Mana Club #2 - Saturday Morning Cartoons
Featuring a chart everyone will be normal about, the future of Fracture Foils, and the weakest main character in Magic
I hope you are reading this on a Saturday. People of Content collectively decided that Things should be released sometime between 12:01AM and 8:00AM on Monday mornings. I presume this is because creating things felt, to them, like work, and you clock in for work on Monday mornings.
Getting a deluge of content on my busiest morning is inconvenient at best. It’s distracting. My wife teases me for attempting to eat dessert after every meal. Impulse control is not a strong suit. By the time the weekend rolls around, I’ve inevitably crammed my content into a drive/dog walk/shower. And there aren’t Saturday morning cartoons for adults.
I’m legitimately unsure if the concept still exists for kids.
But in the ‘80s and ‘90s, nothing ripped like turning the dial to whatever the best half-hour block was with a bowl of cereal and completely forgetting the world existed. I did not need to be checked on because there was nothing else I would prefer to do. You didn’t plan an activity opposite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
I suppose a lot of people try to recreate this in adulthood with football on Sunday or brunch or golf when you’ve really given up on it all.
All of this to say, I’m not promising a Saturday newsletter. I don’t want to promise any day, frankly, because then this would feel like work. I’ll be mostly operating as if I’m an Uber driver, which is to say that I don’t expect this to be financially viable but I like setting my own hours. And I hope this is a nice treat for your Saturday morning.
On to Magic stuff!
UNTAP
UPKEEP
MAIN
COMBAT
SECOND MAIN
CLEANUP
FOREVER DISCARDING
UNTAP
World's Cutest Counterspell Is Also The World's Most Expensive
Dawwwwwwwwww. I’m not a Lego Adult, but this is cheek-pinching cute. It’s the opposite of whatever is going on with Loot. Do we need to get into the amount of grip strength it would take to hold a tome that’s roughly 75% of your body with a hand? Or a wand of that magnitude, for that matter? Absolutely not.
Eric Klug is a master of his craft and this is a gorgeous painting. That said, I was not prepared to see it selling for just shy of $7,000 as of this writing. I am writing this on Friday so I can be hungover tomorrow.
(Editor’s Note: I’m not hungover and it sold for $13,527)
I realistically cannot dabble in the Magic art market. I have a contentious relationship with art in general, mostly because framing things is cost-prohibitive. I have a Ralph Steadman print sitting in a frame store right now because I don’t want to pay the second half. Delay, delay, delay.
Anyway, I’m not saying this isn’t worth 7k. Art is worth what people will pay for it (I have made $0 from this newsletter, for example) and Klug’s work speaks for itself. But in the last newsletter, I talked about the compensation for Magic artists and how that’s roughly $1250 per piece, and none of this makes sense to me.
Is This Your Deck?
I’m just going to need to devote a section of this newsletter to the prolific Nile Joan Rivers at some point, but definitely not for the cool, cool crime of stealing someone’s deck. C’mon, Nile. /s
Unrelated: When I was a kid in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one of the local grinders traded me two handles of Captain Morgan for my entire collection. Eddie, was a real character. I was probably 15 and was leaving the dorky game of Magic for the sexy world of policy debate. I remember there were duals and a beat-to-hell Mox Pearl in there. If you’ve been around the game long enough, you have this story.
A few weeks later he wanted to do the same deal. How, you ask, if I had already sold? This adult man, probably in his late 20s or early 30s, asked me to go to our LGS and STEAL A CHILD’S BACKPACK. Casually walk off with it and the contents, which would he would trade for spiced rum on some real pirate shit. I didn’t, but I wonder if someone did. At the time, I immediately thought of all of my stuff that had come up “missing.”
I cannot find him on LinkedIn.
Lost Cat Happier With New Owners
Templating gore or my biggest nightmare? You be the judge. We had outdoor cats growing up and you always were terrified they’d just shack up with someone that offered wet food and one fewer annoying dog. Cats seem fickle like that if the design team is to be believed.
Not returning “under its owner’s control” is mostly a corner case for Foundations limited, where Rakdos Sacrifice is Very Good Right Now. It’s also nearly unprecedented. Things have always returned under your control or the owner’s control. Otherwise, it contains a reference to “you(r)” in some way.
The one exception I can find of something going to the graveyard and then returning?
I’m going to be vulnerable per Brene Brown and admit I don’t understand if “flipping” has an implied (or oracle text) you/your on it. You know what’s easier? Patting myself on the back and moving on.
