Modern Masters 2015: What Did You Expect From A Sequel?

For several years during my early teens, my extended family would frequently get together for general socializing. One aunt and uncle lived on the same dead-end street as my grandparents, and so my siblings, cousins and I spent countless hours coming up with all manner of games, activities, and video skits to pass the hours. A few times we even came up with schemes to persuade other neighborhood kids to participate in some low-end means of raising some extra cash, such as lemonade stands or pseudo-carnival style games. It was a fun, formative time, and for the life of me I can’t recall why we thought some of the things we dreamt up to whittle away the summer days were good ideas.

Such is childhood I suppose.

One such quandary came in the form of endlessly enduring the movie Grease one summer in the mid 90’s. I forget how a movie from 1978 consumed the interest of both my sisters and my two female cousins for weeks on end. They watched it repeatedly. They secured a copy of the soundtrack. Once, we all went camping in New Hampshire for the weekend, and the local campground by chance hosted a talent show of sorts. At least two of my family got up on stage to perform We Go Together to 30 some odd strangers – and won.

The reason that campground audience responded so well their rendition, why four girls were encapsulated by a movie that came out almost ten years before most of them were born, and why as a result of their one summer obsession that I have the lyrics to far more of the songs from Grease seared into my memory than I care to admit, is that, well, it was a good movie. Sure, it’s a movie adaptation of theatrical musical, but the basic story has a timeless and enduring quality about teenage romance. Plus, the movie had a quality principal cast in the form of John Travolta, Olivia-Newton John, and Stockard Channing, and many of the songs are pretty catchy after a fashion. Grease was incredibly popular during its time, and it’s still hailed as one of the best musicals to date.

Grease 2, however, was abysmal.

With none of the main cast, an even more outlandish premise than the first, and incredibly forgettable songs, the movie was considered a failure almost immediately, relegated to the footnotes of cinematic history as an ill-fated plan to stretch Grease into a musical movie franchise.

Sadly, terrible sequels to popular movies is nothing new. Sometimes it’s simply the result of not being able to catch the lightning in a bottle effect of the first movie, or too much of a shakeup in the cast, or a poorly-executed or unrelated script. Other times it’s simply because the initial movie was successful and the studios want to squeeze as much money out of the material that they can. Most of the time, it’s all of the above.

Unfortunately, that’s also what Wizards of the Coast has done with Modern Masters 2015. They went and George Lucased their sequel.

When we explored the forces behind the creation of Modern Masters, we noted that Wizards was certainly taking a chance making a fully-reprinted set that was intended to be draftable, helpful to the financial pains of Modern tourney players, and accessible for casual players as a premium-level product. When we reviewed Modern Masters on those criteria, we found that the overall presentation was pretty decent, although our skepticism on the financial easement aspect has proven true – but we’ll get to that. Still, the set had a ton of sought after cards that people wanted, from lowly commons through mythic rares, and drafting it was top notch. People wanted to draft it again, even if the price point was a bit high for most people at an MSRP of $7 per pack. This above all was a telltale sign that, aside from seriously underprinting the set, most players were pleased with it.

Modern Masters 2015 has not garnered the same adoration. This set didn’t give us Godfather 2. Instead, we got Anchorman 2: a passable but ultimately disappointing fare. What follows are three key reasons why.

Next: Plot Issues

Problem #1: The Plot Is Too Derivative

Writing for sequels is always tough, as to be truly successful you must build upon the original’s foundations without simply rehashing the same story. If you deviate too far from what attracted people to the first film, viewers feel disconnected. As an example, The Matrix is a beloved sci-fi action movie that engrossed people with great special effects, suspenseful action sequences, and substantive philosophical questions to grapple with. Yet most of the world likes to pretend that its two sequels don’t exist.

By contrast, if you retell the same story in a slightly different vehicle you risk having a final product that can’t stand on its own merits, and it comes across feeling phoned in. Consider just about any comedy, action, or horror movie sequel in the history of. . .ever.

