Paper penny dreadful: dollar dreadful
The Kitchen Table forum
Posted on Nov. 1, 2018, 9:30 p.m. by shadow63
For those of you who dont penny dreadful is a magic online format where the only cards that are legal are 0.01 tix or 1 cent US. It has round 10,000 cards legal in the format and the cards are checked for legality everytime a new standard set is released. It self regulates because as cards are bought up they'll eventually raise to over $0.01. Now my proposal is to bring this to paper as a budget alternative to pauper. Now you might be asking how many cards are only worth a cent. Well none to my knowledge. But there are a ton of cards worth a dollar or less. Or perhaps even 50 cents or less. So I'd like to know peoples thoughts on a format like this and what it would take to get off the ground. Thanks for reading and have a good day
Guess I overlooked that bit. But mtggoldfish is usually my go to for pricing stuff and I think the average price on there would be a solid choice
November 1, 2018 10:58 p.m.
I myself use MTGStocks.com and Scryfall, which have similar pricing structures when pricing cards. I've heard MTGGoldfish is a bit higher in comparison, but have never actually proven this myself. Maybe I should. =\
Should the "lowest" pricing site take precedence, or should the most "popular" site take precedence? What if each cycle a different pricing site was randomly chosen? How effed up would that be? lol
Also, rotating every time a Standard set is released sounds pretty intense in paper. Maybe rotation for paper Dollar Dreadful should align with Standard rotation, instead?
I swear this idea is possible, it just would take more minds than my own to pull it off, so I'm just playing Devil's Advocate here for a bit. Sorry if I sound negative. =P
November 1, 2018 11:27 p.m.
Well the cards wouldn't rotate when a set was released that would be when legality would be readjusted. And if we where to pick a random source better hope we dont get star city games we wont have anything to play with lol. And pointing out the negatives in something is crucial for it to succeed
November 2, 2018 12:02 a.m.
Every couple of months on T/O I see some sort of format variant suggested. But my big question is "Why?" What does this acheive above and beyond the initial format? generally it's just instigating a bunch of subjective rules on what seems to be a working format (this is most common with commander) but the gains that rules create are so much more heavily outweight by the compleities of the logisitcs.
So as mentioned, are you using mid price? lowest price? price for NM/M only? is it in USD? Euro? Which website is it based off? are these English language prices? Do stock levels affect price? What about buyouts?
The beauty of a format comes from the simplicity of building for it/playing it. The biggest turnoff to a foramt is a bunch of confusing and in most completely subjective rules.
If you an your playgroup want to make it work, sure. But What works for a very few players often times doesn't scale. Especially since a playgroup can generally worth things out for their playgroup amongst themselves. But if you're a ruling body and you have to instigate the "house rulesto fix stuff" rule on an already variant of a format then your basis of design has failed you.
November 2, 2018 12:09 a.m.
Well I'm trying to convert a somewhat popular mtgo format to paper. And itd be us dollar mtggoldfish mid. The list would be updated at the start of every new standard set. Those rules are pretty simple to me
November 2, 2018 12:57 a.m.
OK, but you've answered the easy questions, not the harder ones to manage. Who is managing the price of the cards?
If you're trying to bring across a format to paper, why not just use the banlist as maintained from MTGO? then it doesn't matter about banlist clashes. Sure, the cards aren't actually a cent, but it's the easiest and most fair (from a WotC standpoint) way to do it and especially not have to get the secondary market involved.
November 2, 2018 1:41 a.m.
I already said the prices would be mtggoldfish. You could do it with the mtgo penny dreadful list. That would probably be easier
November 2, 2018 1:54 a.m.
I have a concern - how much cheaper is it compared to Pauper? The most popular Pauper deck on MTGO is UR Delver which is 130 bucks on MTGoldfish. Now the bulk of that comes from playing skred and a dozen snow-covered lands. You can halve the cost of the deck by playing Flame Slash.
The second most popular option is Rainbow Tron, which costs 65 bucks on MTGoldfish. So, if the most expensive decks in Pauper cost 65 bucks on average, a set of 8 decks will cost you at most 520 bucks on MTGoldfish. One of the most popular decks in Standard is Jeskai Control, which is 650 bucks on MTGoldfish.
