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writerkitWizards of the Coast *is* slowly pricing everyone out of the game. When you have the same major kerfuffle over and over again, either you're doing it on purpose and you don't care, or that highly vaunted market research you're always so proud of needs a major tweak. Since I don't think the people running Wizards and specifically Magic are *actually* this unobservant, that leaves door number one.
Actually, what I think happened is they didn't count on the players being smart enough to spot the pattern and get angry about it-- though I also don't think, now that they *have* pissed off their entire customer base *again*, that they care enough about this to change, because it will still sell out. Some of the people in this game have a lot of money and are willing to spend it on things like a $300 booster set. This is actually the first set to hit *my* break point although it's not the first time I was grousing about the price: I was willing to buy an Ultimate Masters box. I had enough fun having a draft that I was willing to buy a Modern Horizons box, although the pandemic has put actually drafting it on hold. If my income remains stable and I don't end up forced to move somewhere drastically more expensive, I will be buying a Mystery Booster box when Pandemonium reopens.
However. I *will not* buy a Double Masters set. $300 for a box is far too expensive. And this is unfortunate, because it looks like a really fun, really exciting set.
There's kind of a tangled web of stuff that leads up to this, though-- a context I have to put it in, for you to understand exactly what's going on. It tracks back to loot boxes, to Wizards' history skirting gambling laws, to a new product called Secret Lairs... actually, I'm realizing as I type that out just how daunting the prospect of giving even a brief overview of this to people who are lacking the context is. But this is my journal, and I want to rant, and I'm hoping that laying it all out will help *me* get it in some kind of order, so here, you are now going to be treated to an examination of the MtG pricing structure.
Wizards has always pretended that the secondary market doesn't exist. They *need* to pretend the secondary market doesn't exist, because if they admit the cards have monetary value in the real world, suddenly opening a booster pack is *gambling*. Then they're subject to a whole bunch of laws they really don't want to be subject to, and they're marketing a gambling product to minors. So the fiction is that every $4 booster is equivalent to every other $4 booster, and the special sets which are more expensive are more expensive because they're a premium draft experience, not because there's a chance of getting more expensive cards in them. (And in all fairness, they usually actually *are* wonderful draft experiences; there is a *reason* I'm bitter about being priced out even though I have little interest in the things that require expensive cards.) This is not true in the least, but here we are.
The standard euphemism for price is "collectibility". We don't want to make it easy to get the cards you need because then the game isn't a *collectible* anymore.
I will observe here that fetchlands, which you need in order to get into the older formats which some people find more interesting, cost around $80 each. You need four for a deck. They're *not* in Double Masters, although it does contain at least some other badly needed reprints. Printed at rare, of course, so you have to spend a lot of money on the set and then probably not even get the thing you're after.
The thing is, up until recently, Wizards has had an incentive not to let secondary market prices get too out of hand, because they didn't sell single cards. If they sold singles, they'd have to admit the cards had monetary value and then we're back to gambling laws. So local game stores and online card marketplaces made a ton of money on reselling individual cards, and to keep it worthwhile for people to keep buying packs, they made sure to offer enough reprints to keep secondary markets under control enough for people to be able to get the cards they need to participate in formats that use older cards. They couldn't admit this was what they were doing, but they absolutely were doing it. They needed to do it; it was the only way they could make money off the older formats.
Then someone came up with Secret Lairs. Which is Wizards selling singles, with a small fig leaf over the fact that that's what they're doing. This was a new product line introduced this year that was print-to-demand small sets containing four or five cards. (Occasionally they have been *outright* selling singles; Bitterblossom is a card that makes tokens, and so its Secret Lair was infamously the card and four tokens. But according to Wizards it's not selling singles because the tokens have panoramic art!) They are special collectors' items because they have cool new art. The Secret Lair line has taken a lot of flack for the actual quality; there's been a number of instances of cards *arriving* too curled to be legal for tournament play, and there's no real recourse for when that happens. The pricing calibration of Secret Lairs has *very clearly* been calibrated to the secondary market, because they're sold for at or just below what the contents are selling for on the secondary market. With, again, a fig leaf that the price differences between the various five-card Secret Lair jobs are because of the special art.
(They're also sold directly by Wizards, undercutting the local game stores, which pissed *everyone* off.)