Modern Masters 2015 regrettably falls more into this latter camp than the former, which is surprising. Like its previous incarnation, this set is chock full of mechanics far in excess of a normal set. Whereas a typical set revolves around 4 mechanics on average, Modern Masters 2015 has seventeen – that’s two more than the first one. More interestingly, the more you dig into the set, the more evident it becomes that the designers put substantial effort into cycling the mechanics. Indeed, of all of the mechanics in MM2, only five overlap from the first time around: Affinity, Changeling, Domain, Kickers, and Sunburst.

On the plus side, this nearly full mechanics swap provides a whole new arena to explore a seemingly diverse range of strategies. As one would expect, just like its progenitor, this set isn’t friendly to new players, and simply going through the drafting portion of the event served as a reminder of that. With well over a dozen different mechanics to work around, there were a lot of potential areas to explore, and it was fun to see specific cards floating around again. It certainly takes some time to flesh out how to proceed, as the set definitely challenges you to make difficult decisions as the packs are passed around.

However, much like a sequel not quite living up to its older sibling, MM2 stops short of repeating the same level of drafting success, namely because it takes a slight step backwards in complexity and variety. This coincides with the influx of the previously absent Zendikar and Scars blocks and many of the mechanics they brought with them. The consensus among our draft group was that these block inclusions added more hegemony to the pool of options. Of its 17 mechanics, five revolve around adding or manipulating counters in some way, while four have an artifact-centric approach. This says nothing of the fact that six of Modern Masters’ 15 mythics center around artifacts or colorless creatures – most of them catering to the popularity of the mana-intensive ‘Tron’ decks in Modern that rely on Karn and the Eldrazi to function.

That’s a large chunk of creative space at mythic level devoted to a single “color”, and that focus point became evident that it propagated throughout the set the further along we got. None of our drafting pod were novice players; everyone was fully capable of exploring the depth of what the set theoretically offers. As our deck choices solidified though, two approaches were clearly more dominant than the rest, focusing either on artifact/colorless cards or token manipulation.

Gee, what are the odds?

When the decks were completed and the matches started, these were our eight deck focuses:

• A Blue / Red control deck revolving around Metalcraft and flyers
• A monoblack deck around wither and creature removal
• A Green / Red aggressive deck, focusing on cheap creatures and backed up with some Graft mechanics and Goblin War Paints
• A Black / Green Eldrazi deck, revolving around mana ramp and token generating until Emrakul, the Aeons Torn came online.
• A monowhite artifact deck involving Rusted Relics, Lodestone Myrs, and buffing that also contained all five basic land types for a solid Sunburst subtheme.
• A Blue / White artifact control deck focusing on Affinity and Equipment
• A different Blue / White artifact control deck based around Tezzeret the Seeker, flyers and Ethercaste Knights
• A Blue / White / Black utility deck leveraging a host of different abilities while they pecked at the enemy.

That’s four out of eight decks in the pod that ultimately took up some kind of artifact motif. While this could be a potential outlier among the set writ large, feedback from other drafts indicates it actually seems to be more the rule than the exception. That revelation was disappointing, and the consensus afterwards was that original Modern Masters had a better cross-section of deck styles. For instance, in exchange for upping the emphasis on colorless cards, Modern Masters 2015 dropped from five tribal deck options to two, and it largely eliminated any graveyard-centric or more unconventional styles seen previously (such as Storm or Suspend). Given that drafting the set is one of its central tenants, this reduction in complexity and choice came off as a step in the wrong direction.

The other thing that was noteworthy – to us at least – was that there was also distinctly less nostalgia in this set. Since Zendikar and Scars were absent the first time around, there was a concentrated effort for them to be heavily represented here. This is understandable to a point, lending to the set’s underlying purpose of getting reprints onto the market. Yet these blocks are more recent than the rest, being released in 2010 and 2011 respectively, and didn’t come out all that long ago when compared to those from the older end of the Modern pool. To adjust for these newcomers, the percentages of cards from the oldest sets was reduced, removing some of that inherent charm of playing with decade old cards made new again.

