They're not going to mix old and new frame cards in these. That's the reason for the quantum reprints. So Swiftclaw and friends are in M15.
The sample decks have always had cards from other recent sets peppered in. It doesn't mean they're seeing reprint in M15. It seems to me the previewed cards are being reprinted so they can do their job of introducing basic concepts to new players without gumming up the booster packs of more experienced players. It doesn't have anything to do with the border. They could have just put M13/14 versions in, but they didn't because they want new players to be able to play with their cards, so they had to keep the contents standard-legal. Personally, I think it's genius. Every time I opened a Nightmare or Shivan Dragon out of M14 I got angry my rare slot was being taken up by a card with a thousand prior printings that would never be worth playing in standard, so why did they keep reprinting it? Now I realize they were including those cards just for brand new players. Thank god they found a better venue.
Oh, and most distributors don't mark up brand new product based on scarcity or contents. Those are scummy retailer tactics. Hell, several distributors have already made their allocations known to their retailers (not all of them, though).
My numbers are conforming to the original poster's, and I run a large and reasonably well-connected advanced store. Yes, Wizards is limiting advanced stores to a display of event decks, and three cases of Conspiracy, but Wizards isn't the only outlet for this stuff. Stores can still order more from ACD, Alliance, GTS, PHD, Southern, etc.
If there are 6 distributors, and you can get 8 decks from a distributor, then a shop can get 48 decks. I fail to see the problem.
And the MINIMUM you could get per distributor is 4, since that's the size of a single display. So each store can get at least 24.
There is nothing accurate about this post. When a product is truly limited, distributors don't get everything they ordered, so they allocate each store a certain amount. Each distributor has a different method for determining who gets how many. Some give preference to their prerelease stores, some to those who do the highest volume of purchasing through them, others to those who do the highest volume of purchasing regular Magic sets, etc. Often stores who have none of these things going for them are allocated zero. Further, most US distributors are breaking down the displays and selling these by the deck so they can allocate any quantity they want. I imagine the same is true elsewhere. In the US we have the benefit of being able to order Wizards-direct, and Wizards always allocates the same amount to every core store and the same amount to every advanced store (for this release, they are allocating four decks to each advanced store). The rest of the world doesn't have that luxury.
My store's in a good position. We're high volume, and well-liked by several major distributors. I expect to be able to get 40 or 50 of these decks. The same will not be true of most stores worldwide.
If the product is limited enough, I may limit the amount each customer can buy. That worked well for us for Modern Masters, which we sold at MSRP with a limit of five boosters per customer per day. I am confident I can get the necessary supply to reach demand on this product, however. It's not limited, and it doesn't come packaged with less desirable products (a'la the Mind Seize Commander dilemma). It should be easy to handle, and you're welcome to come buy from us at MSRP. If you want to PM me more details about the local stores and their issues with falsely reported policy violations, I'd be happy to look into it and see if I can get WotC to take a second look. A store being able to use underhanded tactics like that to take down another store is bad for honest stores everywhere. I've known stores to report each other to manufacturers for these sorts of violations in the past (I'm thinking of Games Workshop here more than Wizards of the Coast), but they usually need to provide proof.
Redcap's Corner. I try to run a great store, but we're not without our faults (our website being one of them, though I promise we're actively working on that). It just makes me so mad when other shops go so out of their way to alienate their customers that people truly believe Walmart is the better buy. There is such a thing as a friendly local game store, and not every store has the "I can make more money off of this, so why shouldn't I?" mentality.
I just spoke with an owner of a LGS in the area, and I told him what you said. And he replied that every magic product is limited, some more than others, and that they are sold out already of their allotted amount (and another LGS in my area haven't even started preorders lol).
The owner of that LGS is lying to you. I own a game shop in Philadelphia, and first of all: Wizards hasn't even started taking preorders on these yet. I called them this morning to check. They told me to call back in early April. The only distributor that I found that has started taking preorders is Alliance. ACD, PHD, Southern, and Wizards themselves aren't setup for preorders on these yet. I don't have an account with GTS, so I can't speak for them.
Second of all, most Magic products aren't limited, or at least not in any meaningful sense. They print them to meet expected demand (and often reprint if they fall far enough short of that mark). Stores that preorder early, and accurately anticipate demand, and stay in good standing with their distributors will get most if not all of what they preorder. If that store thinks the products are "limited", it's because they're ordering too conservatively or too late, or they're pissing off their distributors in one way or another. That said, some products are limited, like the From the Vaults and Commander's Arsenal, but the vast majority aren't.