This came to a head with Secret Lair Ultimate Edition, which was very clever from a diabolical deniability standpoint. Wizards has done away with the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price this year, almost certainly as a prelude to the Secret Lair drops. They did, under the umbrella of Secret Lair, sets of one each of the five different enemy-colored fetchlands. This was not an unlimited drop. Every local game store could have a maximum of ten copies of it to sell, and you bought it there. Thus, the reason it costs several hundred dollars for five cards when previous drops had mostly been in the $30-40 range is not Wizards, it's your local game store. They're the one setting the price. This isn't selling singles with an awareness of secondary market prices at *all*. Also it's in a very nice display box which the others weren't in and is thus *obviously* more expensive. (We don't know what Wizards charged the game stores for this product but we do have some good deductive reasoning suggesting that the couple of hundred dollars was in fact their *intended* price point, though it very quickly skyrocketed well past that.)
Which brings us back around to Double Masters. The stated rationale offered up by Mark Rosewater, lead designer for Magic, is that the reason it is so expensive is because it isn't *for* the people who are priced out by it. "It's not for you" is a phrase normally offered up to serious players of one format who are upset that time and resources and product slots are being spent on products that target a different format-- dedicated tournament players who are upset that this year's "innovation product" is aimed at beginners, dedicated Commander players who dislike a product aimed at the tournament crowd, beginners who think a thing aimed at the enfranchised players is too complicated. It's something he offers up to remind people that there are a lot of audiences for Magic, they all play it in different ways, and that Wizards is trying to appeal to all of those crowds.
It's fundamentally different when you create a product that a lot of people are really enthusiastic about and would be into playing, except you've priced it so far above the normal prices for similar products that none of those people can afford it. ("Masters" is a product line. Ultimate Masters, which came out roughly a year ago, was supposed to be the thrilling conclusion and they were retiring the Masters line for a while, there would be no Masters sets for a long time. Given how far ahead they work on sets, they *have* to have known this was a lie at the time they were making those announcements. They've been getting gradually more expensive over time-- people complained about Ultimate Masters-- but this is a major jump. For comparison, a normal releases-three-times-a-year set is $100 for a box; Ultimate Masters was $210 at Pandemonium.)
Rosewater's explanation is this: they need to create some products for the people who want to spend lots of money on fancy special sets, in the same way they need to create products for the Commander players and the Standard players and the kitchen table players. Previously, this has been done via genuine "supplemental products with fancy artwork"-- not the Secret Lair fig leaf, but things with *genuinely* fancy art and cool card frames and foil. But now he's insisting that Magic needs to be collectible. Some stuff in the tone of his post makes one think it's coming down from highly corporate; he said outright that "making Magic not be collectible anymore" is not something he can take to his bosses. Offering sets like this at a reasonable price point definitely would not have that effect; they did Masters sets at reasonable price points for years without that happening. But if we remember that "collectible" is a euphemism for "expensive"...
They're going to kill the golden goose, though. If they'd done this as an unlimited print run at a lower price point, it might have brought down some of the secondary market prices, but they'd have endeared themselves to players, everyone would have bought some, and they'd almost certainly have made the same or more money because of the added volume. Instead they've pissed everyone off and a lot of people who don't have massive amounts of disposable income are starting to feel like perhaps their disposable income is better spent elsewhere because Magic clearly doesn't want any customers who don't have *massive amounts* of disposable income and it certainly doesn't want anyone who only has a moderate amount of disposable income to be able to play in tournaments.
As a sort of postscript to all of the above: Wizards has maintained something called the Reserved List for years, which are cards that it is not going to reprint, adopted after some of the earliest reprints upset people whose cards suddenly dropped dramatically in value. This has been on the basis of not getting sued for promissory estoppel (yes, *really*). The common opinion among the lawyers in the community is they'd win any promissory estoppel lawsuit, but they'd have to admit on the record in court that the secondary market exists. Pretty much the entire playerbase wants the reserve list gone, because cards that are on it are some of the oldest and most powerful and people want them back. (Google "Power Nine" if you want some examples of the most expensive ones.) They've been ignoring that market potential for *decades* because they didn't want to risk acknowledging the secondary market. Now they're skating very close to the edge and doing things that cannot be taken any other way than "this is actions we are taking based on the secondary market". Eventually someone's going to notice that this is basically analog loot boxes.
("But Kit," you say, "the subject line said this was a *brief* discussion of Magic pricing!" It is. I didn't get into the judge lawsuit at all. Nor did I get into the ways this policy biases the professional scene to the already well-connected, or the way the story has shifted from free online to products that we're charged for, or Brandon Sanderson writing an Official Magic Novella for free on the condition that it be free to read and now it's behind a paywall... think about how much of a mess MtG has currently made if this is a *brief* discussion of it.)
