Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
I don't remember the last time the msrp went up for mtg cards. I think they were $4 per booster as far back as original theros block.
If they magically pretend that msrp no longer exists, then it shouldn't be a big issue.
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pucatrade
big receipts
alpha mox emerald
beta time walk
4 goyfs received
3 liliana of the veil
4 karn liberated
3 force of will
4 grove of the burnwillows
snapcaster mage
3 horizon canopy
2 full art damnation
Last I checked, Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro got rid of MSRP when they partnered with Amazon in order to sell direct-to-consumer with Secret Lairs only exacerbating the problem further. The cost of card singles going up within the Secondary Market is more to do with inflation rather than Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro trying to cut corners by relying less on Print Media. Reserve List buyouts aren't as active as they once were because it's costing collectors too much in order to keep up with which was bound to happen eventually even when they were easier to purchase back when the U.S. Government was handing out Stimulus Checks as a result of the global pandemic two years ago.
You also have a situation where Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro could be reprinting less cards outside of Secret Lairs in order to create more artificial scarcity to increase prices not just for cards that haven't had another reprint but to also cater to Whales who are wanting to flip sealed product for a quick buck. It also doesn't help that the budgets they use to commission specific artwork for Magic cards have actually been going more toward Secret Lairs and Showcase cards leaving the regular cards to be less desirable and causes Local Game Stores (LGSs) to potentially lose money that could otherwise save their own businesses. So Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro can't blame ALL their Magic: The Gathering Print Media woes on inflation.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
I don't remember the last time the msrp went up for mtg cards. I think they were $4 per booster as far back as original theros block.
If they magically pretend that msrp no longer exists, then it shouldn't be a big issue.
For some products it wasn’t all that long ago. All I play is Commander, so I buy singles but I buy I’d estimate 80% of the Commander Precons. Precon prices:
Back then for Commander product i advocated it to all people as the value was there.
For 30 bucks you got 100 cards, lots of good reprints, some of them even had more value then the price you paid for (and instantly sold out for that matter, making the "other" ones even cheaper to get, even better value for people that wanted them to play).
For the first bunch of Commander product that stayed true, it was a really good product, worth to pre-order and worth buying lots of, made the LGS happy and the player happy, win-win.
THEN it become increasingly worse, more expensive and the value vanished.
Now its basically bad to buy Commander products and i resort to only buying a few singles of them, much cheaper as the value got so bad, that its simply not worth buying them ... meanwhile LGS due to Covid and all of that, basically only bought whatever pre-orders they got and not more, people just dont buy that product anymore (at least locally, might just order them online for cheaper, to squeeze out the value thats left in there).
----
At the very least WotC is "claiming" to want to keep the booster-pack at a value for drafts, thats fine, but at the same time, they butchered the value of booster-packs so drastically, as all the value shifted over to collector packs anyway, and with set-boosters you cant even get all the cards from a booster-packs in the first place ... so its really just for draft by now, its outright terrible to buy booster-packs if you dont intend to draft with them (which hurts the LGS that has to buy them in bulk, as you now have to carry multiple different product, where you could before all that just buy booster-packs and make everyone happy with that).
----
The funny part about making product more expensive is that the entire value of a product culminates in very few expensive cards of a set, while all the rest is cheap anyway, even in premium product and collectors boxes, the vast majority of singles are cheap, which makes it even more so attractive to buy them as singles, as hitting a card that is worth your pack in money is a bad gamble (only worth if you buy in large numbers to basically guarantee the big hits to offset all the loses).
Its a weird world now in Magic.
At my place we get back to playing in Paper just right as of this PreRelease, so i might have to see how it potentially shifts again, but with the economy world wide going to shambles, making the product more expensive might throw paper in a decline even more than it already is.
making the product more expensive might throw paper in a decline even more than it already is.
BINGO, we have a winner.
By design? Possibly.
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():
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Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
At the very least WotC is "claiming" to want to keep the booster-pack at a value for drafts, thats fine, but at the same time, they butchered the value of booster-packs so drastically, as all the value shifted over to collector packs anyway, and with set-boosters you cant even get all the cards from a booster-packs in the first place ... so its really just for draft by now, its outright terrible to buy booster-packs if you dont intend to draft with them (which hurts the LGS that has to buy them in bulk, as you now have to carry multiple different product, where you could before all that just buy booster-packs and make everyone happy with that).
