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Magic: the Gathering |OT| Guilds of Ravnica - We built this city on blocks of gold
- Thread starter SigmasonicX
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Man, I feel those pains so hard. Nothing makes me want to strangle someone more than the constant flicking of the corners of cards. It's the legitimate most annoying thing so many Magic players do.
Some of them are really boring and dry. But you can say the same thing for SCG too
But I have to hide information because I don't want you to know I'm looking at the card I drew for the turn and not one that was already in my hand or something.
I'm not an anxious wreck who can't sit still I'm a strategic genius okay.
I'm starting to think they need to start providing Top 8/Championship players with Required Low-Glare Sleeves to swap their deck into.
But then I guess they'd have to ban Foils even more than their tendency to curl has already self-banned them.
But then I guess they'd have to ban Foils even more than their tendency to curl has already self-banned them.
The only commentators who aren't are probably LSV, Cedric, and Patrick Sullivan. Everyone else is flat as a piece of cardboard.
I don't really mind any of the commentators, but I guess if I were to be honest the only one that doesn't sort of half remind me of snooker play-by-play guys is Cedric. He is an entertainer.
I of course also have my preferences, I watch pretty much everything with Marshall but others only if I am interested in the match up.
It just felt so unnecessary that he would use this platform to pretty much personally attack the commentators when this is probably the last thing holding Magic back and certainly not the huge issue that would warrant a mention.
It just felt so unnecessary that he would use this platform to pretty much personally attack the commentators when this is probably the last thing holding Magic back and certainly not the huge issue that would warrant a mention.
Yeah, I mean the difference in good and bad commentary in Magic is... not super obvious or particularly important.
Probably the reason a lot of people like the SCG commentators is because they aren't afraid to just start shooting the shit when a game's boring as heck and no one wants the play-by-play. They're a bit closer to fighting game shoutcasters.
Probably the reason a lot of people like the SCG commentators is because they aren't afraid to just start shooting the shit when a game's boring as heck and no one wants the play-by-play. They're a bit closer to fighting game shoutcasters.
I actually think they have been doing a great job with the commentators. I really like the move towards bringing in more of the pros and while Cedric and Patrick are entertaining I don't find their actual commentary on the matches to be all that great. They both pretty much fill the play by play role and they are missing the color part which Wizards does a good job ensuring they fill both those roles.
Reid Duke's commentary was pretty great and knowledgeable. In fact, that GP where they followed him with the table mics and hand cam was probably the only event I've watched for more than half an hour or so.
Everyone getting all up-in-arms over direct sales is funny on so many fronts to me. The general assumption that if something is bad for the LGS it's bad for the game is inherently, obviously, flawed. That viewpoint somehow neglects the possibility that things that LGSs do could possibly be *bad* for the game. I'm finding out through all of this that a lot of people are paying way over MSRP for their boxes. That's crazy to me! People getting price gouged, on an apparently wide scale, is that good for the game? I'm not inclined to think so.
People are decrying Wizards for chasing short term profits, completely oblivious to any long term profit that they actually stand to make. They also seem basically unwilling to confront the inevitability of direct sales. Did we all so quickly forget that Wizards used to do direct sales? And had a whole line of their own name brand stores? For quite a while? One of the end games of rampant counterfeiting, that Wizards clearly can't directly stop, is direct sales being forced back into the open as a secondary market price control method.
There's a fair amount of people henny-pennying over this. As if a couple weeks ago they weren't acting like BaB exclusives weren't Wizards greatest gift to LGSs. The actually destructive mentality here is that LGSs are somehow infallible. That's how we get stupid shit like the Reserved List. Acting like one group actually controls the totality of magic is delusional.
People are decrying Wizards for chasing short term profits, completely oblivious to any long term profit that they actually stand to make. They also seem basically unwilling to confront the inevitability of direct sales. Did we all so quickly forget that Wizards used to do direct sales? And had a whole line of their own name brand stores? For quite a while? One of the end games of rampant counterfeiting, that Wizards clearly can't directly stop, is direct sales being forced back into the open as a secondary market price control method.