So, how did these decks do? Feel free to click below to look at quick breakdown if you’re curious, or you may continue on to our summary of the draft itself.

 

At the end, that the players had a near-unanimous opinion on the diversity of the set was telling: Modern Masters 2015 had a difficult time achieving the same level of critical drafting success as the previous set. There was a lot of representation of cards throughout the now eight year span, but they weren’t evenly distributed by any means. In some ways, MM2 felt like the emphasis leaned too heavily on being a drafting vehicle to reprint a handful of expensive Zendikar and Scars cards than it was about making a drafting set that could be at least as good, if not better, than its previous attempt.

To our non-tournament crew, that took some of the fun out of it. Our appreciation of the draft portion of Modern Masters 2015 is solely from the guise of casual and Commander players with a penchant for drafting. Given that none of us are Constructed players, our focus remained predominantly on the playability and cohesion of this being a draft-worthy set. Even within that more limited critical lens, this set of reprints left many of us wanting more.

Modern Masters 2015 still succeeds as a draftable set, just as the last one did, giving players a unique mix of reprinted cards of various combinations worth trying. That being said, it also never climbed to that same level of drafting excitement as it had previously. Regardless of whether it was because it had too high of a concentration of newer block cards, or it simply didn’t reach the same level of anticipation the second time around, there was nevertheless a notable enthusiasm gap.

Modern Masters 2015 is certainly worth draft consideration on merit alone, but in many ways its play style felt closer to drafting a slightly more advanced expansion than a highly complex anthology set. The result is that distinctive ‘good but not great’ feeling that most sequels have.

Draft capability is just one part of the set, though. General cost and the distribution of individual cards themselves are a whole different story.

Next: Casting Issues

Problem #2: It Has A Weaker Supporting Cast

Like a solid plot evolving from its origins, casting is a huge component to a sequel’s success. Sometimes you can run into cases where the vast majority of the cast returns and the results are still terrible (we’re looking at you The Exorcist II). More commonly though, most bad sequels shuffle too much of the cast, whether that’s not having some of the main cast return, or the primary character(s) do but the entire supporting cast has been swapped with subpar replacements.

Take the classic and iconic movie Jaws. This fairly low-budget film about a giant shark terrorizing a New England coastline earned numerous award nominations, catapulted Spielberg into fame, and swam into the annals of cinematic history. It resonated because it struck the right emotional chord, it had a cohesive plot, and it had a decent cast.

Then they went and made Jaws 2, which not only rehashed nearly the exact same plot and trivialized the heroism and sacrifices people went through in the first movie, but so few people returned from the first movie that you could feel the plummet in quality. Even lead actor Roy Scheider didn’t want to be part of it, but he was forced to because he was under contract with the studio.

The failure of Jaws 2, like many sequels, is that it simply became a vehicle for the main character to be on screen and drum up sales. In this case it was a giant man-eating shark. With Modern Masters 2015, it’s Tarmogoyf and his pricey friends.

The single biggest complaint most have with the second Modern Masters is its monetary valuations. The value of the cards in the set on the whole aren’t nearly as good of an investment this time around, which has led to some cynical observations that the set serves mostly as a reprint machine for Vendilion Clique, Tarmogoyf, and Dark Confidant.

Those views aren’t inherently wrong.

An excellent article was done over on MTGGoldfish that dissected the card value breakdowns incredibly well, and the entire thing is worth a read. However, the gist is that if you open a mythic in your pack (besides the comically out-of-place Comet Storm), you totally get your money’s worth for that pack’s cost. Beyond that, your chances of getting value for your purchase drops substantially:

Unlike the mythics which are pretty much all valuable, there are only 10 Rares that can really be considered winners either paying for the pack, or at least coming close enough that you can break even with a decent foil or uncommon. This ratio actually isn’t that bad. The bigger problem is the lack of mid-tier rares. There are only six rares in the $3 through $7 range, and all of these are much closer to $3 than to $7.

