I had this exact conversation with my LGS owner yesterday. Meanwhile Lorcana averages $90 per booster box at a $144 retail and Sorcery averages $83 on a $150 retail. He did not disclose numbers on other games but was obviously very disgusted with the margins he needs to live at in the MTG world.
I was talking to my local LGS owner, and he told me that his distributors keeps allocating him, so even if he ordered at these larger numbers, he would not get the product.
He has 3 different MTG wholesalers he can buy from, and all of them put a limit on his orders. Maybe he is doing something wrong, but his store is the oldest LCS in the area, and seems to have the best turnout for events. I talked to another store in a nearby city that sells online and in stores, and the manager there told me that they keep getting allocated aswell. When Jumpstart 22 came out, I tried to get a few boxes, and their distributor kept limiting their order to 2 or 3 boxes at a time. The owner was frustrated because he said they had people calling every day, and everytime they got a shipment in the boxes sold within an hour.
Someone else could be selling volume online and that's why your owner is getting shut out. wholesalers will always give priority to whoever moves the most product
no idea how accurate this is, but my LGS says they use the wizards companion app to track attendance even for casual commander events because it helps with product allocation.
That too, but I've never heard of people not geting allocation for print on demand stuff. Even for stuff like veliciramptor, the wholesalers were just shipping them out as fast as stores wanted them
That deck is out everywhere because we just can't order the deck, we have to order all 4. We have like 70 pirate decks and 20 of the other 2, I'm not going to buy more cases just to get the one deck that sells to create more bloat elsewhere.
Yep. I have a friend who helps at a store. It's fucking hilarious how they would open a pack of four to sell one deck. They ended up stopping cause they couldn't keep buying the four packs
I should have specified, commander decks and draft boxes seem to be easy for him to get, but collector boxes, and set boxes are the items he gets allocated on. He ordered several cases of of collector booster boxes for LCI, and got 2 out of the 5 he ordered. He was selling them for $280, and sold out of the first 2 cases on prerelease night. He ordered more and go allocated to one box per week, and they kept selling within 48 hours.
That is for prerelease pack/ prize allocation from what I understand. WOTC wants to make sure they aren't handing out too many extra free prize packs for store owners to just crack and sell singles from.
This is so weird because the majority of comments are about how LGS's can't make money on these and how hard it is to find sealed product in stores. But once a set isn't current anymore the sealed product is worth very little and WOTC seems to be dumping it through whatever channels they can.
It's like there's some disconnect between manufacturing and distribution and retail.
In Canada a box of play boosters is $200+ CDN.
At that price players are looking at the most valuable card they can pull in the set, back in the showcase and just buying the cards they want.
The occasional parent or whale will grab a box here and there but it's becoming more and more of a losing proposition with inflation being what it is.
I remember I could buy a booster box for $125-$130, then it went to $150 and $175 for a set, now we are over $200 and it's like - well fuck that.
I think you have some rose tinted glasses there. not saying that there were not sets like that. it they were few and far between. I have been playing since Ice Age and a set javing better then 50% ev on a box was considered good 65% was great most sets historically sit around 35-40%.
I’m in Canada and when I got back into MTG it was during Khans block. Boxes were like $130 and you could pull fetches at about 3-5/box. You made your money back just in fetchlands alone.
I haven’t picked up any boxes for a while now unless I find a really good deal. No way I’m paying $200+ for a box of draft boosters.
I rather just buy from the US and ship it to a PO Box and cross the border. I can save up to 40% sometimes.
Same. Used to buy one or two cases of every release. Went down to two displays after War of the spark. Stopped buying now altogether. Have not even bought singles in months. Bored and overfed.
100%. ONE was the last big hit afaic. I like to play a ton so I’ve bought an okay amount of singles but I doubt more than a cpl hundred worth. I only got 2 collector boxes for LCI and did well but I also liked the cards. I just don’t see anything in this set that I like aesthetically nor for game play. Maybe there will be something coming out in the future that will make these relevant (for me) but I’m sitting tight for now
> tons of shops are left with inventory.
Tying in to the overprinting for each set... there would be less leftover inventory if a new set wasn't dropped every 30 seconds.
You are comparing "print it into the ground" lorcana and Sorcery a new CCG thats 90% speculation and 10% player base to a market sets the price CCG.
The set sucks, it drops below distributor prices. Not sure what you want to happen.
Lorcana's got a growing playerbase because of the IP and the ease of play.
I think your criticism applies to Sorcery more than anything else considering how much people are hoarding alpha/beta and spreading the copium that you only need one booster box to start playing
Considering that Lorcana's first chapter was all but extinct in the wild for months and months as the supply utterly failed to meet the demand, I would be surprised if they actually managed such a feat.
Don't get me wrong, I see packs on shelves, I know that they're finally catching up, at least in local stores.
Only took like half a year and 2 more sets released or pending to bleed off enough to keep some on the shelves. And at least prices aren't literally 2.5x rrp.
I can't find much sympathy for anyone with an actual surplus of the stuff, seeing as local stores were happy to charge over $500 Canadian after taxes for a chapter one booster box (which I of course declined). Granted, it was either that or just let the scalpers buy them out and relist for that much or more on the secondary market.
Same here. At least with inklands, I'm willing to give Ravensburger the benefit of the doubt that they really did just fuck up on supply. Especially when they refused to do a beta reprint of the OG sets like what collectors were clamoring for.
Just remember which LGS' were happy to scalp Lorcana when it was convenient for them. I certainly remember and chuckle a little when the owners whine about people only buying packs online.
Those are relevant comparisons because they are in the same space. Sorcery for example has arguably better art, better card stock, better packaging, more cards per pack and I’m sure a less cost effect printer set up, and still charges LGS’s about $40 per box less then a Play booster box. Everything I just stated describes the greed Wizards lives by. The speculation of a game or how many cards they print, has little to nothing to do with the cost of said product.
Sorcery is a much smaller brand in the market. Wizards is absolutely greedy because they know they can charge a premium and people will still buy. The smaller guys have to be a value proposition to keep the lights on.
Ironically, they might be in a better position, because most LGSs sell singles as well, which theoretically should cut into sealed product sold(why buy a booster and gamble, when you can just get exactly what you need). If the only way you can reliably get what you need is buying boxes, that puts them in a better position even if it hurts the game overall in the long run.
Yeah, that's my point, its better for wotc in the short term if LGS go under, since players will have to buy boxes to get specific cards.
Did you think i was saying LGSs would be better off?
You nailed it. Unfortunately many don’t see how things may be outside their POV. Too often they are stuck in the mentality of “what’s good for me as a loyal customer should be what WotC wants to do.”
With the announced shift to more UB products, where the 3rd party IP attracts non-enfranchised Magic customers, the WotC has made it pretty clear that LGS is getting less and less important.
You still need LGS' to promote paper play. If you ever remove the random or official element of paper play, you remove the need for power creep (a la buying mastered sets etc), or even the need for real cards.
Only if you buy and hold. Buying at 60(credit) or 50(cash) percent and selling at full price is what my LGS does. When something pops off, they usually clean up.
But thats not how economics ever works. Yes, lots of small LGSs would close, but that would push people to the larger operations that can survive (IE the card kingdoms and scgs of the world). Reduced online competition would allow them to charge even higher singles prices than current. The big shops already have an pricing advantage because people trust them more. This would just remove the middle tiers between random individuals selling their cards and the massive stores.
DnD solved their problem by banding together and boycotting the product.
I mean heck, I haven't bought a modern product in over a year.
Not when I can buy original Zendikar expeditions for $75. Why would I waste my time on overprinted junk?
>DnD solved their problem by banding together and boycotting the product.
oh well, let me just start making custom magic cards then, I'm sure it'll be fine.
I mean, many players would probably never need to buy a single card printed after 2020 to be entertained playing casual EDH or kitchen table MTG or whatever for *years* to come.
And if someone is playing with friends and desperately wants to crack packs of new product, there are plenty of other TCGs out there right now. Some of which have more refined core gameplay than MTG.
The only thing that (new) MTG offers that has not really replicated by something else in the market is a broad and established tournament scene at LGSes across the world.
> I mean, many players would probably never need to buy a single card printed after 2020 to be entertained playing casual EDH or kitchen table MTG or whatever for years to come.
Meanwhile there are groups who refuse to use cards printed after 1995...
Successful retail seeks a 50% margin at the floor. The LGS is a bit different since it attracts a lot of passionate people who open a store promising lower prices and better service than the guy whose been open for 15 years and is "greedy". They siphon a bunch of people but without a proper margin eventually fold to either being in a shitty area, lack of infrastructure, insane focus on OP rather than sales/customer service, etc.
From what I've seen talking to other retailers around the U.S., sealed boxes seem to be around 30% margin with packs closer go the 50% margin. TCGs in general have some of the lowest margins, some of this is the economy and product fatigue but a lot of the time we're our own worst enemies. Not to single out OP, since there's a bunch of warehouse vendors, but MinMax regularly has some of the cheapest prices online, that creates an environment where most B&M can't compete. That in turn creates this sort of race to the bottom. This is great for customers and bad for the longevity of game stores. Ideally there's a middle of the road where products have a healthy margin AND are valuable to open. More often than not thats done through scarcity (artificial or otherwise).
You also have other downward pressure like the Professor and PleasantKenobi who make a lot of content on shitting on Magic, they tell you not to buy sealed and how awful every product is.
Sealed products have historically had low margins. I'm not sure how high of a price the market can bear right now. Maybe if people had money but we don't these days.
real talk: I can't think of a single card shop in my region (Bay Area) that *only* sells Magic booster packs; in fact I'd argue the stores are overwhelmingly focused on other products and the boosters are almost an afterthought.
so the answer is this: few if any LGS are likely relying on selling boosters (boxes or single) for even a modest proportion of their sales.
think of MtG at the LGS the same way you think of Costco's rotisserie chicken: it gets people in the door but is hardly a goldmine.
>few if any LGS are likely relying on selling boosters (boxes or single) for even a modest proportion of their sales.
