for such a thing. I really think what Wizards should have done was to have a normal draft set and then collector boosters for those that want the chance of fancy cards. But THAT would not have been good for Wizards profits so yes, Limited formats will still suffer, in my opinion.

My biggest issue is that the introduction of set boosters seemed to make the phasing out of traditional draft boosters inevitable. It's hard to not feel like this is simply how they chose to raise the cost of draft boosters with the smallest amount of pushback. They tested the market with a more expensive booster with the intent to shift everything to that model if/when it sold.

Really cool that drafting becomes more expensive to save drafting

My only problem is the price increase for the drafts and prerelease

I think a real problem hinted to in this video are players driven away by the higher costs. Draft was one of the cheaper entry points to playing magic. With price increases that could drive away people from playing the game. Sure a portion of the market has shown that people are willing to spend more for a fancier product, but what about the sales lost from people who have been priced out. I was excited to buy the Sliver precon this summer untill I saw the price. It feels like this is happening more and more.

WOTC: incentivizes players to largely ignore draft packs by making their EV bad and dropping support for organized play and is then Pikachu-shocked when people stop buying draft packs. Who could have seen this coming?

I'm not going to stubbornly proclaim that this is a wholly negative change (it's not) but how convenient for WotC that the solution is going to be more expensive for players. Neat huh?

Funny how game pieces can go from 15 to 14 and get more expensive at the same time.

What concerns me the most (apart from the price increase) is the effect that the change in the proportions of rarities will have on Sealed. It's less if a problem in draft, as everyone sees most of every pack and you still only get to pick one card at a time, but in sealed, this will hugely increase the variability. If your 6 packs all have one rare or maybe one pack has 2, and someone else got a 4 rare pack, they're in a much stronger position right off the bat.

Simplifying the product line makes total sense. What we should dread is when they realize how much Arena has cannibalized paper drafting.

I'm from Brazil, and here we are feeling completely overwhelmed by this change. Magic, in general, is going to become SO EXPENSIVE. You guys have no idea.

This change plugs one hole, but the ship is still sinking under the weight of price increases and nonstop neverending set releases. I’m content to sit on the sideline and see how things shake out.

I like the idea of having just one booster pack. I think we were happier when there was only the booster pack instead of set boosters, draft boosters, collector's booster and whatever Hasbri creates to try to take the money from our wallets.

I agree with you Prof, I definitely am glad that we are going back to one type of non-premium pack. Most of my LGS said that the split gave them a huge headache and inventory nightmare. I'm hoping this helps.

This is going to make me attend less pre-release events. They are going to be even more expensive, and they were already absurdly expensive

I've been waiting for this video since it was announced. I appreciate the Professor for being informative and giving his insight when WoTC messes with our game without exaggeration or hyperbole.

I think, from hearing from many local game stores, that the "increased demand for Set Boosters" is often a result of Hasbro just not making draft boosters as available at the distribution level. I know many who wanted to order more Draft, but all that was available was Set Boosters, so their "data" is skewed because this was their plan all along to raise the price of the default booster.

To me going to something like a draft night or prerelease for a new set is an excuse to spend a bit of money at my LGS, an increase of price in those sorts of events just means that I end up being more picky with what I buy afterwards. It's not entirely possible to say for certain at this point, but I believe this will lead me to spending less at my LGS due to an increase in event prices, even if its just $10. When LTR prerelease happened I ended up getting a lot less than I normally would due to its above average event price as it was harder to justify spending a lot on sealed things, especially when LTR was already expensive as a set; I don't think that the Play Booster price increase will be that egregious, but I do think that it will have a similar effect, ESPECIALLY for when sets that are high power and have multiple chase cards are released in the future (MH3 prerelease will likely be something I have to skip out on depending on how bad the event prices get for it).

I am happy for going back to just a "normie" booster - there was too much stuff around - but I am a bit saddened by the fact price is increasing while my wage is remaining the same since 2018 :( Draft became expensive in my lgs and now it will be even more and I will be completely left out of these events The List was also an interesting idea that I see now reduced to 40 cards - it helped in the past to lower the prices for some never-reprinted cards.

I really appreciate your nuanced perspective as always Prof! I think I got the most understanding about Play Boosters here than from any other of the many sources discussing this issue. Thanks!

Nice one prof!! As someone that stopped playing MTG prior to the evolution of the draft booster, I really found your mulligan video incredibly helpful - now I just need to make it to Commander night to get going!

