It's Been Found

There it is, people: The One One Ring has been found. 

Now, there are two reasons I'm glad it has been found: first, we can all stop talking about finding it. The conversation wasn't ever that interesting to begin with. 

Two: some rando found it. Not Post-Malone, or a streamer, or someone who just doesn't need the publicity or money. I think that's great. This random person has just been set for life if they so choose and fuck it. Life is hard enough. If someone can golden ticket themselves into stability, good.

For me, however, there is a larger question that comes up regarding Magic the game. 

WotC is, ostensibly, in the business of making a game, and game pieces. The cards they produce, while valuable, are supposed to be shuffled up in a deck and played. 

This One One Ring was never that. It will never be sleeved up, it will never be part of a deck, no one will ogle it and marvel at how cool it is. 

It'll get put in a private museum of some sort, a status symbol representing nothing but money. Not hard work, not the legacy of a game that is over thirty years old, not someone's championship run, not the community. 

It will be held by someone with money, to show off how much money they have. And WotC knew that. Oh, they will insist about how their product is out of their hands once it's released into the world (the argument will sound remarkably similar to what Smith & Wesson would say) and they just have no control!

I just want to refute that argument as utter nonsense. They made this object, they sold it as being unique in a way that is unlike any other unique card they have made (WotC has made unique cards for important people in the company for things like weddings or the birth of a child but these cards weren't ever meant to be part of the larger ecosystem of Magic-i.e. making the company money/played in a game) and they aren't fucking stupid.

"Fucking stupid" is the only phrase I can think of to apply to the notion that WotC didn't know what they were doing. This was about the hype machine and the longer the card wasn't found, the more dollar signs appeared in their eyes.

So what I want to know is: how much longer is WotC going to be in the business of making game pieces? Or are they just going to transition into this mega-lottery system? 

How much is the lottery system going to start to impact how they make (and how we play) the game?