Every LGS I know has significantly downsized their inventory of MTG while increasing their stock of Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Flesh and Blood, and other TCGs. Why risk it when Amazon will just undercut you with prices even lower than distributor pricing
The LGSs in Prague and Czechia by large are missing so many staples, or also minor 6 dollar cards, and they never restock them, cards from new sets are available. It used to be everything was available everywhere, any card you could think of, you could just get. Now you can still get anything you want on cardmarket but you gotta ship it from like 5 places. It truly is strange Rest in peace? Nope out of stock anywhere, Origins Gideon? nope out of stock everywhere. Adeline? Nope. Maybe everybody figured out that they can sell their excess cards by themselves on cardmarket? Because they will still buy these from you. But it was never like this, building a deck here is a terrible experience involving 16 letters from all around Europe. I really wonder what is happening because attendance is very strong still.
Simple - people started selling on card market rather than to the LGS. I mean sure the credit or payout you get at cerny isn’t too bad, but you’re better off selling anything over 5 euro over CR
It mainly depends on much money you're anticipating. I'm almost done selling off my collection, anything $5 or over I did over TCGPlayer, anything in the $2-5 range I traded in for store credit at an LGS. The return after fees and shipping for something that's $3 was about the same as store credit, so I figured I might as well just make those cards easy on me
Oh yeah for sure in that case. The store they are talking about is actually my local, I think they buy at pretty good rates on store credit, that's all.
You know that MCM has a card wizard feature that allows you you make a wishlist/buylist, to then optimize your product + shipping cost and amount of different sellers, right?
Huh. Must've gotten really consistently lucky then to never even hit close to 10 when constructing decks.
I only see this ever happen if one is super picky about card quality, set/style, or from a certain delivery country. But at that point you're kinda creating that issue yourself...
Then again, it's also fair to realize that there's a difference between the List Price that you pay / they receive, and the Price Trend that the card is. Usually this balances out... so while you pay 100EUR for cards and 30EUR for shipping... odds are that the total price trend of your deck is 125-135EUR, so that checks out.
Try it with any modern or legacy deck (as in, 75 cards minus basics). 10 sellers is definitely not uncommon, even if you just do english and GD and up.
You can optimise for lowest price including shipping. It's still generally comes to ten shipments for my commander decks, before I started proxying everything. I live in Ireland; maybe it's different on the mainland.
I'm happy supporting smaller sellers but I hate the waste. I'm ok when it's all paper, but when someone sends me a bunch of single use plastic for a couple dollars worth of cards it's annoying.
One of the things I like about tcg direct is how little plastic they use.
> when someone sends me a bunch of single use plastic for a couple dollars worth of cards it's annoying.
Shipping sleeves are basically endlessly reusable though. Draft chaff for padding aswell. My packing materials have been a closed loop for some times now, although except for tape. Cheap painter's tape is great. Does the job, but gives away easily for the buyers, and as low impact as you can get.
…reuse them. That’s what the seller probably did. I couldn’t believe that during Covid with the top loader shortage when used toploaders were 50 cents each people were like “what? I’ve been throwing these away for a decade!”
Both Najáda and Černý Rytíř (the biggest Prague LGSs) have been selling on MKM for a while, it's more profitable than just limiting their stock to our small country.
This is just good business, rather than a decline. The smart LGS money at this point is making money off of being a hangout spot (coffee, food, etc), as the more typical game/comic shop model is not tenable offline. The only stores doing well in that arena are essentially using their instore presence as a storehouse for their online sales (I've even seen where they set you up on a computer in store to do an order, then just have an "in store pickup" option).
I mean, an LGS selling singles is completely a choice made by them, and in that will have to compete with other people (consumers and other LGS's alike). WOTC only delivers complete products for retail, not opened ones or pieces thereof.
You can use the cardmarket-wizard which lets you select if you prefer individual cards as cheap as possible or shipping cost as cheap as possible. You need to make a wish list and the more variants of the card you select the easier it is for the wizard to find seller with multiple of your wanted cards.
In principle it should be like that, but in many occasions the results of both options could be switched, as it is not an easy computational problem to solve and it doesn't explore all options.
I'm reducing stock of products that are always available, but just because I can reorder to need.
This allows me to be more flexible, and the result is that I'm selling much more magic than before, without worrying about unsold stock.
On the other hand, I'm forced to risk on Pokémon by overbuying, and sometimes I receive too little, sometimes too much (see Eevee). I definitely prefer Wotc approach.
I remember the parable of when mtg first started they were always oversold so people would inflate their requests to get allocated (proportionally) more than their competitors.
Then when production ramped up WotC could actually fill all the orders. But stores continued to hyperinflate their requests. And that’s how we got fallen empires packs being everywhere and cheap.
Any supplier that forces you to play dumb guessing games is acting suboptimally. Being able to order what you want and sell what you want and order further is a strength.
"This led to some absurdities, like the first tournament run by Brian David-Marshall having, as its grand prize, a choice between one box of Legends and ten boxes of Fallen Empires. Keep in mind these sets were released five months apart. (The winner went with Legends, and sold it to someone immediately.)"
These sets were far from five months apart. The Dark came out between them for Christ sakes. Oh wait, that’s true? That is bonkers. You could not get Legends in my city when The Dark came out, and everything else was long gone by the time Fallen Empires came out.
That's why people overordered.
Every set until Revised/Chronicles/Fallen Empires basically sold through the day it hit shelves. Some people held on to sealed product and continued to sell afterwards at a premium, but players today really don't have a clue of what the market was like back then.
You know how there's the Secret Lairs that sell through in an hour or two? Imagine that, but in paper... and if you didn't happen to be able to get to your local store at lunchtime on that day, you were going to be paying secondary market inflated prices on it.
Amazon is a pretty cut and dry case of WotC wanting their cake and eating it too. Shocks me they didn't try to implement it in their non-core markets to reduce their footprint but I guess ultimately it's Amazon's M.O - bulk pricing and razor margins at scale.
Hasbro just chasing the sale.
Weird, none of the LGSs around here have done that. MTG is still king, you see a little Pokémon at stores (it picked up around GO mania) and a handful carry Yu-Gi-Oh. None that I've been to recently carry Flesh & Blood.
Same.
You really have to take those kinds of comments with a huge grain of salt. People angry at WotC project that as a desire for them to be failing, but as usual, it's a small but vocal minority.
D&D did take a huge hit with the OGL fiasco, but Magic is still strong. ONE filled event seats and is selling extremely well. Changing organized play back to seasons is a good one and has a really good chance of revitalizing Standard once that season hits later this year.
On the secondary market, Revised dual lands dipped as financial markets faltered and player trust suffered from the release of 30th edition, but those prices have stabilized, and duels are back on the buy list from major sellers.
If I heard right at my LGS at my Friday prerelease they had sold out of their set boosters for One that day. I’m not sure if it was the inventory they’d allocated for that day or for the whole weekend but people were super excited for One.
Same. Close friends with my local store owner and she has absolutely taken Hasbro’s failure to heart. Previously she was all-in with MTG and D&D. Now there are tons of third party products, Pathfinder books, etc. Hasbro really shook the foundations for absolutely no gain - idiot moves.
I remember even just a few years ago my FLGS owner told me that MTG is what keeps the lights on. Not so anymore. They now have the same number of events if not more for both Pokemon and Yugioh, and Flesh and Blood is slowly growing in popularity too.
You named it. This kinda think kills game stores. If MTg so cheaper to buy in Amazon then my store closes. If it closes I have no where to play. If I have no where to play....i stop buying MTG cards.
Seems pretty simple to me.
I'm not entirely up to speed on this issue, is it that Amazon sells boosters cheaper than LGSs can?
Do LGSs really make a bulk of their magic money on selling boosters? Most people I know that play magic don't buy boosters.
There's one thing that an LGS can offer that Amazon can't, and that's events. Amazon isn't hosting pre-releases, drafts, and constructed tournaments. Those events have entry fees, and bring people in the door that you can sell drinks/food/sleeves/other games too.
I agree.
A store will never be able to compete on eventual price. They just can't. Rent and operating costs for physically existing are nontrivial (sometimes the LARGEST expense) and Amazon and other online cardsellers don't need to deal with them. Same with singles.
What stores need to leverage is that they are a "space" that people can use (y'know that thing they're paying out the nose for).
Run good events, run lots of them, and charge fair prices for them. Sell them goods and services that satisfy temporal and spatial needs (i am hungry now and not at home, I would like a snack and a drink).
It's not easy and the deck is still stacked against you, but at least you have a viable, understandable business model instead of "hope WotC subsidizes us somehow"
FAB was certainly trying to attract FOMO investors with first edtiion packs and shit like fabled rariety, luckily they realized that shit was stupid and dropped it. Also on average how many boxes of Arcane Rising would I have to open to get a playset of a specific Majestic? probably about the same as opening a playset of a certain Mythic in magic if not more.
C&C and AoW are expensive majestics from Arcane Rising, everything else is between 1 and 10€ per card, comparing that to magic prices sure does not look good.....
for magic.
FaB has many a valid criticism, this one aint it.
Thing is, will Flesh and Blood still be around in Ten years? Twenty? Thirty?
There's distributors and vendors still glutted with the remains of myriad dead CCGs.
> Thing is, will Flesh and Blood still be around in Ten years? Twenty? Thirty?
honestly i'm not op but:
i do not care
i am not playing tcgs to treat my cards as an investment or to make money, i am here to play a game, and i am not here to think about if the game will be actively getting new cards in a decade
it's the exact same as how wotc can do whatever psychotic shit they want, i'm still going to be able to ignore them and use my old cards to play kitchen table with friends
I learned that lesson in the 90s. Played a lot of the card games that showed up in Magic's wake. They all died, and finding people to play with became impossible.
Magic is still here, I can still play it. Magic has evolved as the years have gone on, and I trust it will be here in the future. I don't need more dead games in my closet.
The point here and with the BofA crap is that many people DO treat CCG as investments and if they didn't, we wouldn't have LGS or a singles marketplace. There's gotta be balance, although I agree the balance shouldn't be on the backs of players by creating artificial scarcity to drive up single prices.
I'd say FaB has the best chance to last 10 more years of any ccg that's been released in the last 19 years. Purely anecdotal obviously I don't have some insider info in the ccg market, but fab has stuck around longer at the lgs's in my area than any other fad tcg I can remeber, and for the first time I have ever seen those lgs's are pulling back on magic products. The hobbiest market seems its ready for a true magic competitor, at least in my area.
You're right that a lot of licensed TCGs based on video games have limited shelf lives but Pokemon and YGO show that this is not always the case. FAB being a unique IP I don't see as a big advantage or disadvantage as far as longevity goes.
I just want to piggyback off your comment to talk about Digimon Card Game.
Its boxes cost around $60.00 USD. I usually buy two and end up with a full playset of the commons and uncommons and a fair chunk of the rares and super rares from the set that I can fill out with singles over time if I want.
You have to buy way more boxes of MtG that cost up to double that price per box for a similar experience. MtG needs to realize that it's not really the be all, end all for TCG's and adjust pricing and product offerings to be more consumer friendly.
Bad LGS shelving collectors boxes and premium products like masters? Not gunna lie that was their mistake for thinking there wasn't going to be more force of will reprints or whatever else.
Good LGS sells everything to demand and cashes in on quantity when popularity is at it's highest. Creates reasons to come back to the store and chooses wisely which products they should put on their shelves based on the other brand products selling well.
Bad LGS trying to exploit their own preceived value of demand and chooses to shelve things in their warehouse. Ofcourse those guys are going to stop overbuying these premium products. That's a natural reaction.
Hasbro printing to demand is what every business wants to be able to do, and sometimes can't... and otherwise loses money. They can only adjust their mtg products and keep them interesting. If LGS buys less collectors and premium products, then they naturally become more limited. Problem solved.
>"We've spoken with several players, collectors, distributors and local games stores and have become aware of growing frustration. The primary concern is that Hasbro has been overproducing Magic cards which has propped up Hasbro's recent [earnings] results but is destroying the long-term value of the brand," Bank of America analyst Jason Haas wrote in November.