Instead of doing a banned and restricted announcement they did a play booster announcement, so I have read the article, and one other article that leaned closer to a review first from one of the magic reporting sites. In my local commander group i posted that "In this article they admit they are flooding local game stores with too many kinds of products. But only narrowly defined it as set vs draft. They don't even consider the larger scope." - Monday and the article was from star city games. I also said from some article, "Play boosters will be more expensive than set boosters, and are 36 boosters per box (like draft boosters)." My opinion is that these are draft boosters that have had some set booster ideas grafted onto them. Not the other way around. it's much easier to see them as what did they do with some of the common slots in a draft booster makes way more sense in my brain. Sunday Night we were discussing the pioneer cube i built with the help of this channel a couple of years ago, and how it's a more bomb-heavy environment. Well guess what, we will now get that in draft. They made a point to say they were going to design more answers at lower rarities. I might need to take a cue from that and adjust cube cobra's list.

Basically WotC changed something that had been working for decades (the draft boosters), and when the new products caused vrious issues in the ecosystem, they pretended to act in the best interest of the community by changing course, with that "accidentally" removing from the market the least expensive product and replacing it with something more expensive than both discontinued options.

Thanks for the educating recap, Prof. Always a pleasure to see you in my new video feed.

We hold a monthly draft night. So I'm very interested to see how this affects my play group. Especially since we typically buy draft boxes that have gone down in price.

I am interested to see how this affects prereleases. I remember at my lgs they charged $40 for the Lord of the Rings set and a lot of people being annoyed about it.

i remember some emplyee of wizards said when asked about the sheer amount of products wotc was releasing: ''you need to engage in products you want to engage''. And that is the result.

Excellent animations! Thx for the effort 🙂

Sweet! Sounds like a good fix. Thanks for another great video!

I was pretty devastated about draft boosters getting the axe at first, but since then i have accepted that this change had to come. The only thing i cant understand are the 14 cards per pack. As if that 1 common more per pack would be so bad, i mean they literally put cardboard ads for arena in the same booster.

Everything we said was going to happen with the announcement of set boosters has happened. I'm going to say now that play boosters are going to be a nightmare to try and play with in limited 😂

As someone who has played more sealed in the last year than ever before, I am curious to see what the change will bring, but I really hope this is an overall improvement for LGSs in limiting their outlay and making it easier to stock products. Fewer products is definitely better, and a simple dichotomy between a play booster and the premium collector booster is miles better than this time last year. Worried the increase in cost, guessing about $5 per event, is going to price some folks out. Will be checking stores to see where they are landing when MaKM comes out.

Hey Prof. I am just thanking you for your content! Greetings from Germany. And ofc I also really enjoy your Kickstarter playmat+that sweet treasure tokens. Greetings F.

Thanks for the level headed evaluation, prof. As someone who just keeps playing in person when buying a draft box with friends, I was really bummed out by the fha fact they change the whole foundation of drafting, pushing more rares and uncomment into the format,in which I already disliked the level of power creeping and getting pushed in. Sucks a little having to spend more on a format I enjoy less and less, but I atleast understands where it's coming from. Good old wizards again having to beat out the fire they caused with a stick.

I would be interested to see how each set having less commons printed into Pauper affects the format, either by stagnating it due to a lesser card pool added every year or possibly breaking it wide-open if they push design space for commons because there aren’t as many

I really liked your Mulligan video. Good stuff

The large majority of the sealed product I buy is pre-release kits. It's going to be a bummer that prices are going up, but I'm excited that I'll be seeing more of The List.

I had a bet and predicted this about two years ago. I said that draft boosters would go away as it is stupid for a company to offer two products that are so similar but one is slightly more expensive but does not offer the function of the other. Clearly sales would eventually reflect this and set boosters would be modified for draft and retain the set booster price. The only reason I lost the bet was because we agreed the change would have to be announced by the end of September. I was two weeks off the mark.

Personally I'm thrilled things are being simplified. Coming back to magic this year after a decade plus of not playing was pretty confusing with all the new products. Your channel helped immensely in figuring things out btw.

That's a sick tie!

After a nearly 5 year hiatus I came back to MTG and was so confused about what each packs were about and very few people were able to explain any of it, now that this is being changed I feel more confident buying packs again.

I really only play Commander, but I do try to build a new deck from a single set booster box. It will be interesting to see if this new pack makes things better or worse for that. While I may not play draft, I'm glad steps are being taken to save that experience for others.