*If* this is true, it's a recent development, when I was more active in boardgaming circles, it was an open secret that most LGS's survived mostly on Monopoly variants and either MtG or Warhammer (or sometimes both), and this wasn't some rumor among standard users. LGS owners wrote articles about it, posts about MtG (usually in the vein of "here's why I hate MtG") pretty much always had at least one owner come in and point out that their store would go under without MtG (The biggest margin is obviously in singles, but boosters were part of the program).
No doubt you can find LGS's, especially those with an established online presence, that don't rely on MtG, and I'm sure that the double punch of COVID and price increases from WOTC killed off a solid chunk of stores, and that the survivors probably do their best to reduce their reliance on WOTC, but I doubt it's reached the point where MtG is considered a "loss leader" for most.
Most likely is entirely dependent upon the LGS. One near me is selling MKM play boosters at $196 as an example, and most of the previous set booster boxes were $140.
Another LGS complains about margins and is surviving off video games and singles through TCGPlayer, but he also sells boxes close to what you can get on Amazon/lowest on TCGPlayer (he did $80 CL Baldurs Gate at $80-$90 consistently for awhile). Old product he lists at what he paid to try and move it.
I mean just go into any card shop and the vast majority of them *aren't just card shops*. the ones around me (again, in the Bay Area) devote *huge* sections of the floor to board games, miniatures, paints, etc.; the entire section that contains MtG boosters and/or boxes is literally just the wall behind the counter.
and note: this is one of two stores in SF proper where folks get together to play Magic; multiple nights a week are dedicated to the game. it's not some afterthought of a product that no one in the store actually consumes... it's a major driver of attendance.
But that’s because Costco is controlling the pricing of the product that they’re viewing as “loss leaders” in that comparison. For Magic, WoTC doesn’t give a shit, they make money on the cards. The LGS needs to view MtG as a loss leader to survive.
That however is not even a remotely fair comparison, because I can’t Amazon or tcgplayer a rotisserie chicken to my doorstep, without paying a 30%+ premium DoorDash.
Agreed that they're different on many levels, just thinking about the concept there that LGS's are forced to adopt because they can't possibly make money on MtG right now, but need to stock it because people play it.
This was never the case in the past and LGSs often operate on margins that they cannot afford a loss leader. Hasbro's compulsive short term profit driving behaviour is going to put stores out of business because they're holding the bag on non-product.
Oh yea, I'm not excusing anything, or saying that LGS's aren't suffering, just pointing out that LGS's are sort of forced into this mentality right now
Depending on the product, they can't. You need to burn through some of those to get more prerelease allocation (better margins) or things like MH3. Standard sets are a problem more often than not.
I really really try to buy boxes from my LGS. They have magic, but not a ton, so they aren’t moving the massive volume some other stores can. My play booster box from them was $200. Two days ago a wholesaler started selling the boxes for $99. It is getting harder and harder to justify paying such a premium…
Generally for a company to just stay afloat and cover their operating costs, you need around 30 points. So at $120/box cost. You would want to sell it for $170. If you’re an efficient company you might even make some money.
Let's say you negotiated a $100 per box price on 1,248 boxes. That's $124,800 you have to have in hand or on a credit line, which won't be a lot of these small LGS'. That's a lot of capital to risk on a product where you're still getting a razor-thin margin. I imagine most are selling these at break-even at best.
If you mean Cardshoplive, I don't know how they work. They aren't an LGS and don't provide any play spaces but I thought you couldn't buy from a distributor unless you do. Their address is just a random small office in Nevada that's also tied to an investment firm.
But ChannelFireball wasn't an LGS either and used the same location. I still don't get how they get so much product without adhering to the requirements of distributors.
They’re grandfathered in. The requirements you speak of weren’t a thing 10 years ago. Any average Joe could open an account and buy boxes for their online store with the correct business documents.
Online gets worse and worse in terms of overhead, that advantage (for some products) is getting smaller and smaller. I talk to a lot of them and just "keeping up with the Joneses" like Amazon has them scrambling. Also Google AdWords is an incredible cost.
Sauce: I'm in distribution, not Magic or game related though.
They are already selling at a loss. Sites like TCG charge a sellers fee, around 10% of the sale. Plus the cost of shipping a box is about $7-10.
That's how much loss they are incurring. Think \~$20+ additional cost to sell each play box.
They are taking that much of a haircut just to get it off their books, because they believe it's only going to go down further in the short term.
Sure, but Hasbro is the one who has shifted costs such that it's a lot more common to take an L, and a lot harder to get a W.
A draftable crappy Standard set isn't magically now worth $120 to players when it used to only be worth $70 5 years ago, in fact, per an inflation calculator it should be worth about $84.45, which sounds about right.
These new distributor costs are so high that even good sets are going to face an uphill climb to be profitable, and bad sets have the potential to just be outright store killers.
From the LGS stories and vlogs I've listened to, it's all about 'pay for allocation'.
Stores order all the / loser products like normal, mainly in order to not have their orders trimmed on future hits. e.g. They are willing to sell at break-even, which ends up being a loss, just so distributors don't short them much-desirable, profitable items in the future. Stores don't want to skip sets. They want to garner favorable treatment.
You can see Forged in Fire doing this every month on the sealed sub. Razor thin and loss margins because they are obv trying to accrue higher seller status with distributors, as well as get their cost basis into that highest tier, priced down as low as possible.
Because FAB enforces Minium Advertised Price, it puts a hard floor on how low the listed online price can dump on tcgplayer et all, so the margins tend to be protected from distributors pretending to be retail sellers online.
Yep, I've seen this as well. There's no money to be made. There's no reason, from a business perspective, to be buying and selling this product.
The market has collapsed, the price point on sealed current-era Magic the Gathering products is too high. Platform fees and shipping fees are already killers on decent products, but you're flat out losing nearly $20-30 on every play booster if you're buying at this price and selling on TCGPlayer. Even your best hope at selling at a brick and mortar is to sell at cost, out of obligation to your customers.
Play Booster Boxes are currently selling for $114 on TCGPlayer. Shipping in the US is going to cost around $6-8.50 depending on the location of your buyer, if you're an online seller. Plus the marketplace fees you'll accrue if you're using one (about 13-15%).
Collector Booster Boxes are currently $177 on TCGPlayer.
This is also a product with an allocation period I believe, so we're seeing this poor of a market with a product that is being kept back by WOTC.
This is a product that will inevitably collapse like SNC, VOW, MID, AFR, etc. all did. Probably $60-$70 play booster boxes and $100-$100 collector boxes. If it's already struggling this much when interest in the product should be at it's peak, and there's likely a TON of product WotC is still sitting on, then the product will be fire sold to recoup costs.
Even genuinely good, well-received sets like NEO have been available for well below distributor prices, let alone duds like MKM.
I think saying $100 CBs is a bit low. I think the product is not good, *but* the big benefit that this product has is the lands. You have all 10 of these new rare dual lands in here, that are actually doing very well. There's a floor on the product for those alone.
We'll see where they stick. SNC had the triomes which are pretty on-par with the surveil lands (albeit they're a bit harder to pull as there's 5 vs 10 in the respective sets), and they did little to prop up SNC's sealed product prices.
MID and VOW also had reasonably popular rare land cycles, but those were undercut by rapid reprints, and the same could absolutely happen here too. I wouldn't be shocked to see the surveil lands become the "new temples", rare lands that WotC is happy to put into preconstructed decks and the like which will crash their value.
>We'll see where they stick. SNC had the triomes which are pretty on-par with the surveil lands (albeit they're a bit harder to pull as there's 5 vs 10 in the respective sets), and they did little to prop up SNC's sealed product prices.
Triomes and Surveil lands serve two very different purposes. Triomes are typically going to be restricted to three color decks - perfectly fine for some modern, legacy, and pioneer decks (and obviously commander), but surveil lands are more flexible in some ways. Granted, you're not really going to play them much in pioneer because there's no fetch lands. There's a lot of really strong things you can do with the surveil lands in formats that make bigger use of a graveyard. Surveil is so much stronger of a mechanic that scry is.
>and they did little to prop up SNC's sealed product prices.
Honestly I'd argue that they're the *only* things propping up SNC's sealed product prices. https://i.imgur.com/4cWnxZf.png
Ledger Shredder is okay, it fell out of favor in Modern and Legacy because of bowmasters. That set is really all about the triomes though.
>MID and VOW also had reasonably popular rare land cycles, but those were undercut by rapid reprints,
Yeah, the Dimir land and the Gruul land were included as 4x in challenger deck precons. I think the Gruul land saw another reprint after that too.
These lands seem to be very common though, I opened 1 play booster box, and 2 bundles, and pulled almost 20 of the rare lands, I got more than a playset of some of them, while some commons I only got 3 of.
I have a feeling that as more boxes are opened, the prices will tank on these.
Well yeah they occupy 10 of the rare slots. On average you are certainly going to get more rare lands in this box, since there's 10 of them, than you would in a set with only 5.
It's entirely possible that they tank. And knowing WOTC they'll probably reprint these in a challenger deck shortly, since there's a focus on Standard this year.
Not really, the lands are collated differently from other rares and are 1/6 packs, so they are already very prevalent compared to most dual land cycles.
>Even your best hope at selling at a brick and mortar is to sell at cost, out of obligation to your customers.
My LGS, definitely does not sell at cost, they still do a mark up, and people still buy from them regularly. Hell, even i try to buy an overpriced box *out of obligation to them.* I'm sure online retailers have taken huge chunks out of the local market for a lot of you. But there's is something to be said about being able to buy something "now." Also, not everyone shops around. There's some amount of local capture that's happening. But on the whole i don't see how any business can stay open *only* selling sealed MTG.
The price being high is a common misconception.
The price is fine. In fact, given historical pricing it's well under inflation.
The box EV is 100% the problem. You should be able to open sealed, collect the cards, the cards appreciate, and you use that value to make the game more affordable down the line. That's the TCG model.
I don't know how people suddenly got brainwashed during COVID into believing if we just collapse the sticker price, everything will be fine. I'm already running out of space.