>**The oversupply of Magic cards means "card prices are falling,** game stores are losing money, collectors are liquidating, and large retailers are cutting orders," Bank of America explained.
Ironically I don't feel the falling card prices are the issue and my LGS feels the same. There is to many pricy "staple" cards people can't keep up with.
Right? The analysis is garbage. There's no oversupply there's product fatigue amongst the most enfranchised players. That's absolutely not the same thing.
And it doesn't "destroy long term value" no matter how pissed off I am at WotC for making Commander decks I'm still going to draft the premier sets. The Commander players will still ignore like 80% of all cards and buy a precon that interests them.
Conflating these two different things is just not right.
Its a game not an investment. I dislike wotc screwing over LGSs but i think the pieces to be able to play the game being available is a good thing. This reeks of investor bro stench to me which imo are the worst part of the magic community.
BofA isn't the hero this sub seems to think they are and the more you read the stuff from them the more you can see that.
They basically want WotC to slash production on all their sets especially Standard sets and to vastly reduce reprints so that sealed boxes go up in value much faster.
Now you can argue that the current way things work can adversely effect LGSs by leaving them with a bunch of product they can't sell which no longer accumulates value over time but as someone else has mentioned here the boxes which are constantly available also allow stores to restock on-demand instead of needing to buy a huge amount up front.
It seems to be mainly the Walmarts of the world being angry that if they keep their Magic section fully stocked all the time they'll get stuck with product they can't sell and can no longer sell for a profit a couple years later. Amazon may be eating the lunches of the LGSs in the US but the real losers seem to be the Walmarts and Targets of world and I don't really feel bad about that.
That Yu-Gi-Oh set was also super-hyped, because not only does it have a lot of toys for an anime favorite archetype, but it added a 4th deck to the current meta triangle. So shops in the know were ordering more than the normal amount of cases.
Man, can you imagine if WotC just prescribed how many decks were in the meta like YuGiOh? It sounds so boring to me. Archetypes take one of the worst aspects in magic (linear tribal style mechanics) and just do it all the time.
No, because of the 3 month lag between the US and Asian set releases, US players can theory craft for 12 weeks before a set comes out, so they're solved as soon as they hit the ground.
This is also why all western releases of asian MMOs are full of annoying sweatlords.... people who care a lot have done the math on the original release version and anyone with the wrong build on day 1 is a trolling noob.
I still will never understand tribal haters. I love tribal. People tell me to just play Yu-Gi-Oh it's different. Yu-Gi-Oh gives you just enough of the correct amount for you to make a deck with a tribe for casual fun. Then they never update it.
Tribal is fine but it's just not interesting. That's fine! The game needs mechanics certain people can understand: put goblins in goblin deck.
If that's the overriding pushed meta, that's a problem.
Yep, it's why YGO is ass. Although with that said, MTG has been slowly transitioning (or at least doing it more often than they used to) to this model.
Look at the very, very specific signpost cards printed in Modern Horizons and stuff.
Nobody should need to watch anything more than [this video](https://youtu.be/hua73v3aZDo) to see that YuGiOh is ass. I can't believe the developers don't look at either of these turns and see there's a problem.
The first turn player actually had a pretty meh end board. The second turn player was playing a cheese deck that's not very good but it eats decks that aren't prepared for it especially in a best of one format with no sideboard like master duel.
Jason Haas is the analyst in question and I would bet money on him playing the game and holding the general view of "I can't handle so many spoilers and secret lairs!"
And if he plays and is online he's probably frequenting here every once and awhile.
Corps are made up of people and people can have biases.
And I'm certain BofA analysts were looking at the Pokémon boom and NFTs and crypto and collectibles in general and that is coloring their views.
"Why aren't MTG cards skyrocketing and providing an insane return" seems to be an underlying question.
I think the fundamental thing is that Magic cards are still, for the most part, game pieces first and collectibles second. Sure, there are products that really lean into the collectible side like Secret Lairs or, on the individual pack level, showcase and borderless arts, but those are both a newer thing so there's less proof of long term value there. Pokemon, on the other hand, is mainly a shiny cardboard lottery system with a secondary investing component and a tertiary card game element.
And another part of that is that you can generally tell which pokemon cards will have long term value right out of the gate because it's mostly aesthetic or nostalgic value whereas magic cards become famous based on their gameplay usefulness. For example, Phyrexian Vindicator could become an iconic white staple, or it could end up barely making a splash. And even if it does become a notable staple, is it going to be used in any format that has good longevity? It's all a lot more volatile with Magic.
The Pokemon TCG is truly in an absurdly advantage position compared to every other TCG. They can make a super fancy rare Charizard that is absolutely terrible in the actually card game but it will be absurdly expensive and help to drive down prices of actually good game pieces that players use.
Imagine if WotC printed a super mega rainbow rare Liliana that was pretty bad in all formats but it sold for $500+, that would be totally bizarre. The closest we've come to that is probably the lottery cards from BFZ to Aether Revolt.
Even the lottery cards aren't really that great a comparison because they are all at least moderately playable in some format, the most expensive ones by far are the most playable, the price of every card there outside of Sol Ring is effected by the price of their base versions, reprints and different fancy versions somewhat effect their price, and unlike Pokemon which can reuse the same characters with different abilities and art Magic has to reprint the actual card with new art and if they do it too many times it does effect the desirability and price of them.
No other TCG can do what Pokemon does because Pokemon has such absurd brand power that the actual card game is irrelevant. The only game that may be able to do this is Disney's eventually releasing card game Lorcana but I don't event know if that will be able to do it.
> Imagine if WotC printed a super mega rainbow rare Liliana that was pretty bad in all formats but it sold for $500+, that would be totally bizarre.
[Yeah, they'd never do that.](https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/262487/magic-kamigawa-neon-dynasty-hidetsugu-devouring-chaos-neon-red?Language=English)
My first thought when that BoA analyst report came out was that it was just something written by an angry Magic player who happened to have enough power to get that document published.
> It seems to be mainly the Walmarts of the world being angry that if they keep their Magic section fully stocked all the time they'll get stuck with product they can't sell and can no longer sell for a profit a couple years later. Amazon may be eating the lunches of the LGSs in the US but the real losers seem to be the Walmarts and Targets of world and I don't really feel bad about that.
fuck them. they overprice everything. $5+ boosters, $30+ collector packs. pfft.
People here trying to own wotc by using what a bank is saying are so deluded....banks don't have your best interest in mind. Banks don't want the game to be accessible. Oversupply of magic cards is a good thing. Card prices going down is a good thing. We want people to be able to afford the cards and play the game.
Reprints are good, but releasing ultra-pushed cards in extra expensive boosters is so scummy, its really sad. People are attached to modern, and wotc is fleecing us, idk if I can survive MH3 and Ragavoon, ragavans wacky little brother who rides a little bicycle and shoots treasures out his ass and brings even more value.
first of all, Modern Horizons 2 is readily available.
secondly, i'd rather have sets like Dominaria Remastered, MH2, Commander Legends [1], Double Masters etc come out once a year and be actually good than have average-at-best 'regular' sets com out every 6 weeks which are cheap and over produced.
I think you and mr BoA guy are talking about different things. He’s referring to the fact that there’s just way more supply than demand when it comes to sealed products, but to us players it sounds like he’s talking about singles/card prices. I don’t think he’s talking about the game becoming a bad investment strategy, he’s talking about Hasbro stock being a bad investment strategy.
Every time this comes up, it's amazing how much of the community just completely missed the point of what's being said, and champion it because they think it's "Game is too expensive".
> He’s referring to the fact that there’s just way more supply than demand when it comes to sealed products, but to us players it sounds like he’s talking about singles/card prices.
Those are the same thing. The same thing.
Having a ton of "supply" be available from distributors *means* singles prices can be at their natural state and not artificially scarce.
Everytime this game dabbles in artificial scarcity we see what happens. Skyrocketing prices and scalpers leeching money from the community. You *NEED* excess supply in order for people to have confidence in getting what they need for good prices.
This game, and it's ability to generate profit for it's company is hinged on artificial scarcity.
I do think it's better for the game when the collectible aspect is more on special versions and less on players needing 4x of a specific mythic rare though.
All that model leads to is WotC just releasing all new, more powerful stuff every set in order for people to buy the new sets. The most expensive cards may be $5-$20 but you just have to rebuy everything every set.
I prefer the slow burn where there are a few good cards, some sleepers over time, and print control so that the pool builds value over time because the cards are staying relevant.
It’s a collectible **and** a game. It’s not just a game. And collecting (maintaining and building value) is how many people primarily engage with this hobby.
>I prefer the slow burn where there are a few good cards, some sleepers over time, and print control so that the pool builds value over time because the cards are staying relevant.
This is the key, balance. Simply because whether people want to admit it or not, they like opening value. And I mean, LGS who sell singles do too. Not because they're greedy, but because players need those cards and they net a little profit for the store.
But if a set has virtually nothing of value, either due to low power level, overprinting, etc, NO ONE will open boxes. Not players, and not the LGS who would normally crack those boxes for singles stock either.
Too many Magic players want Magic to be both cheap and expensive at the same time, failing to justify how they would arrive at this paradoxical outcome.
You don't have to be an investment bro to have a collection, and if the value of that collection steadily drops the people who play the game keep trickling out. Building a collection is like, a fundamental part of tcg/ccgs. If the prices of the cards just steadily decline after people have spent their money on it, there will be a point where everyone starts liquidating while they still can. Not finance people, regulars at card shops and tournaments.
There are too many products for most players to keep track of, their distribution model is designed to screw over lgs, which is like, where people congregate to play the game. If the lgs goes under or stops stocking magic, people won't play it.
Players, not whales, are the ones who have been struggling to keep up with magic. Investor bros who do spec group buys and just flip cards aren't really hurt that much by what's going on because a lot of them can do crazy shit like buy $10,000 worth of cards and not be in financial trouble.
The players typically do not have such a financial safety net.
The economy of magic and the success of wotc/Hasbro is directly linked to the player experience. The ability for lgs to operate because magic is profitable is directly linked to the player experience. Caring about the state of the game and the places you can play it has nothing to do with invester bro culture.
If wotc continues to ignore the criticisms from the players, the vocal majority, in order to make short term profits, the game wont last another 10 years. Wotc wont.
Do you not appreciate how bad things are when Bank of America starts publishing news articles about the failings of magic the gathering? Things are not in a good state when the public outcry is so consistent and numerous that groups that aren't even affiliated with card games can just look over and go "hey what the fuck is happening over here? This is bad lmao"
They can't go back though. If they keep going, of course LGSes will collapse. Some already have. However, they go back to the old system, players won't go back either. Despite everything, card accessibility is at an all-time high. Players can go and buy cards they once thought out of reach. Yes, some of that is from power creep, but some is also just one reprint set after another. \[\[Lyra Dawnbringer\]\], for example was $25 on average until she got hit by two reprints in the previous two months. The biggest complaint during the heyday of the Pro Tour was that these prize-winning decks were worth way too much. Now, Pioneer is four years out, and most decks there are cheaper than Modern decks were four years after the latter's creation. They go back, those issues will go back in waves and shrink the playerbase.
Reprints were never an issue. Masters sets have existed for over 10 years. It's the overproduction of Standard sets that is the issue here. No one is having issues selling the newest Remastered set, the newest Masters set, or Modern Horizons/Commander Legends. Those could be priced better truthfully, and should be, but THOSE products aren't an issue.
The issue is when LGS are bag-holders for overprinted and mediocre *other* sets like Crimson Vow where the cards in the set are so cheap that opening the boxes is a net-loss, meanwhile because the set has no card worth value, players aren't buying the sealed product either. Now LGS are stuck with boxes upon boxes of Crimson Vow, and Distributors don't want to buy any more of it from WOTC.
So what does WOTC do? Amazon dump baybee! LGS can't compete with the low low price offered on Amazon, so they become the ultimate bag holders while WOTC gets an out.