Why can't they just stick with one set release instead of dividing it between Draft, Set, and Collector's Edition where all the value is in that one product? Yeah card singles will probably be more expensive as an end result but at least Local Game Stores (LGSs) are making more money without being left with bulk that they can't even sell. They don't want to admit that a one size fits all solution in regards to the current distribution of Paper Magic hasn't been working all that well for them. Sure it's working well for Hasbro and their shareholders but for the rest of us? Not so much. Whenever Hasbro doesn't get their way we rejoice but when they do we suffer the consequences of Wizards of the Coast's actions. Wizards of the Coast will do ANYTHING to use the Local Game Store (LGS) as a scapegoat more so than blaming their current Paper Magic woes on market inflation. Why not change the distribution model for Secret Lairs to where they do support Local Game Stores (LGSs) or is that honestly too much to ask for? It would help avoid printing MTG versions of Secret Lair cards that are mechanically unique.
The funny part about making product more expensive is that the entire value of a product culminates in very few expensive cards of a set, while all the rest is cheap anyway, even in premium product and collectors boxes, the vast majority of singles are cheap, which makes it even more so attractive to buy them as singles, as hitting a card that is worth your pack in money is a bad gamble (only worth if you buy in large numbers to basically guarantee the big hits to offset all the loses).
The more expensive cards they cram into a set based on market demand the higher the overall Expected Value (EV) of the product which is why there's not as many high dollar reprints in sealed product as there used to be because it made these products too much for people to afford purchasing and they don't want to run the risk of making draft experiences too expensive without breaking Standard as much as they already have. This also explains why most reprints are in Secret Lair drops and not in products you can buy out in public because it's much easier to sell the card singles individually than selling them altogether which would've added to the cost to purchase when you factor in the type of artwork they've commissioned for these cards and the royalties they probably had to pay in order to produce and manufacture them. They did try to remedy this issue with reprints from The List, however with market inflation making it harder to crack booster boxes means less quantities of these reprints circulating throughout the Secondary Market.
They stopped adding in new high dollar reprints in Commander Pre-Cons specifically because it would've added to the cost of the product where you're having to pay more than $45 for a Commander Pre-Con and this isn't counting market inflation either. Challenger Decks could've had a similar issue where If they added too many high dollar reprints that become Standard legal that it'd add to the overall cost of the product they're selling. Reprints in Magic: The Gathering have gotten to a point now where the demand has exceeded the supply because there's such a large quantity of cards that need to be reprinted but are too expensive to purchase due to scarcity and are constantly being filled in EDH / Commander decks because of how popular the cards are. This is a type of format that demands consistency in terms of the synergy and combos they have with specific types of deck builds and If underplayed cards in the game's card pool can't measure up to it then that's just the way it is. Players would rather settle for consistency rather than inconsistency.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
$45, lol.
I wasn't buying these back when the value was "good". I'm surprised anyone's buying them now. But I guess somebody must be, or singles wouldn't be available. I remember ten years ago. Everybody was complaining how back in the day a booster pack had value, and nowadays it's all trash. Now everybody's saying "ten years ago sure was great, and nowadays it's all trash." It's always both great and trash at the same time. Nowtimes are great! And they're also trash.
And yeah, if you want value, you get singles. That's how it's always been. Sure, a pack of Urza's Saga is a great investment in retrospect, but that's retrospect. Ask someone in 2000 about the value of a booster pack.
While Commander Pre-Cons have gotten more expensive over time the reprint quality declined in the process. Why did they stop reprinting the Cycling lands from Scourge / Onslaught and Ravnica Bounce lands from the earlier Pre-Cons? I really liked those. They need to focus on reprinting much older commons, uncommons, and rares from Magic's past instead of the same Modern Magic cards they keep reprinting over and over that everyone's already got a million copies of. Apparently the newer cards are supposed to make up for the reprints being half ass to justify it's $45 price tag when all they're doing is rushing the product in order to meet deadlines.
Private Mod Note
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America Bless Christ Jesus
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
$45, lol.
I wasn't buying these back when the value was "good". I'm surprised anyone's buying them now. But I guess somebody must be, or singles wouldn't be available. I remember ten years ago. Everybody was complaining how back in the day a booster pack had value, and nowadays it's all trash. Now everybody's saying "ten years ago sure was great, and nowadays it's all trash." It's always both great and trash at the same time. Nowtimes are great! And they're also trash.