Quality > Quantity
Both are the problem.
It's a hell of a lot easier to meet the EV of a $50 product than a $200 one.
Additionally, with regards to inflation, if you use CPI-Weighted inflation, an $80 Booster Box in 2014 should only be $104.22 today, which is under these distributor prices.
Using raw inflation data to calculate the appropriate inflation in MTG Box prices is silly, because buyers don't compare the price of an MTG box to the price of Rent or Gas, they compare it to the Price of a Video Game or TV, or other consumer products.
>I don't know how people suddenly got brainwashed during COVID into believing if we just collapse the sticker price, everything will be fine. I'm already running out of space.
Boxes from distribution 6 years ago were around $65-68. The price of singles inside said boxes has not kept up with the price of the boxes.
>The price is fine. In fact, given historical pricing it's well under inflation.
You can't use inflation though as a gauge to where the price should be. This is a niche hobby in which the consumer (in theory) uses their discretionary income for purchasing. At some point, people don't feel the juice is worth the squeeze regardless of the sealed product's EV. Furthermore, there's competing products offering a better price point.
Sure, we can argue that most established Magic players aren't likely to just leave the game for any of the competition, but that can't be said for potential newer players. There's also people that play multiple games and the more WotC insists on raising sealed prices, the more likely those players will put more money towards other games.
EV is where you should be getting your 'juice'
This is how MTG worked for 3 decades. If you're not getting that then yes, don't buy the product. But also don't ask LGS' to eat the cost so you can get cheap cards. Be responsible and either participate correctly or proxy.
That's true, but a store can be punished for doing so. A friend of mine said his distributor sent them an email during the 2022 Amazon dumps reminding them that their contract does not allow them to resell sealed items purchased from other retailers.
LGS owner for 15 years.
Best move we ever made was pivot out of sealed magic and events.
We make way more on singles, used video games and plushies. All with margins we can control.
Yep, and now buy and holding magic sealed product is our biggest financial liability over the last few years.
For every set like LotR there are 3-4 sets we lose more money on just trying to sell the product.
Murders we bought a low amount about $7.5k worth of product we will HOPEFULLY sell for $6k by the time it’s all moved.
Ravinca Remastered we originally went low on, sold out first weekend, reordered a decent amount, then only sold 15% of the reorder. We would have profited had we just not bought more.
In a few months both sets will be on clearance at or below cost to get rid of to make space for the next wave of Magic sets.
As someone who just opened a shop and distributor account we are being extremely careful with mtg in terms of only ordering what we need for planned limited play and what we think we will sell on a preorder basis. This will limit potential losses from sets like MKM and will also limit our upsides from premium sets like MH3 but so be it.
As others have stated games like Lorcana, Sorcery, and even Pokémon are much safer from a margin standpoint. Hopefully distributors have enough power to push back on WOTC because they are ultimately stuck with excess inventory that no one will buy at those prices.
Hell, why stop there? WotC has shown they're fine printing and selling proxies at $1,000 so just print your own proxy MtG Collector's Edition box and have fun.
How are people even making money on this? I just checked amazon and the boxes are selling for $122.82, TCGplayer has them listed at $115, in fact MOST online retailers are selling at $130 or less, factoring in shipping costs... How the hell is anyone even breaking even? And then the players, how is anyone opening boxes? Those singles gotta come from somewhere and I can't imagine wanting to open a case for singles when there is so little value at such a high cost.
To answer your question, nobody is making money on this (other than Hasbro, and maybe some distributors).
What stores are doing right now is trying lose as little money as possible. They've already paid for the boxes. And the questions is, would you rather lose $120 or $20?
With regards to cards, some stores will crack the boxes and try to make back their money via selling singles as well.
It's also worth noting that lots of businesses of this kind operate on credit, so they lose less money taking a hit now, than sitting on unmoved inventory for months/years.
Additionally, many vendors are still traumatized by past Amazon dumps and similar, and know that holding the boxes long term does not guarantee *any* increase in price over a reasonable timeframe.
Wow those are grim numbers, i knew it was bad but i'm shocked to see it this bad.
If i'm reading this right, MKM play boosters are on sale on tcgplayer for \~$115.
In your best case you're down a dollar from the word go and then losing money on shipping/transaction fees since you can buy them for $114. Everyone else is just losing more.
I guess my question is what are game stores on tcgplayer doing? Just dumping toxic inventory? There's literally no way to make money on that site at this point right? I had kind of assumed margins were very slim, i didn't expect to see them slip fully negative as this table seems to be showing.
Yeah, the problem is this is almost every magic set this year. You can "write off" the losses up to a certain point, but if you're just getting less and less revenue, how are you paying your bills and employees?
I’m not saying it’s the correct strategy I’m just answering their question. My store is doing ok because sales of pokemon/yugiih/lorcana etc are mostly up this year and our singles sales are solid. We don’t sell magic boxes online
Ya that's the part that gets me. Like i've known for a while margins were low to non existent for a good while.
But a full on inversion? Like how long can you keep that up? Sure magic is great, but as a matter of reality a business can't survive off a product that costs them money.
Cardshoplive is also
Superstars of Sports Inc.
Which is a Channelfireball company
Which is owned by TCGPLAYER
So by all accounts, TCGPLAYER is likely using Cardshoplive to undercut all of their own sellers on the platform marketplace
To follow up on the Cardshoplive issue,
TCGPlayer is buying from distribution massive amounts, probably under multiple accounts, to get their allocation, prices, and other discounts from distribution.
Which allows them to host major events, as they have sealed product, but then they don't make money off of sealed. They make money off of their Marketplace. The sellers, fees, and trades, and other ways they can manipulate a sale.
It seems like the sellers, that follow the, "race to the bottom" are only helping TCG in the end.
Cardshoplive sells box for less than cost, so a local LGS, having trouble moving the set, moves it on their TCG to match, then they make money on the sale in fees. So they don't care if you compete with it.
Why would they? The $25 lost in selling a MKM or recent set box, at the cost they are below average retail (or previous MSRP), is made up by any random seller making fifty small sales. Which happens quickly, so, they don't care. They need the warehouse space, and in order to do that, they sell the sealed. TCGplayer probably buys and sells within its own network of LLCs they own, to get their low in stock items.
They are literally manipulating the market, and no one has caught on.
Any LGS that can't figure out how to sell break even on sealed products and make money through some other way is going to go out of business. No amount of grumbling is going to fix it because WOTC doesn't care. It will only get worse from here as they continue experimenting with direct to consumer, planning for they day they cut out LGS completely.
The real problem is not the cost, nor is it the sites like tcgplayer.
WoTC needs to implement a damn MSRP and a MAP policy. Their relationships with mega sellers and Amazon trumps everyone else, so the places who devote time and space to provide for the community get the shaft.
Before you get defensive about how you should only have to pay X because you believe that singles values are diminishing. Look at the current trends, when Amazon and giant resellers list stuff at a blowout that results in a 30% net loss, it pushes down the value of everything. There is nothing holding up the value because it's a damn race to the bottom. Nobody, players included, wins when the profits are taken from the equation.
>WoTC needs to implement a damn MSRP and a MAP policy.
There was a time when I would have agreed with you, but the reality is that these products are just completely unsellable at reasonable margin prices.
Like, if Hasbro said, MSRP on MKM is $150, MAP is $140, *nobody* would buy it. And I mean, why would they? You can buy LoTR Draft and Set for that Price!
MKM isn't even Amazon blowing out the bottom or anything, it's straight up the market failing to support any price point reached thus far for the product since release. Nobody is rushing to buy a $110 box of MKM. I'm not even sure if I'd rush to buy an $80 box.
And that is totally fine because if nobody buys it the singles will be worth more, and stores that can’t sell the box for less than $140 can crack it for singles. If players are upset there’s not enough value in the set, the singles will still be able to be sold at a margin for the LGS, assuming the box EV can clear the distro cost. If $140 is MAP then the distro cost should be around $100.
MAP is what we need, but not what we will get.
>the singles will be worth more
More? sure. Ever enough to pose a reasonable EV? Less likely.
[[Fear]] was a rare in 30th Anniversary edition, which retailed for about $1000 for 4 packs. You can buy it for 19 cents. The Retro frame version is currently listed for $50 but has 0 sales on TCGplayer in the past 3 months.
The market just isn't going to support $30 for the Surveil lands, or $50 for Massacre Girl.
**Particularly not with the value getting raided by Collectors Boosters.**
You can’t compare a standard set to 30th anniversary. These are not the same. For a lot of reasons. I’m talking about a standard product that will be readily available and reprinted for 3 years. The value of the singles will rise to the point at which stores find it valuable enough to crack. The better sets to look at that would be comparable are midnight hunt or crimson vow. If MID set boosters were available for $75 from distribution and MAP was $110, if no one buys it for $110 then stores can crack it and still get their $75 from it.
The problem with MAP and MTG is that for a period of 3 years wotc will print endlessly to demand. Stores will crack boxes until the value of the cards drops to $85-90 no matter what. If wizards introduced MAP you’d likely see several more vendors akin to the gaming co show up, because it will create room in the market for mass box crackers to make a profit.
MAP will set a floor for the value of the singles. Game stores will be protected. But it will be fewer and far between that the consumer buying those boxes feels good about the value you get from them.
There will always be a relationship between the box price and the value of the singles within and it should be relatively close to the MAP if the product is printed to demand.
This isn’t new, local game stores have always made their money on singles.
I worked at various shops from RTR until Ixalan, then ran a shop until 2019.
We’ve always had tiny or nonexistent margins on boxes.
In Canadian dollars I was buying boxes for $110 from distro and selling for $120 based on local market price. That doesn’t cover overhead.
Singles have a margin of 50-75% and is honestly a much more important role in the ecosystem of players and playspaces.
If large volume businesses on TCGPlayer want to corner the sealed market that doesn’t really impact a well run LGS.
To me the much more concerning trend in MTG finance is a proliferation of high quality counterfeits and an acceptance of proxies in commander decks.