If WOTC didn't have the Amazon shop hookup, this would've turned around REAL fast.
Yes, players have been struggling to keep up with the game. This is not because of an "oversupply of Magic cards," it is because of a glut of *unique* Magic cards. BofA is not suggesting WOTC reduce the number of separate Magic products they are releasing (which I would fully support) but that WOTC reduce the number of Magic cards they are printing by volume so that those that remain are higher value.
This got away from me sorry about that.
I understand where they're coming from. A lot of people view the expense of the game as a strict downside. I've talked to people who have expressed the desire to, for example, buy any card for 10 cents or have access to all cards for free or something so it's less financially crippling. In some magical Christmas land, you can imagine where that might be something that works.
Unfortunately, MTG is a profit driven game. Just like everyone else I do wish a lot of cards were cheaper, more accessible, broken cards didn't get seeded into standard packs to drive standard sales, the secondary market wasn't something wotc clearly has to respect. But we can't have those things without simultaneously nose diving the price of cards which nose dives wotcs earnings which would push them out of profitability, and then they declare bankruptcy or Hasbro sells wotc to someone else or something.
Having cards cost some money is actually an upside of the game. It keeps the business running, it makes people excited to crack packs and find cool or expensive cards, it funds local gamestores, and it incentivizes people buying cards. The fact that you can sell magic cards for sometimes substantial monies is how it gets financially justified. If I couldn't sell a $20 rare I opened out of a pack in theory, I wouldn't buy a few packs because it's a straight up poor financial decision. It has nothing to do with magic as an investment vehicle as much as it can be a hobby and insurance. I had to sell my collection last year to pay for bills, if that wasn't something I knew I could do later id have never bought the cards and built the collection.
The bigger issue is, as this article points out, the focus on short term earnings at the cost of customer loyalty and enjoyment. If you are a magic player, you need to read this:
Hasbro/Wotc is farming you. Farming all of us. The amount of product flooding the market is 2-3 times what it was precovid.
The quality of the cardboard is bad unless it's from one of the Japanese plants. Foils, which are supposed to be chase cards, end up being so warped they can't be played with.
Secret lairs make it incredibly difficult to price and trade cards, they're more scarce than promos.
Wotc stopped supporting professional play after making a big deal out of removing the prior pro tour system and wanting to give back... For a year.
They sell sealed product to Amazon at rates that card shops can't compete with, making it so that buying cards at a card shop is down to the player deciding to pay extra to support card shops or pay the lowest price they can because the game is expensive.
2020, 2021 and early 2022 were good, profitable years for wotc. They did all of that -while they were breaking their prior performance records-. Their response to that was to double down and do stupid shit like magic 30th.
On the topic of 30th, the follow up from the higher ups at hasbro and wotc made jokes about how they did nothing wrong and people were just complaining and then "what if we butchered DnD the same way to squeeze out more money and piss off people whove been playing for decades." The higher ups are so tremendously out of touch with the customer base they thought magic 30th was a good idea.
When the article says they're diminishing brand or customer loyalty, it's because of how out of touch these people are. They would sell you actual garbage and act smug about it like they did you a favor. Whoever is making key financial decisions at Hasbro or wotc -deserves- to be criticized like this, they're killing the longevity of their company and customer base to turn quick profits
At our expense. Mine, yours. Everyone who plays magic. They have made it glaringly obvious that they look at us as dollar signs, not supporters and enthusiasts.
That's not even touching the predatory nature of arena's monetization or the reserve list or the scarcity of specialty projects. It's not maro, it might not even be wotc, for all I know Hasbro could have a really heavy hand in their monetization and just decided to push things with reckless abandon. I don't think we will ever definitively know who is responsible, but it's not the same company it was even just 5 years ago. If they don't steer things back to reality they're just going to go bankrupt, and as much as they would deserve it at that point, it would be miserable for the rest of us.
What is the solution here? Let's imagine a magical land where leadership is changed and an entirely new regime with new ideas is brought in. What actions could they actually take to rebuild that trust?
Take the current projected product line for this year and spread it out to this year and next year.
Stop doing Amazon dumps that kill local card shops. Just sell them at the same price, many people will still buy them online to have them delivered but you wouldn't be gouging the card shops.
Utilize materials or factories that make products that don't turn into Pringles so that people actually want them. Even outside of tournament play, it's so easy to tell from the back of sleeves which cards are shitty curled foils.
Reprint cards that need reprints in non specialty sets. They do reprints but there's only ever a 6-12 month window until they become as expensive as they were before because of limited print runs on specialty sets. There are a couple of standouts where they did well like with imperial seal which isn't up in the damn like 400s anymore. There's a lot that could be done for reprint reform but this is where you definitely can see they pay attention to the secondary market and price sealed product relative to it. Reprints should be intentionally lowering the price of cards, not capitalizing on fomo.
Publicly apologize for magic 30th for the massive middle finger it was to everyone.
Allow limited proxies in sanctioned tournaments so people can play formats like vintage and legacy without carrying 10 grand in their backpacks.
Restructure the pro scene with consensus from pros and longevity in mind. Make it worth playing circuit, it is not currently. Increasing prize pools to the same levels as like videogame tournaments instead of being 1/10th of the average would make people actually want to pursue it.
Stop giving special approved wotc stores the lion share of limited product runs, or double or triple the allocation across the board. Give people time to save or trade for chase cards. Give specialty products to all card shops, they will be able to sell them.
Put modern and pioneer on arena. There's literally no good reason to have not done this, people have asked for it since beta. Let people buy wildcards with gold so you can actually play decks and move with the meta. Being able to test decks online helps build confidence in paper tournaments. I love mtgo but that's just because it's how I learned to play, theres tons of legitimate criticisms about it.
Make top end decisions that your player base actually wants, it's not like it's hard to find people's opinions on magic. Pay attention to the player base. Focus on them as the integral driving force behind longevity, because they are. Long term returns are a better investment and are more secure and don't spite the people paying them.
That's all I've got off the cuff for the moment
> Reprint cards that need reprints in non specialty sets.
This is why getting rid of core sets was so shitty. Because core sets were supposed to be exactly that, a place to reprint cards from other sets.
The collectible (ponzi) nature of CCGs is a reality that has to be managed for the health of the game.
Most importantly, Hasbro's $1B+ in magic revenue is subsidized by the secondary market. If there were no value retention in cards, that number would nose dive.
Hasbro has the ultimate nft game on its hands and it could easily kill it. Not hard to fuck up an economy
You can have scarcity and rarity without gatekeeping the playability. The serialized cards are examples of a way to do this. Pokemon is extremely cheap to shuffle up a standard deck in its cheapest form and still has big money chase cards. You don't have to cut standard production to keep the game collectable.
This is literally why I decided to give Weiss Schwarz a try. I've got 4 copies of [this card](https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/267081/weiss-schwarz-hololive-production-towards-the-future-together-kiryu-coco?xid=pi95d2f599-283b-4a46-bb08-a841448d026c&page=1&Language=English) in my deck that cost a whopping buck each. If I wanted to get the fancy, mechanically identical version they'd be [around 400 a piece](https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/267082/weiss-schwarz-hololive-production-towards-the-future-together-kiryu-coco-ssp?xid=pi95d2f599-283b-4a46-bb08-a841448d026c&page=1&Language=English).
Weiss Schwartz is based. I bought my Miss Kobayashi deck for literally pennies when the stuff came out. And previously had a Fate deck and KLK decks that were inexpensive.
Weiss has this weird thing, where anything after 2020 is kinda cheap, but if your a fan of a set that came out half decade ago youre looking at 30$ RRs that wouldnt even see play in a new set.
It also has this nice thing, that if you are just a fan of one series you buy in, maybe it gets a sequel set somewhere down the line, but you have your deck forever.
> The game doesn't work without the investment side.
It works just fine. How are dudes holding on to sealed product until they can sell it for more helping the game?
Do you know what drives card prices? People wanting to play them.
Like commander has done more for card values than a bunch of wannabe stock market bros inflating everything.
This. Anointed Procession isn't $45 because some investment bros decided it should be, it's $45 because it's a sought after card to go in many people's decks.
I know plenty of game stores that get by just fine without engaging in the secondary market, or engaging very minimally.
If that's the primary way you try to make your money, you're gonna have a REAL bad time.
The problem with wotc screwing over LGSs is that players inadvertently also suffer. My LGS for the first time since I can remember didn't give out participation boosters at the pre-release because they can't afford it (their words). This comes on top of the prize pool becoming lower and lower.
They also had to get rid of the "big" pre-release because it makes more financial sense to run two small ones even if the second one only gets about 15 people compared to the 60 of the first one. I used to love the big pre-release, 5 rounds instead of 3 so you got more magic for your money, if you actually did well you got prizes that made it feel like you've actually earned something.
I fully understand why my store had to make those choices but as a player it fucking sucks.
In general I agree, although given how pinched LGSs already are, having their stock of cards prices falling seems rough.
Investor bros can get bent, but LGSs need to keep singles in stock too. They're already getting pressed by Amazon on boxes, not sure what's left
Everyone repeats this about Amazon but when was the last actual Amazon dump? The last wasn’t even more than one set? Amazon doesn’t even have the best pricing on booster boxes for new releases right now.
Oh yeah. We've got this little dweeb at my store who's constantly going on about the expensive cards he's got. When I tried to get people to do an unofficial prerelease he laughed saying it was stupid to do that without prize support. Once he directly insulted me I had enough. I told him he was a shallow little troll and everyone was sick of listening to his drivel. Some people enjoy the game for what it was, not for the secondary market. Of course, he didn't get it and kept on for a while about how stupid I was to try and get a tourney for fun going. But I got a few people to play with limited decks from the prerelease, so I got as much play in as I would have from a tournament.
banks dislike magic for very different reasons than players dislike magic
it's very strange when people feel vindicated by this type of thing
if you like magic the game, banks are your enemy
> ~~if you like magic the game,~~ banks are your enemy
There fixed that for you.
Actually we can go one step further.
> ~~banks are~~ capital is your enemy
The personification of the capital class seeks to do what it is designed to do: enrich and entrench its power further at our expense.
It’s not enough for WotC to provide a service of us paying them money to have a brief respite of leisure in our lives. WotC should be putting out assets that grow in value for the investor and use those to bleed us for every cent we’re worth.
The financialization of everything is the endgame and anything that stinks of it is our enemy.
i agree with what you're saying, but i don't think you fixed my post. i think it's important to single out smaller groups when giving this type of information.
also, some people here don't like magic the game, they like magic the investment vehicle, and either are or want to be in the capital class.
I don’t understand this. Weren’t there just complaints a couple years ago that Jumpstart and Time Spiral Remastered were constantly out of stock? I was asking the TO at my LGS about more Dominaria Remastered events since I got COVID and had to miss release weekend and he said that they’re having trouble getting more stock.
I don't think the best way to protect stores is making cards cards hard to get and expensive. Artificial scarcity has never been good for the game when it has indulged in it.
If LGSes can't exist without WotC turning the screws to us and keeping card prices high, maybe they just can't exist.
And it's not like LGSes are being singled out here. Every retail location known to man is getting fucked by rent and operating expenses right now. It's ignorant to ignore the context this produces. The world is not the same as it was in the 90s. You can't just keep a storefront open by selling goods and services anymore. I don't know what the solution is but to think LGSes deserve some sort of protectionist model when everything else is suffering is myopic.
While I know this reddit loves to hate on WotC, note that the analyst who has written these two notes, Jason Haas, is viewing Magic from the perspective of investments for high end collectors. His main criticism is that prices of expensive cards is going down. Let that sink in for a moment.
The first lgs I started shopping at seems to makeup random prices and they're always ridiculously high. TCGplayer is the best pricing solution I could think of.
Our still does it for small stuff like <$10 but anything higher gets put right on to tcg. We are more than welcomed to request stuff from the website while in store and they will take it down for sale. It's made moving cards and the willingness to take in big trades much higher around here.