And yeah, if you want value, you get singles. That's how it's always been. Sure, a pack of Urza's Saga is a great investment in retrospect, but that's retrospect. Ask someone in 2000 about the value of a booster pack.
pucatrade
big receipts
alpha mox emerald
beta time walk
4 goyfs received
3 liliana of the veil
4 karn liberated
3 force of will
4 grove of the burnwillows
snapcaster mage
3 horizon canopy
2 full art damnation
just solidifies that i'll have to switch exclusively to singles now. this also means a severe reduction in magic spending as it'll pretty much just be for established decks or blatant sure thing specs, like how meathook was preordering at 10 bucks for a few days and i stocked up.
at the price point they were at prior it was a nice little impulse buy. at target? throw one in the cart who cares they're not that expensive. after a price increase though? way less likely to do that.
use to buy every commander precon, now the value just isn't there for the price.
use to buy a box for every set release. now not so much because there are too many choices and not enough value for the cost. so with an increased cost, theres even less value there.
My LGS didn't carry the singles I wanted from Streets of New Capenna so I went ahead and bought two of the new Commander Pre-Cons ($49.99 MSRP) containing a few cards I wanted but it was well worth it IMO. I was lucky enough to Buy List some of the stuff from the Pre-Cons and made close to $30 in Store Credit to purchase other cards I needed that they actually had singles for. Would've been nicer If they already had the singles in stock so that I wouldn't of had to buy the Pre-Cons, some of which according to my friends had some misprint issues where they bought the new Grixis Pre-Con which was basically, "Oops, all Spells!" compared to another Pre-Con which was "Oops, all Lands!"
You got one Pre-Con and it only included half of the cards it was supposed to where I've heard some cases where there were double the number of rares that normally wouldn't be in there including duplicates of cards that aren't basic lands as in the case with some of the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty Pre-Cons. But yeah the quality control for the Streets of New Capenna Commander Pre-Cons was insane. Fortunately I didn't have that happen to me when I bought mine last Saturday but for my friend I felt bad enough that I offered the lands I wasn't using to complete the actual Pre-Con since one of them was the Grixis deck and he declined my offer since he had better lands to build with it already in his inventory.
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America Bless Christ Jesus
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Unfortunately I don't think the global supply chain issues that attributed to a 9% inflation rate increase will EVER go back to the way it was before. We may have just witnessed the largest exodus of workers / employees in world history due to mask / vaccine mandates, people retiring much earlier for their 401k's, as well as food shortages and famine globally. Global shipping is in shambles because they can't find enough people willing to distribute product and If they do then they're making less than what their companies would owe them under less turbulent circumstances.
How does this affect Paper Magic? Since we have less truck drivers to help distribute sealed product that means more delays with product releases as well as more manufacturing errors in recent products to where the print quality isn't what it once was but it did seem to get better though. Players who order card singles online will probably get more snail mail from the post office because even they're suffering from staff shortages like everyone else. Local Game Stores (LGSs) can't even break even anymore without losing sales to Secret Lair drops that Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro refuses to let them sell publicly.
With the way things are going right now it's gonna make 1929 seem like Happy Fun Day at Six Flags. People are going to be wishing they stocked up on things that actually matter like food, water, guns, and ammunition. Why waste that money on a luxury item like Paper Magic? Not gonna sugarcoat it but I think we're going to be in for some really tough times ahead. We're already in a mild recession due to rising market inflation but at least it's not as bad as it was in 2008 when the global economy was in free fall.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Hey WotC/Hasbro if you are reading this. I keep on paying more and more for everything, all my bills are higher and my salary isn't keeping up with inflation. What do you think I am going to cut out of my budget? Hint: it won't be necessities. Rethink your strategy or prepare for leaner times.
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Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Hasbro operates on like a 10% profit margin overall with all product lines.
WotC has a 40% profit margin, and that is like 22% of Hasbro revenue.
With a 40% profit margin, increasing the cost of boosters is pretty wild, so nobody can possible deny that WotC is indeed milking the player base dry.
They have plenty of room to not increase prices.
Funny I got back into Magic because it seemed like a cheap hobby to have a few decks to play with my friends...
It certainly is, if you never buy any new product (or just few singles).
Can also proxy a lot of expensive cards with a color printer for casual play and its basically "free".