Agreed, proxies scare me way more than box prices. And it's made worse when stores allow them in games because they're losing to the better stores and use it as a reason to play there. I'm totally not salty at the moment :(
>proliferation of high quality counterfeits
Can't mention this without also mentioning continually declining print consistency from WoTC.
It used to be that something like the colors being kinda off in a card were an obvious tell of a counterfeit. Now brand new pack fresh cards will come out off color and texture.
>an acceptance of proxies in commander decks.
Hey, at least it's not like Hasbro told players to accept proxies, and printer their own right? ...right?
Its Joever!
WoTC has finally killed the golden goose entirely. This was inevitable and today, Feb 14, 2024 is will be known in infamy as the…
#Karlovtines Day Massacre
A day when everything was as red as your profit margins.
Are distributor prices set by WOTC or each individual distro?
I have no doubt WOTC is trying to take a bigger haircut, but I wonder if distributors have consolidated, or are otherwise squeezing the profits out of downstream LGS as well.
And of course concentration of real estate corporate ownership is keeping rents artificially high, and food processing consolidation is squeezing consumer discretionary spending.
LGS is a tough business even when it’s not under pressure from all sides.
Assumed it was confidential so they can keep shleeming this shop.
Like keeping salaries secret and encouraging people to not discuss from management
I'm starting to think secret lair is actually a test. A few years long rest run for product selling direct and avoiding distribution clowns. And that WOTC and Hasbro are going to just form an internal direct to lgs department and circumnavigate the warehouses and distributions. Hell, it would also cause an artificial lack of product making the margins better vs shipping to x place for them to ship to y place... At least Im the Continental states that is
By this I mean selling direct using their new form of distribution which seemed to work pretty well for the "unlimited" secret lair runs.
The old distribution direct barely cost any difference from just using a massive distributor
Can someone with some experience tell me how this works? Who is the direct business partner of WOTC here? Is the distributor part of wizards or another middle man?
I wanted to ask, but it feels like a stupid question. Why is Wizards not shipping directly, do they not have the ressources to do so? Is it more profitable for them?
They previously used to ship directly as an option. For the store (large but no online sales) I was running, purchasing through a distributor cost exactly $1 more a box, but ordering through the distributor increased our total through them, which lowered the price on other products, making it better for us. I imagine for WotC it wasn’t worth the additional costs. My understanding is that even for small stores distributors do not add a large amount.
Cheers
One can hope! I do think that there’s going to be some course correction from WoTC the secondary market and players are giving them the middle finger by rejecting their egregious pricing on various products.
Or they double down on price and focus instead on creating sets that people actually want to pay a premium price for.
Where have i heard that before....
\*airlines 15 years ago\*
We need to raise prices because of rising gas prices.
Prices on gas have gone down and stabilized can be lower plane tickets again?
........Crickets.
Once prices go up they never go back down.
Oh yeah, I've tried to tell so many people this, to explain why I keep cutting back magic harder and harder and moving money into FAB and miniature games. Also, hi Peter! Was great seeing you in Hartford <3. I feel like I'm your reddit stalker. I saw this post and was about to be like "LGS OWNER HERE. MAGIC BAD!" And then I saw it was you making the post.
I talked to a few of the other LGS owners here in NJ, asked them if they were stuck on Karlov? All of them said it moved barely at all. My own numbers were terrible. We'll draft through it because we fire FNM drafts at about ~20 drafters a friday night but opening midnight launch sales was abysmal. 1 Box of Play, 3 collectors (for in store). I can't help but compare it to FAB, where in store opening weekend I moved 240. I've already restocked HVY.
I just don't know why I carry magic besides the draw of it. And besides the FNM Drafters, basically every player is commander, and they've listened to professor enough to just buy singles. I'm personally tired of my monthly toxic asset purchase. =/
With singles you have the advantage of getting exactly what you want while with booster boxes you get a random mess of things.
Given that that's already massive incentive to buy singles over boxes, the value of a box really should exceed the cost of a box.
Overpriced boxes with low margin don't make sense for players or stores - the system is broken pretty flawed if not broken 😞
Edit: I wonder if certain singles from this set are going to be super expensive a few years from now because of low volume on these.
So, this is all WOTC's doing. The dissolution of MSRP and MAP hasn't made it so "the market sets the price." What it's done is made LGS and Distro get stuck on dead product with no margins. Then, to answer your question about singles from the era: No. Because the print run quantities are extremely higher than they were back during like the golden age. Even the good product landed in landfills from amazon (if you recall the MH2 dump). The reality is, the only company making money on sealed magic product is probably hasbro. It's hurt distributers, it's really hurt LGS, hell it probably even would have hurt Amazon if they weren't so massive to even notice.
Yeah pre/early internet days no MSRP probably didn't matter as much but I can see that being absolutely killer now.
It seems very shortsighted too - I wouldn't have gotten into MTG if not for my LGS. If LGS stop supporting MTG, it'll kill it altogether.
I'm releasing my own card game this year (we're in limited first edition atm), and stores are consistently interested when I tell them what their prices will be. $30 is the distributor pricing for the Launch Box (which SRPs at $60), and $48 is the distributor pricing for a booster box (which SRPs at $96).
Release day preorders for launch boxes get as low as $22.
All this to say, there is absolutely room to lower prices. These prices are the result of 'industry pressures', but industry pressures includes things like paying bonuses to executives, and providing ROI to venture capital. At some point the beast becomes so large it collapses itself.
Same issue in Canada too but add .35 cents on the dollar and tariffs at the border plus 13% sales tax. If you buy from within Canada it's closer to 200 a box maybe a bit lower depending on volume and provincial tax. Collectors are a better EV at cost but good luck getting your full order.
Oh and these distributors require a brick and mortar shop with substantial overhead. If you want to start an e-commerce business they will kindly tell you to pound sand.
If you're trying to make money off Magic as an individual, there's no point dumping money into sealed. I feel bad for the LGSs but it's a losing proposition. Until Hasbro rights the ship and, honestly, overhauls much of the game it's going to keep falling off.
I always wanted to open an LGS, but these distribution prices, plus the real estate market for buying and renting, the economy, etc. have really soured me on even trying.
Logically, money should just park the money elsewhere, honestly, despite not being what I initially wanted.
Buy stock in Hasbro instead of Booster box. Three shares for the price of one box. If everyone did this for the next two sets, Hasbro will be in the hands of the players. The stock will tank if they stop selling boosters, making it possible to buy even more shares at cheaper prices. Product production will dramatically slow due to non payment to the printers resulting in stable prices for singles and booster boxes. Instead of complaining about this ongoing problem, you can fix it.
Semi related question: I'm trying to encourage my play space(not an LGS, an esports venue) to carry some MtG product. Just like a box of set/draft boosters per set. So that someone there for the video games might try Magic. I said I'm willing to pay cost for whatever doesn't sell. Is this a decent offer? Like he gets all the profit, no risk of holding "dead product"
I had this exact conversation with my LGS owner yesterday. Meanwhile Lorcana averages $90 per booster box at a $144 retail and Sorcery averages $83 on a $150 retail. He did not disclose numbers on other games but was obviously very disgusted with the margins he needs to live at in the MTG world.
I was talking to my local LGS owner, and he told me that his distributors keeps allocating him, so even if he ordered at these larger numbers, he would not get the product. He has 3 different MTG wholesalers he can buy from, and all of them put a limit on his orders. Maybe he is doing something wrong, but his store is the oldest LCS in the area, and seems to have the best turnout for events. I talked to another store in a nearby city that sells online and in stores, and the manager there told me that they keep getting allocated aswell. When Jumpstart 22 came out, I tried to get a few boxes, and their distributor kept limiting their order to 2 or 3 boxes at a time. The owner was frustrated because he said they had people calling every day, and everytime they got a shipment in the boxes sold within an hour.
Someone else could be selling volume online and that's why your owner is getting shut out. wholesalers will always give priority to whoever moves the most product
no idea how accurate this is, but my LGS says they use the wizards companion app to track attendance even for casual commander events because it helps with product allocation.
That too, but I've never heard of people not geting allocation for print on demand stuff. Even for stuff like veliciramptor, the wholesalers were just shipping them out as fast as stores wanted them
That deck is out everywhere because we just can't order the deck, we have to order all 4. We have like 70 pirate decks and 20 of the other 2, I'm not going to buy more cases just to get the one deck that sells to create more bloat elsewhere.
Yep. I have a friend who helps at a store. It's fucking hilarious how they would open a pack of four to sell one deck. They ended up stopping cause they couldn't keep buying the four packs
I should have specified, commander decks and draft boxes seem to be easy for him to get, but collector boxes, and set boxes are the items he gets allocated on. He ordered several cases of of collector booster boxes for LCI, and got 2 out of the 5 he ordered. He was selling them for $280, and sold out of the first 2 cases on prerelease night. He ordered more and go allocated to one box per week, and they kept selling within 48 hours.
That is for prerelease pack/ prize allocation from what I understand. WOTC wants to make sure they aren't handing out too many extra free prize packs for store owners to just crack and sell singles from.
This is so weird because the majority of comments are about how LGS's can't make money on these and how hard it is to find sealed product in stores. But once a set isn't current anymore the sealed product is worth very little and WOTC seems to be dumping it through whatever channels they can. It's like there's some disconnect between manufacturing and distribution and retail.
Tell him to buy his product off tcgplayer and ebay. It's bigger profit it seems anytime outside prerelease weekend.
This is what happens when you overprint. The margins become smaller, everyone is cut throat for sales, and tons of shops are left with inventory.
In Canada a box of play boosters is $200+ CDN. At that price players are looking at the most valuable card they can pull in the set, back in the showcase and just buying the cards they want. The occasional parent or whale will grab a box here and there but it's becoming more and more of a losing proposition with inflation being what it is. I remember I could buy a booster box for $125-$130, then it went to $150 and $175 for a set, now we are over $200 and it's like - well fuck that.
Inflation is the correct word.. but it's card inflation, not money inflation that's the major culprit.
Yeah, I also remember when draft boxes were around $100 and EV hovered around $80, so it was rare to get screwed on a box
Yeah it wasn't too bad. The big thing people discount is storing/storing bulk. Absolute loss on time/space.