Actually, what I think happened is they didn't count on the players being smart enough to spot the pattern and get angry about it-- though I also don't think, now that they *have* pissed off their entire customer base *again*, that they care enough about this to change, because it will still sell out. Some of the people in this game have a lot of money and are willing to spend it on things like a $300 booster set. This is actually the first set to hit *my* break point although it's not the first time I was grousing about the price: I was willing to buy an Ultimate Masters box. I had enough fun having a draft that I was willing to buy a Modern Horizons box, although the pandemic has put actually drafting it on hold. If my income remains stable and I don't end up forced to move somewhere drastically more expensive, I will be buying a Mystery Booster box when Pandemonium reopens.
However. I *will not* buy a Double Masters set. $300 for a box is far too expensive. And this is unfortunate, because it looks like a really fun, really exciting set.
There's kind of a tangled web of stuff that leads up to this, though-- a context I have to put it in, for you to understand exactly what's going on. It tracks back to loot boxes, to Wizards' history skirting gambling laws, to a new product called Secret Lairs... actually, I'm realizing as I type that out just how daunting the prospect of giving even a brief overview of this to people who are lacking the context is. But this is my journal, and I want to rant, and I'm hoping that laying it all out will help *me* get it in some kind of order, so here, you are now going to be treated to an examination of the MtG pricing structure.
Wizards has always pretended that the secondary market doesn't exist. They *need* to pretend the secondary market doesn't exist, because if they admit the cards have monetary value in the real world, suddenly opening a booster pack is *gambling*. Then they're subject to a whole bunch of laws they really don't want to be subject to, and they're marketing a gambling product to minors. So the fiction is that every $4 booster is equivalent to every other $4 booster, and the special sets which are more expensive are more expensive because they're a premium draft experience, not because there's a chance of getting more expensive cards in them. (And in all fairness, they usually actually *are* wonderful draft experiences; there is a *reason* I'm bitter about being priced out even though I have little interest in the things that require expensive cards.) This is not true in the least, but here we are.
The standard euphemism for price is "collectibility". We don't want to make it easy to get the cards you need because then the game isn't a *collectible* anymore.
I will observe here that fetchlands, which you need in order to get into the older formats which some people find more interesting, cost around $80 each. You need four for a deck. They're *not* in Double Masters, although it does contain at least some other badly needed reprints. Printed at rare, of course, so you have to spend a lot of money on the set and then probably not even get the thing you're after.
The thing is, up until recently, Wizards has had an incentive not to let secondary market prices get too out of hand, because they didn't sell single cards. If they sold singles, they'd have to admit the cards had monetary value and then we're back to gambling laws. So local game stores and online card marketplaces made a ton of money on reselling individual cards, and to keep it worthwhile for people to keep buying packs, they made sure to offer enough reprints to keep secondary markets under control enough for people to be able to get the cards they need to participate in formats that use older cards. They couldn't admit this was what they were doing, but they absolutely were doing it. They needed to do it; it was the only way they could make money off the older formats.
Then someone came up with Secret Lairs. Which is Wizards selling singles, with a small fig leaf over the fact that that's what they're doing. This was a new product line introduced this year that was print-to-demand small sets containing four or five cards. (Occasionally they have been *outright* selling singles; Bitterblossom is a card that makes tokens, and so its Secret Lair was infamously the card and four tokens. But according to Wizards it's not selling singles because the tokens have panoramic art!) They are special collectors' items because they have cool new art. The Secret Lair line has taken a lot of flack for the actual quality; there's been a number of instances of cards *arriving* too curled to be legal for tournament play, and there's no real recourse for when that happens. The pricing calibration of Secret Lairs has *very clearly* been calibrated to the secondary market, because they're sold for at or just below what the contents are selling for on the secondary market. With, again, a fig leaf that the price differences between the various five-card Secret Lair jobs are because of the special art.
(They're also sold directly by Wizards, undercutting the local game stores, which pissed *everyone* off.)