This means that 20 percent of the time you’ll open something sweet, 10 percent of the time you’ll open something middling, and 70 percent of the time you’ll open a rare worth $2 or less. For every Noble Hierarch you’ll open four Long-Forgotten Gohei. Compare this to the original Modern Masters, which had 17 rares in the “more than a pack” category (32 percent), another 14 in the $3 through $5 range (26 percent), and about 40 percent in the bulk range. This is a stark and significant difference.

And this is not to mention the high number of literal bulk rares. In researching this article I stumbled across the fact that Modern Masters 2015, a set that has a MSRP of $10 per pack (2.5 times the cost of a “regular” pack), has more bulk rares than Dragons of Tarkir. And it was only a couple months back I was writing about how DTK had an absurdly low EV during the prerelease period.

Ergo, if you pull a decent foil rare or a mythic, it helps justify the cost. Most of the time, though, you are going to lose money on this set. Compared with the previous Modern Masters, that is a huge deviation. Sure, this set has a number of high end reprints like the Hierarch and Spellskite, but it also has an awful lot of rares that do not come close to being a fair deal for the cost of the pack, let alone a draft.

This says nothing of the absolutely abysmal uncommon pool. Aside from Remand, there are almost no highly sought after uncommons in this set. This is an even starker contrast from the previous set where many uncommons printed were going for the same price as many of the lower to middle range rares. Hell, in the first one, there were commons that had value to them. In many ways, uncommons are the true supporting cast of any set though, and when it comes to a cost benefit ratio, Modern Masters 2015 went with a bunch of C-list actors.

The cost of packs only compound this problem. The last Modern Masters packs had an MSRP $3 cheaper than this time around. Yet since most stores were charging $10-12 each, they were making a nice profit off it. Well, Wizards decided to shift that cash back towards themselves by making MM2 a $10 per pack MSRP, which rightfully or not, is highly perceived as nothing more than a stopgap measure at best and a pure money grab at worst. On the one hand, this shift made it much harder for stores to price gouge their customers with extravagant prices. On the other hand, it means Wizards reaps more of the profit, and stores that adhered to $7 last time (they did exist) are forced to price part of their clientele out of a product with this set.

Most importantly, this increased price tag adds that much more of a barrier to entry for players new to the Modern format since it was already deemed an expensive endeavor the last time around. But this increase makes it almost $10 more expensive to draft (at a minimum) and $3 more for a pack, creating a very real effect of pushing casual players away from it entirely. Modern Masters 1 at least had the veneer of giving casual players a luxury item to purchase, but MM2 seems intent on avoiding that.

With more expensive packs having less overall worthwhile cards, Modern Masters 2015 is not nearly as cash-friendly as its predecessor. There seems to be two possibilities for Wizards doing this, both driven by their terrifying fear of the Chronicles Effect. Firstly, since they were worried about the possibility of ‘flooding the market with too many good cards’, Wizards opted to stratify the set by containing fewer cards of financial worth at the lower ends of the spectrum in exchange for increased production.

It’s widely known that the first Modern Masters had a conservative print run because of the fear that too many powerful, popular, and valuable reprints would be disruptive on the market. In that sense, they were partially successful: while the prices of ‘bulk’ and medium-valued rares of the first set did drop over time, the value of the top-tier rares and mythics stayed flat for a while before going up. This is simple supply and demand again at work.

Say I made 100 of the most amazing toy cars. They look cool, they’re fun to play with, and they’re really solid quality. And I then sell them for $1 each, stating that it was unlikely I would ever make more of them. In time, people continued to buy and sell those toy cars on their own, and the market price steadily climbed. Many people became willing to pay $20 for a $1 toy car. For those with the money or the driving need to have those cars, they were willing to pay that premium. For the average person, though, it proved too hard to justify spending more than a couple dollars above what those mere toys originally went for. As a result, most consumers stop trying to buy them, consigning themselves to the reality that those cars are not something they’ll attain at a reasonable rate.