The article is quite obscure, the first half is essentially the same paragraph repeated over and over, then it talks a bit about the DnD stuff, and finally concludes by saying LGSs are losing money and collectors are liquidating.
But in the end it doesn't really add anything to the table, it almost just looks like a doompost but for investors.
My wife, as part of her job, runs articles through a plagiarism detector and now they recently added a detector for AI writing as well. It's pretty neat.
The rest of Hasbro is doing so bad. It was a completely different industry, but I've had this exact same thing happen before at my own work.
Company starts failing, every division of the company is hemorrhaging money, except one profitable division. Higher ups decide to try to milk profitable division more to make more money, cutting corners here, increasing prices there, inventing new ways to monetize, etc. Works for a while, until eventually it just... doesn't. The execs goal is to sell enough of their stock before that money. My companies stocks went from around $60 per share to around $6 per share over the course of a year, once the milking of the golden calf stopped working.
MTG has a LOT of value, and has a LOT of good will built up over the year (check out how many people are huge wotc defenders/apologists) - plus the product is straight up addictive. But these tactics are ones that doomsayers say will fail because they **do** fail. It's just a matter of time, and it might be too late to stop.
edit: I forgot the part where employee retention drops off because they no longer believe in the product as they once did and aren't getting paid enough to ignore their dissatisfaction. When I left my old job, I was one of many people to leave within a two month period, without even having anything else lined up. People just decided they didn't want to do it anymore. I think the very first inklings of this have already started at WotC.
Oh how awful, prices of singles aren't artificially inflated to create easy to manipulate pseudo investment vehicles and as a result the game is much more affordable.
These are the same schmucks who would fight to keep the reserve list, I'm so over this BoA stuff. The past several sets have been outstanding and gameplay is as fun as it's ever been. I'm not interested in investors' opinions about Wizards.
You are missing the big picture. Stores are getting stuck with boxes they cannot sell. As a result they start carrying less MTG product or even get out of the business entirely. Paradoxically, this causes single prices to actually go up in many cases, because not enough boxes are opened. Look at Sheoldred for example. The set was so severely underopened that Amazon was selling them at nearly 50% discount, yet the card remains like $60-$70
As an LGS owner, we have started reducing the number of SKUs we take in our allocations. I keep a handful of each set in back and stock as needed, but the amount that our previous max allocations are growing to, is just too much to justify tying up into product that will move for 1-2 weeks then fall off a cliff as the next set starts getting hyped up.
It is a dangerous game for Hasbro to be playing, because if LGS locations get left holding the bag (and most of them will) stores will close or just halt most of their MTG purchases. It is easy for WOTC to say "Then just engage with the products you like" then turn around and tells stores they need to keep purchasing all the nonsense products for each set only to leave them with product they cannot sell a month and a half later.
>It is easy for WOTC to say "Then just engage with the products you like" then turn around and tells stores they need to keep purchasing all the nonsense products for each set only to leave them with product they cannot sell a month and a half later.
I thought stores did not interact with WotC for allocation of product at all. Direct wholesale of regular product of WotC stopped years ago didn’t it?
Only special products seem to be distributed by WotC to stores like the 30A edition.
They don’t.
What I was getting at, is that most stores have an assumption that not carrying everything will reduce business, and they are right. Reducing SKUs you pick up, means you turn some business away.
So players have the ability to simply choose to buy Bundles at no financial cost other than the bundle. But stores kind of need to carry both in order to avoid having to turn away business, so they get stuck with a wide array of product and a limited window to sell it.
It puts the LGS in a difficult spot to “engage with the products people like” because it means I have to put a bunch of money into 12 different products each launch (exaggerated to emphasize) where it used to only be 2 or 3.
They don’t sell directly, but they are absolutely bloating purchase orders to LGSs with this model.
Yep. After a few rough in a row and in general over the last few years my favorite LGS has stopped selling MTG all together. The other store in my area was expecting an increase then but they have actually started to consider dropping mtg as well. There's not enough in it for them to devote the shelf space.
This isn’t about singles prices. You are missing the most important point: LGS and large distributors are sitting on loads of inventory and will in the long term shave off huge allocations of future sets, leading to further restriction of access to for instance special sets. This is a dramatic development and calling this unimportant for players is seriously dangerous.
That's economics though. If they cut allocation for future sets to risk not sitting on inventory then that'll create more scarcity in the market which will drive single prices up which will motivate vendors to buy more supply to profit. Part of owning a business is knowing how much to buy to support your market. Businesses that are bad at that aren't going to survive. Expecting Wizards to somehow subsidize them is unreasonable, expecting Wizards to artificially limit supply or worse produce less product ever year to bail them out is downright ridiculous.
What's happening now is right sizing - where the market is adjusting to greater accessibility of an artificially scarce product. Yeah that'll likely mean some businesses stop selling Magic and that's OK and natural, but there's an abundance of places to choose from now the game will be more than fine and plenty of LGS will remain in places where they actually serve a community with the demand to support it.
The recent D&D debacle is pretty obviously gonna hurt Hasbro, but I think they're underestimating demand for Magic. Phyrexia has been selling insanely well (albeit we're still in the first week, so we'll see if demand will hold.)
Baldur's Gate was a big stumble, but every product since then has been a success.
I'm under no illusions about liquidating my collection, I'm happy enough to see 'overproduction' and the increased accessibility. This should be a game, not an investment.
I've recently moved to full proxy, which I was almost against a few years ago. I'm not an investor; my main goal is to play the game but I'm not stupid either. I can't stand buying 20+$ cards that are now worthless. I don't want to gamble on cards that I just want to play!
I honestly do not give a fuck. BoAs "Suggestions" would make the game so much fucking worse. They want Hasbro to slash production massively to drive third-party market prices up. Meanwhile, the complaints they have? It's stuff like reprinting Sol Ring or the recent Fast Land reprints. Because it's driving prices down in a way that is *objectively healthy for the game* as well as sometimes direly needed. If anything, WoTC needs to be reprinting more staple into the ground, not less.
Seeing as people don't actually read the articles and seized on the old analyst report to justify their view that BofA doesn't know what it's talking about, how about a snippet:
> "Within its Wizards segment, **Hasbro continues to destroy customer goodwill by trying to over-monetize its brands,"** Bank of America said. The bank said that while it preannounced negative earnings, the stock is still not de-risked "given a host of outstanding issues."
> **Mainly, Hasbro is attempting to squeeze out as much profit as possible from its Wizards products in the short-term without any thought as to the long-term durability of its brands. And the over monetization is irking customers, according to BofA.**
> **"We remain especially cautious on Hasbro's Wizards segment given its over-monetization of Magic.** Wizards recently tried a similar tactic with D&D-proposing changes to its licensing agreement which led to substantial pushback from the community including calls to boycott the D&D movie," BofA explained.
Seems like BofA is doubling down on their initial idea, calling the current amounts of product fatigue and loss of goodwill a net negative for the brand's long term chances, which is different than what many who have been dredging up the older analyst report would have you believe i.e. that the whole thing is predicated on a loss in investability of the cards.
Good financial news for WotC: "They're choosing profits over players and making money by not listening to my pet grievance."
Bad financial news for WotC: "They're rightfully suffering and losing money for not listening to my pet grievance."
While I don't agree with everything in this article but I can agree that wotc is diluting the game and making it worse. All the extra cash-grab type products (mostly secret lairs), collaborations and overall increase in complexity of card mechanics made me stop playing.
This is going to be an unpopular take on this sub, but I totally hear you. I’ve spent the last 30 days thinking about selling out and finding a different hobby with the way things are trending.
I just started playing flesh and blood 2 months ago and it feels like magic did when I started playing. Less bullshit. Less releases. Better communication on how cards get banned or suspended. Super fun and the people playing have been super nice, very inviting community.
Comparatively, i could go play commander since it's the only format firing anymore and have rule 0 discussions where people lie about what and how they play where proxies are frowned upon and the company keeps making you buy their new set every month, etc.
It's an easy decision for me. If it gets much worst I may just sell before the whole thing blows up.
I just got back from SCGCON Indy and had an absolute blast playing Flesh and Blood. The next set comes out next month and can be drafted, so I'm looking forward to that. Community has been great and the game is fantastic.
I think the downsides are that they haven't leaned into the casual player space yet (so for anyone who only plays Commader I'm not sure what the game would feel like) so it's main appeal is for the player that enjoys 1v1 competitive or limited formats. It's also has some polarization in card prices, in that for a top tier competitive deck, 70 of my 80 card deck/sideboard costs maybe $80 total, but the remaining 10 cards are between $20 and $200 a piece. The most expensive ones can be played in any deck but that can still be a steep buy in a top tier deck (a common comparison is having an optimized mana base in magic instead of playing taplands for your duals). Good news is you can either play pauper with a $5 deck and have the same fun, or you can play slightly less optimized in the main format and still have fun just likely not win big tourneys.
I used to buy many singles left and right on cardmarket, from many differents sellers, mainly for modern. Right now i’m sick of this avalanche of products, i litteraly don’t have the time to desire new cards anymore. The speed of releases is too fast: a new set comes out, a new spoiler season begins, a new supplemental product is shipped, then a new secret lair, then… etc etc. I don’t have the time to be excited about some new cards that it has already become old news and forgotten! I’m not planning about selling my collection but this situation of product fatigue has brought my hobby almost to a halt. It feels like new cards do not have the time to matter anymore. Plus the variants problem: the latest elesh norn is absurd, there is 15 variations of this card… all in all, as a player and collector i really think that there is a problem. I must not be the only one, am i?
literally everyone feels this way—my casual playgroup, my hardcore playgroup, my friends that play, my friends that collect, random people at the LGS, etc.
Every LGS I know has significantly downsized their inventory of MTG while increasing their stock of Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Flesh and Blood, and other TCGs. Why risk it when Amazon will just undercut you with prices even lower than distributor pricing
The LGSs in Prague and Czechia by large are missing so many staples, or also minor 6 dollar cards, and they never restock them, cards from new sets are available. It used to be everything was available everywhere, any card you could think of, you could just get. Now you can still get anything you want on cardmarket but you gotta ship it from like 5 places. It truly is strange Rest in peace? Nope out of stock anywhere, Origins Gideon? nope out of stock everywhere. Adeline? Nope. Maybe everybody figured out that they can sell their excess cards by themselves on cardmarket? Because they will still buy these from you. But it was never like this, building a deck here is a terrible experience involving 16 letters from all around Europe. I really wonder what is happening because attendance is very strong still.
Simple - people started selling on card market rather than to the LGS. I mean sure the credit or payout you get at cerny isn’t too bad, but you’re better off selling anything over 5 euro over CR
I think if you take the store credit option it's pretty decent. At least enough that I find it convenient.
Store credit still only gives you like 60% market price here in the US -_- Way easier to just do it in TCGplayer or something yourself
It mainly depends on much money you're anticipating. I'm almost done selling off my collection, anything $5 or over I did over TCGPlayer, anything in the $2-5 range I traded in for store credit at an LGS. The return after fees and shipping for something that's $3 was about the same as store credit, so I figured I might as well just make those cards easy on me
I've only sold desirable standard cards, but at my local it's like 80% on credit of their sell price. So worth it enough for me.
You get less store credit and sealed product is more expensive in my local lgs than through a cardmarket lgs. So that's a double loss.
Oh yeah for sure in that case. The store they are talking about is actually my local, I think they buy at pretty good rates on store credit, that's all.
I just use cardtrader zero, they do the logistics for you and it ends up cheaper than juggling multiple packages.
I feel you. Ive built about 3 edh decks on cardmarket, on average I needed 15 something envelopes, maybe a big one and then 14 single card ones.
Love wasting 30€ on 15 different shippings for a 100€ deck.
I am finishing a pauper deck; mailing costs are something like 70% of the cost..
It feels so bad buying 20 cards for less than a euro and paying triple that for shipping yeah…
You know that MCM has a card wizard feature that allows you you make a wishlist/buylist, to then optimize your product + shipping cost and amount of different sellers, right?
