Layman’s Conjecture on Modern Masters 2017 Supply

I call myself a layman, because I am not a Magic player, my store is not a majority-Magic business (though it briefly was when I opened), and though I’ve been open for only six years, I am not a distribution expert.

It’s been a bad couple of sets for Magic. Wizards needs a home run. Most of distribution is crunched for cash and needs at least a base hit. Many Magic-heavy retailers are not in a great cash position, judging from how many of them went out of business following the Red October outages.

My gut feeling after witnessing the unexpected Eternal Masters reprint was that Modern Masters 2017 was going to be printed heavily.

When spoiler season arrived, and the set became more and more ridiculous, I became more fearful as other retailers rejoiced. The set was too good. Acknowledging that I’m probably a little jaded, I expressed some concerns that it might be a cash grab. If the value of your product lies mostly in a back catalog of valuable IP that you can release whenever you want, the correct play would seem to be to restrict it to a steady, modest flow. To suddenly throw the lever all the way over and allow the value to gush out seems to send the same signal as a store throwing a sudden 50% off sale: The customers will rejoice, but partners in the business may see the blood in the water.

My allocation from Wizards was modest, but Distribution told me that I could get more. A lot more. In fact, I haven’t talked to anyone who wasn’t offered at least double their official allocation. Almost everyone I know took it. I didn’t.

Release day. Prices in my neck of the woods were driven down by area competitors selling the $240 MSRP boxes for $200 and $188. That’s sometimes advertised as the tax-included price, which is illegal in this state and hints at wider misbehavior, but that’s the norm. This matches the online price, which at the time of this writing is about $200.

Here’s something to ponder: Look at the industry-standard discount applied to booster boxes of regular sets. My store and many others sell a Standard booster box for $110. This is not an exciting sale for us. The profit from a booster box at that price will pay my payroll for about 39 minutes, assuming my pay as an owner is zero. If you apply that same discount to a box of Modern Masters, then you’d expect the demand curve to meet the supply at a price of about $195. Is Modern Masters supposed to be just another set? No? Then why does it appear to be printed like one?

On Friday, the weekly product list emails from Wizards went out. After rumors of an eight-box restock offer, we were all surprised to see that the offer was twenty additional boxes. If you were Wizards, and you had or intended to print a few more trailer-loads of this product, but you didn’t want to let on that supply was infinite, what would you offer as a first-week restock? One hundred would certainly cause a panic. Even 32 is more than many retailers were allocated, for all that those allocation numbers mattered. Twenty seems right. Many retailers I’ve seen talking about this hurried to get in their restock orders as early as possible. Every restock order is being filled. None have been turned away.

Wizards, being a subsidiary of Hasbro, a publicly-traded company, is not doing anything wrong, and is accountable to shareholders who demand profit maximization. Ultimately Wizards doesn’t, shouldn’t, and legally can’t care whether the margin on their products at market price is 42% or 12%. Their wholesale price is the price they get, so the only question is how many boxes they can ship at that price. I’ve stated elsewhere that the supply of young adults happy to throw the best years of their lives away running unprofitable game stores seems nearly infinite. If you had such a resource, your shareholders would require you to use it.

I want very badly to be wrong about this launch. Many of my dearest friends went deep on this product. If I’m wrong, then I will blow through my allocation at MSRP and be unable to get more. I will have made a good bit of money while watching my friends make a lot of money. If I’m right, then I guess I’ll have the prestige of having called it correctly, but I’ll struggle to sell my product at MSRP among the throngs of retailers desperately dumping the product so that they can pay their terms.

So far I’ve sold one booster box and sixteen boosters. I have heard from other retailers that are selling lots of product and seem to be doing great. There is still time for me to be wrong. Please, let me be wrong.