And finally, there's no way that store knows how many they've been allocated. As I said, virtually no distributor has even started taking preorders yet, and those distributors won't have their final numbers from Wizards until a few weeks before the decks release at best. Distributors don't allocate products until they know how many they have to allocate.
I don't mark up Magic products because selling at MSRP is the right thing to do. Customers like you better for it, and a good reputation goes a long way toward selling more product, even if you don't take into consideration how many more units you're liable to sell at MSRP than you otherwise would. Scummy old-business game shops who lie to their customers and try to use supply and demand as a justification for ordering too few copies and jacking up the price go out of business all the time. Please don't think that the owner of the LGS in question speaks for local game stores in general. I have a feeling his store won't be around much longer anyway.
For genuinely limited products like From the Vault, he's right that in a very narrow short-sighted way he'll make more money marking them as high as he can get away with. If he can only get 25 either way, sure, selling 25 products at $75 each yields more direct profit than selling them at $30 each. But that extra $1125 is going to cost him a lot more business in the future. If your customers don't like you, they won't be your customers much longer.
That still tells me that a store selling out at profit is profit, and the fact that their able to move product that fast means you get your money quickly without having inventory sitting their there as dead weight.
Getting money quickly is great, but it isn't profit if your expenses outweigh your income, which I just explained is the likely outcome of selling too many boxes.
You as a store owner do not have to give discount to boxes.
No, I don't. But customers expect a discount on a box, and it's bad for business not to play to expectations to an extent. Sometimes you have to take a hit to keep a customer, so they'll keep shopping at your store rather than buying exclusively from the internet. When you show a customer you're willing to come close to internet prices to keep them shopping with you, they're usually willing to meet you half way.
Also a smart business move would be to refuse selling in boxes when you know there's a short supply, someone wants to buy a box, you know it will sell out anyway, tell them there's only packs because you want to be fair to the other customers.
Of course, I do this, but this harkens back to point number three from my previous post. Obviously I can't sell boxes if it means I won't have enough packs to last until my restock, but when someone comes in to buy a box and you can't sell it to them, it's not good for business either.
I also doubt your store solely runs on the boxes of mtg. You are profiting but mtg is a part of the solution and not the whole thing for running a business.
You're right. Magic's not our whole business, and thank goodness. It wouldn't be sustainable if it was.
Every business struggles; most business don't get a fraction of the support WOTC has done for LGS. I don't believe that without PTQs next years being handed over to the LGS, that all of the sudden stores are going to shut down left and right.
I don't disagree with this at all, but game stores are already shutting down left and right. I can think of three in my general area (southeast Pennsylvania/southern New Jersey) in the last two years that have closed. Wizards takes care of its retailers, and this change is a continuation of that care. Game stores are not easy to run well. All I'm saying is that the notion that we're making money hand over fist and that "Innistrad's already making us rich, so why should we need PTQs too" is absurd.
How many stores will do the right thing and get a judge to be at PTQs? How many stores will actually put the money to get a larger venue just for PTQs event? How many stores might tilt in favor of their biggest buyers in one of these events?
Who knows? Wizards hasn't announced the changes to this program yet, and last time I spoke with my Wizards rep about them, he didn't have any specific information. He knew the change was coming, but he hadn't been made aware of the details. They haven't said one way or the other which stores will get PTQs, what criteria they will use to make those selections, or how strictly they'll monitor those stores' involvement.
And make no mistake, Innistrad was under-printed. Sure, they printed the same amount (or more) as other recent sets, but they didn't print enough to meet demand. Same as Zendikar. Thankfully, the second printing is already upon us, and supply's getting easier to come by, but it was a rough couple of weeks.
Stores not being able to keep product in stock is not necessarily an indication of them doing well. There are three factors you aren't considering:
1) Distributors allocate product when it becomes scarce. If 20,000 stores each want to order a case, but a distributor only has 40,000 boxes, they usually sell two boxes each to those stores rather than sell a case each to the first third of them. Innistrad was under-printed. Yes, we're all selling out of everything we get, but we haven't been able to get what we NEED in the vast majority of cases.