Then, say, I go and announce that I’ll be releasing another set of toy cars. Only this time I’m making just 20 of them, and I’ve raised the price to $5 each. Those who were willing to pay $20 are beyond excited – but so are some of the people who only wanted to spend $1. $5 is far more reasonable than $20 after all, and so they once again hop into the ring to try to snag one. For a brief time, it’s possible to get them affordably, before the market quickly reasserts itself. As a result of a new limited supply far outstripping renewed demand (which was never adequately met the first time around), those with the more disposable budgets started to trade them at $30 instead. As a producer, I don’t care because I’m only adding a small percentage of my awesome toy cars to the market, keeping them a valuable commodity. And I still made my $100.

This is exactly what happened with the first Modern Masters. Many Modern and Modern-to-be tournament players initially were priced out of the chance at getting top-tier cards for the format, but MM1 gave the prospect of easier access to Goyf, Bob, and friends. Existing tournament players saw it as a way of saving money, whereas some players on the tourney sidelines saw it as their chance to finally get in on the action. The problem was, the supply of the first Modern Masters wasn’t nearly enough to meet the demand of the existing Modern base plus newcomers. As a result, the price of these marquee cards has actually increased. Tarmogoyf, for example, has risen almost 50% since Modern Masters 1 – completely antithetical to advertised premise of what the set was supposed to do.

Way to go Wizards. You failed at basic economics. And to some extent, you did it on purpose.

To be fair, even Wizards came out after the fact and admitted that the highly limited run was a mistake. But their concerns about flooding the market didn’t dissipate. Thus, when Modern Masters 2015 was decided upon, they needed to make a tough decision. The knew that they had to make a larger print run than they did previously, but with that looming fear of negatively impacting the secondary market (you know, the one they repeatedly can’t publicly acknowledge the existence of), they took two important steps.

The first was the aforementioned reduction of medium to upper tier valued cards represented in the set. Just like the previous Modern Masters, this is a 249 card set that breaks down along normal set distribution: 101 commons, 80 uncommons, 53 rares, and 15 mythic rares, all in 15 card booster packs. And just like last time, each pack contained a foil instead of a basic land. The only change was the inclusion of 20 more uncommons, which increased diversity but also diffused the overall number of times a given uncommon would be seen.

This increase in uncommons coincides with the conspicuous absence of a lot of valuable uncommons and medium-valued rares, since Wizards is aware that if they print more than the current demand level for them, prices will drop. Once the need for Splinter Twins, Blinkmoth Nexuses and Daybreak Coronets are saturated in the Modern format, the price will inevitably start to come down…at least for a while. It’s already started with Remand – the only uncommon in MM2 that’s worth more than the ink it was printed on.

Secondly, they increased the MSRP of the box. The logic here seemed to be that aside from getting more money, the added cost would help deter just enough of the player base to keep pace with interest in the set. Remember: MM2 is considered a premium product, which means contrary to people’s interest in it, Wizards doesn’t intend it for every Magic player. And there seems to have been a deliberate effort to price some non-tournament people out of buying it.

In short, the theory seems to hold that Modern Masters 2015 purposely put less valuable cards in the set overall because they’d be printing more of them. They were fine with the selected mythics and chase rares, because helping to stabilize the cost of the format is within their best interest, they drive up interest, and the extra volume of those upper echelon cards should actually help mitigate card inflation of those two dozen cards for a bit. In a few cases, the price should even dip. For the rest of the cards, though, there will inevitably be notable price drops as cards begin to circulate. Therefore, they couldn’t have the set be crammed full of cool and marginally pricey cards; too many cards would be in flux at one time, which would certainly not amuse stores and collectors.