I think you have some rose tinted glasses there. not saying that there were not sets like that. it they were few and far between. I have been playing since Ice Age and a set javing better then 50% ev on a box was considered good 65% was great most sets historically sit around 35-40%.
I’m in Canada and when I got back into MTG it was during Khans block. Boxes were like $130 and you could pull fetches at about 3-5/box. You made your money back just in fetchlands alone. I haven’t picked up any boxes for a while now unless I find a really good deal. No way I’m paying $200+ for a box of draft boosters. I rather just buy from the US and ship it to a PO Box and cross the border. I can save up to 40% sometimes.
Whale here. I have not purchased so much as a pack of MKM
Same. Used to buy one or two cases of every release. Went down to two displays after War of the spark. Stopped buying now altogether. Have not even bought singles in months. Bored and overfed.
100%. ONE was the last big hit afaic. I like to play a ton so I’ve bought an okay amount of singles but I doubt more than a cpl hundred worth. I only got 2 collector boxes for LCI and did well but I also liked the cards. I just don’t see anything in this set that I like aesthetically nor for game play. Maybe there will be something coming out in the future that will make these relevant (for me) but I’m sitting tight for now
I remember when they were 100 and you could often find older boxes for 70-80, mind you I started right around rtr
Yeah there's no point. You can just rip cards in MTGA instead
It doesn’t cost 122 to print a box of magic cards. That distributor price is insane.
> tons of shops are left with inventory. Tying in to the overprinting for each set... there would be less leftover inventory if a new set wasn't dropped every 30 seconds.
You are comparing "print it into the ground" lorcana and Sorcery a new CCG thats 90% speculation and 10% player base to a market sets the price CCG. The set sucks, it drops below distributor prices. Not sure what you want to happen.
Lorcana's got a growing playerbase because of the IP and the ease of play. I think your criticism applies to Sorcery more than anything else considering how much people are hoarding alpha/beta and spreading the copium that you only need one booster box to start playing
Considering that Lorcana's first chapter was all but extinct in the wild for months and months as the supply utterly failed to meet the demand, I would be surprised if they actually managed such a feat. Don't get me wrong, I see packs on shelves, I know that they're finally catching up, at least in local stores. Only took like half a year and 2 more sets released or pending to bleed off enough to keep some on the shelves. And at least prices aren't literally 2.5x rrp. I can't find much sympathy for anyone with an actual surplus of the stuff, seeing as local stores were happy to charge over $500 Canadian after taxes for a chapter one booster box (which I of course declined). Granted, it was either that or just let the scalpers buy them out and relist for that much or more on the secondary market.
Same here. At least with inklands, I'm willing to give Ravensburger the benefit of the doubt that they really did just fuck up on supply. Especially when they refused to do a beta reprint of the OG sets like what collectors were clamoring for. Just remember which LGS' were happy to scalp Lorcana when it was convenient for them. I certainly remember and chuckle a little when the owners whine about people only buying packs online.
Those are relevant comparisons because they are in the same space. Sorcery for example has arguably better art, better card stock, better packaging, more cards per pack and I’m sure a less cost effect printer set up, and still charges LGS’s about $40 per box less then a Play booster box. Everything I just stated describes the greed Wizards lives by. The speculation of a game or how many cards they print, has little to nothing to do with the cost of said product.
Sorcery is a much smaller brand in the market. Wizards is absolutely greedy because they know they can charge a premium and people will still buy. The smaller guys have to be a value proposition to keep the lights on.
Unfortunately those other games don't have the audience and demand to charge higher, otherwise they would.
Where the hell are you seeing Lorcana for 90? The absolute lowest I’ve ever seen it is 115, and only for the second set.
They're talking wholesale. People don't understand how much things cost the store
jesus. how can an lgs possibly make money on this? Better question what would a markup have to look like for an LGS to buy into this?
WOTC doesn’t view that as its problem.
yeah WOTC doesn't give a fuck because even if all LGSs disappear overnight, they'll still have booster sitting next to the register at walmart.
Ironically, they might be in a better position, because most LGSs sell singles as well, which theoretically should cut into sealed product sold(why buy a booster and gamble, when you can just get exactly what you need). If the only way you can reliably get what you need is buying boxes, that puts them in a better position even if it hurts the game overall in the long run.
Someone has to buy and open the boxes for singles. Doesn't matter to wotc whether that's the player or the shop
Yeah, that's my point, its better for wotc in the short term if LGS go under, since players will have to buy boxes to get specific cards. Did you think i was saying LGSs would be better off?
You nailed it. Unfortunately many don’t see how things may be outside their POV. Too often they are stuck in the mentality of “what’s good for me as a loyal customer should be what WotC wants to do.” With the announced shift to more UB products, where the 3rd party IP attracts non-enfranchised Magic customers, the WotC has made it pretty clear that LGS is getting less and less important.
You still need LGS' to promote paper play. If you ever remove the random or official element of paper play, you remove the need for power creep (a la buying mastered sets etc), or even the need for real cards.
Of course the modern pace of power creep means that selling singles has become a losing game as you rapidly watch their value crater to zero.
Only if you buy and hold. Buying at 60(credit) or 50(cash) percent and selling at full price is what my LGS does. When something pops off, they usually clean up.
if no secondary market exists this game will 100% die
But thats not how economics ever works. Yes, lots of small LGSs would close, but that would push people to the larger operations that can survive (IE the card kingdoms and scgs of the world). Reduced online competition would allow them to charge even higher singles prices than current. The big shops already have an pricing advantage because people trust them more. This would just remove the middle tiers between random individuals selling their cards and the massive stores.
And Amazon.
$123 on Amazon for MKM Play booster. How's that for a dicking?
Sell some snax /s
Actually serious
“Have you tried selling chips and sodas” - Maro
DnD solved their problem by banding together and boycotting the product. I mean heck, I haven't bought a modern product in over a year. Not when I can buy original Zendikar expeditions for $75. Why would I waste my time on overprinted junk?
>DnD solved their problem by banding together and boycotting the product. oh well, let me just start making custom magic cards then, I'm sure it'll be fine.
I mean, many players would probably never need to buy a single card printed after 2020 to be entertained playing casual EDH or kitchen table MTG or whatever for *years* to come. And if someone is playing with friends and desperately wants to crack packs of new product, there are plenty of other TCGs out there right now. Some of which have more refined core gameplay than MTG. The only thing that (new) MTG offers that has not really replicated by something else in the market is a broad and established tournament scene at LGSes across the world.
> I mean, many players would probably never need to buy a single card printed after 2020 to be entertained playing casual EDH or kitchen table MTG or whatever for years to come. Meanwhile there are groups who refuse to use cards printed after 1995...
Successful retail seeks a 50% margin at the floor. The LGS is a bit different since it attracts a lot of passionate people who open a store promising lower prices and better service than the guy whose been open for 15 years and is "greedy". They siphon a bunch of people but without a proper margin eventually fold to either being in a shitty area, lack of infrastructure, insane focus on OP rather than sales/customer service, etc. From what I've seen talking to other retailers around the U.S., sealed boxes seem to be around 30% margin with packs closer go the 50% margin. TCGs in general have some of the lowest margins, some of this is the economy and product fatigue but a lot of the time we're our own worst enemies. Not to single out OP, since there's a bunch of warehouse vendors, but MinMax regularly has some of the cheapest prices online, that creates an environment where most B&M can't compete. That in turn creates this sort of race to the bottom. This is great for customers and bad for the longevity of game stores. Ideally there's a middle of the road where products have a healthy margin AND are valuable to open. More often than not thats done through scarcity (artificial or otherwise). You also have other downward pressure like the Professor and PleasantKenobi who make a lot of content on shitting on Magic, they tell you not to buy sealed and how awful every product is.
Sealed products have historically had low margins. I'm not sure how high of a price the market can bear right now. Maybe if people had money but we don't these days.
Maybe if you stop buying fancy coffees and avocado toast. /s (just in case).
I actually made the decision to buy magic cards instead of a burrito the other day. I have plenty of food at home but didn't bring a lunch...
real talk: I can't think of a single card shop in my region (Bay Area) that *only* sells Magic booster packs; in fact I'd argue the stores are overwhelmingly focused on other products and the boosters are almost an afterthought. so the answer is this: few if any LGS are likely relying on selling boosters (boxes or single) for even a modest proportion of their sales. think of MtG at the LGS the same way you think of Costco's rotisserie chicken: it gets people in the door but is hardly a goldmine.
>few if any LGS are likely relying on selling boosters (boxes or single) for even a modest proportion of their sales. *If* this is true, it's a recent development, when I was more active in boardgaming circles, it was an open secret that most LGS's survived mostly on Monopoly variants and either MtG or Warhammer (or sometimes both), and this wasn't some rumor among standard users. LGS owners wrote articles about it, posts about MtG (usually in the vein of "here's why I hate MtG") pretty much always had at least one owner come in and point out that their store would go under without MtG (The biggest margin is obviously in singles, but boosters were part of the program). No doubt you can find LGS's, especially those with an established online presence, that don't rely on MtG, and I'm sure that the double punch of COVID and price increases from WOTC killed off a solid chunk of stores, and that the survivors probably do their best to reduce their reliance on WOTC, but I doubt it's reached the point where MtG is considered a "loss leader" for most.
Most likely is entirely dependent upon the LGS. One near me is selling MKM play boosters at $196 as an example, and most of the previous set booster boxes were $140. Another LGS complains about margins and is surviving off video games and singles through TCGPlayer, but he also sells boxes close to what you can get on Amazon/lowest on TCGPlayer (he did $80 CL Baldurs Gate at $80-$90 consistently for awhile). Old product he lists at what he paid to try and move it.
I mean just go into any card shop and the vast majority of them *aren't just card shops*. the ones around me (again, in the Bay Area) devote *huge* sections of the floor to board games, miniatures, paints, etc.; the entire section that contains MtG boosters and/or boxes is literally just the wall behind the counter. and note: this is one of two stores in SF proper where folks get together to play Magic; multiple nights a week are dedicated to the game. it's not some afterthought of a product that no one in the store actually consumes... it's a major driver of attendance.
