Thanks for supporting the idea even if you might not ultimately support rift watchers as the vehicle. RiftWatchers as the vehicle is tricky. It's been out a while and people have different connections to it. For me I don't care about the set and would just assume watch it burn if I didn't think it would be better used to burn far more cards.
What I want more than anything is for players to want to buy Rebellion packs. I want the team to stay afloat. I think the biggest deterrent to buying packs is the idea that cards are infinitely inflationary.
So I'm going to push back on your logic here. While I think cards holding their value or increasing in value is important for pack demand, I'd say that's negated when everyone just watches the packs burn to no fanfare. Did it really hold value if no one is buying it?
I think they will take that same lack of enthusiasm with them to the next set if anything short of skyrocketing prices happens to RiftWatchers. And I think what's actually going to happen to riftwatchers is that many people who bought those will start selling them to get funds for rebellion so their prices will fall to their lowest levels as rebellion gets closer instead of popping because the set is sold out.
There is no catalyst on the horizon for a spike in Rift Watcher prices between now and Rebellion and its doubtful we get one before the following set because that's when they'll cycle out of modern.
Ultimately, I think RiftWatchers has already seen its peak and its not going to inspire anyone to buy more packs (its not even inspiring people now to buy riftwatchers packs now). But setting a precedent that shows cards aren't infinitely inflationary, burning a tons of them, and watching riftwatchers go out with some demand? That might inspire some buying.
Anyway, that's my thoughts. I can see it both ways but I think watching RW burn to no fanfare could be a disaster coming into rebellion.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think you have it backward. When people see that excess packs are being burnt, they'll be more likely to buy future packs knowing that if there are too many, chances are that they'll be burned until the supply matches the demand.
They big problem with CL is that there were so many sales and promos that actually sold the packs for WAY less than the $4.00 in store price. This caused a massive over printing of the cards because they were so cheap, and now we have a huge hole to climb out of.
Riftwatcher prices should not skyrocket short term, I'm talking long term, a year or more from sell/burn out of the set.
Seeing Riftwatchers burn WITHOUT a sale or promo is about the only thing that will give me any confidence to buy any Rebellion packs, unless Rebellion has a built in burn/expiration right from the start. I'd also like to have a guarantee that the Rebellion prices will not be sabotaged by fantastic sales like they did with CL. (Basically what you're proposing here for Riftwatchers)
For most of what you're saying, you won't hear much argument from me. I voted against or rallied against every sale they had for CL. I've written extensively about why the team should purge kickstarter sales methods from their company DNA. I was also a lonely voice begging them to reconsider the CL print rate when it was just a rumor that it might 10x untamed. I voted for both the CL and the RW pack burns with glee.
That said, CL was overprinted on the first day and it would have happened if there was a sale or not. Too many people thought packs would sell out in 15 minutes and they'd be able to turn around and scalp them for instant riches. Once that didn't happen and demand died, every subsequent sale just made it predictably worse.
On the other hand, RW aren't overprinted. If this proposal passed, by the time it goes live there might be 500-600k packs left. Add that to the 900k already sold and you get about 1.5 million packs. That's untamed.
But what it could do with 500k packs is undo a lot of the damage from CL sales and overprints. Clearly the following math is weird because there's different BCX burns for different rarities of card but let's look at the 200 bcx for a dumb extreme example.
200BCX is 40 packs of cards. That means in the most extreme example, we'd be burning 40 CL packs worth of cards to add one RW pack to the world. 40 * 500k RW packs is 20 million CL packs worth of cards burned. Thats basically all of CL and its reward cards gone 😂
Clearly that can't happen for a myriad of reasons but let's average it way down to 50 BCX burned because some will be legendaries and epics. that means 10 packs of CL burned per RW pack brought into the world. That would be 5 million CL packs melted by adding 500k RW packs. That could matter greatly. By definition, A LOT more people have and are disenchanted about their CL cards value than have RW cards and packs.
Raising the value of CL and making it less of a swamp could raise morale and make people more willing to reach into their wallets for rebellion. I don't think RW has that same effect on so many players. I mean, you're a top ten holder of RW packs but would I lose a bet if I said you have more wrapped up in CL than you do RW?
I did some math and on average across all rarities, you would burn 13-14 packs worth of cards per RW pack. I hadn't looked at it from this perspective, and I have to say I'm not so against the idea now.
And yeah, I have a lot more in CL that RW. But that hadn't crossed my mind until you mentioned it. I'm here for the long term like you, and always try to vote in a way that makes sense long term. On principle I'm generally against anything that just shifts value around in the ecosystem from one asset to another. Which is why I'd much rather see a situation where the excess cards get burnt for a new asset instead of using a current pack set.