Essentially, outside of their pool of mythics, Modern Masters 2015 pulled their punches when it came to this print run. Granted, besides core sets – which served a different purpose – this is only the second attempt since Chronicles for a real anthology set. And whereas Chronicles printed too many, Modern Masters printed too few. MM2 was an experiment to see what a printing range in between would do. By putting a lower percentage of sought-after cards into the set, it allows them to be riskier on print volume. If the set proves still too restrictive, they always have the ability to reprint them yet again, and if volume proves too much, there won’t be nearly as many notable casualties in their overreach.

From a financial standpoint, doing so was a secure bet. But from a consumer’s perspective, where you’re trying to gets as much value for your money, them playing it safe has turned out to be very disillusioning. Due to the decrease in the overall value of the set, increased sticker price, and diluted strategic options, there is far less incentive for all but the hard-core tournament players to draft this more than once, if at all. For many casual players, the higher price tag alone is enough to justifiably turn them away.

Case in point: with the first Modern Masters, you had a 50% chance of opening packs that were worth more than their MSRP value. With MM2, the majority of the time you’ll open a pack that is worth 66% less than MSRP. Sure, cracking random packs in general nets you less than what you pay for them, but averaging $1-3 worth of cards for a $10 pack is egregious and outrageous from a consumer standpoint.

With too few notable cast members and the emotional substance they brought to the first flick, a poorly staffed movie sequel either winds up something that will be profitable but will suck (see Star Wars Episodes I-III), or its lack of talent and concerted desire to improve on the original’s story will create a become a box office bomb that should never have been made in the first place – like Caddyshack II.

Yet for all of our grousing and complaining, there’s little doubt that this set will be hailed as a huge success from a sales perspective. As such, Modern Masters 2015 is firmly in the same camp as Jar-Jar Binks. And no one wants that.

 

Back to Plot Issues or Onward to Poor Post Production

Problem #3. Poor Post Production

Sometimes a bad sequel can have a decent storyline and maintain its worthwhile cast, but its failings are due to being beset with a range of unrelated problems after the fact. Superman II would have been on par with the Superman I since they were filmed simultaneously, but due to famous clashes between the director and producers, another director was brought in 3/4 of the way through filming that led to an entire tonal shift during the last bit of filming and editing. Especially that whole cellophane ‘S’ thing…

It just goes to show that even if you theoretically do everything right, how your product is packaged and presented to the public also makes a big difference to how it’s perceived. Just think of the last time you saw a trailer that gave you a vastly different impression than when you saw the actual movie itself.

In that regard, the last wrinkle to Modern Masters 2015 is that Wizards of the Coast used the set to experiment with new biodegradable cardboard booster packs instead of the typical tearable foil packaging. The initial reaction was highly positive, and the set should be commended for that, even if it was more of a parallel development than an aspect of the set itself. These new box packages were met with universal praise for attempting to be more eco-friendly. They were so liked, in fact, that many of our play group remarked that if the company eventually decided to replace the packaging of the cards entirely, they wouldn’t mind at all.

Philosophically, the early reaction from most Magic: the Gathering players tend to agree with this sentiment. Anyone who regularly opens boxes of new cards knows that the booster packaging is hardly environmentally friendly, and for a company the size of WotC to implement recyclable packaging for its flagship game, it would go a long way for sustainability. Plus, the packaging looks cool, giving off sleek but slightly angular feel.

Of course, though, like everything else Modern Masters 2015, even the packaging was had a pair of issues. And they were sizable ones.

First, unlike airtight foil packaging, the cardboard boxes are slightly larger than the cards themselves, allowing cards to shift around during movement. In many cases, this caused foils to become scratched and card edges to be dinged before they were even opened. When you’re hoping to open a pristine $150 card, let alone paying $10 a pack for a brand new 15 cards, there’s a justifiably high expectation that they be in perfect condition. In this case, they weren’t. Moreover, because they were trying out a different printer, there was also many instances of cards being miscut on top of that, leading to a lot of unhappy players – tournament, collector, and casual alike. There were so many reports of cards being damaged and miscut, in fact, that Wizards even posted a notice about it on their site just days after the set’s release.

Secondly, and far more concerning, was incidents of card tampering.