2) Selling boxes as boxes sucks for stores. If you're ordering product directly from Wizards and selling it at $4/pack, you're making 49% profit on that product. If you're selling those boxes at $110, let's say (which is about average for a store and WAY above average for the internet), you're only making 34% profit. Now, unfortunately, in order to hit your bottom line, you need to be spending about 55% of your sales money on inventory, which means you need to be averaging 45% profit margin on sold items. If you're getting in three cases and two of them are walking out the door as boxes you're hurting your bottom line unbelievably. To look at it another way, Imagine I have $1000 to spend on product this week, and my labor, rent, bills, etc., weekly expenses are $450. If I spend that $1000 on Innistrad, I'll get 13 boxes, sell them for $110 each and make $1430. My weekly expenses are $450, though, so next week's budget is only $980. Repeat the process and my budget shrinks every week. I'm selling 100% of what I order, but I'm actually LOSING money. This is the reality for game stores. Selling by the pack is great, but people's expectations for box prices are really, really hurting the industry.
3) When someone wants a product and you don't have it, that's lost sales potential. No matter how you slice it, selling out of a product is really, really bad for business. There's no "well, at least it means you're selling a lot of it" about it, you didn't have enough product to meet demand and that translates to lost reputation which means lost customers. You might have sold 900% more than you anticipated, but if your demand was 1000% more than you anticipated, you did a bad job ordering (or somebody on the distributor side screwed you).
So, yeah, a lot of stores are doing great right now. My store's under three years old and so I can't say we're doing "great," but we're certainly doing great considering the economy and how long we've been around. But complaining that we're always out of Innistrad (which we are) doesn't mean we're being greedy. It means that we're getting by, but every day is a struggle to hit the bottom line and Wizards (along with other game manufacturers) should always be looking for ways to help us win that fight.
The problem with this plan is that PTQs can get 200+ people attending, which is more than most stores can handle. There are ways to deal with this, of course. How they choose to do so is what interests me here.
Right now? 75 people. When we move to our new location in 5 or 6 weeks, around 200 comfortably, and more if we squeeze. Granted, average PTQ attendance in this area is around 350, depending on the format, but I think we're much better equipped for the change than most stores. I kind of assumed only the northeast was really getting screwed by the change. Are PTQs around the rest of the country and world as big as they are here?
I'm a store owner who had been communicating with the local TO about having him bring PTQs into my store, and he gave me exactly the same story a few weeks ago. PTQs are moving to stores.
Every Saturday, Redcap's Corner in Philadelphia is running alternating extended and legacy events. These events begin at noon, cost $5, and offer store credit prize support (usable with our thousands of singles, as well as anything else in the store) to the top two at each event. All events take place at the store, at 4040 Locust St. in beautiful West Philadelphia!
In October, we'll be running extended on the 2nd, 16th, and 30th, and legacy on the 9th and 23rd. Extended and legacy events will continue to alternate Saturdays indefinitely from there on out!
Thanks a lot!
Benn Roe
Redcap's Corner
4040 Locust St.
Philadelphia, PA
(215) 387-4040
[email]redcapscorner@gmail.com[/email] http://www.redcapscorner.com/
If I were you I'd be pretty confident that you're getting eight of their leftover book promos (as shown above). This isn't Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Wizards isn't known for doing super short-runs (read: 80) of anything. On the other hand, they ARE known for recycling old promos to clear out back stock. On the plus side, those promos often sell for $60 or so apiece, because they look really nice and are incredibly rare. They're not foil, though.
I was just checking out the retailer section of the Wizards website, when I found the Elspeth Vs. Tezzeret sales solicitation flyer (found here). Check out these key-selling points (emphasis mine):
• This is the sixth release in the popular “Duel Decks” series.
• Each Duel Deck comes with two 60-card decks featuring cards from throughout Magic’s history
• Includes 12 rare cards, including foil alternate art versions of two Mythic rare Planeswalker cards.
• Six total cards will feature brand new art, and two preview cards from the fall 2010 Magic set, Scars of Mirrodin™ are included.
• The two featured Planeswalkers will play a role in the story of Scars of Mirrodin.
This doesn't confirm that either walker will get a new card in Scars of Mirrodin, but it does make it incredibly unlikely that neither of them will (at least before the block is through)!
EDIT: Made the title more clear! Sorry about that!