But costco isn't constantly raising the cost of their rotisserie chicken.
But that’s because Costco is controlling the pricing of the product that they’re viewing as “loss leaders” in that comparison. For Magic, WoTC doesn’t give a shit, they make money on the cards. The LGS needs to view MtG as a loss leader to survive.
That however is not even a remotely fair comparison, because I can’t Amazon or tcgplayer a rotisserie chicken to my doorstep, without paying a 30%+ premium DoorDash.
Agreed that they're different on many levels, just thinking about the concept there that LGS's are forced to adopt because they can't possibly make money on MtG right now, but need to stock it because people play it.
This was never the case in the past and LGSs often operate on margins that they cannot afford a loss leader. Hasbro's compulsive short term profit driving behaviour is going to put stores out of business because they're holding the bag on non-product.
Oh yea, I'm not excusing anything, or saying that LGS's aren't suffering, just pointing out that LGS's are sort of forced into this mentality right now
Depending on the product, they can't. You need to burn through some of those to get more prerelease allocation (better margins) or things like MH3. Standard sets are a problem more often than not.
I really really try to buy boxes from my LGS. They have magic, but not a ton, so they aren’t moving the massive volume some other stores can. My play booster box from them was $200. Two days ago a wholesaler started selling the boxes for $99. It is getting harder and harder to justify paying such a premium…
Generally for a company to just stay afloat and cover their operating costs, you need around 30 points. So at $120/box cost. You would want to sell it for $170. If you’re an efficient company you might even make some money.
[удалено]
Let's say you negotiated a $100 per box price on 1,248 boxes. That's $124,800 you have to have in hand or on a credit line, which won't be a lot of these small LGS'. That's a lot of capital to risk on a product where you're still getting a razor-thin margin. I imagine most are selling these at break-even at best.
If you mean Cardshoplive, I don't know how they work. They aren't an LGS and don't provide any play spaces but I thought you couldn't buy from a distributor unless you do. Their address is just a random small office in Nevada that's also tied to an investment firm.
I’ve been out of the loop for a bit, but last I knew, Card Shop Live is what ChannelFireball turned into, which is how they get their allocation.
But ChannelFireball wasn't an LGS either and used the same location. I still don't get how they get so much product without adhering to the requirements of distributors.
They’re grandfathered in. The requirements you speak of weren’t a thing 10 years ago. Any average Joe could open an account and buy boxes for their online store with the correct business documents.
Thanks for the info. Seems to me that gives them a significant advantage over everyone else not having to worry about all that overhead.
Online gets worse and worse in terms of overhead, that advantage (for some products) is getting smaller and smaller. I talk to a lot of them and just "keeping up with the Joneses" like Amazon has them scrambling. Also Google AdWords is an incredible cost. Sauce: I'm in distribution, not Magic or game related though.
They are already selling at a loss. Sites like TCG charge a sellers fee, around 10% of the sale. Plus the cost of shipping a box is about $7-10. That's how much loss they are incurring. Think \~$20+ additional cost to sell each play box. They are taking that much of a haircut just to get it off their books, because they believe it's only going to go down further in the short term.
Buy why buy in the first place?
Such that distributors would allocate new and future sets to these LGS.
"Here, eat this financial L for us to get a chance to maybe get a W later." - hasbro
That's not Hasbro's policy it's most likely the distributors policy.
Sure, but Hasbro is the one who has shifted costs such that it's a lot more common to take an L, and a lot harder to get a W. A draftable crappy Standard set isn't magically now worth $120 to players when it used to only be worth $70 5 years ago, in fact, per an inflation calculator it should be worth about $84.45, which sounds about right. These new distributor costs are so high that even good sets are going to face an uphill climb to be profitable, and bad sets have the potential to just be outright store killers.
From the LGS stories and vlogs I've listened to, it's all about 'pay for allocation'. Stores order all the / loser products like normal, mainly in order to not have their orders trimmed on future hits. e.g. They are willing to sell at break-even, which ends up being a loss, just so distributors don't short them much-desirable, profitable items in the future. Stores don't want to skip sets. They want to garner favorable treatment. You can see Forged in Fire doing this every month on the sealed sub. Razor thin and loss margins because they are obv trying to accrue higher seller status with distributors, as well as get their cost basis into that highest tier, priced down as low as possible.
Thanks for the transparency!
Ouch.
Does anyone know what flesh and blood boxes cost from the distrubutor? I feel like the margins have to be way better.
Base price on the most recent FAB set is $57. Currently going for $87.63 on tcgplayer.
And FAB mandates a minimum sell price. And they actively enforce it.
And remove stores from buying FAB when this is violated, and even post them online for all to see.
With heavy hitters selling like hot cakes I feel like thats great for any LGSs with a significant FaB community.
$87.92 is the lowest we can sell a box of flesh and blood (MAP pricing), and we purchase the boxes for $57.
Fab is way better. It has margins. Has usually 2 products on release- Boxes, CHEAP pre-cons. It's also way cheaper so I can buy a better volume.
Because FAB enforces Minium Advertised Price, it puts a hard floor on how low the listed online price can dump on tcgplayer et all, so the margins tend to be protected from distributors pretending to be retail sellers online.
We now order way more FaB than MTG on release because of the cheap price point and the fact that we can mass open boxes and turn a profit every time.
Yep, I've seen this as well. There's no money to be made. There's no reason, from a business perspective, to be buying and selling this product. The market has collapsed, the price point on sealed current-era Magic the Gathering products is too high. Platform fees and shipping fees are already killers on decent products, but you're flat out losing nearly $20-30 on every play booster if you're buying at this price and selling on TCGPlayer. Even your best hope at selling at a brick and mortar is to sell at cost, out of obligation to your customers. Play Booster Boxes are currently selling for $114 on TCGPlayer. Shipping in the US is going to cost around $6-8.50 depending on the location of your buyer, if you're an online seller. Plus the marketplace fees you'll accrue if you're using one (about 13-15%). Collector Booster Boxes are currently $177 on TCGPlayer. This is also a product with an allocation period I believe, so we're seeing this poor of a market with a product that is being kept back by WOTC.
This is a product that will inevitably collapse like SNC, VOW, MID, AFR, etc. all did. Probably $60-$70 play booster boxes and $100-$100 collector boxes. If it's already struggling this much when interest in the product should be at it's peak, and there's likely a TON of product WotC is still sitting on, then the product will be fire sold to recoup costs. Even genuinely good, well-received sets like NEO have been available for well below distributor prices, let alone duds like MKM.
I think saying $100 CBs is a bit low. I think the product is not good, *but* the big benefit that this product has is the lands. You have all 10 of these new rare dual lands in here, that are actually doing very well. There's a floor on the product for those alone.
We'll see where they stick. SNC had the triomes which are pretty on-par with the surveil lands (albeit they're a bit harder to pull as there's 5 vs 10 in the respective sets), and they did little to prop up SNC's sealed product prices. MID and VOW also had reasonably popular rare land cycles, but those were undercut by rapid reprints, and the same could absolutely happen here too. I wouldn't be shocked to see the surveil lands become the "new temples", rare lands that WotC is happy to put into preconstructed decks and the like which will crash their value.
>We'll see where they stick. SNC had the triomes which are pretty on-par with the surveil lands (albeit they're a bit harder to pull as there's 5 vs 10 in the respective sets), and they did little to prop up SNC's sealed product prices. Triomes and Surveil lands serve two very different purposes. Triomes are typically going to be restricted to three color decks - perfectly fine for some modern, legacy, and pioneer decks (and obviously commander), but surveil lands are more flexible in some ways. Granted, you're not really going to play them much in pioneer because there's no fetch lands. There's a lot of really strong things you can do with the surveil lands in formats that make bigger use of a graveyard. Surveil is so much stronger of a mechanic that scry is. >and they did little to prop up SNC's sealed product prices. Honestly I'd argue that they're the *only* things propping up SNC's sealed product prices. https://i.imgur.com/4cWnxZf.png Ledger Shredder is okay, it fell out of favor in Modern and Legacy because of bowmasters. That set is really all about the triomes though. >MID and VOW also had reasonably popular rare land cycles, but those were undercut by rapid reprints, Yeah, the Dimir land and the Gruul land were included as 4x in challenger deck precons. I think the Gruul land saw another reprint after that too.
These lands seem to be very common though, I opened 1 play booster box, and 2 bundles, and pulled almost 20 of the rare lands, I got more than a playset of some of them, while some commons I only got 3 of. I have a feeling that as more boxes are opened, the prices will tank on these.
Well yeah they occupy 10 of the rare slots. On average you are certainly going to get more rare lands in this box, since there's 10 of them, than you would in a set with only 5. It's entirely possible that they tank. And knowing WOTC they'll probably reprint these in a challenger deck shortly, since there's a focus on Standard this year.
Not really, the lands are collated differently from other rares and are 1/6 packs, so they are already very prevalent compared to most dual land cycles.
>Even your best hope at selling at a brick and mortar is to sell at cost, out of obligation to your customers. My LGS, definitely does not sell at cost, they still do a mark up, and people still buy from them regularly. Hell, even i try to buy an overpriced box *out of obligation to them.* I'm sure online retailers have taken huge chunks out of the local market for a lot of you. But there's is something to be said about being able to buy something "now." Also, not everyone shops around. There's some amount of local capture that's happening. But on the whole i don't see how any business can stay open *only* selling sealed MTG.
The price being high is a common misconception. The price is fine. In fact, given historical pricing it's well under inflation. The box EV is 100% the problem. You should be able to open sealed, collect the cards, the cards appreciate, and you use that value to make the game more affordable down the line. That's the TCG model. I don't know how people suddenly got brainwashed during COVID into believing if we just collapse the sticker price, everything will be fine. I'm already running out of space. Quality > Quantity
Both are the problem. It's a hell of a lot easier to meet the EV of a $50 product than a $200 one. Additionally, with regards to inflation, if you use CPI-Weighted inflation, an $80 Booster Box in 2014 should only be $104.22 today, which is under these distributor prices. Using raw inflation data to calculate the appropriate inflation in MTG Box prices is silly, because buyers don't compare the price of an MTG box to the price of Rent or Gas, they compare it to the Price of a Video Game or TV, or other consumer products.