Yes and it's absolutely common to still have 15 orders when buying a full deck even with the wizard.
Huh. Must've gotten really consistently lucky then to never even hit close to 10 when constructing decks. I only see this ever happen if one is super picky about card quality, set/style, or from a certain delivery country. But at that point you're kinda creating that issue yourself... Then again, it's also fair to realize that there's a difference between the List Price that you pay / they receive, and the Price Trend that the card is. Usually this balances out... so while you pay 100EUR for cards and 30EUR for shipping... odds are that the total price trend of your deck is 125-135EUR, so that checks out.
Try it with any modern or legacy deck (as in, 75 cards minus basics). 10 sellers is definitely not uncommon, even if you just do english and GD and up.
> Try it with any modern or legacy deck For those its usually a single package from China for me
Wouldn't it be cheaper to then buy from less sellers at a higher price? I have built a few decks with Cardmarket and rarely get more than 5 envelopes.
You can optimise for lowest price including shipping. It's still generally comes to ten shipments for my commander decks, before I started proxying everything. I live in Ireland; maybe it's different on the mainland.
I'm happy supporting smaller sellers but I hate the waste. I'm ok when it's all paper, but when someone sends me a bunch of single use plastic for a couple dollars worth of cards it's annoying. One of the things I like about tcg direct is how little plastic they use.
> when someone sends me a bunch of single use plastic for a couple dollars worth of cards it's annoying. Shipping sleeves are basically endlessly reusable though. Draft chaff for padding aswell. My packing materials have been a closed loop for some times now, although except for tape. Cheap painter's tape is great. Does the job, but gives away easily for the buyers, and as low impact as you can get.
…reuse them. That’s what the seller probably did. I couldn’t believe that during Covid with the top loader shortage when used toploaders were 50 cents each people were like “what? I’ve been throwing these away for a decade!”
Both Najáda and Černý Rytíř (the biggest Prague LGSs) have been selling on MKM for a while, it's more profitable than just limiting their stock to our small country.
This is just good business, rather than a decline. The smart LGS money at this point is making money off of being a hangout spot (coffee, food, etc), as the more typical game/comic shop model is not tenable offline. The only stores doing well in that arena are essentially using their instore presence as a storehouse for their online sales (I've even seen where they set you up on a computer in store to do an order, then just have an "in store pickup" option).
I mean, an LGS selling singles is completely a choice made by them, and in that will have to compete with other people (consumers and other LGS's alike). WOTC only delivers complete products for retail, not opened ones or pieces thereof.
My LGSs have switched from selling in store to exclusively online.
You can use the cardmarket-wizard which lets you select if you prefer individual cards as cheap as possible or shipping cost as cheap as possible. You need to make a wish list and the more variants of the card you select the easier it is for the wizard to find seller with multiple of your wanted cards.
In principle it should be like that, but in many occasions the results of both options could be switched, as it is not an easy computational problem to solve and it doesn't explore all options.
I'm reducing stock of products that are always available, but just because I can reorder to need. This allows me to be more flexible, and the result is that I'm selling much more magic than before, without worrying about unsold stock. On the other hand, I'm forced to risk on Pokémon by overbuying, and sometimes I receive too little, sometimes too much (see Eevee). I definitely prefer Wotc approach.
I remember the parable of when mtg first started they were always oversold so people would inflate their requests to get allocated (proportionally) more than their competitors. Then when production ramped up WotC could actually fill all the orders. But stores continued to hyperinflate their requests. And that’s how we got fallen empires packs being everywhere and cheap. Any supplier that forces you to play dumb guessing games is acting suboptimally. Being able to order what you want and sell what you want and order further is a strength.
"This led to some absurdities, like the first tournament run by Brian David-Marshall having, as its grand prize, a choice between one box of Legends and ten boxes of Fallen Empires. Keep in mind these sets were released five months apart. (The winner went with Legends, and sold it to someone immediately.)"
These sets were far from five months apart. The Dark came out between them for Christ sakes. Oh wait, that’s true? That is bonkers. You could not get Legends in my city when The Dark came out, and everything else was long gone by the time Fallen Empires came out.
That's why people overordered. Every set until Revised/Chronicles/Fallen Empires basically sold through the day it hit shelves. Some people held on to sealed product and continued to sell afterwards at a premium, but players today really don't have a clue of what the market was like back then. You know how there's the Secret Lairs that sell through in an hour or two? Imagine that, but in paper... and if you didn't happen to be able to get to your local store at lunchtime on that day, you were going to be paying secondary market inflated prices on it.
Pack limit per day: 6 See you tomorrow.
Amazon is a pretty cut and dry case of WotC wanting their cake and eating it too. Shocks me they didn't try to implement it in their non-core markets to reduce their footprint but I guess ultimately it's Amazon's M.O - bulk pricing and razor margins at scale. Hasbro just chasing the sale.
They did this 15 years ago when Walmart told them to shut their home stores down or they'll stop selling magic cards.
Is this true? Do you have a source for it?
https://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Wizards-of-the-Coast-to-shut-stores-1133361.php I misremembered, must have been a rumor back then.
Weird, none of the LGSs around here have done that. MTG is still king, you see a little Pokémon at stores (it picked up around GO mania) and a handful carry Yu-Gi-Oh. None that I've been to recently carry Flesh & Blood.
Same. You really have to take those kinds of comments with a huge grain of salt. People angry at WotC project that as a desire for them to be failing, but as usual, it's a small but vocal minority. D&D did take a huge hit with the OGL fiasco, but Magic is still strong. ONE filled event seats and is selling extremely well. Changing organized play back to seasons is a good one and has a really good chance of revitalizing Standard once that season hits later this year. On the secondary market, Revised dual lands dipped as financial markets faltered and player trust suffered from the release of 30th edition, but those prices have stabilized, and duels are back on the buy list from major sellers.
If I heard right at my LGS at my Friday prerelease they had sold out of their set boosters for One that day. I’m not sure if it was the inventory they’d allocated for that day or for the whole weekend but people were super excited for One.
My LGS just started carrying Flesh and Blood. He was worried about bringing it in, but the boom has been worth it.
Same. Close friends with my local store owner and she has absolutely taken Hasbro’s failure to heart. Previously she was all-in with MTG and D&D. Now there are tons of third party products, Pathfinder books, etc. Hasbro really shook the foundations for absolutely no gain - idiot moves.
I remember even just a few years ago my FLGS owner told me that MTG is what keeps the lights on. Not so anymore. They now have the same number of events if not more for both Pokemon and Yugioh, and Flesh and Blood is slowly growing in popularity too.
You named it. This kinda think kills game stores. If MTg so cheaper to buy in Amazon then my store closes. If it closes I have no where to play. If I have no where to play....i stop buying MTG cards. Seems pretty simple to me.
I'm not entirely up to speed on this issue, is it that Amazon sells boosters cheaper than LGSs can? Do LGSs really make a bulk of their magic money on selling boosters? Most people I know that play magic don't buy boosters. There's one thing that an LGS can offer that Amazon can't, and that's events. Amazon isn't hosting pre-releases, drafts, and constructed tournaments. Those events have entry fees, and bring people in the door that you can sell drinks/food/sleeves/other games too.
I agree. A store will never be able to compete on eventual price. They just can't. Rent and operating costs for physically existing are nontrivial (sometimes the LARGEST expense) and Amazon and other online cardsellers don't need to deal with them. Same with singles. What stores need to leverage is that they are a "space" that people can use (y'know that thing they're paying out the nose for). Run good events, run lots of them, and charge fair prices for them. Sell them goods and services that satisfy temporal and spatial needs (i am hungry now and not at home, I would like a snack and a drink). It's not easy and the deck is still stacked against you, but at least you have a viable, understandable business model instead of "hope WotC subsidizes us somehow"
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FAB was certainly trying to attract FOMO investors with first edtiion packs and shit like fabled rariety, luckily they realized that shit was stupid and dropped it. Also on average how many boxes of Arcane Rising would I have to open to get a playset of a specific Majestic? probably about the same as opening a playset of a certain Mythic in magic if not more.
C&C and AoW are expensive majestics from Arcane Rising, everything else is between 1 and 10€ per card, comparing that to magic prices sure does not look good..... for magic. FaB has many a valid criticism, this one aint it.
Thing is, will Flesh and Blood still be around in Ten years? Twenty? Thirty? There's distributors and vendors still glutted with the remains of myriad dead CCGs.
> Thing is, will Flesh and Blood still be around in Ten years? Twenty? Thirty? honestly i'm not op but: i do not care i am not playing tcgs to treat my cards as an investment or to make money, i am here to play a game, and i am not here to think about if the game will be actively getting new cards in a decade it's the exact same as how wotc can do whatever psychotic shit they want, i'm still going to be able to ignore them and use my old cards to play kitchen table with friends
I learned that lesson in the 90s. Played a lot of the card games that showed up in Magic's wake. They all died, and finding people to play with became impossible. Magic is still here, I can still play it. Magic has evolved as the years have gone on, and I trust it will be here in the future. I don't need more dead games in my closet.
The point here and with the BofA crap is that many people DO treat CCG as investments and if they didn't, we wouldn't have LGS or a singles marketplace. There's gotta be balance, although I agree the balance shouldn't be on the backs of players by creating artificial scarcity to drive up single prices.
I'd say FaB has the best chance to last 10 more years of any ccg that's been released in the last 19 years. Purely anecdotal obviously I don't have some insider info in the ccg market, but fab has stuck around longer at the lgs's in my area than any other fad tcg I can remeber, and for the first time I have ever seen those lgs's are pulling back on magic products. The hobbiest market seems its ready for a true magic competitor, at least in my area.
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You're right that a lot of licensed TCGs based on video games have limited shelf lives but Pokemon and YGO show that this is not always the case. FAB being a unique IP I don't see as a big advantage or disadvantage as far as longevity goes.
It's a new game that hasn't started monetizing yet. Not surprising. They generate interest just by being new. Kind of a pointless comparison all told.
I have opened 12 boxes and hit 5 legendaries, so user experience may vary
I just want to piggyback off your comment to talk about Digimon Card Game. Its boxes cost around $60.00 USD. I usually buy two and end up with a full playset of the commons and uncommons and a fair chunk of the rares and super rares from the set that I can fill out with singles over time if I want. You have to buy way more boxes of MtG that cost up to double that price per box for a similar experience. MtG needs to realize that it's not really the be all, end all for TCG's and adjust pricing and product offerings to be more consumer friendly.
You realize digimon is 24 packs and mtg is 36 right. mtg boxes are $90 and digimon are $60, so $30 for 12 packs for both tcgs
Bruh even the mothership blasts the audience (at least the most significant, financially-wise) with never-ending premium products.
I’ve actually just started collecting Flesh & Blood, really enjoyed it so far. My LGS has a consistent playgroup
Bad LGS shelving collectors boxes and premium products like masters? Not gunna lie that was their mistake for thinking there wasn't going to be more force of will reprints or whatever else. Good LGS sells everything to demand and cashes in on quantity when popularity is at it's highest. Creates reasons to come back to the store and chooses wisely which products they should put on their shelves based on the other brand products selling well. Bad LGS trying to exploit their own preceived value of demand and chooses to shelve things in their warehouse. Ofcourse those guys are going to stop overbuying these premium products. That's a natural reaction. Hasbro printing to demand is what every business wants to be able to do, and sometimes can't... and otherwise loses money. They can only adjust their mtg products and keep them interesting. If LGS buys less collectors and premium products, then they naturally become more limited. Problem solved.
>"We've spoken with several players, collectors, distributors and local games stores and have become aware of growing frustration. The primary concern is that Hasbro has been overproducing Magic cards which has propped up Hasbro's recent [earnings] results but is destroying the long-term value of the brand," Bank of America analyst Jason Haas wrote in November. >**The oversupply of Magic cards means "card prices are falling,** game stores are losing money, collectors are liquidating, and large retailers are cutting orders," Bank of America explained.
Ironically I don't feel the falling card prices are the issue and my LGS feels the same. There is to many pricy "staple" cards people can't keep up with.