The sample decks have always had cards from other recent sets peppered in. It doesn't mean they're seeing reprint in M15. It seems to me the previewed cards are being reprinted so they can do their job of introducing basic concepts to new players without gumming up the booster packs of more experienced players. It doesn't have anything to do with the border. They could have just put M13/14 versions in, but they didn't because they want new players to be able to play with their cards, so they had to keep the contents standard-legal. Personally, I think it's genius. Every time I opened a Nightmare or Shivan Dragon out of M14 I got angry my rare slot was being taken up by a card with a thousand prior printings that would never be worth playing in standard, so why did they keep reprinting it? Now I realize they were including those cards just for brand new players. Thank god they found a better venue.
There is nothing accurate about this post. When a product is truly limited, distributors don't get everything they ordered, so they allocate each store a certain amount. Each distributor has a different method for determining who gets how many. Some give preference to their prerelease stores, some to those who do the highest volume of purchasing through them, others to those who do the highest volume of purchasing regular Magic sets, etc. Often stores who have none of these things going for them are allocated zero. Further, most US distributors are breaking down the displays and selling these by the deck so they can allocate any quantity they want. I imagine the same is true elsewhere. In the US we have the benefit of being able to order Wizards-direct, and Wizards always allocates the same amount to every core store and the same amount to every advanced store (for this release, they are allocating four decks to each advanced store). The rest of the world doesn't have that luxury.
My store's in a good position. We're high volume, and well-liked by several major distributors. I expect to be able to get 40 or 50 of these decks. The same will not be true of most stores worldwide.
The owner of that LGS is lying to you. I own a game shop in Philadelphia, and first of all: Wizards hasn't even started taking preorders on these yet. I called them this morning to check. They told me to call back in early April. The only distributor that I found that has started taking preorders is Alliance. ACD, PHD, Southern, and Wizards themselves aren't setup for preorders on these yet. I don't have an account with GTS, so I can't speak for them.
Second of all, most Magic products aren't limited, or at least not in any meaningful sense. They print them to meet expected demand (and often reprint if they fall far enough short of that mark). Stores that preorder early, and accurately anticipate demand, and stay in good standing with their distributors will get most if not all of what they preorder. If that store thinks the products are "limited", it's because they're ordering too conservatively or too late, or they're pissing off their distributors in one way or another. That said, some products are limited, like the From the Vaults and Commander's Arsenal, but the vast majority aren't.
And finally, there's no way that store knows how many they've been allocated. As I said, virtually no distributor has even started taking preorders yet, and those distributors won't have their final numbers from Wizards until a few weeks before the decks release at best. Distributors don't allocate products until they know how many they have to allocate.
I don't mark up Magic products because selling at MSRP is the right thing to do. Customers like you better for it, and a good reputation goes a long way toward selling more product, even if you don't take into consideration how many more units you're liable to sell at MSRP than you otherwise would. Scummy old-business game shops who lie to their customers and try to use supply and demand as a justification for ordering too few copies and jacking up the price go out of business all the time. Please don't think that the owner of the LGS in question speaks for local game stores in general. I have a feeling his store won't be around much longer anyway.
For genuinely limited products like From the Vault, he's right that in a very narrow short-sighted way he'll make more money marking them as high as he can get away with. If he can only get 25 either way, sure, selling 25 products at $75 each yields more direct profit than selling them at $30 each. But that extra $1125 is going to cost him a lot more business in the future. If your customers don't like you, they won't be your customers much longer.
Getting money quickly is great, but it isn't profit if your expenses outweigh your income, which I just explained is the likely outcome of selling too many boxes.
No, I don't. But customers expect a discount on a box, and it's bad for business not to play to expectations to an extent. Sometimes you have to take a hit to keep a customer, so they'll keep shopping at your store rather than buying exclusively from the internet. When you show a customer you're willing to come close to internet prices to keep them shopping with you, they're usually willing to meet you half way.
Of course, I do this, but this harkens back to point number three from my previous post. Obviously I can't sell boxes if it means I won't have enough packs to last until my restock, but when someone comes in to buy a box and you can't sell it to them, it's not good for business either.
You're right. Magic's not our whole business, and thank goodness. It wouldn't be sustainable if it was.