I use to play Draft whenever i can, so thats each FNM, did cost 10 euros some years ago, now they charge 20 euros (provide and extra guaranteed pack at least, to move more product).
Thats like 40 weeks a year x20 bucks, 800 euros a year for drafting, then like 4 PreRelease sealed events (30 euros a pop now) , 120 bucks.
Buying (and selling) some singles over a year, thats a combined like 1000 bucks a year.
Thats certainly more money then i spend in video games or any other hobby, just a few years back, it combined to like 500 euros a year, so that basically all doubled.
Funny I got back into Magic because it seemed like a cheap hobby to have a few decks to play with my friends...
It certainly is, if you never buy any new product (or just few singles).
Can also proxy a lot of expensive cards with a color printer for casual play and its basically "free".
I use to play Draft whenever i can, so thats each FNM, did cost 10 euros some years ago, now they charge 20 euros (provide and extra guaranteed pack at least, to move more product).
Thats like 40 weeks a year x20 bucks, 800 euros a year for drafting, then like 4 PreRelease sealed events (30 euros a pop now) , 120 bucks.
Buying (and selling) some singles over a year, thats a combined like 1000 bucks a year.
Thats certainly more money then i spend in video games or any other hobby, just a few years back, it combined to like 500 euros a year, so that basically all doubled.
I know what you mean that it can be cheap, but at the same time it's like... My favourite format is Modern.... which is basically legacy light now and way way out of budget to have more than one deck for me. Tried proxying a bit just with my friends, but it's quite a hassle. I've only bought a few singles the last two years. I HATE playing draft in basically any game, Magic included, so I never do that. I do like playing sealed with my friends though, but it's been a very long time since we did that too. I think the last set I actually bought some boosters from was the latest Theros set. Everything other than that has been a few cheap singles here and there on Cardmarket. But even the prices on singles are pretty crazy.
I don't play in gamestores anymore either. I kinda got burnt out by the people there, so I just play with a group of friends when everybody can. Commander, pauper and sometimes modern with proxies. I just can't justify spending the money it costs for "strong" cards.
Hasbro operates on like a 10% profit margin overall with all product lines.
WotC has a 40% profit margin, and that is like 22% of Hasbro revenue.
With a 40% profit margin, increasing the cost of boosters is pretty wild, so nobody can possible deny that WotC is indeed milking the player base dry.
They have plenty of room to not increase prices.
Thanks for posting that. They (Hasbro) suffer from the fallacy that players/buyers are like some inexhaustable money tree that you can just keep on taking from and it will never run out. It will run out at some point and maybe that is the goal, take as much as possible short term and who cares about the long term. It doesn't surprise me what they are doing, just disappoints me greatly because they aren't thinking about the long term health of the game, just the short term cash grab.
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Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Hasbro operates on like a 10% profit margin overall with all product lines.
WotC has a 40% profit margin, and that is like 22% of Hasbro revenue.
With a 40% profit margin, increasing the cost of boosters is pretty wild, so nobody can possible deny that WotC is indeed milking the player base dry.
They have plenty of room to not increase prices.
Thanks for posting that. They (Hasbro) suffer from the fallacy that players/buyers are like some inexhaustable money tree that you can just keep on taking from and it will never run out. It will run out at some point and maybe that is the goal, take as much as possible short term and who cares about the long term. It doesn't surprise me what they are doing, just disappoints me greatly because they aren't thinking about the long term health of the game, just the short term cash grab.
That was one of the big reasons why the Hedge Fund group Alta Fox was trying to convince Hasbro to "spin off" Wizards of the Coast though unfortunately Hasbro considered it a "hostile takeover" of their company according to the Magic Historian (Mike Hatcher):
Tolarian Community College also had this to say about Magic: The Gathering getting more expensive:
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Magic the game itself is being pulled in a lot of directions right now. A business needs a healthy bottom line but at the sole expense of the consumer is a sleazy way of doing it. There very well may be many within WotC fighting for the long term health of the game being over-ridden by Hasbro execs.
When draft boosters go to $5 USD from $4 USD a pack in big box/retail stores is when I quit buying them on impulse. And I only have X amount budgeted for Magic and I am not bumping that up. I can't but think there are thousands of others like myself out there. Inflation here in the US is real and pervasive as well. Its not going away soon either.