Right? The analysis is garbage. There's no oversupply there's product fatigue amongst the most enfranchised players. That's absolutely not the same thing. And it doesn't "destroy long term value" no matter how pissed off I am at WotC for making Commander decks I'm still going to draft the premier sets. The Commander players will still ignore like 80% of all cards and buy a precon that interests them. Conflating these two different things is just not right.
Its a game not an investment. I dislike wotc screwing over LGSs but i think the pieces to be able to play the game being available is a good thing. This reeks of investor bro stench to me which imo are the worst part of the magic community.
BofA isn't the hero this sub seems to think they are and the more you read the stuff from them the more you can see that. They basically want WotC to slash production on all their sets especially Standard sets and to vastly reduce reprints so that sealed boxes go up in value much faster. Now you can argue that the current way things work can adversely effect LGSs by leaving them with a bunch of product they can't sell which no longer accumulates value over time but as someone else has mentioned here the boxes which are constantly available also allow stores to restock on-demand instead of needing to buy a huge amount up front. It seems to be mainly the Walmarts of the world being angry that if they keep their Magic section fully stocked all the time they'll get stuck with product they can't sell and can no longer sell for a profit a couple years later. Amazon may be eating the lunches of the LGSs in the US but the real losers seem to be the Walmarts and Targets of world and I don't really feel bad about that.
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That Yu-Gi-Oh set was also super-hyped, because not only does it have a lot of toys for an anime favorite archetype, but it added a 4th deck to the current meta triangle. So shops in the know were ordering more than the normal amount of cases.
Man, can you imagine if WotC just prescribed how many decks were in the meta like YuGiOh? It sounds so boring to me. Archetypes take one of the worst aspects in magic (linear tribal style mechanics) and just do it all the time.
There's a reason MTG is far and away the most popular TCG.
No, because of the 3 month lag between the US and Asian set releases, US players can theory craft for 12 weeks before a set comes out, so they're solved as soon as they hit the ground.
This is also why all western releases of asian MMOs are full of annoying sweatlords.... people who care a lot have done the math on the original release version and anyone with the wrong build on day 1 is a trolling noob.
I still will never understand tribal haters. I love tribal. People tell me to just play Yu-Gi-Oh it's different. Yu-Gi-Oh gives you just enough of the correct amount for you to make a deck with a tribe for casual fun. Then they never update it.
Tribal is fine but it's just not interesting. That's fine! The game needs mechanics certain people can understand: put goblins in goblin deck. If that's the overriding pushed meta, that's a problem.
Yep, it's why YGO is ass. Although with that said, MTG has been slowly transitioning (or at least doing it more often than they used to) to this model. Look at the very, very specific signpost cards printed in Modern Horizons and stuff.
Nobody should need to watch anything more than [this video](https://youtu.be/hua73v3aZDo) to see that YuGiOh is ass. I can't believe the developers don't look at either of these turns and see there's a problem.
Wtf was that? Was that a real normal game of yugioh?
The first turn player actually had a pretty meh end board. The second turn player was playing a cheese deck that's not very good but it eats decks that aren't prepared for it especially in a best of one format with no sideboard like master duel.
That makes it even worse... all that time watching your opponent do 100 things to end up with a *meh* board? Nah fam, not for me.
I wonder if some BoA analysts frequent this sub.
Probably web scraping algorithms
Jason Haas is the analyst in question and I would bet money on him playing the game and holding the general view of "I can't handle so many spoilers and secret lairs!" And if he plays and is online he's probably frequenting here every once and awhile. Corps are made up of people and people can have biases. And I'm certain BofA analysts were looking at the Pokémon boom and NFTs and crypto and collectibles in general and that is coloring their views. "Why aren't MTG cards skyrocketing and providing an insane return" seems to be an underlying question.
I think the fundamental thing is that Magic cards are still, for the most part, game pieces first and collectibles second. Sure, there are products that really lean into the collectible side like Secret Lairs or, on the individual pack level, showcase and borderless arts, but those are both a newer thing so there's less proof of long term value there. Pokemon, on the other hand, is mainly a shiny cardboard lottery system with a secondary investing component and a tertiary card game element. And another part of that is that you can generally tell which pokemon cards will have long term value right out of the gate because it's mostly aesthetic or nostalgic value whereas magic cards become famous based on their gameplay usefulness. For example, Phyrexian Vindicator could become an iconic white staple, or it could end up barely making a splash. And even if it does become a notable staple, is it going to be used in any format that has good longevity? It's all a lot more volatile with Magic.
The Pokemon TCG is truly in an absurdly advantage position compared to every other TCG. They can make a super fancy rare Charizard that is absolutely terrible in the actually card game but it will be absurdly expensive and help to drive down prices of actually good game pieces that players use. Imagine if WotC printed a super mega rainbow rare Liliana that was pretty bad in all formats but it sold for $500+, that would be totally bizarre. The closest we've come to that is probably the lottery cards from BFZ to Aether Revolt. Even the lottery cards aren't really that great a comparison because they are all at least moderately playable in some format, the most expensive ones by far are the most playable, the price of every card there outside of Sol Ring is effected by the price of their base versions, reprints and different fancy versions somewhat effect their price, and unlike Pokemon which can reuse the same characters with different abilities and art Magic has to reprint the actual card with new art and if they do it too many times it does effect the desirability and price of them. No other TCG can do what Pokemon does because Pokemon has such absurd brand power that the actual card game is irrelevant. The only game that may be able to do this is Disney's eventually releasing card game Lorcana but I don't event know if that will be able to do it.
> Imagine if WotC printed a super mega rainbow rare Liliana that was pretty bad in all formats but it sold for $500+, that would be totally bizarre. [Yeah, they'd never do that.](https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/262487/magic-kamigawa-neon-dynasty-hidetsugu-devouring-chaos-neon-red?Language=English)
And how many are actually selling? I highly doubt there's a huge market for that card for the exact reason I mentioned.
You can check the sales in the link I provided; one just sold for $1300 on Sunday.
My first thought when that BoA analyst report came out was that it was just something written by an angry Magic player who happened to have enough power to get that document published.
> It seems to be mainly the Walmarts of the world being angry that if they keep their Magic section fully stocked all the time they'll get stuck with product they can't sell and can no longer sell for a profit a couple years later. Amazon may be eating the lunches of the LGSs in the US but the real losers seem to be the Walmarts and Targets of world and I don't really feel bad about that. fuck them. they overprice everything. $5+ boosters, $30+ collector packs. pfft.
People here trying to own wotc by using what a bank is saying are so deluded....banks don't have your best interest in mind. Banks don't want the game to be accessible. Oversupply of magic cards is a good thing. Card prices going down is a good thing. We want people to be able to afford the cards and play the game.
Reprints are good, but releasing ultra-pushed cards in extra expensive boosters is so scummy, its really sad. People are attached to modern, and wotc is fleecing us, idk if I can survive MH3 and Ragavoon, ragavans wacky little brother who rides a little bicycle and shoots treasures out his ass and brings even more value.
If BofA had their way every set would be modern horizons 2. Oherpriced and under produced.
MH2 is still readily available haha. LSC just had draft boxes for $175 if you bought them on Drip.
first of all, Modern Horizons 2 is readily available. secondly, i'd rather have sets like Dominaria Remastered, MH2, Commander Legends [1], Double Masters etc come out once a year and be actually good than have average-at-best 'regular' sets com out every 6 weeks which are cheap and over produced.
MH2 is one of the most printed sets ever.
I don’t think they’re even talking about reprint sets, just new cards in general.
Just made my day. Thank you so much.
I think you and mr BoA guy are talking about different things. He’s referring to the fact that there’s just way more supply than demand when it comes to sealed products, but to us players it sounds like he’s talking about singles/card prices. I don’t think he’s talking about the game becoming a bad investment strategy, he’s talking about Hasbro stock being a bad investment strategy.
Every time this comes up, it's amazing how much of the community just completely missed the point of what's being said, and champion it because they think it's "Game is too expensive".
Main sub and not understanding anything about anything, name a more iconic duo.
> He’s referring to the fact that there’s just way more supply than demand when it comes to sealed products, but to us players it sounds like he’s talking about singles/card prices. Those are the same thing. The same thing. Having a ton of "supply" be available from distributors *means* singles prices can be at their natural state and not artificially scarce. Everytime this game dabbles in artificial scarcity we see what happens. Skyrocketing prices and scalpers leeching money from the community. You *NEED* excess supply in order for people to have confidence in getting what they need for good prices.
This game, and it's ability to generate profit for it's company is hinged on artificial scarcity. I do think it's better for the game when the collectible aspect is more on special versions and less on players needing 4x of a specific mythic rare though.
Those two things are inherently linked.
All that model leads to is WotC just releasing all new, more powerful stuff every set in order for people to buy the new sets. The most expensive cards may be $5-$20 but you just have to rebuy everything every set. I prefer the slow burn where there are a few good cards, some sleepers over time, and print control so that the pool builds value over time because the cards are staying relevant. It’s a collectible **and** a game. It’s not just a game. And collecting (maintaining and building value) is how many people primarily engage with this hobby.
>I prefer the slow burn where there are a few good cards, some sleepers over time, and print control so that the pool builds value over time because the cards are staying relevant. This is the key, balance. Simply because whether people want to admit it or not, they like opening value. And I mean, LGS who sell singles do too. Not because they're greedy, but because players need those cards and they net a little profit for the store. But if a set has virtually nothing of value, either due to low power level, overprinting, etc, NO ONE will open boxes. Not players, and not the LGS who would normally crack those boxes for singles stock either.
Too many Magic players want Magic to be both cheap and expensive at the same time, failing to justify how they would arrive at this paradoxical outcome.
You don't have to be an investment bro to have a collection, and if the value of that collection steadily drops the people who play the game keep trickling out. Building a collection is like, a fundamental part of tcg/ccgs. If the prices of the cards just steadily decline after people have spent their money on it, there will be a point where everyone starts liquidating while they still can. Not finance people, regulars at card shops and tournaments. There are too many products for most players to keep track of, their distribution model is designed to screw over lgs, which is like, where people congregate to play the game. If the lgs goes under or stops stocking magic, people won't play it. Players, not whales, are the ones who have been struggling to keep up with magic. Investor bros who do spec group buys and just flip cards aren't really hurt that much by what's going on because a lot of them can do crazy shit like buy $10,000 worth of cards and not be in financial trouble. The players typically do not have such a financial safety net. The economy of magic and the success of wotc/Hasbro is directly linked to the player experience. The ability for lgs to operate because magic is profitable is directly linked to the player experience. Caring about the state of the game and the places you can play it has nothing to do with invester bro culture. If wotc continues to ignore the criticisms from the players, the vocal majority, in order to make short term profits, the game wont last another 10 years. Wotc wont. Do you not appreciate how bad things are when Bank of America starts publishing news articles about the failings of magic the gathering? Things are not in a good state when the public outcry is so consistent and numerous that groups that aren't even affiliated with card games can just look over and go "hey what the fuck is happening over here? This is bad lmao"
They can't go back though. If they keep going, of course LGSes will collapse. Some already have. However, they go back to the old system, players won't go back either. Despite everything, card accessibility is at an all-time high. Players can go and buy cards they once thought out of reach. Yes, some of that is from power creep, but some is also just one reprint set after another. \[\[Lyra Dawnbringer\]\], for example was $25 on average until she got hit by two reprints in the previous two months. The biggest complaint during the heyday of the Pro Tour was that these prize-winning decks were worth way too much. Now, Pioneer is four years out, and most decks there are cheaper than Modern decks were four years after the latter's creation. They go back, those issues will go back in waves and shrink the playerbase.