Had strong feelings about how the multiple rares and list cards will warp selection order and create a greater chance of spikier deck quality. Where you will be rewarded for lucking into multiple 1 color good rares and forcing a color pair. But with fewer commons, (a thing i had missed,) we will also see less punishment for this as it means the best commons will be more likely to crop up, so when forcing a color pair you are less likely to get hosed by not seeing 2-3 of the best common enablers for your deck, they will just be more common. Conversely the uncommons become more uncommon as the pool grows so if your deck relys on a few key uncommons to really maximize potential you are best served in letting that deck pass by. Also means any uncommons that are okay buy amazing together become a worse pick because you are less likely to find its mate.

It's no wonder that set boosters were more popular than draft because a lot of the time the prize support (at least at my lgs) was set booster packs. It just seemed like there was more reason for a shop to have set booster packs on hand than draft. I'm glad we're returning to one product, though the price increase sucks

Killer tie prof!

As more of a set booster buyer, I’ll miss my regular art cards, but I’m excited to be able to draft the packs and get the sorts of cards that I buy set boosters for!

After Ixalan, I'll wait to see how this plays out, and check Bloomburrow if the feedback from players is positive.

This will make me start drafting every once in a while. I never drafted because I mostly play commander and wanted the value from set boosters but now it sounds like I could get both

I just got into magic and TCG games a month or 2 ago, and It was really really hard to learn all the stuff by myself. I appreciate it's just the play boosters and collector boosters now

I've personally switched to drafting FaB. I can't keep up with all the draftable MTG sets, FaB's slower release cadence is a lot less stressful. Plus now it's going to be more affordable!

I think its a good step to combine the two . Only bad thing is the higher price for drafting.

the problem is not only the increased pricing for draft via more expansive boosters but also the fact that to get the uncommons you need, you will have to open up more booster in general since there will be a bigger pool to pull from while keeping the same number of slots in play boosters.(yes buy singles folks, but this will also increase prices since most likely there will be less suply for chase cards increasing also prices on singles.)

I think it's the smart move. My LGS is getting more into drafting, so it should be nice! That and brand new players sometimes get duped into buying draft boosters expecting set booster rarities.

While the idea of multiple rares to pick from in draft seems like it would change the format in an interesting new way, I think the price increase will push a lot of players out of regular drafting, myself included.

Personally, I like this idea. It makes logistics easier for all parties involved. It also means that when I buy a box, I don't have to forego buying a box of set boosters just so my friends and I can draft with it. My only gripe is that they're still planning to include ad cards. They're pointless. If we're seeing the blasted things, we're already buying your product. If margins are so tight that you can't afford to throw in an extra common, just save the bloody cardboard and cut the packs to 14 cards.

Glad I had some jumpstart packs. Me and my partner needed up putting a commander deck together with it and any cards we had. Right now it's more for fun and it's a graveyard deck.

I am a draft only player and its funny because my LGS gives out set boosters as prizes for draft events, which further discourages drafting. We always specifically ask for draft boosters for prizes to draft more. I think a lot of the sales data they are citing is because they intentionally shifted the emphasis to the more expensive product. Set boosters were pitched as the new standard and they wanted it to eclipse draft boosters. To me it seems like a 5 year convoluted way to just do a price hike.

My main reason to go to my LGS was for the prerelease. Given the price increase coming I am much more likely to just play in Arena instead and save my money for singles. This game is already very expensive to play and with a functional free alternative I would guess more people will make a similar switch to Arena over their LGS in the future.

It is "funny" how every single decision since some years now looks like it is mainly about players giving more money.

8:00 great sense of direction during the editing there XD that said, as long as we don't get lower rates on rares and mythics i'm fine with the play boosters, makes it far easier for people who just don't know what's the difference of cards you can get.

I think as a newish player this is helpful to simplify things. This was already in place when I started could have saved me a lot of confusion but overall I just hope to draft and pre-releases don't become too expensive to play at stores

in my country, I feel drafts and prereleases are already at the most expensive a middle-class-centered community can afford. if these events are about to get even 50% more expensive, it will really galvanize paper magic as a hobby for rich people around here

I only draft. Not convinced this’ll be a great change..

Glad you addressed the jumpstart issue. Had a bunch of friends over and spent a not insignificant money on jump booster packs. Try to relive our teens, have some drinks, eat some pizza, play some magic.

I always bought set boosters, jumpstart and draft confused me and I never really understood the difference between them all. I'm so glad there's just going to be one main booster! If they are the same price as set boosters as well then nothing will change for be bar it being easier to understand!