This came to a head with Secret Lair Ultimate Edition, which was very clever from a diabolical deniability standpoint. Wizards has done away with the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price this year, almost certainly as a prelude to the Secret Lair drops. They did, under the umbrella of Secret Lair, sets of one each of the five different enemy-colored fetchlands. This was not an unlimited drop. Every local game store could have a maximum of ten copies of it to sell, and you bought it there. Thus, the reason it costs several hundred dollars for five cards when previous drops had mostly been in the $30-40 range is not Wizards, it's your local game store. They're the one setting the price. This isn't selling singles with an awareness of secondary market prices at *all*. Also it's in a very nice display box which the others weren't in and is thus *obviously* more expensive. (We don't know what Wizards charged the game stores for this product but we do have some good deductive reasoning suggesting that the couple of hundred dollars was in fact their *intended* price point, though it very quickly skyrocketed well past that.)
Which brings us back around to Double Masters. The stated rationale offered up by Mark Rosewater, lead designer for Magic, is that the reason it is so expensive is because it isn't *for* the people who are priced out by it. "It's not for you" is a phrase normally offered up to serious players of one format who are upset that time and resources and product slots are being spent on products that target a different format-- dedicated tournament players who are upset that this year's "innovation product" is aimed at beginners, dedicated Commander players who dislike a product aimed at the tournament crowd, beginners who think a thing aimed at the enfranchised players is too complicated. It's something he offers up to remind people that there are a lot of audiences for Magic, they all play it in different ways, and that Wizards is trying to appeal to all of those crowds.
It's fundamentally different when you create a product that a lot of people are really enthusiastic about and would be into playing, except you've priced it so far above the normal prices for similar products that none of those people can afford it. ("Masters" is a product line. Ultimate Masters, which came out roughly a year ago, was supposed to be the thrilling conclusion and they were retiring the Masters line for a while, there would be no Masters sets for a long time. Given how far ahead they work on sets, they *have* to have known this was a lie at the time they were making those announcements. They've been getting gradually more expensive over time-- people complained about Ultimate Masters-- but this is a major jump. For comparison, a normal releases-three-times-a-year set is $100 for a box; Ultimate Masters was $210 at Pandemonium.)
Rosewater's explanation is this: they need to create some products for the people who want to spend lots of money on fancy special sets, in the same way they need to create products for the Commander players and the Standard players and the kitchen table players. Previously, this has been done via genuine "supplemental products with fancy artwork"-- not the Secret Lair fig leaf, but things with *genuinely* fancy art and cool card frames and foil. But now he's insisting that Magic needs to be collectible. Some stuff in the tone of his post makes one think it's coming down from highly corporate; he said outright that "making Magic not be collectible anymore" is not something he can take to his bosses. Offering sets like this at a reasonable price point definitely would not have that effect; they did Masters sets at reasonable price points for years without that happening. But if we remember that "collectible" is a euphemism for "expensive"...
They're going to kill the golden goose, though. If they'd done this as an unlimited print run at a lower price point, it might have brought down some of the secondary market prices, but they'd have endeared themselves to players, everyone would have bought some, and they'd almost certainly have made the same or more money because of the added volume. Instead they've pissed everyone off and a lot of people who don't have massive amounts of disposable income are starting to feel like perhaps their disposable income is better spent elsewhere because Magic clearly doesn't want any customers who don't have *massive amounts* of disposable income and it certainly doesn't want anyone who only has a moderate amount of disposable income to be able to play in tournaments.
As a sort of postscript to all of the above: Wizards has maintained something called the Reserved List for years, which are cards that it is not going to reprint, adopted after some of the earliest reprints upset people whose cards suddenly dropped dramatically in value. This has been on the basis of not getting sued for promissory estoppel (yes, *really*). The common opinion among the lawyers in the community is they'd win any promissory estoppel lawsuit, but they'd have to admit on the record in court that the secondary market exists. Pretty much the entire playerbase wants the reserve list gone, because cards that are on it are some of the oldest and most powerful and people want them back. (Google "Power Nine" if you want some examples of the most expensive ones.) They've been ignoring that market potential for *decades* because they didn't want to risk acknowledging the secondary market. Now they're skating very close to the edge and doing things that cannot be taken any other way than "this is actions we are taking based on the secondary market". Eventually someone's going to notice that this is basically analog loot boxes.
("But Kit," you say, "the subject line said this was a *brief* discussion of Magic pricing!" It is. I didn't get into the judge lawsuit at all. Nor did I get into the ways this policy biases the professional scene to the already well-connected, or the way the story has shifted from free online to products that we're charged for, or Brandon Sanderson writing an Official Magic Novella for free on the condition that it be free to read and now it's behind a paywall... think about how much of a mess MtG has currently made if this is a *brief* discussion of it.)
no subject
Date: 2020-06-21 10:36 am (UTC)