In the past, I’ve expressed concern that the design team is stretched too thin. The sheer volume of cards released now for Commander alone is staggering. Back in Nadu August, or NadAugust as we all collectively refer to it in hindsight, MaRo put out a blog that discussed the sausage making:
We have two play design teams, one focused on competitive play and one focused on casual play. The competitive play design teams determines which cards they think have a shot at competitive play (remember we’re making predictions as where we think the environment might go,we don’t definitively know; we need to make an environment complex enough as to entertain tens of millions of players). The casual play design team then looks as the cards that don’t play a competitive role to see what casual role they can play.
I have questions. Does this mean Limited falls under competitive play, since it’s a format for the Pro Tour and Worlds? One team is kind of responsible for limited and competitive constructed? Does the casual team accidentally develop competitive cards? Can I oversee the cards that see no play?
Design is a maddening job I would never want, so I give them the benefit of the doubt. Or whatever a kinder way of phrasing Hanlon’s Razor is: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Let’s just stupidity and replace it with “being absolutely crushed by work.”
UPKEEP
Foundations Collectors Boxes And Your Closet
Two weeks ago, I was on one. This is common. I finally cracked what drove me nuts about the Fracture Foils and made a million tweet thread about it. Editor’s note: I promise this newsletter isn’t just me playing my Twitter greatest hits.
Well, what you resist persists. Or, like Chris Rock once said, “Whoever you hate will end up in your family.”
When I took to Twitter to share my hit, a lot of people misinterpreted me complaining about the frame as me complaining about opening the card, which is an easy mistake (I am prone to complaining) but the card itself is doing quite well and something we need to talk about.
Foundations will be the core of Standard, the seemingly singular non-Commander focus of WotC, through 2029. That means they’ll be printing this until the ink runs dryer than my elbows in a Colorado winter. I won’t pretend to know what impact it’ll have on the format, but Llanowar Elves are going to Llanowar Elf. To say it should do “well” is as bearish as I can be.
So why are Fracture Foils at all interesting? Because, per Magic Untapped, there’s only one printing of Foundations Collector Boosters. Ever.
As for some of the set's other products, though, the print run plan isn't as generous.
Says Brown, "Collector Boosters and Bundles, however, are typically a single-print run and I would not expect the same extended availability there."
He continues, stating that while Play Boosters should be generally available throughout the set's tenure in Standard, "Bundles are unlikely to be reprinted, however, and Collector Boosters will not be."
Fracture Foils only appear in these boosters. Special treatment + limited supply usually is a “cash out quick” scenario because, in the era of Booster Fun™, everything is special, so nothing is. With Foundations being around for another five years, though?
This might be one of the times to go against conventional wisdom and buy now (the weekend of the set release) and hold. Or toss a CBB of Foundations in your closet. I haven’t seen this type of organic demand for a Collector release among vendors since Lord of the Rings.
The only hard thing to parse is how wishy-washy Brown is with the language. “I would not expect” and “will not be” are two different answers to the same question. Pick one, please.
Epilogue:
I bought a couple of packs in the best vendor Discord during auction night because I’m a firm believer in pushing my luck, and wouldn’t you know it:
More Cat News (Cats Perpetually Winning)
Regal Caracal continues to move units, but keep an eye on cats in general. I treat bulk like a junk drawer: I have a vague idea of where everything is, but sorting it wouldn’t bring a net positive. That said, I keep cats, dragons, angels in the front. Dinos might crack the rotation soon. Goblins, you’re on notice. Step it up.
Buy A Staff Of The Storyteller Now
I could just stop there, right? Okay, moving on.
Vintage Cube enthusiasts are quite familiar with this staple since the release of ONE but it seems like the general public is finally catching up. Repeatable card draw in white is in short supply and while this doesn’t slot into every deck, it feels like 27% of new Magic cards make a creature token of some sort. It’s not intimidating enough to be a “kill on sight” artifact. It’s just hanging out. It makes a 1/1. Anyone scared of it can legally be pantsed.
This isn’t a quick flip. This isn’t a buyout. Just steady, organic demand for a card that can and probably will be reprinted at some point. If you need one, buy one.
Thoughts About “Waffle” Giveaways
One of my besties was over last night after happy hour. She always has little questions about how all of this Magic stuff works. Wants to learn how to play at some point. I was doing fulfillment at the living room/dining room table (it’s just a weird room, tbh) and she asked about Waffles.
If you’re not familiar, it’s a portmanteau of Weird and Raffle. The one she does is for concert tickets: 20 people throw in $10 for a chance at a $200 Sabrina Carpenter show or whatever. Two people are very happy (seller, winner), the other 19 people go, “Hey, I had $10 to waste.”