There's a fair amount of people henny-pennying over this. As if a couple weeks ago they weren't acting like BaB exclusives weren't Wizards greatest gift to LGSs. The actually destructive mentality here is that LGSs are somehow infallible. That's how we get stupid shit like the Reserved List. Acting like one group actually controls the totality of magic is delusional.
Thoughts on this Jank Fest i made? I can even swap Spell Pierce for Swan Song since i don't give 2 fucks about the opponent having a 2/2 creature.
I agree. The price gouging by LGSs is insane and should have been totally unacceptable. I think people get into the mentality that LGSs do something for them when really it's the other way around.
The MSRP for a standard set booster box is $143 and some change. Who is paying more than that?
LGS provide product, a place for people to interact and play Magic with each other casually and competitively, run prerelease events, etc. I couldn't disagree with you more. "Price-gouging." Do you know how much it costs to run a store?
The concern with people with regards to LGS brick-and-mortar and game health isn't so much that any given LGS is good for the community it's in, it's that it's good for the game on the larger scale. The idea is that LGS locations effectively act as a massive source of advertising and a sort of player support network that keeps people interested in Magic from just saying, "Oh, but I don't know anyone who plays" and writing it off.
They would arguably be unnecessary if the digital product was actually carrying that weight, but I remain unconvinced.
They would arguably be unnecessary if the digital product was actually carrying that weight, but I remain unconvinced.
I don't know about you guys, but I have zero plans to buy boxes from Amazon. I like to buy a single box just for the feel of cracking packs early in a set, and we're already in a position where buying such a box from an LGS will get you the box a week early with a promo. So I have every incentive to buy that box from my LGS and not Amazon. Who are the people actually buying boxes a bunch of boxes online? I feel like it has to be a pretty small audience. Maybe just the serious box crackers or speculators. People trying to make a profit off buying boxes.
This actually makes this whole thing even crazier to me. I was under the impression that MSRP for a box was like $100-$115. So widely available is the $100 price point that I was completely incredulous to this. Paying $143 for a box is insanity. I doubt any LGS that is charging this for a box sustainably would actually be effected by *any kind* of direct sales. Because the end consumer has been able to get $100 boxes from all of these locations for years.
'It costs money to run a store' is not a defense for 'charging more than is acceptable for an item to the general detriment of the community'. Theoretically, this kind of thing sorts itself out with competition. I've never experienced an LGS that doesn't do (apparently under MSRP) $100 boxes. But in reading the discussion about direct sales, $143 boxes appear to be way more common than I would have imagined.
LGSs totally play an important role in the healthy ecosystem of any given game. Direct sales has never stopped any game from still being perfectly viable LGS products. Warhammer products are an obvious comparison. Direct sales available, and yet huge crowds for it at any LGS I've been to that has proper floorspace. Direct sales doesn't destroy viability, it just caps profitability on sealed product.
An aside: People can't argue that amazon et all will undercut LGSs by a significant margin and argue that Wizards is going for a cash grab. Wizards wouldn't actually make any extra money from this if they offered amazon the same prices that distributors get. Wizards can very easily for big retails price point to stay at around $100 by charging more than they charge distributors. That's how they make money here. In all likelihood, these relationships have been in place for a while and it's only getting formalized now. The increasing proliferation of masters sets into big retail should have made it very obvious that this was happening.
If they wanted to be pissed at $100 online boxes they should have been pissed a decade ago.
Really, people getting up in arms about this is mind boggling to me.
I have never heard of a shop charging 143 for a box and I live in the Northeast where we have plenty of Magic stores, so maybe that's just from my point of view. If someone lives in an area where there's not much competition and the LGS are charging 143 and taking advantage of that fact then I would agree that's gouging, I was disagreeing with the sentiment that LGS shouldn't be making some kind of profit off of the boxes.
Sorry, I was reacting to seeing people saying they have LGSs doing $143, assuming that $100 is the obvious fair price that we're working towards. LGSs profit just fine off a $100 box. Obviously not as much as $143, but its still fair profit.
Just wait until Wizards is forced into direct singles sales (or some equivalent). That's when profits will actually be threatened.
