MTG Guilds of Ravnica Post-Mortem, Remastered!
Throwback Thursday presents an article from October 2, 2018
Today we continue our look back at the Magic: the Gathering release post-mortem articles from The Backstage Pass! In some cases the hindsight on this stuff is fairly significant. In other cases, not so much. In other cases, it’s a howl of laughter. Please feel free to amuse yourself at my expense as you read this.
On the Backstage Pass, I stopped writing the rigidly formatted post-mortem articles around the time of the store move to Chandler in 2017. But for many sets, I still wrote debriefing articles on their prerelease/release and market outlook and so forth in much the same way the post-mortems had been set up. I decided here on LGSNI to repurpose those articles as post-mortem Remasters as well, so that I can extend the series all the way to the end of the Pass to where LGSNI took over. I did skip a few sets because I just never wrote any articles about them at the time; one surmises they simply didn’t leave much of an impression. So far we’ve skipped Iconic Masters, Rivals of Ixalan, Masters 25, and Core Set 2019. When Guilds of Ravnica came around, I got back on track, and that’s where we pick up today.
As always, original in normal text and my new annotations in italics.
Here we go!
Notwithstanding my bearish forecast for the Magic: Guilds of Ravnica prerelease weekend, we somehow broke records. Proportionately, Dominaria did better, but our Ravnica allocation was higher and ultimately led to a higher-grossing weekend on slightly narrower margins.
I was bearish going in because I imagined that there would be a mindspace shift away from independent local game stores in the wake of the last two weeks of Wizards announcements. [The end of direct distribution to stores and first-party Amazon sales of Magic boxes at discounts.] The saving grace, I imagined, would be strong content and players finally being ready to focus on the new set and the new Standard to follow it, despite all the market upheaval. That saving grace, as it turns out, saved its... grace? Headwinds or none, GRN launched well.
I understand the use of faction packs (the five guild choices) to drive engagement and immersion. I don't think the original Ravnica: City of Guilds, Guildpact, and Dissension events suffered in any way from using the older, more traditional sealed deck product configuration, but then again I was already a deeply invested player by then, and not a newbie experiencing Magic fresh. Two years before that, I had been an active level 3 judge, and retired to focus my attention on law school. The 4-3-3 guild layout for that block was a delicious challenge to me, and would probably be extremely unintuitive and frustrating to someone just getting their sea legs.
Return to Ravnica and Gatecrash featured faction packs that were relatively balanced by virtue of the seeded guild packs having nothing extremely warping in them. Dragon's Maze simply mashed the two together to provide ten different cross-set combinations, and if it weren't for that set's small size for its complexity level, I think it could have been one of Magic's peak experiences. Great on the drawing board, not so great as-shipped. For DSG's fifth anniversary, I tracked down a case of Dragon's Maze prerelease packs and held a Return to Ravnica block sealed deck tournament that by all accounts was nostalgic enough to overcome the set's drawbacks. [To this day Dragon’s Maze is a bit of an enigma. It should have been a runaway all-time set and the design seemed perfect as a way to build a 10-guild story in 5-5-10 order as a block unfolded. Yet somehow it just didn’t strike home, and there’s nothing of worth left in the set anyway thanks to reprint saturation, so it’s among the few “older” packs that has no particular allure to shopping collectors.]
For last weekend's prerelease, two guilds were in far, far higher demand than the rest out of the gate. Golgari, because of a jackpot card 1-in-8 shot, and Dimir, because surveil is great in limited and there were non-negligible lesser jackpot opportunities. Boros was good for wins as it always is, as it plays every game with the opponent on the back heel, but red-white traditionally offers lesser expected value on anything rare or mythic. Selesnya was a sleeper; by the end of the event people realized it had good play and good expected value. By then it was too late to impact the weekend-long balance of picks. Izzet was for people who like flipping coins, as always. [Which is worse, I wonder: One of the faction packs being clearly better than the other four, or one being way, way worse and undesired. I think the latter. But there seem to be good arguments either way.]
