Magic: The Gathering can benefit from cryptocurrency and NFTs.
Magic: The Gathering (Magic/MTG) is a tabletop/digital collectible card game created in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast. Magic was the first trading card game and has approximately 35 million players as of December 2018 with over 20 billion Magic cards produced between 2008 and 2016.
In 1996 the "Pro Tour" was established with a Top Prize of a single tournament being $50,000. In 1999, Wizards of The Coast was acquired by Hasbro for $325 million.
To simplify the game; each player casts spell cards with the objective of eventually dealing enough damage to an opponent’s ‘life point’ total to reduce it from 20 to 0. God’s Unchained basically ripped off the entire game play dynamic from Magic, but let’s not go there just yet.
Each season of the game follows a different story line and involves new spells and new artwork made by various, diverse, and well-known artists. These aspects add to the artistic dimension within the game. The last season is called “Kamigawa” and is a cyberpunk traditional Japanese faux-kanji type aesthetic and looks amazing.
There is now a digital adaption of the game called Magic: The Gathering Arena that allows players to play the game on their phones, gaining cards through booster packs, in-game achievements, or microtransaction purchases (aka real money), to build their own decks and challenge other players, you can even play against your friends!
Doing the math, ($4.99 / 750gems = $0.006653 per Gem) (3 packs = 600 Gems) (1 pack = 200 Gems = 8 cards) (200 Gems x $0.006 = $1.3306 = 1 pack) ($1.3306/8 = 1 card = $0.166325)
$9.99 Gem pack = $0.00624/Gem = $0.156/card
$19.99 Gem pack = $0.00624375/Gem = $0.1469/card
$49.99 Gem pack = $0.005433/Gem = $0.1358/card [with bigger bundles]
Besides using fiat to purchase Gems, you can earn ‘Gold’ by winning games and completing objectives like ‘cast 20 red spells’. These Gold coins can then be used to purchase packs.
1000 Gold = 1 pack = 125 gold per card. If each card is worth $0.14, that would make each gold worth, $0.00112. $0.006 _v_ $0.001; fiat Gems are 6x more valuable than the play-to-earn Gold.
Furthermore, within the cards acquired, there are levels of rarity, denoted Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Mythic. From packs, you can also receive Wildcards (of each rarity level) that can be "swapped" for any card of the same rarity.
From r/mtgfinance “…The online format lacks a secondary market or a specific way of buying cards. The average player cannot pick a deck they want to play without spending an insane amount of money cracking packs and rolling the dice for the cards they want. Content creators have huge issues with this method when they try to stream specific decks. MTGGoldfish analyzed it would cost around $400 to open enough packs to get all of Kaladesh Remastered [an old season], yet a full playset in paper cost $236 and for Magic Online only $17.”
Wizards is limiting themselves by not adopting a multiplatform interoperable system that can combine payment systems, with ownership, with fundability of tokens, with games, or networking, all within an established community; DeFi and blockchain do just that.
SIDESTORY: In late 2006, programmer Jed McCaleb thought of building a website for users of the MTG Online to let them trade MTG cards like stocks. In January 2007 he purchased the domain name mtgox.com, short for "Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange". In 2009, he reused the domain name to advertise his card game The Far Wilds. In July 2010, McCaleb read about Bitcoin and decided that the Bitcoin community needed an exchange for trading Bitcoin and regular currencies. So he launched Mt. Gox, a price quoting service, and deployed it on the spare mtgox.com domain name. In 2011, a stream of fraudulent trades caused the nominal price of a Bitcoin to fraudulently drop to 1 cent on the Mt. Gox exchange, as a hacker allegedly used credentials from a Mt. Gox auditor's compromised computer to transfer a large number of bitcoins illegally to himself. Accounts with the equivalent of more than $8,750,000 were affected.
A huge part of magic the gathering is that it is a collectible card game (CCG), also called a trading card game (TCG). Wizards is also considering the "Gem" economy will continue to provide access to seasonally exclusive cosmetic items in the app such as new card designs and pets (that you can pet) that sit next to the battlefield while you play. This is what NFTs games are trying to build without the history or love already backing them! Magic has a heavy reliance on commissioned artwork and has a tendency to reprint old cards with new borders or other stylistic embellishments. It is perfect for NFTs.
There have been issues in the past of fans assembling by themselves under the name the “mtgDAO,” that took digital versions of actual Magic cards and minting them as NFTs. Wizards of the Coast sent them a very polite email saying they consider their use of NFTs as described in the mtgDAO whitepaper to be unlawful IP infringement.
Hasbro and its subsidiary Wizards of the Coast have ALREADY STARTED considering using NFTs. Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner stated, “We’ll continue to monitor and look at [the] accelerating MAGIC business, The NFT is a real opportunity for us…and we have a team that’s leading our effort out of the West Coast” He said that the company is “actively developing” its opportunities and sees those opportunities as “substantial.”
If Magic adopts NFT technology, it will be the most popular mainstream game to do so. Moreover, if it tokenizes its Gems/gold in app, or makes the digital version cross-compatible with the printed card versions, an entire economy of opportunity opens up. There are MANY primary and secondary markets IRL and online to buy used cards, rare cards, even misprinted cards! Near mint condition of some cards go for hundreds even thousands of dollars! To compare, Gods unchained has a market cap of $33million, having already sold over 4,600ETH worth of ‘cards’ in its first year in 2018, worth $1.3 million at the time ($13m now). It is high time that MTG steps into the new digital economic age.
Citations:
https://np.reddit.com/r/mtgfinance/comments/ngf3kv/things_you_should_know_about_mtgs_economy/
https://cryptobriefing.com/hasbro-plans-nfts-for-magic-the-gathering-and-more/
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This was a great stumble upon reading and I think the idea of NFT is pretty much the unique application of how their is a timestamp to an item. Wizards is a big company that may take quite a lot of numbers in order for them to truly start changing. Because they own the intellectual property and as soon as they cross to the NFT world a lot of it isn't really protected per say, but it really is a unique application that can reward artists and give them more control over their vision and a unique way to time stamp things on an open ledger for history.
After wizards sees magic arena numbers drop or other numbers (in terms of trading cards as that is their direct area of competition/gaming sector) great increase is when they will start creating online brands based for nft only like a hotwheel did or funko through WAX mtg will probably take a similar approach.