So, for the cost of a competitive standard deck, you can buy 8 Pauper decks and a box of Guilds of Ravnica, plus meals from a fast-food chain for every participant, and organzie a pauper tournament yourself and have 8 decks that will never rotate instead of one that will be worthless in an year.
Finally, some challenges - suppose you create hte format, put all the legal cards in a Google spreadsheet, put everybody's decks in there as well and vlookup the cards versus the list. Nobody has any illegal cards, so you start the tourney. Turns out, a savvy player perused the list and found that Mind's Desire and Grapeshot are far less than a dollar, so he/she storms out everybody. Thus, these storm cards are now banned. next tourney, someone discovers that Temporal Fissure and Storm Entity are still super good and wins that tourney with a modified storm list. So, you ban all storm cards. Next tourney, someone notices Invigorate is 26 cents and builds infect, which kills everyone on turn 3. There are a lot of broken cards that are under a dollar, these are just the ones banned in pauper.
TLDR: The proposed format is cheap, but Pauper already is cheap. It turns out that 10 000+ cards are very hard to balance.
November 2, 2018 7:39 a.m.
Well if we use the mtgo list there wont be a need for a ban list and the decks would be super cheap either way most likely cheaper then pauper decks. If we go with dollar dreadful the most a deck could be would be like $40. Also with the format being based on prices it will be self regulating. No format is perfect they all went through growing pains.
I enjoy these critiques and criticisms
I'm thinking porting the mtgo penny dreadful to paper is the best bet
November 2, 2018 11:43 a.m.
Hi there,
I started playing MTG a few months ago and one of the things that frustrated me a lot (and still does) is that, even on Friday Night Magic, you'll almost always play against decks that are already on the $400+ range. As a new player, I'm not gonna invest that amount of money only to realize that I don't like that particular deck in a few months time.
By comparison, having found out about PD, I was able to get started with as little as $2-$3 on MTGO. Pauper is also nice, but as it starts becoming popular/competitive, popular commons end up costing as much as most rares. A self-regulating format would of course introduce change, but the cost of keeping up with that change would be, by definition, small.
One of the things that is silly to me is that the huge majority of Magic cards in existence are right now gathering dust in people's basements. Making them usable again would create a new markey which would mean some return on investment (even if little) for collectors and a lower barrier to entry into this community.
As I said, I'm just starting out, so this may be a bit of a naive idea... But I'm sure many others are in the same situation.
By the way, the PD community has developed a series of Open Source tools that help them manage tho whole rotation scheme and organise tournaments. I'm sure a lot of that could be reused.
November 3, 2018 7:17 a.m.
SMASHER101 says... #13
No idea if anyone still cares about this idea but I thought of it on my own and I would use scryfall price because it's easy to then sort out all the cards that are and aren't legal. Going to try to convince some of my commander playgroup at fnm to try something like this. The problem would be what to do when prices change unless I can find a way to get scryfall to search based on prices on a certain date.
November 15, 2019 5:57 p.m.
I would say do it at the start of a sets relase. And mtggoldfish would be the best as you can see how the price changes day to day and what a price is on any given date
Gattison says... #2
I've often thought of a way to port Penny Dreadful to the real world. PD sounds like an awesome idea, and I'd love to see it happen.
However the problem is that online, within the confines of MTGO, there is only one pricing guide for PD (Penny Dreadful), and that is MTGO's economy itself. Out here in the real world, we have Scryfall, MTGStocks, TCGPlayer, etc. Which one of these "price guides" would be the "official" one for Dollar Dreadful? There is no singular source for the definitive price on each and every Magic card atm, thus I feel like we'd either have to favor one pricing site over the others (probably the one with the "lowest" avg.), or else come up with an algorithm to average the prices on all sites. And then release that info somewhere convenient so that anybody interested could find it.
I'm into this idea, and would be interested in discussing it further, but this is probably our first hurdle to overcome.
November 1, 2018 10:27 p.m.