Is it the end of the world to track all this small binary shit?
So I had a guy pick up a commander deck who had played the game maybe a good ten years ago or so, understood the mechanics, didn't really know a lot of more modern stuff. He was I think a Modern guy, so Conspiracy wasn't up his alley.
Took us five seconds to get him up to speed on Monarch. Sure, we missed some triggers here and there, but it's all good.
He had bought the RG Baldur's Gate precon. He played Tome of Sarevok. It took us around seven minutes to fully explain Initiative and Dungeons, and we had to scramble around to find enough tokens to represent it the first time someone else got hit. That's more what I mean.
Commander Masters seems to be all the talk with countless stores talking about how it's financially crippled them worse than that one tiger did to Joe Exotic.
The reason it dumped a lot of stores hard is that they placed positions way ahead of anything in the set being spoiled, and the stores couldn't predict the community would shit their diaps about it this hard.
It has a lot of dud rares - true (...monetarily. Sidisi is an awesome card, just worth nothing.. But it also has a lot of bomb commons and uncommons, with a price point that isn't that much above sets like M25. M25 was a shit set at a stupidly inflated price-point that, along with Iconic Masters, helped to sink the 'Masters' brand. This is a good set being sold at an inflated price... much like Baldur's Gate. But you wouldn't really know that unless you drafted it, same as Baldur's Gate. You know, the set that, even less than a year after its release, had an EV higher than its original, high price-point because people stopped shitting on it and realized that it actually had lots of good stuff (alongside truly stellar common/uncommon designs and an overall perfect power-level for the format).
The way all the youtube channels tell it, Commander Masters is the worst set ever / total shit / blah blah blah because it isn't Commander Legends 2. Commander Legends printed so many problem cards into the format that turned it into even more of a wallet-warrior arms-race, and because those people didn't get another set full of designs like Jeweled Lotus or Hullbreacher, they're throwing a hissy-fit.
As a result of all the negativity, even people who don't mind the price point and would otherwise be into the product are staying away, which is forcing stores to crack packs or race to the bottom. Small stores that use preorders to gauge their allocation are gonna do alright; the medium-size ones that buy a bunch at bulk pricing are stuck with some heavy bags.