My store is moving from $90 preorder/$100 normal to $100 preorder/$110 normal with the cost increase for them. Local stores aren't making a ton off of boxes anyway. No more than $10 profit or so. Considering their volume is much less than online retailers, every dollar counts.
Thankfully my store is pretty diverse as it's a card game/hobby game/RPG book/board game/comic book shop, so they're not reliant on any one of those industries to stay afloat.
Thankfully my store is pretty diverse as it's a card game/hobby game/RPG book/board game/comic book shop, so they're not reliant on any one of those industries to stay afloat.
They can't do that. It would turn it into actual gambling.
My experience has been that with the possible exception of board games those other products are even worse for turning a profit than Magic.
Most "LGS" shops were actually RPG and comic stores that got into Magic to keep the lights on.
There is no MSRP for a box, just for individual packs. If you add up the MSRP for each pack ($3.99) it comes to $143.64, which is the official MSRP for a box. No stores actually sell boxes at that price though. Most stores will sell in the $90~$115 range depending on the local market. $100 a box is pretty common around here.
The issue for LGSes has never been $100 boxes, it's the $75 ~ $85, race-to-the-bottom prices that you can often find easily online for boxes. From Wizards Direct booster packs were $2.11 wholesale (about $76 for a box). From distributors it was a little more (generally in the $2.20 range or about $79~$80 a box). Less than a month ago, Wizards ended the Wizards Direct program that allowed stores to buy wholesale product directly from Wizards, so now all LGSes are forced to go through 3rd party distributors. I don't know how that's affected the distributor's prices, but the worry is that if Amazon is getting product for the same prices (or cheaper) that distributors get them from Wizards they'll sell them in the $80~$85 range with basically unlimited supply, which is virtually impossible to compete with given wholesale prices.
That retail comes with a lot more overhead than warehouse space has been an issue with retail for the last couple of decades. Ultimately, it's up to the people running the game stores to figure out how to stay profitable and keep the lights on, but unlike a lot of other industries, there's a tension with tabletop gaming because the biggest competition isn't actually the other companies in the market, but activities outside of the market (movies, bars, cafes, etc.) Plenty of people play games at home, but a big chunk of the segment doesn't for various reasons. If they don't have a place to play, then they simply won't and will do something else. If all of a store's customers are buying their product elsewhere, but still using the space to play, the store is going to have a difficult time staying open.
Minis gaming (especially ones where you build and paint the models) have a bit of built-in safety valve because they take up a lot of space both when playing and when painting. Depending on where you are, a lot of people simply don't have the space or the setup to do that sort of stuff at home. On top of that, unlike a lot of other games, minis games have a more difficult time becoming commoditized, both because of their physicality and because companies like Games Workshop actively work to prevent it (similar to Nintendo). Magic's business model, on the other hand, basically forces cards to to be commoditized. If you buy a Warhammer battle force, you know exactly what you're getting. If you buy a booster box, you get a ton of stuff that you likely don't want or need.
I think the general consensus, amongst retailers, is that Wizards basically dropped them to deal with mass market stores as their sole fulfillment stream. That they made this announcement so soon after cancelling the Wizards Direct program doesn't look like a coincidence, whether or not it actually is. The fulfillment infrastructure that Wizards was using to send product to hundreds (or thousands?) of individual clients has likely been cut back and streamlined to instead send to a small number of mass market clients, which likely will save Wizards on overhead.
$145 is like nearly a 100% markup. Your LGS is happily ripping you off. Stores near me don't even sell packs for MSRP.
I have two LGS in my City one sells at 100 the other at 90. But it doesn't seem like thats what they make the most money off. One is the biggest Seller of Comic Books in the Region and the other is mostly about boardgames. Sure if you only sell or mainly rely on Magic as your buisness it's really hard but doing so doesn't seem all that smart as well.
How does your store not close when people find out you can buy boxes from the internet for ~$90?
I have no idea. They have 3 locations and 1 tavern/arcade, so clearly boxes are not the main draw. The owner's family used to own a carpeting business, which is how I think he can afford to dump so much money into what is traditionally considered an awful business idea.