I know someone posts this every day, but this one was the nail in the coffin for my magic spending, and I am glad I preserved some great draft booster boxes to draft with my friends. I am, personally, of the opinion that a draft format is best with a comparatively low average power discrepancy between rarities and as few strange "bonus slots" as possible. I noticed many players online expressed how the bonus sheets introduced with Strixhaven were super fun because they would "keep the draft format fresh", but that's the opposite of what I experienced. The only sets I enjoyed drafting within the last year or so were Dominaria United and Dominaria remastered (and, if I'm perfectly honest, Commander Masters, but that's its own can of worms). All the bonus sheet sets have been miserable for me. It may be fun to kick people down with a Skithiryx or Ragavan in a Masters set, but doing that in a Standard Set I found it felt like I might as well flip a coin. Now, with Play Boosters, not only are the bonus sheets I so dislike not going away, but ADDITIONAL variance is added to the mix, Wizards basically told me "This format is not for you", and I admit that it makes me very pessimistic about me drafting future magic sets in any meaningful way.

Yeah. With this change I’ll probably be playing half as many drafts at most. It’s so much harder to justify that expenditure when I’m paying so much for so little draft time.

I have a friend that likes magic and I play as well but hadn’t bought boosters in over a year. For his birthday, I went to my local LGS to get him some boosters. Had like a 5min conversation trying to understand what each booster was and what the price would be, plus math for discounts if I happened to buy 4 boosters of some specific type. I ended up turning around and leaving empty handed.

As someone who's new to magic, (currently only own the one precon, no other cards...) I also like the simplification, like you said. Though I still have to worry about picking which kind if an older set is available... I also like the idea of collector boosters, as far as wanting guarantee on "pretty version", however it is a bit too rich for my blood... which you kind of said (I have not looked at the previous video you did on it, and linked). But as someone who still is interested in buying boosters (even though I've been preached to about buying singles) I feel like opening a collector booster would feel more exciting/fun (until you look at your wallet lol). So I'm not sure what the compromise there would be. Like if they made one combined pack with price between the two, with a quantity of fancy cards in between the two as well... but then I feel like both types of buyers would be upset at that...

My issue is the vplume of uncommon/commons nyugioh had a similar problem a few years back; they upgraded to having more Super rares (guarenteed 1/pack where previously i believe it had been 1/4 chance) and suddenly rares were harder to track donw than supers. Increasing the number of uncommona per set is juat going to make getting uncommons you actually want for constructed, or consistently finding signpost uncommons in limited, is going to be harder than it already was.

Hopefully this probability layout remains consistent for the foreseeable future - one of the more annoying things with set boosters is that the layout keeps changing from set to set. Overall, I think this is a great change - though I see it less as the two things you said, and more that yes, they discontinued draft boosters, but just made set boosters draftable. I mean, the only real changes are to the new probability layout (which regularly changed anyway), and removing the "story" collation of set boosters, which tbh I wasn't a fan of after the first set or two (since it tends to generate very similar packs). The downside of course is that they just went with the pricing for set boosters, rather than at least averaging the two...

I draft often and attend most prerelease events at my LGS. I think that play boosters will make draft/limited more interesting. Sure, it will increase the intensity of play at those events, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Plus, more good cards in the pockets of players.

As much as i do understand the upset behind keeping the price towards the set booster price, i was never one to buy draft boosters in the first place and really have only attended one prerelease event in my whole life. But one of my favorite parts about opening set boosters was the guaranteed art card, and now to find out they arent guaranteed just disincentivizes me from buying packs at all. Sure they’re by all definition useless, but they were cool and i love the mtg art. I also felt like when i opened draft boosters, that all the cards felt the same. Hopefully these new play boosters still have the fun set booster nature to them, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

My biggest concern is and always will be the accessibility of the game and I believe that raising the price of a draftable booster hurts that goal. Of particular concern, Pre-Releases will now cost about 25% more, and that's gonna price a lot of people out of one of the best entry points into the game. And I get it, with where we're at, it's a necessary move to keep the formats I love alive. But it didn't have to be this way if WotC hadn't introduced a product that contained all the fudge-coated booster fun variants and extra rares that were deliberately absent from the Draft Boosters they were purposefully priced to compete with.

One thing I hadn't seen anyone mention at all until now, and was sorta glossed past here The decrease in the number of Common Card Designs will mean that the chances of those individual commons showing up in these new Play Boosters will increase substantially, 20% more likely and, I could be wrong, I don't draft myself, but I don't recall anyone complaining that the variety of commons was just overwhelming and that they wished there were more reprints of the chaff cards. Certainly I'm sure the impact this will have on Pauper Formats will be -substantial- going forwards, and that's something I do care about, and think will suffer because of this change

I think it’s a good idea. Now I have the option to play sealed with my boosters that I didn’t when I purchased set boosters just for cracking.