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():
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Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Would officially discontinuing specific paper formats outside of EDH / Commander and Modern help reduce the cost of the game in terms of the Secondary Market to offset market inflation? Who still realistically plays Legacy and Vintage anymore let alone Pioneer? Keeping Standard would be a necessity to help grow the game yet at the same time Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro doesn't really want to have anything to do with Standard anymore because it feels more like an obligation rather than a passion project like EDH / Commander. The less paper formats the game has the more they won't have to micromanage every format on a constant basis. I know it probably sounds like a terrible idea and it might cause certain demographics of players to quit the game but having too many paper formats I don't think is very healthy and sustainable for Paper Magic long term.
Compare to other Paper Trading Card Games / Collectible Card Games like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon TCG where they aren't bombarded with more than two or three formats that become dictated by the Secondary Market. The less formats your game has the more your Secondary Market is affordable for a lot of players. Maybe it doesn't actually work that way where If one card is popular in multiple said paper formats then the actual market demand for the card is doubled or even tripled. You also have to factor in scarcity within the Secondary Market and how much of the card is circulating which can definitely make these kinds of price estimates quite challenging. Cost of shipping varies between where the item is being sold to and from as well. Is there something I'm missing here? Feel free to enlighten me on this If there's an actual correlation to the subject matter.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
America Bless Christ Jesus
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
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https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/magic-gathering-pricing-update-2022-04-19
If you like audio and visual, try this out.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_bBnS42D-c&t=657s
Gotta love that inflation.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
If they magically pretend that msrp no longer exists, then it shouldn't be a big issue.
pucatrade
big receipts
alpha mox emerald
beta time walk
4 goyfs received
3 liliana of the veil
4 karn liberated
3 force of will
4 grove of the burnwillows
snapcaster mage
3 horizon canopy
2 full art damnation
You also have a situation where Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro could be reprinting less cards outside of Secret Lairs in order to create more artificial scarcity to increase prices not just for cards that haven't had another reprint but to also cater to Whales who are wanting to flip sealed product for a quick buck. It also doesn't help that the budgets they use to commission specific artwork for Magic cards have actually been going more toward Secret Lairs and Showcase cards leaving the regular cards to be less desirable and causes Local Game Stores (LGSs) to potentially lose money that could otherwise save their own businesses. So Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro can't blame ALL their Magic: The Gathering Print Media woes on inflation.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
For WotC/Hasbro sure.
For everyone else that buys product first or secondhand and all of WotC's employees and employee's of distributors, not so.
Magic is a "luxury" item, not a staple or necessity like food/housing/clothing/medicine. People cut luxuries first, sales are going to drop, period.
Agreed. But it makes a handy scapegoat doesn't it?
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
For some products it wasn’t all that long ago. All I play is Commander, so I buy singles but I buy I’d estimate 80% of the Commander Precons. Precon prices:
2013: $29.95
2014: $34.95
2018: $39.95
2022: ~$45.00
For a 50% increase in price we get tokens, 2-3 foils per deck, and a useless life wheel. Meanwhile, the reprint equity languishes in the toilet.
For 30 bucks you got 100 cards, lots of good reprints, some of them even had more value then the price you paid for (and instantly sold out for that matter, making the "other" ones even cheaper to get, even better value for people that wanted them to play).
For the first bunch of Commander product that stayed true, it was a really good product, worth to pre-order and worth buying lots of, made the LGS happy and the player happy, win-win.
THEN it become increasingly worse, more expensive and the value vanished.
Now its basically bad to buy Commander products and i resort to only buying a few singles of them, much cheaper as the value got so bad, that its simply not worth buying them ... meanwhile LGS due to Covid and all of that, basically only bought whatever pre-orders they got and not more, people just dont buy that product anymore (at least locally, might just order them online for cheaper, to squeeze out the value thats left in there).
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At the very least WotC is "claiming" to want to keep the booster-pack at a value for drafts, thats fine, but at the same time, they butchered the value of booster-packs so drastically, as all the value shifted over to collector packs anyway, and with set-boosters you cant even get all the cards from a booster-packs in the first place ... so its really just for draft by now, its outright terrible to buy booster-packs if you dont intend to draft with them (which hurts the LGS that has to buy them in bulk, as you now have to carry multiple different product, where you could before all that just buy booster-packs and make everyone happy with that).