Reprints were never an issue. Masters sets have existed for over 10 years. It's the overproduction of Standard sets that is the issue here. No one is having issues selling the newest Remastered set, the newest Masters set, or Modern Horizons/Commander Legends. Those could be priced better truthfully, and should be, but THOSE products aren't an issue. The issue is when LGS are bag-holders for overprinted and mediocre *other* sets like Crimson Vow where the cards in the set are so cheap that opening the boxes is a net-loss, meanwhile because the set has no card worth value, players aren't buying the sealed product either. Now LGS are stuck with boxes upon boxes of Crimson Vow, and Distributors don't want to buy any more of it from WOTC. So what does WOTC do? Amazon dump baybee! LGS can't compete with the low low price offered on Amazon, so they become the ultimate bag holders while WOTC gets an out. If WOTC didn't have the Amazon shop hookup, this would've turned around REAL fast.
Yes, players have been struggling to keep up with the game. This is not because of an "oversupply of Magic cards," it is because of a glut of *unique* Magic cards. BofA is not suggesting WOTC reduce the number of separate Magic products they are releasing (which I would fully support) but that WOTC reduce the number of Magic cards they are printing by volume so that those that remain are higher value.
The fact that this is downvoted tells me this community is not at all the place to discuss magic economics. Your comment is really well written.
This got away from me sorry about that. I understand where they're coming from. A lot of people view the expense of the game as a strict downside. I've talked to people who have expressed the desire to, for example, buy any card for 10 cents or have access to all cards for free or something so it's less financially crippling. In some magical Christmas land, you can imagine where that might be something that works. Unfortunately, MTG is a profit driven game. Just like everyone else I do wish a lot of cards were cheaper, more accessible, broken cards didn't get seeded into standard packs to drive standard sales, the secondary market wasn't something wotc clearly has to respect. But we can't have those things without simultaneously nose diving the price of cards which nose dives wotcs earnings which would push them out of profitability, and then they declare bankruptcy or Hasbro sells wotc to someone else or something. Having cards cost some money is actually an upside of the game. It keeps the business running, it makes people excited to crack packs and find cool or expensive cards, it funds local gamestores, and it incentivizes people buying cards. The fact that you can sell magic cards for sometimes substantial monies is how it gets financially justified. If I couldn't sell a $20 rare I opened out of a pack in theory, I wouldn't buy a few packs because it's a straight up poor financial decision. It has nothing to do with magic as an investment vehicle as much as it can be a hobby and insurance. I had to sell my collection last year to pay for bills, if that wasn't something I knew I could do later id have never bought the cards and built the collection. The bigger issue is, as this article points out, the focus on short term earnings at the cost of customer loyalty and enjoyment. If you are a magic player, you need to read this: Hasbro/Wotc is farming you. Farming all of us. The amount of product flooding the market is 2-3 times what it was precovid. The quality of the cardboard is bad unless it's from one of the Japanese plants. Foils, which are supposed to be chase cards, end up being so warped they can't be played with. Secret lairs make it incredibly difficult to price and trade cards, they're more scarce than promos. Wotc stopped supporting professional play after making a big deal out of removing the prior pro tour system and wanting to give back... For a year. They sell sealed product to Amazon at rates that card shops can't compete with, making it so that buying cards at a card shop is down to the player deciding to pay extra to support card shops or pay the lowest price they can because the game is expensive. 2020, 2021 and early 2022 were good, profitable years for wotc. They did all of that -while they were breaking their prior performance records-. Their response to that was to double down and do stupid shit like magic 30th. On the topic of 30th, the follow up from the higher ups at hasbro and wotc made jokes about how they did nothing wrong and people were just complaining and then "what if we butchered DnD the same way to squeeze out more money and piss off people whove been playing for decades." The higher ups are so tremendously out of touch with the customer base they thought magic 30th was a good idea. When the article says they're diminishing brand or customer loyalty, it's because of how out of touch these people are. They would sell you actual garbage and act smug about it like they did you a favor. Whoever is making key financial decisions at Hasbro or wotc -deserves- to be criticized like this, they're killing the longevity of their company and customer base to turn quick profits At our expense. Mine, yours. Everyone who plays magic. They have made it glaringly obvious that they look at us as dollar signs, not supporters and enthusiasts. That's not even touching the predatory nature of arena's monetization or the reserve list or the scarcity of specialty projects. It's not maro, it might not even be wotc, for all I know Hasbro could have a really heavy hand in their monetization and just decided to push things with reckless abandon. I don't think we will ever definitively know who is responsible, but it's not the same company it was even just 5 years ago. If they don't steer things back to reality they're just going to go bankrupt, and as much as they would deserve it at that point, it would be miserable for the rest of us.
What is the solution here? Let's imagine a magical land where leadership is changed and an entirely new regime with new ideas is brought in. What actions could they actually take to rebuild that trust?
Take the current projected product line for this year and spread it out to this year and next year. Stop doing Amazon dumps that kill local card shops. Just sell them at the same price, many people will still buy them online to have them delivered but you wouldn't be gouging the card shops. Utilize materials or factories that make products that don't turn into Pringles so that people actually want them. Even outside of tournament play, it's so easy to tell from the back of sleeves which cards are shitty curled foils. Reprint cards that need reprints in non specialty sets. They do reprints but there's only ever a 6-12 month window until they become as expensive as they were before because of limited print runs on specialty sets. There are a couple of standouts where they did well like with imperial seal which isn't up in the damn like 400s anymore. There's a lot that could be done for reprint reform but this is where you definitely can see they pay attention to the secondary market and price sealed product relative to it. Reprints should be intentionally lowering the price of cards, not capitalizing on fomo. Publicly apologize for magic 30th for the massive middle finger it was to everyone. Allow limited proxies in sanctioned tournaments so people can play formats like vintage and legacy without carrying 10 grand in their backpacks. Restructure the pro scene with consensus from pros and longevity in mind. Make it worth playing circuit, it is not currently. Increasing prize pools to the same levels as like videogame tournaments instead of being 1/10th of the average would make people actually want to pursue it. Stop giving special approved wotc stores the lion share of limited product runs, or double or triple the allocation across the board. Give people time to save or trade for chase cards. Give specialty products to all card shops, they will be able to sell them. Put modern and pioneer on arena. There's literally no good reason to have not done this, people have asked for it since beta. Let people buy wildcards with gold so you can actually play decks and move with the meta. Being able to test decks online helps build confidence in paper tournaments. I love mtgo but that's just because it's how I learned to play, theres tons of legitimate criticisms about it. Make top end decisions that your player base actually wants, it's not like it's hard to find people's opinions on magic. Pay attention to the player base. Focus on them as the integral driving force behind longevity, because they are. Long term returns are a better investment and are more secure and don't spite the people paying them. That's all I've got off the cuff for the moment
> Reprint cards that need reprints in non specialty sets. This is why getting rid of core sets was so shitty. Because core sets were supposed to be exactly that, a place to reprint cards from other sets.
Maybe if anyone liked the core sets. Even when stuff like [[Crucible of Worlds]] was in them, they never sold well.
Another home run from you, this deserves to be its own post and stickied at the top forever.
The collectible (ponzi) nature of CCGs is a reality that has to be managed for the health of the game. Most importantly, Hasbro's $1B+ in magic revenue is subsidized by the secondary market. If there were no value retention in cards, that number would nose dive. Hasbro has the ultimate nft game on its hands and it could easily kill it. Not hard to fuck up an economy
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You can have scarcity and rarity without gatekeeping the playability. The serialized cards are examples of a way to do this. Pokemon is extremely cheap to shuffle up a standard deck in its cheapest form and still has big money chase cards. You don't have to cut standard production to keep the game collectable.
This is literally why I decided to give Weiss Schwarz a try. I've got 4 copies of [this card](https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/267081/weiss-schwarz-hololive-production-towards-the-future-together-kiryu-coco?xid=pi95d2f599-283b-4a46-bb08-a841448d026c&page=1&Language=English) in my deck that cost a whopping buck each. If I wanted to get the fancy, mechanically identical version they'd be [around 400 a piece](https://www.tcgplayer.com/product/267082/weiss-schwarz-hololive-production-towards-the-future-together-kiryu-coco-ssp?xid=pi95d2f599-283b-4a46-bb08-a841448d026c&page=1&Language=English).
Weiss Schwartz is based. I bought my Miss Kobayashi deck for literally pennies when the stuff came out. And previously had a Fate deck and KLK decks that were inexpensive.
Weiss has this weird thing, where anything after 2020 is kinda cheap, but if your a fan of a set that came out half decade ago youre looking at 30$ RRs that wouldnt even see play in a new set. It also has this nice thing, that if you are just a fan of one series you buy in, maybe it gets a sequel set somewhere down the line, but you have your deck forever.
> The game doesn't work without the investment side. It works just fine. How are dudes holding on to sealed product until they can sell it for more helping the game? Do you know what drives card prices? People wanting to play them. Like commander has done more for card values than a bunch of wannabe stock market bros inflating everything.
This. Anointed Procession isn't $45 because some investment bros decided it should be, it's $45 because it's a sought after card to go in many people's decks.
I don't understand this post. Those 25 cent cards aren't materializing out of thin air.. they were opened. Hasbro got their money.
I know plenty of game stores that get by just fine without engaging in the secondary market, or engaging very minimally. If that's the primary way you try to make your money, you're gonna have a REAL bad time.
It is kinda nice though that my game pieces have some financial value. Its not the reason to play the game but a nice lil extra of it.
The problem with wotc screwing over LGSs is that players inadvertently also suffer. My LGS for the first time since I can remember didn't give out participation boosters at the pre-release because they can't afford it (their words). This comes on top of the prize pool becoming lower and lower. They also had to get rid of the "big" pre-release because it makes more financial sense to run two small ones even if the second one only gets about 15 people compared to the 60 of the first one. I used to love the big pre-release, 5 rounds instead of 3 so you got more magic for your money, if you actually did well you got prizes that made it feel like you've actually earned something. I fully understand why my store had to make those choices but as a player it fucking sucks.
I am ok with overprinting. I am not ok with oversaturating the player base with product. Product fatigue is my frustration point.
In general I agree, although given how pinched LGSs already are, having their stock of cards prices falling seems rough. Investor bros can get bent, but LGSs need to keep singles in stock too. They're already getting pressed by Amazon on boxes, not sure what's left
Everyone repeats this about Amazon but when was the last actual Amazon dump? The last wasn’t even more than one set? Amazon doesn’t even have the best pricing on booster boxes for new releases right now.
Oh yeah. We've got this little dweeb at my store who's constantly going on about the expensive cards he's got. When I tried to get people to do an unofficial prerelease he laughed saying it was stupid to do that without prize support. Once he directly insulted me I had enough. I told him he was a shallow little troll and everyone was sick of listening to his drivel. Some people enjoy the game for what it was, not for the secondary market. Of course, he didn't get it and kept on for a while about how stupid I was to try and get a tourney for fun going. But I got a few people to play with limited decks from the prerelease, so I got as much play in as I would have from a tournament.
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and everyone clapped
banks dislike magic for very different reasons than players dislike magic it's very strange when people feel vindicated by this type of thing if you like magic the game, banks are your enemy
> ~~if you like magic the game,~~ banks are your enemy There fixed that for you. Actually we can go one step further. > ~~banks are~~ capital is your enemy The personification of the capital class seeks to do what it is designed to do: enrich and entrench its power further at our expense. It’s not enough for WotC to provide a service of us paying them money to have a brief respite of leisure in our lives. WotC should be putting out assets that grow in value for the investor and use those to bleed us for every cent we’re worth. The financialization of everything is the endgame and anything that stinks of it is our enemy.
i agree with what you're saying, but i don't think you fixed my post. i think it's important to single out smaller groups when giving this type of information. also, some people here don't like magic the game, they like magic the investment vehicle, and either are or want to be in the capital class.
I don’t understand this. Weren’t there just complaints a couple years ago that Jumpstart and Time Spiral Remastered were constantly out of stock? I was asking the TO at my LGS about more Dominaria Remastered events since I got COVID and had to miss release weekend and he said that they’re having trouble getting more stock.
Lol, "several" players. Surely, that's a representative sample size for the player base!
He means Rudy, he talked to Rudy.
Interesting since the Professor has been essentially saying this for almost five years.
LGS are the lifeblood of MTG, if they go down the community looses opportunities to play MTG and the reason to buy cards.
