Gift Horse Dental Care

My professional life has been chaotic the past few weeks, mostly due to some dramatic and humbling staffing shakeups at my store. We’re okay, and the store will be better for it in the long-term, but I have gone from 20 hours a week to 70 this month, and as a result I haven’t had the brainpower to talk about bigger-picture stuff. I have been taking notes about future entries as they’ve come to mind, so when my muse comes stumbling home, I will write more.

Modern Masters was, well… I could say that it was over-printed, or that players are suffering wallet fatigue, or that non-Standard Magic is a bubble built on “MTG Finance” speculators that don’t represent as many players as their dollars would seem to represent. It might be a little of everything, but the takeaway is that I was sadly right:

Over the past few weeks the price has more or less settled at $190 a box. At that price, and assuming the most favorable pricing commonly possible from WOTC direct, the COGS on Modern Masters 2017 boxes is 66.8%. This is very close to the COGS of a regular box of non-allocated Magic product sold at $110, which is 69.2%. (Those selling boxes for $100 face a COGS of 75.9%.)

For years, I’ve treated the “X Masters” and other limited-allocation products as sure bets. I’ve bought as much of them as I possibly could, because I knew that the margins would be great and I’d sell through them very reliably. I came to think of them as love-gifts from Wizards of the Coast to the WPN locations which provide a place to play their cards.

I just did a stock check on Modern Masters 2017. Having stood firmly at MSRP out of principle, I have sold 25% of my product. I will eventually sell it all a pack at a time, but man, that’s a long run for a short slide.

There are no more sure bets on the horizon. With premium releases becoming more like regular releases, and regular releases becoming more like, well, Kaijudo, I can no longer blindly order the maximum allocation on anything. We cut our Amonkhet order pretty dramatically. I haven’t even decided if I want to carry the Commander Anthology in quantities greater than one or two. If I’m wrong, these products will be in short supply and I’ll lose money by not having them.

This isn’t to say that we’re giving up on Magic. It’s still about 20% of my business, and still important. We’re doing events all weekend and we’re busting a case of singles on livestream tonight. As a store we’re doubling down on the enthusiasm. As a buyer, I’m going to work on limiting my potential losses.

Perhaps this is the way I should always have treated Magic. It was just so much easier to take it for granted and work harder on the things that needed more attention to sell. That’s bad retailing, but the price I will pay as a diversified store will be small. What will be the butcher’s bill when the finances settle for all the one-brand card shops out there?

2 comments on “Gift Horse Dental Care

  1. Paul I have to agree with you. Magic is over exposed at the moment, and I fear this will hurt them both in the short and long run.

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