I don't disagree with this at all, but game stores are already shutting down left and right. I can think of three in my general area (southeast Pennsylvania/southern New Jersey) in the last two years that have closed. Wizards takes care of its retailers, and this change is a continuation of that care. Game stores are not easy to run well. All I'm saying is that the notion that we're making money hand over fist and that "Innistrad's already making us rich, so why should we need PTQs too" is absurd.
Who knows? Wizards hasn't announced the changes to this program yet, and last time I spoke with my Wizards rep about them, he didn't have any specific information. He knew the change was coming, but he hadn't been made aware of the details. They haven't said one way or the other which stores will get PTQs, what criteria they will use to make those selections, or how strictly they'll monitor those stores' involvement.
And make no mistake, Innistrad was under-printed. Sure, they printed the same amount (or more) as other recent sets, but they didn't print enough to meet demand. Same as Zendikar. Thankfully, the second printing is already upon us, and supply's getting easier to come by, but it was a rough couple of weeks.
1) Distributors allocate product when it becomes scarce. If 20,000 stores each want to order a case, but a distributor only has 40,000 boxes, they usually sell two boxes each to those stores rather than sell a case each to the first third of them. Innistrad was under-printed. Yes, we're all selling out of everything we get, but we haven't been able to get what we NEED in the vast majority of cases.
2) Selling boxes as boxes sucks for stores. If you're ordering product directly from Wizards and selling it at $4/pack, you're making 49% profit on that product. If you're selling those boxes at $110, let's say (which is about average for a store and WAY above average for the internet), you're only making 34% profit. Now, unfortunately, in order to hit your bottom line, you need to be spending about 55% of your sales money on inventory, which means you need to be averaging 45% profit margin on sold items. If you're getting in three cases and two of them are walking out the door as boxes you're hurting your bottom line unbelievably. To look at it another way, Imagine I have $1000 to spend on product this week, and my labor, rent, bills, etc., weekly expenses are $450. If I spend that $1000 on Innistrad, I'll get 13 boxes, sell them for $110 each and make $1430. My weekly expenses are $450, though, so next week's budget is only $980. Repeat the process and my budget shrinks every week. I'm selling 100% of what I order, but I'm actually LOSING money. This is the reality for game stores. Selling by the pack is great, but people's expectations for box prices are really, really hurting the industry.
3) When someone wants a product and you don't have it, that's lost sales potential. No matter how you slice it, selling out of a product is really, really bad for business. There's no "well, at least it means you're selling a lot of it" about it, you didn't have enough product to meet demand and that translates to lost reputation which means lost customers. You might have sold 900% more than you anticipated, but if your demand was 1000% more than you anticipated, you did a bad job ordering (or somebody on the distributor side screwed you).
So, yeah, a lot of stores are doing great right now. My store's under three years old and so I can't say we're doing "great," but we're certainly doing great considering the economy and how long we've been around. But complaining that we're always out of Innistrad (which we are) doesn't mean we're being greedy. It means that we're getting by, but every day is a struggle to hit the bottom line and Wizards (along with other game manufacturers) should always be looking for ways to help us win that fight.
Right now? 75 people. When we move to our new location in 5 or 6 weeks, around 200 comfortably, and more if we squeeze. Granted, average PTQ attendance in this area is around 350, depending on the format, but I think we're much better equipped for the change than most stores. I kind of assumed only the northeast was really getting screwed by the change. Are PTQs around the rest of the country and world as big as they are here?
In October, we'll be running extended on the 2nd, 16th, and 30th, and legacy on the 9th and 23rd. Extended and legacy events will continue to alternate Saturdays indefinitely from there on out!
Thanks a lot!
Benn Roe
Redcap's Corner
4040 Locust St.
Philadelphia, PA
(215) 387-4040
[email]redcapscorner@gmail.com[/email]
http://www.redcapscorner.com/
• This is the sixth release in the popular “Duel Decks” series.
• Each Duel Deck comes with two 60-card decks featuring cards from throughout Magic’s history
• Includes 12 rare cards, including foil alternate art versions of two Mythic rare Planeswalker cards.
• Six total cards will feature brand new art, and two preview cards from the fall 2010 Magic set, Scars of Mirrodin™ are included.
• The two featured Planeswalkers will play a role in the story of Scars of Mirrodin.
This doesn't confirm that either walker will get a new card in Scars of Mirrodin, but it does make it incredibly unlikely that neither of them will (at least before the block is through)!
EDIT: Made the title more clear! Sorry about that!