One month ago, the new Core rotation was announced. The news spread like wildfire and the feedback was overwhelmingly... negative. Not that much of a surprise, considering that the announcement translated to "a big part of your collection will be worthless in 3 months" in most players‘ minds. I’m not going to blame you or anyone else for that matter as I’ve more or less been one of all the critics.

I’ve chosen my words carefully and used the Present Perfect Progressive for a good reason as I changed my mind a bit. As long as we’re talking about collections and formats (rather than, say, politics), players are rather hesitant to welcome change. (Then again, I don’t know a single politician who announced that he’ll increase every single tax there is by 20% and who still got a majority of the votes...)

What was the reason for the change of mind? Well, to be perfectly honest, it took me a while until I remembered that there’s actually a bigger picture and not just my personal opinion. But I want to break the whole thought process down for you. It will start with the random rant that seemingly 90% of all players went on and it concludes with a quote from none other than Hans Joachim Höh. Let’s get things started!

Like I said, the first thougt that comes to mind – more often than not – is something along the line of „my cards are now worthless“. There’s certainly some truth to this statement as you might feel like all your Scourgewar cards just got flushed down the drain. However, is everyone really as affected by this change as they claim? If you take a closer look and think a little ahead, you’ll learn that the change might not be so bad after all – even from a financial perspective. Let’s break down the various parties:

• First we got the vendors:

Quite honestly, I think they have quite a good reason to rant. They’re selling cards to make a living and they simply lost money by this change as all their copies of Scourgewar block cards will now sell for smaller prices. They expected to sell those [Broderick Langforth]s at $30 in the upcoming year, but it now seems more likely that they’ll go out for $15 each.

On the other hand, cards that weren’t in demand a month ago will now see play and rise in value. If I’m not all too mistaken, a vendor makes his money buying cards from a player and selling them for a (slightly) higher prize to another customer. With the new rotation, players will have to add more cards to their respective collections, even though they might only be tournament legal for 1,5 years in the by-far-most-popular format. Basically, the more often cards need to change hands, the more opportunities for vendors arise. Smart traders can use this to their advantage and increase their income in the long run. So I guess even though you might have lost a lot of money with the announcement, if you just stay patient, continue to do your thing and use your brains to figure out which cards will and which cards won’t be in demand tomorrow, you’ll end up fine. Hopefully, all the vendors came to the same conclusions and we won’t have to watch the secondary market crash in the following weeks.

• He who has no interest in selling any of his cards:

To be perfectly honest, I’m one of those guys. I rarely sell any of my cards. I just add more and more and more of them to my collection (up to the point where my girlfriend threatens to set some of them on fire and I try to sort through it and get rid of spare copies of commons and uncommons).

With the new rotation, I’ll have to buy more cards in case I want to play different decks in each single format. Then again, this has always been the case and I guess I don’t have that much reason to complain. Either I suck it up or I opt to play a deck that doesn’t make use of as many fresh cards (as long as I own enough cards that are still tournament legal in the respective format to build another deck).

This will be hard at first, but once you got the hang of it and stocked up on some of the Worldbreaker / War of the Elements / Twilight of the Dragons / Throne of the Tides (soon™) cards, you should be fine.

• Power traders:

There are also those members of our community who tend to trade. A lot. In fact, sometimes it might seem like all they do is trade. Those dudes will be affected heavily, but it pretty much comes down to what we’ve already said about the vendors. More opportunities arise, so if they’re able to make some smart trades, they’ll end up just fine. Maybe even better than before.

Thinking about the future changes in this way kinda opened my eyes and made me aware of the fact that not that much is actually going to change. Granted, I might end up buying some more singles than before, but I already got used to paying Damien a visit prior to a bigger tournament and cashing in $100 for singles that I need for my respective deck. Nothing really changed, huh?

Well, not quite. The new Core format will feel rather different. I don’t want to add my 2 cents to the discussion if it will benefit creative deck builders or if the format will feel "stale" as there aren’t enough cards available – you’ve heard most of the arguments by now and others found better ways to communicate them to you than I could.

Like I pointed out earlier, I want to end with a quote from Hans Joachim Höh: "I think we can all agree that we would have been a lot more upset if Cryptozoic announced that they were going to file for bankruptcy as everyone’s still only buying ridiculous Upper Deck Scourgewar spoilers instead of their sets."

I told you in one of my first articles that I’ve been working in the industry, but just like many of you, I always thought of Cryptozoic of Upper Deck 2.0. Granted, they’re still committing some of the mistakes that UD used to make, but I think the vast majority of the changes they implemented were for the better of the game.

What I often forget, though, is the fact that Cryptozoic didn’t take over the product from Upper Deck. Which means that all the boosters, boxes and cases that are still in distribution today don’t help Cryptozoic to make a single dime.

I want to add that I didn’t explore the opportunities that the whole Worldbreaker Block offers so far. I know little about the cards from Elements and I only know that Twilight is full of Black and Twilight Dragonkin. I guess there’s a little more to those sets and I’m looking forward to checking them out when it comes to building decks for the Nationals.

Let me end with 2 quotes from Patrick Sullivan that will hopefully help calming down some of you. Regarding the "sheer number of changes" in the past few months, he voiced his concern that they "[...] (will result in) certain players not handling the lack of stability."

However, he added that he "really believes this will be the last massive change for a very long time."

In other words: Once we got used to the new Core format, we should be fine. The announcement of the OP schedule for 2012 proves that Cryptozoic is planning ahead and still wants to keep the World of Warcraft TCG fresh and interesting for months to come.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Are you staying with the game or did you put down the cards for the time being?

- Oliver Gehrmann (soulwarrior@soulwarrior.net)