Special: Conspiracy: Is it a Conspiracy Against the Market?

So, as you may or may not be aware, Conspiracy has been out for about a week now. Since I was on vacation during its release with my friends, I got a lot of play-time in for the set. What do I think of it? Well, to put it simply:

Conspiracy is the greatest multiplayer product that WotC has created in all conceivable time

That being said, it does have some issues. First and foremost, it's going to damage the secondary market. I had some time to talk with the people over at Fusion Gaming when I was in Winnipeg and they made a very valid point: people's excitement for Conspiracy is screwing up card prices and they will tank faster than people expect. Cards like Exploration and Misdirection are seeing massive drops in price already (Exploration lost $5 over 3 days and Misdirection lost almost $8 over the same period). While that's great for players since they can buy the cards cheap, that's not so great for the sellers since they will have paid too much for cards bought early and won't be able to recoup their costs as a result of the fast price drop. They will then be forced to turn around and offer lower values for people looking to offload the results of their drafts or outright refuse to take any, which will make the people who money-draft unhappy.

The other thing it will probably do is raise the already-high prices of some other Legacy staples due to the reprinting of other staples. Cards like Exploration and Misdirection are important is certain decks (Lands and control respectively) and they used to be quite expensive. Now that they've been reprinted, people will want to get into Legacy because it's cheaper to get main cards. We saw a minor version of this when Modern Masters was printed last year, but there's a major difference: Modern Masters had a limited print run. Conspiracy will continue to be printed as long as there is a demand for it. This sort of ties into the first point I made about card prices since the supply will skyrocket but the demand won't jump as much (let's be honest, Force of WIll's price will still be a barrier for most people).

Despite all that though, I encourage everyone to go out and buy a box or participate in a Conspiracy draft. It's super fun and you'll walk away with some nice cards (and probably new enemies).