Top 8 Suggestions for Future Exclusive Magic Products

When it comes to exclusive products that stir up the masses, Wizards has been on a roll recently. From cards only legal in Standard in China and MTGA to Nexus of Fate and the Guilds of Ravnica Mythic Edition, it’s been fun watching Wizards try to see how many different subsets of their playerbase they can design unique cards for. WOTC is always grateful for feedback, so I decided to compile my eight favorite suggestions.

 8. Willy Wonka Golden Ticket Super Hyper Mega Exclusive Promo

Willy Wonka wasn’t subtle in its messaging: drinking from a brown river is generally a bad idea; if you’re poor, lottery tickets are the best way out; and CEO’s can do pretty much whatever they want. But what Willy Wonka and it’s animated counterpart, Yu-Gi-Oh! (more on that later), do so well is demonstrate the effectiveness of marketing based on extreme scarcity. Veruca Salt’s father, who owned a factory, had his workers open 760,000 Wonka Bars, completely halting his business’s operation and hemorrhaging massive sums of money. He even had to give out a £1 bonus to the worker who found the Golden Ticket! This is how CEO’s go bankrupt and middle classes are created; beware!

In Yu-Gi-Oh!, Seto Kaiba, an orphaned child who uses his billions to purchase airplanes that look like dragons, is obsessed with obtaining all copies of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon. There are only four copies in existence, and he has three. The fourth is owned by an elderly card shop owner who, convinced that his cards are alive, seems to be losing his mind. Because of this scarcity, the Blue-Eyes presumably has a market value of tens of thousands of dollars, leading our hero Seto Kaiba to take the logical step of kidnapping a senior citizen so that he can leave him unconscious on the floor after beating him at a card game. After Kaiba, a billionaire 18-year-old at the top of his game, defeats Solomon Muto, a mentally ill 71-year-old, at a card game with no real rules, he claims the fourth Blue-Eyes for himself. Upon obtaining a card worth tens of thousands of dollars, Kaiba destroys it.

This is the kind of exciting storyline that could play out in real life if Wizards would print a small number of copies of a card that mirrored the power of the Blue-Eyes White Dragon: a slightly overpriced vanilla beater. Just imagine LSV hunting down a small child at a card store after his spies informed him that he opened one of only eight copies of a card, kidnapping that child, and then taking his toys away. With stories like this, we could be living Hall of Fame season every single day.

 7. Temporal Standard Exclusives

We’ve seen Standard cards that are only legal if you play them within a defined area of (cyber)space (Chinese Planeswalker Decks, MTGA). The next step is for Wizards to print promos that are only playable during certain times. What better way to keep the game fresh than to have a different metagame each day of the week? Monday Standard revolves around the new promo Nissa, She Who Has Yet to Break Standard while Thursday Standard is all about the Emrakul, She Who Warps Bodies to the Same Degree as Her Foiling Warps the Cardboard. And don’t let your opponent get you by holding up four mana on a Tuesday – the new Collected Company promo is only in Standard on the weekends. If you’re planning making Day 2 of a GP, choose your deck (or hide from those deck checks) carefully!

6. ‘Murica Exclusive Promos

We’ve already had exclusive promos for other parts of the world, so how about the good ol’ US of A? If those foreigners want to come over and play our card game at our GP’s, they’d better be ready to sleeve up some Abraham Lincolns, George Washingtons, and Capitalism. All promos are obviously Jeskai, turning the metagame into a sea of patriotism. After all, what better colors than Red (Freedom) White (Haha JK Our Democracy is a Lie) and Blue (We’re Totally Smarter than Everyone Else) to represent our glorious nation?

5. Pro Tour-Exclusive Promos (but not boring reprints)

As they highlighted with their recent premier play announcement, Wizards likes to keep on the Pro Tour all the people who are already there. What better way to do that than to issue them powerful, Pro Tour-exclusive promo cards? Watch on Twitch as the PT metagame becomes entirely about The Scarab Teferi, Courier of Chains. Don’t be upset that you can’t have it. If you were halfway decent at Magic and qualified back when it was possible for a normal person to qualify, you could be Marveling in Scarab Teferi too. What’s that? Marvel is banned? Maybe for you; for the pros, it’s next season’s promo.

 4. Alternate Text Promos

A popular method of creating promos has been to simply change the artwork. However, Wizards recently dropped some hints that they’re willing to alter more than art. In Unglued, WOTC printed cards that had alternate text, such as Very Cryptic Command. What if you could buy a booster box and get an alternate text Teferi, who untaps seven lands and costs two mana? Or, if you like forcing draws, an alternate text Hostage Taker that is just Hostage Taker with the same text, but with errata that undoes its errata? The possibilities are endless once WOTC is willing to start thinking outside the art box.

 3. GP Promo Promo

As everything that used to come along with a GP registration has slowly shifted to becoming an add-on, the GP Promos have remained sacred. For as long as you sign up for a GP, you are guaranteed to receive one more warped copy of a Progenitus that you can slot into that untouched pocket of your trade binder. I’m not suggesting that these promos become add-ons as well (I’m not a monster!) I’m only suggesting that Wizards could make bank if they added an additional promo that required further payment. Perhaps people would be willing to pay an additional $15 for a sweet promo version of the powerful Ravnican legend, Emmara Tandris. Then, put your pile of warped Emmaras next to your pile of warped Progeniti and see which will form a cylinder first.

 2. Come Back to Standard Pretty Please Promo

Wizards has been using promos to sell products, but it’s time to start using them to sell other things as well. Standard’s had a rough couple of years, and if the recent GP sizes are anything to go by, the format has yet to recover from the scarring things that Aetherworks Marvel, Saheeli Rai, and nightmare-of-children-everywhere Rampaging Ferocidon did to it. As such, I propose that signing up for any sanctioned Standard event should earn you a nice, Standard-playable promo. Something that welcomes you right back to Standard, promising a better time, before it breaks the format in half again. I propose a new version of Nexus of Fate, but just lowering the cost to, say, two mana. It would synergize so much better with Teferi that way.

 1. Play Brawl Because it is the Best Format Ever We Promise Promo

Brawl has seen resounding success since its introduction. From the one-man Brawl Champion at GP Barcelona to members of R&D handing out Brawl decks like candy to get people to play at GP Richmond, signs of the format’s health are everywhere. To celebrate just how different this format is from dead formats like Tiny Leaders, Frontier, and Legacy, I propose a special promo for anyone who signs up for a Brawl event! Of course, there is a slight possibility that this still won’t be enough, and we’ll end up with the scenario presented in the first part of this article (eight copies of a card in circulation, child billionaires run amok). But I believe the benefits outweigh the risks. Frankly, the opportunity to bring the light and joy that is Brawl into the hearts of players everywhere is worth any price.

Ryan Normandin is a grinder from Boston who has lost at the Pro Tour, in GP & SCG Top 8's, and to 7-year-olds at FNM. Despite being described as "not funny" by his best friend and "the worst Magic player ever" by Twitch chat, he cheerfully decided to blend his lack of talents together to write funny articles about Magic. Make fun of him online through Twitter (@RyanNormandin) and Twitch (norm_the_ryno).