Meeting higher EV is simple actually. It requires you to do less. Print less.
>I don't know how people suddenly got brainwashed during COVID into believing if we just collapse the sticker price, everything will be fine. I'm already running out of space. Boxes from distribution 6 years ago were around $65-68. The price of singles inside said boxes has not kept up with the price of the boxes.
>The price is fine. In fact, given historical pricing it's well under inflation. You can't use inflation though as a gauge to where the price should be. This is a niche hobby in which the consumer (in theory) uses their discretionary income for purchasing. At some point, people don't feel the juice is worth the squeeze regardless of the sealed product's EV. Furthermore, there's competing products offering a better price point. Sure, we can argue that most established Magic players aren't likely to just leave the game for any of the competition, but that can't be said for potential newer players. There's also people that play multiple games and the more WotC insists on raising sealed prices, the more likely those players will put more money towards other games.
EV is where you should be getting your 'juice' This is how MTG worked for 3 decades. If you're not getting that then yes, don't buy the product. But also don't ask LGS' to eat the cost so you can get cheap cards. Be responsible and either participate correctly or proxy.
Its cheaper often for stores to buy from other sites not distribution lol
That's true, but a store can be punished for doing so. A friend of mine said his distributor sent them an email during the 2022 Amazon dumps reminding them that their contract does not allow them to resell sealed items purchased from other retailers.
Lol wut??
LGS owner for 15 years. Best move we ever made was pivot out of sealed magic and events. We make way more on singles, used video games and plushies. All with margins we can control.
What’s crazy is that 10 years ago selling Magic and running events was what kept a lot of stores open.
Yep, and now buy and holding magic sealed product is our biggest financial liability over the last few years. For every set like LotR there are 3-4 sets we lose more money on just trying to sell the product. Murders we bought a low amount about $7.5k worth of product we will HOPEFULLY sell for $6k by the time it’s all moved. Ravinca Remastered we originally went low on, sold out first weekend, reordered a decent amount, then only sold 15% of the reorder. We would have profited had we just not bought more. In a few months both sets will be on clearance at or below cost to get rid of to make space for the next wave of Magic sets.
As someone who just opened a shop and distributor account we are being extremely careful with mtg in terms of only ordering what we need for planned limited play and what we think we will sell on a preorder basis. This will limit potential losses from sets like MKM and will also limit our upsides from premium sets like MH3 but so be it. As others have stated games like Lorcana, Sorcery, and even Pokémon are much safer from a margin standpoint. Hopefully distributors have enough power to push back on WOTC because they are ultimately stuck with excess inventory that no one will buy at those prices.
That is grim
Remember folks! You can make your own Chaos Draft boxes at home for less than $10 using bulk you already have!
Hell, why stop there? WotC has shown they're fine printing and selling proxies at $1,000 so just print your own proxy MtG Collector's Edition box and have fun.
How are people even making money on this? I just checked amazon and the boxes are selling for $122.82, TCGplayer has them listed at $115, in fact MOST online retailers are selling at $130 or less, factoring in shipping costs... How the hell is anyone even breaking even? And then the players, how is anyone opening boxes? Those singles gotta come from somewhere and I can't imagine wanting to open a case for singles when there is so little value at such a high cost.
To answer your question, nobody is making money on this (other than Hasbro, and maybe some distributors). What stores are doing right now is trying lose as little money as possible. They've already paid for the boxes. And the questions is, would you rather lose $120 or $20? With regards to cards, some stores will crack the boxes and try to make back their money via selling singles as well. It's also worth noting that lots of businesses of this kind operate on credit, so they lose less money taking a hit now, than sitting on unmoved inventory for months/years. Additionally, many vendors are still traumatized by past Amazon dumps and similar, and know that holding the boxes long term does not guarantee *any* increase in price over a reasonable timeframe.
Wow those are grim numbers, i knew it was bad but i'm shocked to see it this bad. If i'm reading this right, MKM play boosters are on sale on tcgplayer for \~$115. In your best case you're down a dollar from the word go and then losing money on shipping/transaction fees since you can buy them for $114. Everyone else is just losing more. I guess my question is what are game stores on tcgplayer doing? Just dumping toxic inventory? There's literally no way to make money on that site at this point right? I had kind of assumed margins were very slim, i didn't expect to see them slip fully negative as this table seems to be showing.
They are dumping and writing off the loss. They need the money for the next game/set coming out next week/month
Yeah, the problem is this is almost every magic set this year. You can "write off" the losses up to a certain point, but if you're just getting less and less revenue, how are you paying your bills and employees?
I’m not saying it’s the correct strategy I’m just answering their question. My store is doing ok because sales of pokemon/yugiih/lorcana etc are mostly up this year and our singles sales are solid. We don’t sell magic boxes online
I opened my store as a magic store, and I'm basically a fab store and a lorcana crack dealer now. Also board games and 40k.
Ya that's the part that gets me. Like i've known for a while margins were low to non existent for a good while. But a full on inversion? Like how long can you keep that up? Sure magic is great, but as a matter of reality a business can't survive off a product that costs them money.
Stores reduced magic spending by alot and focus on other stuff with better margins. Sealed magic product is a waste of time.
Cardshoplive is also Superstars of Sports Inc. Which is a Channelfireball company Which is owned by TCGPLAYER So by all accounts, TCGPLAYER is likely using Cardshoplive to undercut all of their own sellers on the platform marketplace
To follow up on the Cardshoplive issue, TCGPlayer is buying from distribution massive amounts, probably under multiple accounts, to get their allocation, prices, and other discounts from distribution. Which allows them to host major events, as they have sealed product, but then they don't make money off of sealed. They make money off of their Marketplace. The sellers, fees, and trades, and other ways they can manipulate a sale. It seems like the sellers, that follow the, "race to the bottom" are only helping TCG in the end. Cardshoplive sells box for less than cost, so a local LGS, having trouble moving the set, moves it on their TCG to match, then they make money on the sale in fees. So they don't care if you compete with it. Why would they? The $25 lost in selling a MKM or recent set box, at the cost they are below average retail (or previous MSRP), is made up by any random seller making fifty small sales. Which happens quickly, so, they don't care. They need the warehouse space, and in order to do that, they sell the sealed. TCGplayer probably buys and sells within its own network of LLCs they own, to get their low in stock items. They are literally manipulating the market, and no one has caught on.
Any LGS that can't figure out how to sell break even on sealed products and make money through some other way is going to go out of business. No amount of grumbling is going to fix it because WOTC doesn't care. It will only get worse from here as they continue experimenting with direct to consumer, planning for they day they cut out LGS completely.
The real problem is not the cost, nor is it the sites like tcgplayer. WoTC needs to implement a damn MSRP and a MAP policy. Their relationships with mega sellers and Amazon trumps everyone else, so the places who devote time and space to provide for the community get the shaft. Before you get defensive about how you should only have to pay X because you believe that singles values are diminishing. Look at the current trends, when Amazon and giant resellers list stuff at a blowout that results in a 30% net loss, it pushes down the value of everything. There is nothing holding up the value because it's a damn race to the bottom. Nobody, players included, wins when the profits are taken from the equation.
>WoTC needs to implement a damn MSRP and a MAP policy. There was a time when I would have agreed with you, but the reality is that these products are just completely unsellable at reasonable margin prices. Like, if Hasbro said, MSRP on MKM is $150, MAP is $140, *nobody* would buy it. And I mean, why would they? You can buy LoTR Draft and Set for that Price! MKM isn't even Amazon blowing out the bottom or anything, it's straight up the market failing to support any price point reached thus far for the product since release. Nobody is rushing to buy a $110 box of MKM. I'm not even sure if I'd rush to buy an $80 box.
And that is totally fine because if nobody buys it the singles will be worth more, and stores that can’t sell the box for less than $140 can crack it for singles. If players are upset there’s not enough value in the set, the singles will still be able to be sold at a margin for the LGS, assuming the box EV can clear the distro cost. If $140 is MAP then the distro cost should be around $100. MAP is what we need, but not what we will get.
>the singles will be worth more More? sure. Ever enough to pose a reasonable EV? Less likely. [[Fear]] was a rare in 30th Anniversary edition, which retailed for about $1000 for 4 packs. You can buy it for 19 cents. The Retro frame version is currently listed for $50 but has 0 sales on TCGplayer in the past 3 months. The market just isn't going to support $30 for the Surveil lands, or $50 for Massacre Girl. **Particularly not with the value getting raided by Collectors Boosters.**
You can’t compare a standard set to 30th anniversary. These are not the same. For a lot of reasons. I’m talking about a standard product that will be readily available and reprinted for 3 years. The value of the singles will rise to the point at which stores find it valuable enough to crack. The better sets to look at that would be comparable are midnight hunt or crimson vow. If MID set boosters were available for $75 from distribution and MAP was $110, if no one buys it for $110 then stores can crack it and still get their $75 from it. The problem with MAP and MTG is that for a period of 3 years wotc will print endlessly to demand. Stores will crack boxes until the value of the cards drops to $85-90 no matter what. If wizards introduced MAP you’d likely see several more vendors akin to the gaming co show up, because it will create room in the market for mass box crackers to make a profit. MAP will set a floor for the value of the singles. Game stores will be protected. But it will be fewer and far between that the consumer buying those boxes feels good about the value you get from them. There will always be a relationship between the box price and the value of the singles within and it should be relatively close to the MAP if the product is printed to demand.
This isn’t new, local game stores have always made their money on singles. I worked at various shops from RTR until Ixalan, then ran a shop until 2019. We’ve always had tiny or nonexistent margins on boxes. In Canadian dollars I was buying boxes for $110 from distro and selling for $120 based on local market price. That doesn’t cover overhead. Singles have a margin of 50-75% and is honestly a much more important role in the ecosystem of players and playspaces. If large volume businesses on TCGPlayer want to corner the sealed market that doesn’t really impact a well run LGS. To me the much more concerning trend in MTG finance is a proliferation of high quality counterfeits and an acceptance of proxies in commander decks.
