My opinion on mana and printing crap rares.

Mana has always been a controversial issue with Magic the Gathering. Just check out the Wikipedia article on Magic the Gathering to see this is a common consensus, however I want to take the mana issue one step further by arguing that the best mana fixers are needed to play competitively, and most of the best mana fixers out there are printed as rares which drives up the value of each card. Rare Lands can run up to about $10-$15 dollars each, even $20 for the really good ones like reflecting pool. The problem with this doesn't necessarily arrive from good mana sources being difficult to draw but difficult to own and the simplest solution to this problem goes back to yet another issue the players seemed to complain about. Crap rares. I think the biggest issues with MTG goes back to the fact that they print crap rares. Now I've seen several articles written by Wizard's people trying to justify why they print these bad rares and none of the explanations seem legit to me. However after talking about this very topic at a local store someone there summed up for me in one neat simple sentence why Wizards prints bad rares. "Because they don't want it to be profitable to buy a booster pack of MTG." And it makes sense, but at the same time it doesn't make sense. It makes sense that they don't want to have every rare they print have a street value of $5 or more if they are only charging $4 a pack. The reason for this could be that they don't want the store owners buying up all the packs for themselves and strictly only selling singles to make a larger profit. Or it could be that they don't want players having a huge surplus of MTG cards of value that they can trade for cards they need instead of buying more booster packs which is how Wizards make their money. However neither explanation makes sense in light of one simple fact. If all rares were good rares, none of them would have any monetary value of more than the cost of a single pack. Think about it, if every rare in every booster pack you buy was as good as any random 20 dollar rare is now, those rares wouldn't be worth as much. Look at it this way, a box has 36 booster packs in it, so that's at least 36 rares, if only 4-6 of those 36 packs had good rares (value of at least $10-$20), another 15-20 had ok rares (value $5-$9) and the rest were crap that wouldn't sell for $1, then mathematically the chances of getting a good rare is about 1 in 5. This means that in order to statistically get a good rare of $20 value you need to spend about $20 on booster packs. The reason the cards that are good are worth 20 dollars is because it cost about 20 dollars to obtain one. However if all 36 rares were good rares, it would only cost $4 to buy a booster pack and to guarantee yourself a good rare, so it would only be worth about $4 street value. Get it? The rares that are needed to win are so high in value because Wizards wants to print crap rares. If Wizards printed all good rares that can actually win games then any rare you needed to help you win would only cost you about 4 dollars each. So my point is this if you decide to play in a competitive game and you find yourself playing against a deck that was put together for $300.00-$500.00 and you realize that your cheap $25 deck is not going to have a snowball's chance in hell of even staying stable much less actually winning, remember the basic problems rest with wizard's decision to keep certain rares values high by constantly printing crap rares.