I have not gotten actual boosters in a very long time, I had no idea it's gotten so complicated!

My biggest worry is not draft formats, but sealed. Draft i feel can handle the multiple rares per pack, but sealed feels so much more variable now

I’m just happy that the frequency of the art cards are being reduced. They always feel like a waste of a slot in the set booster.

I enjoy the PreRelease events as the first opportunity for me to get my hands on the cards and play them. I'm not as much of a limited player (being primarily a Commander player) though. I'm more curious how this will affect the number of cards being opened and the average prices of cards. Time will tell.

Thanks again

I agree that I think this is probably the best decision because it does get confusing to know what kind of booster pack to buy. I only recently got back into Magic in the last couple of years and they always confused me when I go to a like local game store and they would ask me if I want draft or set boosters because I’m like I I don’t know I just want booster I just want I just wanna pack. So I think combining them into one will simplify it a little bit and if they’re functional is both, I think that’s probably a good idea but he’s right only time will tell really how this works out.

Wizards made the change to split boosters into Draft and Set, now they're un-splitting them and they're getting more expensive again. Just a roundabout price increase.

The loved draft boosters because i felt like even with a bit a money, i could play the booster game , ive got some amazing cards from commander drafts and MH drafts.

I've played limited since I started in the Scars of Mirrodin block. I found it odd coming back to tabletop MTG that packs were separated between set and draft and more. At the end I do like recombining the packs back into a version kinda like back then. Common to uncommon ratio seems backwards, but details details. Hopefully the prices for limited styles of play won't drastically go up so I can continue enjoying draft and sealed.

Even when I had a lot more free time it was tough paying $15 a week if I wanted to draft. Assuming draft will be something like $20-25 with Play Boosters (6x3 plus extra for the store) I anticipate only going to prereleases or only drafting sets I really enjoy.

I'm surprised I don't see much people talking about how this could fundamentally change how it is to draft sets. As an arena player (and paper) drafting has been my primary way to play since Theros Beyond Death. Drafting is a beautiful meticulous art when it all comes together. Now, to me, it seems like these will be more like mini-cubes than traditional drafting. The overall power level will increase with more rares and uncommons being in the boosters. This in turn will lower the ceiling of top drafters and raise the floor to casual drafters. A positive (for wotc, mostly) that could come from this might actually mean more people will be willing to draft despite the price increase. Especially since if they were buying packs at set booster prices anyway, hardly a difference for them. This of course negatively affects sole drafters like myself, price increase and less complexity when it comes to drafting. Will have to see how this goes but overall it doesn't seem like a good change to me for drafts turning into mini cubes.

For me as a casual Commander player i like this. I can buy a box of play booster to draft with out friends and still have good % to refill our shared Binder. At least for the moment it looks like a good change i repeat, for the moment

Prerelease is the most exciting for me ❤🎉❤

I like this change in one way. But I really liked the extra commander cards made for setboosters. So I'm a bit sad to see that part of the booster go away. And I like that they aren't theming the commons and uncommons as they did in set boosters. I also liked that the regular commander cards for the set were also reprinted in the set boosters, so you didn't need to tear apart a prebuilt deck to access those cards. Btw are there going to be a is it worth it to buy for the recent secret lair? 😊

Back in my day, we bought a box that looked like a miniature spell book hat had a bunch of cards in it. The rarity was completely unpredictable, and that's the way we liked it. We had to walk uphill on snow covered mountains both ways to get to a local game store just to play. (Or we played in the chemistry lab on lunch in high school. But it was hard times okay! You youngins don't know how good you have it with your card sleeves, fancy foil treatment, and unfettered corporate greed.)

Professor It would rock my socks to play commander with you!!!

Just feel like set boosters with two more commons, can't help feel this was always the plan.

Its probably not related, but a lot of things that were bad decisions bejnh rectified in good ways seems to be coming after WOTC hired Huey Jensen. Pro play became easier to understand, local stores were brought back into the pro scene, the saving of draft, etc. I know he isnt doing all of this, but I can't help but draw a connection.

So this will have a big effect on pauper and pauper commander w/ there being less commons and more uncommons?

I know wotc likes forcing rotation so congrats! yall found a way to introduce a rotation in chaos draft🥳

Cynical me wants to see this as a long con to increase the price for drafting, but I can't quite convince myself that they would pull a 4 year con for this rather than just increasing the price. It's good that this is happening. It always felt bad to buy either draft or set boosters. What if the other side would have been better? Now there is no choice paralysis anymore.