My favorite Waffle was by MSCHF, who you might know from their Secret Lair, when they made $241,875 in gross profit by selling mostly fake art.
The collective says that their work—titled Possibly Real Copy Of ‘Fairies’ by Andy Warhol (2021)—is a series of 1,000 identical artworks. They are all definitely by MSCHF, and also all possibly by Andy Warhol. Any record of which piece within the set is the original has been destroyed.
The original Warhol was scanned and 999 copies were redrawn by a robotic arm. According to a video on the collective's website, each copy then underwent a degradation process before being authenticated as Possibly Real Copy Of ‘Fairies’ by Andy Warhol by MSCHF, then shuffled together and sold for $250 each. The drawing was supposedly purchased in 2016 for $8,125.
The real genius here is that no one knows which one is real. I would guess that 20% of the buyers are obsessed with proving theirs is authentic because they don’t get it. Buying one isn’t about anything other than dining out on the story for $250 and hopefully enjoying the piece.
She asked me if they exist in Magic and if I would do one. “Unfortunately and no.”
This is an expensive hobby that lauds a lack of impulse control. I had to DM a creator who was constantly posting pulls and also their credit card debt. The algo rewards people with cool stuff (See: Tyrant, Twinflame) and new things. There is always more to crack, more to brew, more to upgrade.
Gambling services like WhatNot prey on people in this community with things like Pull Boxes (usually one high-value card and a bunch of mid hits) or Spinning Wheels (we’re actual children, aren’t we?) that offer miserable returns in exchange for dopamine hits. This is digital carnival work weaponized by our phones.
I don’t begrudge anyone on there; we live in the ruggedest of capitalisms and bills must be paid. But I can’t possibly vet my audience for financial stability, so I stay away. If you have a great suggestion for how Waffles could work in Magic, there’s a button for that.
I imagine the addiction rates for concerts and card games are much different, so I put down $20 with her. We’ll see if it hits.
MAIN
The Commander Alignment Chart
I thought the Commander bans were awful because they were trying to fix Commander players. Or really, one type of Commander player: the poor communicator. “If you won’t let people know they’re about to get stomped, we’ll take away your bootlaces.”
Two things happened:
The poor communicators communicated in the way you would expect, threatening the well-meaning folks at the RC until they had to step down. The whole thing was a #$@%ing mess, idiots were awful, and I’m not proud of how I reacted.
Then they went out and cobbled together new bootlaces out of Mana Vaults and Lotus Petals and went about their business.
The price has since come down.
I’m firmly in the camp that we cannot ban ourselves to a better version of Commander. It’s either a yearning for a Golden Age that is far gone or fails to acknowledge the emergent properties that arise from a massive card pool and a player group with divergent goals.
The card pool is the feature, not the bug. We are the problem.
Commander has a deep struggle ahead as the most popular Magic format because there are few things I want to do with three friends and also with three random strangers, but Magic needs the latter to work.
Very few adults engage with strangers collaboratively for fun. It’s terrifying to think about.
We have a variety of solo experiences in group settings: we go to a yoga class or ride a bus or learn pottery to mourn the loss of our husband as individuals doing our thing.
We have things you’re supposed to go to with someone else: the local Sports Team Game, a concert, a thing where you’re part of the collective fandom, one of those kidney beans in a microorganism I learned about in elementary school. The amount of “engaging” you can do within your proximity firmly depends on the score/who the opener is.
We have Things In Decline (broadly) like church, membership groups (whatever happens in VFW halls?), escape rooms, and I guess networking events? Maybe networking events are great lately and I’m just missing out.
Commander feels the most to me like an away game at sports church, where we all kind of believe the same basic things to be true, but we also show up for different reasons. We’re varying degrees of respectful for an hour or so until we shuffle off in separate directions.
The chart is just a chart. You exist somewhere on it, likely splattered across it like a Magic windshield. We contain multiverses.
You could Sharpie a deck on a 100-pack of wet, wet bologna and shuffle it up against me as long as you’re on the top 50% of that chart. Toss in the Power 9 for all I care. To me, the cards are irrelevant, and frankly, I like people who play from the noon position to 3:00! Let’s make it, like Austin circa the early aughts or Pete Holmes circa forever, weird!
I’m a self-diagnosed vibes player that tries too hard, gets Daniel Day-Lewis levels of impatient when you don’t know your lines, and loves jank. Good luck assigning a number to that and putting it into a pod of strangers.
That’s the challenge on the horizon. I believe getting people to attend a Magic event is the single easiest way to make them a high value player and, as much as I could give a #$% about Hasbro’s bottom line, I do want the game to grow. Convert them from a kitchen table to an FNM attendee to someone who makes a Con something they treat themself to once a year.
