Booster Shot

I had thought maybe I was just a grumpy old man, that I had outdated tastes, that I was needlessly afraid of change. Well, Wizards went and vindicated my stance without even realizing it. They have showed us their hand, admitted their mistakes, lifted the curtain to reveal the empty-headed self-sabotage beneath.

All this in a charming majenta package.

If you haven't seen the recent article, there's a new type of booster pack available that is guaranteed to have rarer and more valuable cards contained within... for a commensurately higher price, of course. This isn't a lousy idea on its face: if you want more rares and foils, you pay more money to guarantee getting something. $25 feels like an awful lot to risk getting a dollar-rare and a bunch of trash commons and uncommons, even in foil, which leads to the same bad-feelings I got from the various Modern Masters boosters and their variants. Nonetheless, I get the more-valuable-content-versus-higher-price dynamic.

What sticks with me is the unveiling of the new 'showcase frames.'



What we have here on the left is the 'normal' version of the card, which you'll see in regular packs. The one on the right features a 'showcase frame,' and from what I understand, you can only expect to find it in the new Collector's Boosters.
So a promo has a different look, so what? That's nothing new. But now that spoilers have started rolling out, there's a real trend of more "fairy tale-esque" art amongst the showcase versions of the cards. Primarily, this means more hand-drawn, fantasy-appropriate art, sometimes by older artists who work in traditional media.
See the problem? The "AAA Hollywood" design of art direction I've been griping about for years is had in regular packs, but the alternate frames with more traditional fantasy art can only be had by one method: buying the new, more expensive collector's pack. They're actually admitting that the old art direction has been deemed more desirable. They're admitting that the actual fantasy art is what people want in a fantasy game, so they're... charging more for it.
Fantasy art design is actually being held hostage behind more expensive packaging, and it's up to the players to pay up or settle for a more dreary-looking world. This isn't just taking things in an unpleasant direction, it's turning cozy immersion into paid DLC, in a move that somehow is even more greedy than the usual price gouging for limited print runs.