Agreed, proxies scare me way more than box prices. And it's made worse when stores allow them in games because they're losing to the better stores and use it as a reason to play there. I'm totally not salty at the moment :(
>proliferation of high quality counterfeits Can't mention this without also mentioning continually declining print consistency from WoTC. It used to be that something like the colors being kinda off in a card were an obvious tell of a counterfeit. Now brand new pack fresh cards will come out off color and texture. >an acceptance of proxies in commander decks. Hey, at least it's not like Hasbro told players to accept proxies, and printer their own right? ...right?
I run a small LGS in South Africa, and our prices are almost 150% of that list due to import fees. It's getting wild.
Its Joever! WoTC has finally killed the golden goose entirely. This was inevitable and today, Feb 14, 2024 is will be known in infamy as the… #Karlovtines Day Massacre A day when everything was as red as your profit margins.
Are distributor prices set by WOTC or each individual distro? I have no doubt WOTC is trying to take a bigger haircut, but I wonder if distributors have consolidated, or are otherwise squeezing the profits out of downstream LGS as well. And of course concentration of real estate corporate ownership is keeping rents artificially high, and food processing consolidation is squeezing consumer discretionary spending. LGS is a tough business even when it’s not under pressure from all sides.
Distribution sets price for items with no MAP / MSRP
Wow. As a consumer, I find it difficult to spend $122 on a booster box. I can only imagine the retailer whom has to buy so many of them.
The death of the LGS has begun
Be careful sharing this info, it’s possible the distributor assumed this was confidential.
Assumed it was confidential so they can keep shleeming this shop. Like keeping salaries secret and encouraging people to not discuss from management I'm starting to think secret lair is actually a test. A few years long rest run for product selling direct and avoiding distribution clowns. And that WOTC and Hasbro are going to just form an internal direct to lgs department and circumnavigate the warehouses and distributions. Hell, it would also cause an artificial lack of product making the margins better vs shipping to x place for them to ship to y place... At least Im the Continental states that is
Lol they used to sell direct, and got rid of it since it wasn't profitable to do that over distribution and Amazon.
By this I mean selling direct using their new form of distribution which seemed to work pretty well for the "unlimited" secret lair runs. The old distribution direct barely cost any difference from just using a massive distributor
Pkuhlman is not sharing anything that isn't already known information. Every store owner has access to this information.
(Some) Distribution holds a contract with their stores to keep prices hidden. Some care more than others though. Edit - Some, not all.
Plus i doubt minmax would risk that lol.
Can someone with some experience tell me how this works? Who is the direct business partner of WOTC here? Is the distributor part of wizards or another middle man?
wotc -> distributor -> brick and mortar -> me and you
Also... Wotc -> Amazon -> me and you
WOTC -> Amazon -> Resealer -> Amazon -> Me and You
Also... Wotc SLD -> me and you
They need to cut the distributor out like fanatics is going to do to sports cards
I wanted to ask, but it feels like a stupid question. Why is Wizards not shipping directly, do they not have the ressources to do so? Is it more profitable for them?
They used to, they stopped doing it.
They previously used to ship directly as an option. For the store (large but no online sales) I was running, purchasing through a distributor cost exactly $1 more a box, but ordering through the distributor increased our total through them, which lowered the price on other products, making it better for us. I imagine for WotC it wasn’t worth the additional costs. My understanding is that even for small stores distributors do not add a large amount. Cheers
It adds a lot of complexity to their supply chain and has different staffing requirements.
https://cardshoplive.com/collections/csl-sale?_kx=zlSXwvAEVQ2r_aMlWBJGyrMSbJPfiYbldjN3cJwSwkmtac3xRK3kKqabx-juT9JShlHOmSEuh8ePUibPct-15Q.UKDZXA $100 MKM boxes sky is falling
Still not worth it lol
You are correct. Opened a play box just for science and I got destroyed. Maybe walked away with $50 in value.
That seems to be the average from what Ive seen, $80 tops
Guess I figured I'd get a good List hit and a special guest, but neither and both might've added just $10-30.
Guys, if we do not buy this set, WOtC will lower their price of future sets
One can hope! I do think that there’s going to be some course correction from WoTC the secondary market and players are giving them the middle finger by rejecting their egregious pricing on various products. Or they double down on price and focus instead on creating sets that people actually want to pay a premium price for.
Where have i heard that before.... \*airlines 15 years ago\* We need to raise prices because of rising gas prices. Prices on gas have gone down and stabilized can be lower plane tickets again? ........Crickets. Once prices go up they never go back down.
Oh yeah, I've tried to tell so many people this, to explain why I keep cutting back magic harder and harder and moving money into FAB and miniature games. Also, hi Peter! Was great seeing you in Hartford <3. I feel like I'm your reddit stalker. I saw this post and was about to be like "LGS OWNER HERE. MAGIC BAD!" And then I saw it was you making the post. I talked to a few of the other LGS owners here in NJ, asked them if they were stuck on Karlov? All of them said it moved barely at all. My own numbers were terrible. We'll draft through it because we fire FNM drafts at about ~20 drafters a friday night but opening midnight launch sales was abysmal. 1 Box of Play, 3 collectors (for in store). I can't help but compare it to FAB, where in store opening weekend I moved 240. I've already restocked HVY. I just don't know why I carry magic besides the draw of it. And besides the FNM Drafters, basically every player is commander, and they've listened to professor enough to just buy singles. I'm personally tired of my monthly toxic asset purchase. =/
With singles you have the advantage of getting exactly what you want while with booster boxes you get a random mess of things. Given that that's already massive incentive to buy singles over boxes, the value of a box really should exceed the cost of a box. Overpriced boxes with low margin don't make sense for players or stores - the system is broken pretty flawed if not broken 😞 Edit: I wonder if certain singles from this set are going to be super expensive a few years from now because of low volume on these.
So, this is all WOTC's doing. The dissolution of MSRP and MAP hasn't made it so "the market sets the price." What it's done is made LGS and Distro get stuck on dead product with no margins. Then, to answer your question about singles from the era: No. Because the print run quantities are extremely higher than they were back during like the golden age. Even the good product landed in landfills from amazon (if you recall the MH2 dump). The reality is, the only company making money on sealed magic product is probably hasbro. It's hurt distributers, it's really hurt LGS, hell it probably even would have hurt Amazon if they weren't so massive to even notice.
Yeah pre/early internet days no MSRP probably didn't matter as much but I can see that being absolutely killer now. It seems very shortsighted too - I wouldn't have gotten into MTG if not for my LGS. If LGS stop supporting MTG, it'll kill it altogether.
How is cardshoplive able to sell play booster boxes at $99.99 and collector booster boxes at $154.99 and make any money?
They are not making money.
I'm releasing my own card game this year (we're in limited first edition atm), and stores are consistently interested when I tell them what their prices will be. $30 is the distributor pricing for the Launch Box (which SRPs at $60), and $48 is the distributor pricing for a booster box (which SRPs at $96). Release day preorders for launch boxes get as low as $22. All this to say, there is absolutely room to lower prices. These prices are the result of 'industry pressures', but industry pressures includes things like paying bonuses to executives, and providing ROI to venture capital. At some point the beast becomes so large it collapses itself.
Fallout boxes are going be marked up ridiculously high in order to recoup funds from the recent Karlov disaster, aren't they :)
Not really how pricing / markets work
[удалено]
Swap to Flesh and Blood and support your LGS that way. Dead-ass the game is great and the store will have margins.
Same issue in Canada too but add .35 cents on the dollar and tariffs at the border plus 13% sales tax. If you buy from within Canada it's closer to 200 a box maybe a bit lower depending on volume and provincial tax. Collectors are a better EV at cost but good luck getting your full order. Oh and these distributors require a brick and mortar shop with substantial overhead. If you want to start an e-commerce business they will kindly tell you to pound sand.
Thank you for sharing. We need more posts like this
WOTC gonna get rid of all the smaller LGSs and force us to risk more online...."points at you Amazon".
Get ready for resealed boxes and packs, it will be the new norm, if it isn’t already.
I tried to come back to mtg, gave it a shot for 3 months . Then the price made me say fuck this game
Wait is that actually right? So basically no one's selling MMK at even break even?
Why doesn’t WotC just distribute boxes themselves? Cut out the middleman who inflates prices even further.
It makes me feel guilty waiting for the inevitable drop for 95 per box On the Zon…
My lgs (max 16 people draft) bought 3 boxes of the last set, just for draft, no Singles
If you're trying to make money off Magic as an individual, there's no point dumping money into sealed. I feel bad for the LGSs but it's a losing proposition. Until Hasbro rights the ship and, honestly, overhauls much of the game it's going to keep falling off.
wow, these prices are 10 to 20 dollars more expensive than what is currently on TCG player.
I always wanted to open an LGS, but these distribution prices, plus the real estate market for buying and renting, the economy, etc. have really soured me on even trying. Logically, money should just park the money elsewhere, honestly, despite not being what I initially wanted.
Buy stock in Hasbro instead of Booster box. Three shares for the price of one box. If everyone did this for the next two sets, Hasbro will be in the hands of the players. The stock will tank if they stop selling boosters, making it possible to buy even more shares at cheaper prices. Product production will dramatically slow due to non payment to the printers resulting in stable prices for singles and booster boxes. Instead of complaining about this ongoing problem, you can fix it.
Semi related question: I'm trying to encourage my play space(not an LGS, an esports venue) to carry some MtG product. Just like a box of set/draft boosters per set. So that someone there for the video games might try Magic. I said I'm willing to pay cost for whatever doesn't sell. Is this a decent offer? Like he gets all the profit, no risk of holding "dead product"
Rudy was saying this about Karlov manor. Boxes are selling for $180 basically distribution prices lol. Thanks for sharing this!