None of that works if the games suck.
Untrusted play needs a solution to the core of what Commander is: the untamed West. A format born out of boredom and chaff, self-expression and camp, a way to kill time with friends. That is now the breadwinner for a Big B Billion-dollar brand. It’s like if Saudi Arabia acquired mini golf.
People bring all manner of ideas of what that West means to them. I don’t begrudge the gold prospector extracting maximum value out of every card in the 99 or the sheriff playing Farewell. I just want to hang out in the saloon and listen to parlour tunes until someone falls off their stool.
We haven’t heard much about the bracket system, so I’ll write about that when there is Big News, but I hope it works. We can’t give everyone a personality test before they sit down. Numbers, like the bracket system purports to leverage, are notorious liars. Communication is hard and therapy is expensive.
Show me who you are on the chart.
COMBAT
Seth Thinks Kellan Is The Worst
🪤is my favorite emoji of 2024. I don’t know if this is a 🪤 or not since I don’t really follow what Seth is up to, but when this was served up to me c/o the dying site, I quickly found myself surrounded by cardboard.
We’re inundated with new, weak characters as whatever is happening with Magic Story trudges through another set. Raise your hand if you think this gets better with more Universes Beyond sets in 2025.
…
Kellan feels like a miss because he’s going through some shit. Imagine having four different color identities in a year. Imagine being Oko’s kid, but being raised by your stepdad. Imagine your stepdad’s name is Ronald.
That’s it. Just… Ronald. It’s all a lot.
IRL, Kellan sees a lot of EDH play, mostly the Fae-Blooded because having a tutor slapped on a body is never not going to see play. Kellan, Daring Traveler is fine. Jury is still out on the Planar Trailblazer, but I definitely played him the wrong way at the prerelease, exiling a card after paying the 1R cost for the first two rounds. I kept thinking, “This templating sucks, how do I pay the 1R AND the card in the same turn?” And I never did.
The actual biggest delta between the printed card and story arc for me? This absolute loser:
Gerrard Effing Capashen. “Commander” of the Weatherlight and product of Urza’s bloodline project, designed to be genetically perfect. Protector of Dominaria. Eater of Boot Soup.
Both of his cards are utterly forgettable. Someone at Commander’s Herald forced Michael Celani to write a deck tech about one of them which is a unique form of punishment for whatever Celani did. I know it’s unfair to judge an old card by modern standards, but I’m not a saint like Ronald.
I’d have a Zombie Weatherlight Crew eff some stuff up, I’ll tell you what. Crash a jetski into a whale type shit.
There is a lot of talk about Gerrard’s legacy in his Wiki. I don’t think anyone has summed up legacy better than Mike Tyson speaking to this teen or tween about the permanence of death:
I’m not sure if Iron Mike has taken exactly the correct amount of Ayahuasca or any other amount, but the man has KO’d his ego. Let us remember Capashen as dust.
(Editor’s note on Saturday morning: It feels appropriate that perhaps the last collective pop cultural moment of 2024 was a former YouTuber and hawker of Energy Drinks beating up a 58-year-old convicted sexual offender and most people rooting for the sexual offender. Almost too on the nose.)
SECOND MAIN
This Contest Is A Bad Idea
In 2005, “The Comedians of Comedy” was released. I found it on whatever version of torrents were back then and became obsessed. Four loveable weirdos, each weird in their distinct way, traversing the nation for the next place that smelled like biological fathers. Almost 20 years later, they’re all still working, various degrees of fame among them.
Back then, though? It was brutal. The pay sucked to do jokes for mid rooms “filled” with small crowds. I promise you that van was burnt after filming. Having to be an alt comic AND a road dawg wasn’t really a thing yet.
This was all by design.
Being a “club comic” back then meant doing the generic bits, giving it up for the waitstaff, and making advances on said waitstaff. None of these comics belonged there, so they made a place where they did in dive bars and black box theaters and an old mausoleum. They found their fans where they were.
So it was a chance for me to kind of, again, get out in front of the fans that would actually like what I was doing and want to see specifically me, rather than just going, "Oh, let's just go see some comedy."
If you are here for the contest, hello, please give it up for the troops, that’s been my time. I’m acutely aware that I’m a niche read and that many of you do not want to be here. YOU ARE LIKELY SCROLLING PAST THIS RIGHT NOW. That’s okay.