See, one of the nice parts about the modern crimped foil packaging is that it’s fairly obvious whether the pack has been tampered with. It’s incredibly difficult to open a pack, extract the cards, replace them, and seal it back up in an identical manner. With the cardboard Modern Masters packs, it technically is possible. That is, it was found to be possible to weaken the package’s glue and open up the pack from the side, allowing someone to extract or swap cards before sealing it back up.

Concerns of buying single packs have been bandied about for years, with some players wary of purchasing individual packs online or in stores because of previous box mapping concerns. Such swindles are pretty rare, though, and requires knowledge of how mapping works. By contrast, these potential packaging exploits of Modern Masters 2015 are pretty low-tech by comparison. Presumably, instances of people doing this are also rare, but just the specter of impropriety on packs that cost a solid $10 can be enough to give people pause, which ultimately only hurts store owners.

Mind you, neither of these packaging issues reach the levels seen in old sets with not-quite-100% opaque packaging or serial number mapping, and the fact that this new process holds serious promise deserves credit. It merely has a few kinks to iron out. Alas, it just so happens that the first attempt coincides with the other aforementioned set issues here, which doesn’t help the its overall presentation.

Much like a bad movie, such post production issues should have been fixed long before it was sent out for public screening. Otherwise, even if you have a halfway decent product, people will be reluctant to go see it. The same goes for players buying more Modern Masters 2015 after a bad packaging experience.

 

Final Thoughts

From the moment the first Modern Masters went out of print – which was fairly quick – players immediately started yearning for a repeat performance. The set contained a massive amount of popular (and valuable) cards from the mid 2000s, complete with both tournament staples and many enjoyable cards that any play group would appreciate. Like a highly successful movie, the first Modern Masters was created with care and precision, with its largest criticisms being that it only ever came out in limited theaters and they charged twice the amount for the luxury of seeing it.

Modern Masters 2015 is that long-awaited sequel who tries so desperately to live up to the hype of its predecessor but, as is often the case, falls short of its own lofty goals. The designers of this reprint set sought to capture the essence of the first one while striving for a much wider distribution, but like taking a cult classic and trying to turn it into a summer blockbuster, they did so at the cost of some of the creativity and value that made the first one so beloved.

It’s not at Modern Masters 2015 is a bad sequel – it’s no Highlander 2 – but it also never reaches the same level of acclaim the first one had. While the set remains fun to draft, it also has fewer and more uniform deck strategies, which limits the desire to do it repeatedly.

What’s more, the Magic player base collectively complained about the high price point of the packs of the original Modern Masters, but Modern Masters 2015 goes a step beyond that, charging you even more for less guaranteed good cards. Sure, this set will help stabilize some of the higher end cards of the Modern format (for a while), and it may even do the one thing these sets were always intended to do: cause the price of some staple cards to drop. But that’s small comfort for those who dish out precious money to get pennies on the dollar in return.

So, at the film’s end and the credits rolling, is this sequel worth it? For the average drafter or casual player, the sad answer is no. We enjoyed our experience, but we would not do another MM2. For groups like ours, you’re much better off drafting something like a normal set or a box of Conspiracy if you can find it. Not only will you have better odds for your money, but you’ll be able to do it at a third of the cost. For tournament players, the prospects aren’t much better. If you are insistent on spending the money on the hopes of those chase cards, you will have to at least accept the very real possibility that you won’t nearly get your money’s worth. On average, a box of Modern Masters 2015 is not going to net you any profit. For every Tarmogoyf out there, there’s also a Comet Storm. Fair warning.

Do you have thoughts on Modern Masters 2015? You can discuss this article on our social media, or contact Ryan at ryan@cardboardrepublic.com.

Photo Credits: Grease and Indiana Jones poster by Paramount Studios; The Matrix and Superman II by Warner Brothers Studios; Jaws by Universal Studios; Webcomic by Cardboard Crack; graphs by MTGGoldfish; Jar-Jar Binks by Walt Disney Pictures; Captain Planet by Wikia.