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The funny part about making product more expensive is that the entire value of a product culminates in very few expensive cards of a set, while all the rest is cheap anyway, even in premium product and collectors boxes, the vast majority of singles are cheap, which makes it even more so attractive to buy them as singles, as hitting a card that is worth your pack in money is a bad gamble (only worth if you buy in large numbers to basically guarantee the big hits to offset all the loses).
Its a weird world now in Magic.
At my place we get back to playing in Paper just right as of this PreRelease, so i might have to see how it potentially shifts again, but with the economy world wide going to shambles, making the product more expensive might throw paper in a decline even more than it already is.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
BINGO, we have a winner.
By design? Possibly.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
The more expensive cards they cram into a set based on market demand the higher the overall Expected Value (EV) of the product which is why there's not as many high dollar reprints in sealed product as there used to be because it made these products too much for people to afford purchasing and they don't want to run the risk of making draft experiences too expensive without breaking Standard as much as they already have. This also explains why most reprints are in Secret Lair drops and not in products you can buy out in public because it's much easier to sell the card singles individually than selling them altogether which would've added to the cost to purchase when you factor in the type of artwork they've commissioned for these cards and the royalties they probably had to pay in order to produce and manufacture them. They did try to remedy this issue with reprints from The List, however with market inflation making it harder to crack booster boxes means less quantities of these reprints circulating throughout the Secondary Market.
They stopped adding in new high dollar reprints in Commander Pre-Cons specifically because it would've added to the cost of the product where you're having to pay more than $45 for a Commander Pre-Con and this isn't counting market inflation either. Challenger Decks could've had a similar issue where If they added too many high dollar reprints that become Standard legal that it'd add to the overall cost of the product they're selling. Reprints in Magic: The Gathering have gotten to a point now where the demand has exceeded the supply because there's such a large quantity of cards that need to be reprinted but are too expensive to purchase due to scarcity and are constantly being filled in EDH / Commander decks because of how popular the cards are. This is a type of format that demands consistency in terms of the synergy and combos they have with specific types of deck builds and If underplayed cards in the game's card pool can't measure up to it then that's just the way it is. Players would rather settle for consistency rather than inconsistency.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
$45, lol.
I wasn't buying these back when the value was "good". I'm surprised anyone's buying them now. But I guess somebody must be, or singles wouldn't be available. I remember ten years ago. Everybody was complaining how back in the day a booster pack had value, and nowadays it's all trash. Now everybody's saying "ten years ago sure was great, and nowadays it's all trash." It's always both great and trash at the same time. Nowtimes are great! And they're also trash.
And yeah, if you want value, you get singles. That's how it's always been. Sure, a pack of Urza's Saga is a great investment in retrospect, but that's retrospect. Ask someone in 2000 about the value of a booster pack.
Low-power cube enthusiast!
My 1570 card cube (no longer updated)
My 415 Peasant+ Artifact and Enchantment Cube
Ever-Expanding "Just throw it in" cube.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
There wasn’t much value in the days of odyssey block era with sets having 110 rares. There were $30 chase cards like call of the herd, but there were many junk rares like the Aven Shrine cycle. I think upheaval and Haunting Echoes andShadowmage Infiltrator were the other chase cards.
pucatrade
big receipts
alpha mox emerald
beta time walk
4 goyfs received
3 liliana of the veil
4 karn liberated
3 force of will
4 grove of the burnwillows
snapcaster mage
3 horizon canopy
2 full art damnation
at the price point they were at prior it was a nice little impulse buy. at target? throw one in the cart who cares they're not that expensive. after a price increase though? way less likely to do that.
use to buy every commander precon, now the value just isn't there for the price.
use to buy a box for every set release. now not so much because there are too many choices and not enough value for the cost. so with an increased cost, theres even less value there.
You got one Pre-Con and it only included half of the cards it was supposed to where I've heard some cases where there were double the number of rares that normally wouldn't be in there including duplicates of cards that aren't basic lands as in the case with some of the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty Pre-Cons. But yeah the quality control for the Streets of New Capenna Commander Pre-Cons was insane. Fortunately I didn't have that happen to me when I bought mine last Saturday but for my friend I felt bad enough that I offered the lands I wasn't using to complete the actual Pre-Con since one of them was the Grixis deck and he declined my offer since he had better lands to build with it already in his inventory.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
How does this affect Paper Magic? Since we have less truck drivers to help distribute sealed product that means more delays with product releases as well as more manufacturing errors in recent products to where the print quality isn't what it once was but it did seem to get better though. Players who order card singles online will probably get more snail mail from the post office because even they're suffering from staff shortages like everyone else. Local Game Stores (LGSs) can't even break even anymore without losing sales to Secret Lair drops that Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro refuses to let them sell publicly.