Unfortunately with that dynamic, many players didn't get full guild choice. Our store guaranteed guild choice or your money back, and over the course of the weekend, four players took us up on the refund offer rather than playing with another guild. We didn't start running into serious guild shortages until Saturday night, but once they started, they got bad fast. We didn't even run a Sunday afternoon event. We were effectively out of stock after Sunday morning, with too few packs left to run a start and prize it. Pre-registered players had a refreshed guild pool to pick from, which just meant that the last two events were only open to Dimir or Golgari if you paid in advance. Unnecessary feelbads. [Looking back this reads like flawed implementation on my part, and I think that’s probably true and that’s on me. The counterargument is, how else do you let people have full guild choice, who work Friday and Saturday and can’t make it to an event until Sunday? They’re willing to pay in advance and they just want the max experience. I’m not seeing a more elegant solution besides tighter limits on the earlier flights, which brings its own set of tradeoffs/drawbacks.]
Wizards is going to be challenged to perfectly balance factions for faction packs, and what we have now is more like Tarkir block and surely far superior to the days of Journey into Nyx when the white pack came with a giant bestow flyer and ran out almost immediately in every event. At least now the promo card has some variation, and the factions are closer to one another in power. But honestly, was it that bad having, what was it, 12 straight prereleases with generic packs and high efficiency? We hit it out of the park with Battle for Zendikar and Shadows over Innistrad with generic packs and only after that saw the Magic market start its deteriorative slide with the only-appreciated-after-it-was-gone Kaladesh block and subsequents. I imagine the faction decision was made around the time the Ixalan sets were posting poor numbers, and before Dominaria and Core 2019 did well. [This analysis is probably incorrect and undervalues the guild structure as part of what sold Ravnica-related sets at the time. What I mean is, there was probably never any serious discussion about not doing faction packs for this prerelease.]
Ravnica Allegiance in January will feature factions again, and in theory they should be tighter in power variation, with Gruul and Rakdos being aggro but not quite as all-in as Boros, and with Azorius, Simic, and Orzhov occupying different spots on the control-to-midrange side of the spectrum. If we can avoid only one guild of the five getting an Assassin's Trophy jackpot card, even better. I like the second set of guilds in particular, even though I am personally very Golgari: black for capitalism and green for sustainability in all things.
I do think it was wise of Wizards not to include the shocklands as stamped foils in the faction packs. The amount of variation in cards is getting kind of extreme these days, and by the time you get to stuff like Masterpieces, each shockland will finish this block with at least seven printed versions. [SEVEN versions! The horror! For real though this should seriously be indicative of a problem. Over the long run, “The List” will help catalog duplication, but a lot of the damage has already been done, and the litany of thousands upon thousands of mundane Commander reprints of various cards is an amplifier of difficulty. I know Wizards would do a lot of stuff differently if they got to redo the evolution of Magic production. I guess we just have to accept the imperfection of how it is now, and mitigate as best way may.] Contrast that to cards like Volrath's Stronghold or City of Shadows, which will only ever have one version each. I'm as anti-Reserved-List as you like, but there's something to be said for introducing a little prominence economy into Magic's long-term production outlook.
Heading into release weekend, we may see a lot of questions answered. Will Mythic Edition Boxes, exclusive to Hasbro's online store and Channel Fireball's Grand Prix events, depress demand for regular booster boxes? [They did not, at least not very much.] With Wizards selling direct through Amazon, Target, and Walmart, making a mockery of their own MSRP as they go, how will supply and pricing behave downstream? [This was a bigger problem.] Will this be like Dominaria where every independent store that doesn't go with the flow gets healthy as their competitors' supply of product dries up too quickly at bottom dollar? [Bottom dollar “won,” except that holding tight “won” for those who could stand to do it.] And for that matter, will people wait for the Guild Decks or whatever the hell they are in early November, rather than buying now? I've made my preparations, and now we will see how things unfold.