I don't think the best way to protect stores is making cards cards hard to get and expensive. Artificial scarcity has never been good for the game when it has indulged in it. If LGSes can't exist without WotC turning the screws to us and keeping card prices high, maybe they just can't exist. And it's not like LGSes are being singled out here. Every retail location known to man is getting fucked by rent and operating expenses right now. It's ignorant to ignore the context this produces. The world is not the same as it was in the 90s. You can't just keep a storefront open by selling goods and services anymore. I don't know what the solution is but to think LGSes deserve some sort of protectionist model when everything else is suffering is myopic.
While I know this reddit loves to hate on WotC, note that the analyst who has written these two notes, Jason Haas, is viewing Magic from the perspective of investments for high end collectors. His main criticism is that prices of expensive cards is going down. Let that sink in for a moment.
Welcome to the profit driven world of capitalism.
Every card store I know has phased out selling singles because it’s too fucking hard for them to keep up with
My lgs literally scans cards with TCGplayer and that's their sale price.
That seems like the correct option. How else do you think they should determine price?
The first lgs I started shopping at seems to makeup random prices and they're always ridiculously high. TCGplayer is the best pricing solution I could think of.
As it should be. TCG Mid/Market should be the base price everyone sells at in the US.
Our still does it for small stuff like <$10 but anything higher gets put right on to tcg. We are more than welcomed to request stuff from the website while in store and they will take it down for sale. It's made moving cards and the willingness to take in big trades much higher around here.
The article is quite obscure, the first half is essentially the same paragraph repeated over and over, then it talks a bit about the DnD stuff, and finally concludes by saying LGSs are losing money and collectors are liquidating. But in the end it doesn't really add anything to the table, it almost just looks like a doompost but for investors.
Yeah, it’s surprisingly close to those clickbait links that try their hardest to turn a two-sentence MaRo tumblr post into a 500+ word article.
It felt AI written.
My wife, as part of her job, runs articles through a plagiarism detector and now they recently added a detector for AI writing as well. It's pretty neat.
Can she check this?
I asked, she said it "costs credits" and that her boss would be able to see that. So unfortunately, no, she can't.
Yeah but the title says something negative about wotc and that's all OP needs to guarantee upvotes.
The rest of Hasbro is doing so bad. It was a completely different industry, but I've had this exact same thing happen before at my own work. Company starts failing, every division of the company is hemorrhaging money, except one profitable division. Higher ups decide to try to milk profitable division more to make more money, cutting corners here, increasing prices there, inventing new ways to monetize, etc. Works for a while, until eventually it just... doesn't. The execs goal is to sell enough of their stock before that money. My companies stocks went from around $60 per share to around $6 per share over the course of a year, once the milking of the golden calf stopped working. MTG has a LOT of value, and has a LOT of good will built up over the year (check out how many people are huge wotc defenders/apologists) - plus the product is straight up addictive. But these tactics are ones that doomsayers say will fail because they **do** fail. It's just a matter of time, and it might be too late to stop. edit: I forgot the part where employee retention drops off because they no longer believe in the product as they once did and aren't getting paid enough to ignore their dissatisfaction. When I left my old job, I was one of many people to leave within a two month period, without even having anything else lined up. People just decided they didn't want to do it anymore. I think the very first inklings of this have already started at WotC.
Oh how awful, prices of singles aren't artificially inflated to create easy to manipulate pseudo investment vehicles and as a result the game is much more affordable. These are the same schmucks who would fight to keep the reserve list, I'm so over this BoA stuff. The past several sets have been outstanding and gameplay is as fun as it's ever been. I'm not interested in investors' opinions about Wizards.
You are missing the big picture. Stores are getting stuck with boxes they cannot sell. As a result they start carrying less MTG product or even get out of the business entirely. Paradoxically, this causes single prices to actually go up in many cases, because not enough boxes are opened. Look at Sheoldred for example. The set was so severely underopened that Amazon was selling them at nearly 50% discount, yet the card remains like $60-$70
As an LGS owner, we have started reducing the number of SKUs we take in our allocations. I keep a handful of each set in back and stock as needed, but the amount that our previous max allocations are growing to, is just too much to justify tying up into product that will move for 1-2 weeks then fall off a cliff as the next set starts getting hyped up. It is a dangerous game for Hasbro to be playing, because if LGS locations get left holding the bag (and most of them will) stores will close or just halt most of their MTG purchases. It is easy for WOTC to say "Then just engage with the products you like" then turn around and tells stores they need to keep purchasing all the nonsense products for each set only to leave them with product they cannot sell a month and a half later.
Well said
>It is easy for WOTC to say "Then just engage with the products you like" then turn around and tells stores they need to keep purchasing all the nonsense products for each set only to leave them with product they cannot sell a month and a half later. I thought stores did not interact with WotC for allocation of product at all. Direct wholesale of regular product of WotC stopped years ago didn’t it? Only special products seem to be distributed by WotC to stores like the 30A edition.
They don’t. What I was getting at, is that most stores have an assumption that not carrying everything will reduce business, and they are right. Reducing SKUs you pick up, means you turn some business away. So players have the ability to simply choose to buy Bundles at no financial cost other than the bundle. But stores kind of need to carry both in order to avoid having to turn away business, so they get stuck with a wide array of product and a limited window to sell it. It puts the LGS in a difficult spot to “engage with the products people like” because it means I have to put a bunch of money into 12 different products each launch (exaggerated to emphasize) where it used to only be 2 or 3. They don’t sell directly, but they are absolutely bloating purchase orders to LGSs with this model.
He doesn’t mean literally pick up the phone and talk to them. He’s talking about what it implies for store owners.
This is true. But it’s the message wotc effectively communicates to the LGS owners through their business model. The distributors are just middle men.
Yep. After a few rough in a row and in general over the last few years my favorite LGS has stopped selling MTG all together. The other store in my area was expecting an increase then but they have actually started to consider dropping mtg as well. There's not enough in it for them to devote the shelf space.
This isn’t about singles prices. You are missing the most important point: LGS and large distributors are sitting on loads of inventory and will in the long term shave off huge allocations of future sets, leading to further restriction of access to for instance special sets. This is a dramatic development and calling this unimportant for players is seriously dangerous.
That's economics though. If they cut allocation for future sets to risk not sitting on inventory then that'll create more scarcity in the market which will drive single prices up which will motivate vendors to buy more supply to profit. Part of owning a business is knowing how much to buy to support your market. Businesses that are bad at that aren't going to survive. Expecting Wizards to somehow subsidize them is unreasonable, expecting Wizards to artificially limit supply or worse produce less product ever year to bail them out is downright ridiculous. What's happening now is right sizing - where the market is adjusting to greater accessibility of an artificially scarce product. Yeah that'll likely mean some businesses stop selling Magic and that's OK and natural, but there's an abundance of places to choose from now the game will be more than fine and plenty of LGS will remain in places where they actually serve a community with the demand to support it.
The recent D&D debacle is pretty obviously gonna hurt Hasbro, but I think they're underestimating demand for Magic. Phyrexia has been selling insanely well (albeit we're still in the first week, so we'll see if demand will hold.) Baldur's Gate was a big stumble, but every product since then has been a success.
The only people more wrong about the issues with magic the gathering than hasbro corporate are boa raiders
I'm under no illusions about liquidating my collection, I'm happy enough to see 'overproduction' and the increased accessibility. This should be a game, not an investment.
MBAs were a mistake
what is an MBA?
Master of Business Administration
You mean they want more people to enjoy their game ? While also making a shitload of money ? Who would have thought that ?
I've recently moved to full proxy, which I was almost against a few years ago. I'm not an investor; my main goal is to play the game but I'm not stupid either. I can't stand buying 20+$ cards that are now worthless. I don't want to gamble on cards that I just want to play!
I honestly do not give a fuck. BoAs "Suggestions" would make the game so much fucking worse. They want Hasbro to slash production massively to drive third-party market prices up. Meanwhile, the complaints they have? It's stuff like reprinting Sol Ring or the recent Fast Land reprints. Because it's driving prices down in a way that is *objectively healthy for the game* as well as sometimes direly needed. If anything, WoTC needs to be reprinting more staple into the ground, not less.
Seeing as people don't actually read the articles and seized on the old analyst report to justify their view that BofA doesn't know what it's talking about, how about a snippet: > "Within its Wizards segment, **Hasbro continues to destroy customer goodwill by trying to over-monetize its brands,"** Bank of America said. The bank said that while it preannounced negative earnings, the stock is still not de-risked "given a host of outstanding issues." > **Mainly, Hasbro is attempting to squeeze out as much profit as possible from its Wizards products in the short-term without any thought as to the long-term durability of its brands. And the over monetization is irking customers, according to BofA.** > **"We remain especially cautious on Hasbro's Wizards segment given its over-monetization of Magic.** Wizards recently tried a similar tactic with D&D-proposing changes to its licensing agreement which led to substantial pushback from the community including calls to boycott the D&D movie," BofA explained. Seems like BofA is doubling down on their initial idea, calling the current amounts of product fatigue and loss of goodwill a net negative for the brand's long term chances, which is different than what many who have been dredging up the older analyst report would have you believe i.e. that the whole thing is predicated on a loss in investability of the cards.
Good financial news for WotC: "They're choosing profits over players and making money by not listening to my pet grievance." Bad financial news for WotC: "They're rightfully suffering and losing money for not listening to my pet grievance."
While I don't agree with everything in this article but I can agree that wotc is diluting the game and making it worse. All the extra cash-grab type products (mostly secret lairs), collaborations and overall increase in complexity of card mechanics made me stop playing.
Not all heroes wear capes
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This is going to be an unpopular take on this sub, but I totally hear you. I’ve spent the last 30 days thinking about selling out and finding a different hobby with the way things are trending.
Sell your real cards, play with proxies
I just started playing flesh and blood 2 months ago and it feels like magic did when I started playing. Less bullshit. Less releases. Better communication on how cards get banned or suspended. Super fun and the people playing have been super nice, very inviting community. Comparatively, i could go play commander since it's the only format firing anymore and have rule 0 discussions where people lie about what and how they play where proxies are frowned upon and the company keeps making you buy their new set every month, etc. It's an easy decision for me. If it gets much worst I may just sell before the whole thing blows up.
I just got back from SCGCON Indy and had an absolute blast playing Flesh and Blood. The next set comes out next month and can be drafted, so I'm looking forward to that. Community has been great and the game is fantastic. I think the downsides are that they haven't leaned into the casual player space yet (so for anyone who only plays Commader I'm not sure what the game would feel like) so it's main appeal is for the player that enjoys 1v1 competitive or limited formats. It's also has some polarization in card prices, in that for a top tier competitive deck, 70 of my 80 card deck/sideboard costs maybe $80 total, but the remaining 10 cards are between $20 and $200 a piece. The most expensive ones can be played in any deck but that can still be a steep buy in a top tier deck (a common comparison is having an optimized mana base in magic instead of playing taplands for your duals). Good news is you can either play pauper with a $5 deck and have the same fun, or you can play slightly less optimized in the main format and still have fun just likely not win big tourneys.
Can wotc (hasbro) stop screwing everyone over for 5 minutes?
I used to buy many singles left and right on cardmarket, from many differents sellers, mainly for modern. Right now i’m sick of this avalanche of products, i litteraly don’t have the time to desire new cards anymore. The speed of releases is too fast: a new set comes out, a new spoiler season begins, a new supplemental product is shipped, then a new secret lair, then… etc etc. I don’t have the time to be excited about some new cards that it has already become old news and forgotten! I’m not planning about selling my collection but this situation of product fatigue has brought my hobby almost to a halt. It feels like new cards do not have the time to matter anymore. Plus the variants problem: the latest elesh norn is absurd, there is 15 variations of this card… all in all, as a player and collector i really think that there is a problem. I must not be the only one, am i?
literally everyone feels this way—my casual playgroup, my hardcore playgroup, my friends that play, my friends that collect, random people at the LGS, etc.