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the markup can be lower if the sales volume is higher
i don't think the sales volume of packs/boxes should really be the focus though. somehow people need to be buying into events that make the store + wotc money. surviving by selling things that nobody should buy (or that the amazons of the world can provide cheaper) isn't really the greatest strategy
organized play is kind of a fail because there's basically no incentive to actually play at a store other than the occasional promo card.
i don't think the sales volume of packs/boxes should really be the focus though. somehow people need to be buying into events that make the store + wotc money. surviving by selling things that nobody should buy (or that the amazons of the world can provide cheaper) isn't really the greatest strategy
organized play is kind of a fail because there's basically no incentive to actually play at a store other than the occasional promo card.
Events make virtually no money; the entry fee is there to pay for the cost of running the event. When stores host events, it's with the hope that the people who come will buy product.
this is a problem then because stores can't realistically be competitive at product sales
This isn't a new thing you could always buy deeply discounted product on Amazon through affiliated retailers. If you want cheap product and are willing to go online for it, it has never been hard to find if you wanted to.
The way you keep your LGS open is putting a bar in it. I'm not joking, by the way.
That doesnt mean that this is how Wizards / Hasbro should handle it. And, in fact, they are harming their game by crapping on the LGS'*.
It's dependent on the mana being any good. UW has horrible mana, but just splashing Teferi in a UB deck seems plausible.
The MSRP is actually listed on Wizards site as $143. It's obvious how they get to that MSRP but boxes aren't lacking an actual MSRP. Wulfric, I hope you're not paying that much for a box, you'd be getting ripped off majorly.
I think this worry is based on misreading their little announcement. Business with amazon et all isn't something that is going to start happening soon, it's something that has been implied to be going on for a while already. That's how it's easy to draw conclusions about how this is working, people haven't magically found cheaper boxes anywhere. And like I said, Wizards doesn't actually make more money on any of this if they sell to amazon et all at distributor prices. They're almost certainly gaming it so that nothing changes on the consumer end.
Diversification is the only real way to keep an LGS going, but that's just like any other business. The bar thing totally works, my current LGS does it, and I've seen multiple others do it. Place has a whole cooking section attached.
Its not as commoditized, but it's still totally commoditized. To the point that companies showing up attempting to make knock offs have been a thing in the Warhammer community. GW hasn't been good about combatting it with business practices until the last couple of years. The real interesting thing is that GW does direct sales, but apparently enables third party sellers to be able to sell their stuff for cheaper.
My impression here is that most LGSs never got product from Wizards directly to begin with. At least, I've never been involved with an LGS that did. So this change didn't really do a whole lot.
If they directly sold the 1-copy-of-each-card-in-a-set redemption packs from MTGO they would effectively be selling singles at a set price. Obviously they already do this but in a super obfuscated way. MTG is already considered gambling in some countries *without* singles present in obvious form.
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I think it's closer to $80 for most LGSs, especially now that Wizards isn't selling direct anymore..
BTW, the $143 MSRP number is what Wizards tells distributors...yet the new direct sell from amazon is like $95..
I mean, Wizards tells distributors that in reference to selling individual packs, which is correct. If you're exclusively selling individual packs, that is, indeed, the MSRP. The issue is, from what I've been told, the average LGS gets their boxes at a price range of $68 to $77, and then mark it up as need be. If they're selling full-on boxes at MSRP, they're trying to almost double their money, which is savagery.
This is not a new number. There was never a point where big retail was selling boxes for more than $100. Wal-mart has been at $100 for years. Card Kingdom, Starcity, CFB, all have been around $100 for years. The $95 price point is in no way new.
I said this when the BaB promos were the topic, but a store that is relying on mtg box margins to stay open is not a store that is running a viable business.
that hasn't been my experience w/ amazon and magic products in europe. Amazon is more expensive than any LGS see for instance commander 2018, any deck costs between €25 and €30 at my LGS but €35 to €40 on amazon.
Man, I was going to build a Dimir EDH mill meck anyway but Yours-moth's Will makes it a total lock. That card is bonkers.
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