I see creators talking about how they’re hemorrhaging followers on Twitter right now. First, unless you’ve lost a percentage of your followers that’s greater than, say, 25%, you’re not the problem and frankly, I do not need to know. If you lose all of your followers and I’m the last one, I am fascinated by what has happened and please tell me. Even the worst people get followers.
Second, no one should be for everyone. I’d rather people know and go than worry about doing anything else than what I want to do. The numbers these engagement bait accounts do are hollow as hell, I promise you that. They’re for people like Ronald.
So why am I doing any of this? Hopefully, this giveaway will accomplish one or more of the following things:
I catch some of my fellow weirdos in this fishing net and we’re inextricably tangled together for some time.
Someone gets a little joy from something collecting dust in my office.
One day I can turn this into something that doesn’t actively lose money.
I will have my nose rubbed into the failure that this becomes, but this time, financially!
On the last point: Asking for money for things is why I’ve been terrible at every sales job I’ve ever had. I actively told people not to give money on my first post (you’re great listeners!) and I try to give more than I get.
But I often think back to something my friend and occasional collaborator Dan Sheehan said about how we think about “content”:
Seeing some of the discourse flying around about what content "should" cost (for both creators and their audiences) and once again I just have to say that if you consume a thing someone makes and you don't pay any money for it, do not be surprised when it goes away.
The faucet's been fully turned off man, platforms don't pay people well even if their stuff is popular and sponsors are fewer and further between. Whether it's Magic gameplay or comedy podcasts or video essays, it's rough out there and it'll get worse before it gets better
The whole thread is great, you should go read it in its entirety.
I like writing. I want to write for you. If you don’t feel like chipping in, one day the writing will stop.
CLEANUP
I know I’m light on limited today, but the format is new and I’m tired. In general, I think card evaluations before cards have been played aren’t great. They’re a relic of a bygone era we simply cannot put out of their content misery. Want to get better at Foundations? Sam Black’s first Drafting Archetypes from a new set is required viewing. I’m also partial to his work, but check out Sierkovitz for data insights. I also had a hell of a run (4 trophies in five drafts) playing Orzhov, Simic, Dimir, and Golgari. Black is very good right now.
Speculation on Return to Tarkir EDH precons is a deep dive into the unknown from /u/Master-Environment95.
And /u/TheProphetDave has a sweet gallery of an all Magic card floor that reminds me of when my friends and I used to play “Card Wars” in my spare bedroom. The floor was entirely covered in draft chaff and we’d whip them at each other. Toploaders would draw blood.
Goldsabertooth’s Kickstarter is really close to hitting the 50k stretch goal which unlocks Winota, Joiner of Banlists art. Only a few days left to get in there.
Robert Taylor with the news that Pro Tour Las Vegas will also be Pro Tour Final Fantasy and people are being real normal about it:
(IDK why Fireshoes is locked down but trust me, that’s what is in the tweet)
FOREVER DISCARDING
Welp, here it is. A Rainbow Foil Cap Lair, a beat to hell Beta Terror, and a Mox Diamond that has been “gently loved.” There are also 120 invisible MTGO Play Points.
Since the Beta Terror wasn’t moving the needle, I’ve upped the ante and also figured out some rules because the first time I was really winging it. Here’s how this works:
Subscribe at any level (free is on the right). You can do that with the thing right here:
Retweet or Resky this, whichever you feel comfortable with. If you already entered from the previous post, I have your email and will not hold you to this condition. This will be a pain to check but, if you’ve been following along, it should be abundantly clear that I have free time.
If you win the Mox Diamond, you are legally obligated to read everything I post here, even if I have no way of verifying or enforcing this.
That’s it. I’ll announce three winners next Saturday morning at 10AM MST. If 1,000 of you actually do this, I’ll throw in the MLP playmat to a lucky 4th winner. Ships worldwide, but if you win Cap, you gotta chip in for the ship’in.
Thanks for hanging in here. Next week, I want to talk a little more about the fundamentals of limited and get into why Captain America has so much hype when Storm is doing tornados around him when it comes to sales. I’ll also have a new, much smaller weekly giveaway.
Passing the turn,
Jake
Bonus Seymour of the Week (Throwback Edition)
Hey Jake! I'm recently getting back into magic after a bit of a hiatus, so I'm happy to have found your blog, it's looking to be a great way to play catch-up and to just have a nice read.
I have a question about the raffle though: How/where do I submit my email? I've followed you here as you can see and I've retweeted/sky'd your post. Is there a submission form I'm missing somewhere?
Hey TCGKenny here, there’s actually a few “Waffle” groups on Facebook, they call them ‘lucky lots’, ‘rolls’, or ‘razzes’. I’ve won and lost a good amount of them.