With the way things are going right now it's gonna make 1929 seem like Happy Fun Day at Six Flags. People are going to be wishing they stocked up on things that actually matter like food, water, guns, and ammunition. Why waste that money on a luxury item like Paper Magic? Not gonna sugarcoat it but I think we're going to be in for some really tough times ahead. We're already in a mild recession due to rising market inflation but at least it's not as bad as it was in 2008 when the global economy was in free fall.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-reports-first-quarter-2022-financial-results
Hasbro operates on like a 10% profit margin overall with all product lines.
WotC has a 40% profit margin, and that is like 22% of Hasbro revenue.
With a 40% profit margin, increasing the cost of boosters is pretty wild, so nobody can possible deny that WotC is indeed milking the player base dry.
They have plenty of room to not increase prices.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
It certainly is, if you never buy any new product (or just few singles).
Can also proxy a lot of expensive cards with a color printer for casual play and its basically "free".
I use to play Draft whenever i can, so thats each FNM, did cost 10 euros some years ago, now they charge 20 euros (provide and extra guaranteed pack at least, to move more product).
Thats like 40 weeks a year x20 bucks, 800 euros a year for drafting, then like 4 PreRelease sealed events (30 euros a pop now) , 120 bucks.
Buying (and selling) some singles over a year, thats a combined like 1000 bucks a year.
Thats certainly more money then i spend in video games or any other hobby, just a few years back, it combined to like 500 euros a year, so that basically all doubled.
WUBRG#BlackLotusMatterWUBRG
👮👮👮 #BlueLivesMatter 👮👮👮
I know what you mean that it can be cheap, but at the same time it's like... My favourite format is Modern.... which is basically legacy light now and way way out of budget to have more than one deck for me. Tried proxying a bit just with my friends, but it's quite a hassle. I've only bought a few singles the last two years. I HATE playing draft in basically any game, Magic included, so I never do that. I do like playing sealed with my friends though, but it's been a very long time since we did that too. I think the last set I actually bought some boosters from was the latest Theros set. Everything other than that has been a few cheap singles here and there on Cardmarket. But even the prices on singles are pretty crazy.
I don't play in gamestores anymore either. I kinda got burnt out by the people there, so I just play with a group of friends when everybody can. Commander, pauper and sometimes modern with proxies. I just can't justify spending the money it costs for "strong" cards.
Thanks for posting that. They (Hasbro) suffer from the fallacy that players/buyers are like some inexhaustable money tree that you can just keep on taking from and it will never run out. It will run out at some point and maybe that is the goal, take as much as possible short term and who cares about the long term. It doesn't surprise me what they are doing, just disappoints me greatly because they aren't thinking about the long term health of the game, just the short term cash grab.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Tolarian Community College also had this to say about Magic: The Gathering getting more expensive:
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Magic the game itself is being pulled in a lot of directions right now. A business needs a healthy bottom line but at the sole expense of the consumer is a sleazy way of doing it. There very well may be many within WotC fighting for the long term health of the game being over-ridden by Hasbro execs.
When draft boosters go to $5 USD from $4 USD a pack in big box/retail stores is when I quit buying them on impulse. And I only have X amount budgeted for Magic and I am not bumping that up. I can't but think there are thousands of others like myself out there. Inflation here in the US is real and pervasive as well. Its not going away soon either.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Save me Martin Shkreli
Compare to other Paper Trading Card Games / Collectible Card Games like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon TCG where they aren't bombarded with more than two or three formats that become dictated by the Secondary Market. The less formats your game has the more your Secondary Market is affordable for a lot of players. Maybe it doesn't actually work that way where If one card is popular in multiple said paper formats then the actual market demand for the card is doubled or even tripled. You also have to factor in scarcity within the Secondary Market and how much of the card is circulating which can definitely make these kinds of price estimates quite challenging. Cost of shipping varies between where the item is being sold to and from as well. Is there something I'm missing here? Feel free to enlighten me on this If there's an actual correlation to the subject matter.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta