Collectibles: Investment, Confidence Game or Gamble?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The first thing that I want to do is give an acknowledgement to Paul, who is the owner of Geekadrome: Games and Comics, in the Brookline area of Pittsburgh, PA.

Without Paul’s insight and decades of experience in the world of collectibles, this article would have either been impossible, or at best, not particularly good and presented in a very one-sided way.

If you’re in the Pittsburgh area or want to order by mail, then I would recommend contacting Paul at Geekadrome as his product knowledge and knowledge of his segments of the collectibles market is unparalleled. Here’s where you can find them:

Geekadrome: Games and Comics

534 Brookline Boulevard

Pittsburgh, PA 15226

Online: Geekadrome

And, on Facebook.

Again, Paul’s a really great dude and is extremely well-spoken! You might be able to buy Magic cards online, but you can’t buy product knowledge, so if you are into that, other trading card games, or comics, Paul can help you find exactly what you’re looking for.

Finally, excerpts of the interview will be included throughout the article, but the full interview will also be included prior to the conclusion. I would recommend that everyone read the interview, if nothing else…as Paul obviously knows 1,000,000x more than I do about this subject and it’s generally a very interesting interview. I did my best to ask good questions, occasionally stumbled upon a half decent one, as if by accident, but Paul definitely carried the interview in terms of substance!

DISCLAIMERS

This webpage is not meant to be construed as investing, collectible or gambling advice in any shape, way, form or fashion. Opinions expressed by Brandon James are, just that, opinions…and there will never be a substitute for doing your own thorough research into a matter and coming to your own conclusions based upon a MUCH larger body of information.

This webpage does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of WizardofOdds.com, or our parent website, LCB.org. Any views or opinions expressed by Brandon James or Paul of Geekadrome: Games and Comics are their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this family of websites.

The purpose of this webpage is for educational, informational and entertainment purposes only.

My fictional legal assistant says that’s fine, so on we go!

INTRODUCTION

Until recently, I only had a passing familiarity with the world of collectibles, which is to say, I knew that things could be collected.

After two weeks of four-hour study days into one specific collectible, I can honestly say, I only have a passing familiarity with one specific collectible.

The world of collectibles is an interesting one to me because it appears to me that all of the implied value of a possession is based entirely on people perceiving the item in question to have value. I mean, all of it. While I would go on to learn a lot about the fundamentals of Magic the Gathering collecting, it occurs to me that I learned just enough to realize that I still know nothing. I have opinions, but opinions are of no greater value than a proxy The Meathook Massacre that’s not even centered neatly.

Oh, proxies? Don’t worry. We’ll be getting into those.

With that, I will simply do the best that I can with the limited information that I was able to discover, and hopefully, this work will not be a complete injustice to the Magic: The Gathering community.

THE QUESTION OF VALUE

Before we get into that, and largely so you know where my biases might be, I must address the question of how I perceive collectibles, on the whole.

I think that Beanie Babies are, and always were, near worthless stuffed animals that are stuffed using little inedible beans, as opposed to cotton. Quite frankly, I imagine that some Magic enthusiasts would even agree with that statement!

I think Magic: The Gathering cards, and other trading card game cards, are little squares of cardboard with pictures and words that I mostly don’t ascribe any value to because I don’t play the games.

I think that automobiles are a means of conveyance that serve no purpose but to get a person from Point A to Point B. While I can appreciate that some are more aesthetically appealing, or have more power, than others…what makes a good, ‘Value,’ automobile to me is the one that I can expect to travel the greatest overall distance for the lowest total cost to go that distance.

I think that paintings, even historically relevant ones, are just paint on some kind of canvas. Unless I find it visually appealing, then it has no value to me, and even if I do, it has very little value to me. $15, maybe, and only then if I think it would look good in the living room.

I think that sports cards are little squares of cardboard with a picture of a guy, or a gal, on them combined with some statistics on the back.

But, as some athletes will accomplish more in their careers than others, some Magic cards are superior to others. This superiority might be as near as objective as can be, such as gameplay value in terms of being a useful card. Farewell, for example, can remove every card (except Plainswalkers) that your opponents have in play and can also exile their graveyard to prevent the opponent from bringing cards back, or pulling them out of graveyard into hand, for decks that do that. I don’t think that one needs to be particularly experienced in Magic: The Gathering to know that can be a highly useful card.

However, much like sports cards, the value of Magic: The Gathering cards can sometimes be based off of rarity, or desirability simply due to age or the artwork.

Some of the value comes from an even deeper place than that: the love of the game.

For some Magic players, opening up an old box of cards and playing a draft, or just looking through them, evokes memories of playing at the local game store with your friends after school and enjoying the love of your favorite game together.

Perhaps those memories are even more specific, such as spending every allowance you got your hands on on packs and then FINALLY managing to rip one open and find a card that you could build an entire deck’s gameplan around.

Either way, much as with other collectibles, some of the value comes from an emotional attachment to the game or item in question, so what price that puts on an item is in the eye of the beholder.

It’s a fundamental principle of sales that an item is worth whatever the buyer and seller can agree upon, each whilst trying to extract what they perceive as favorable value (“Buy low, sell high”), so where I might see a piece of cardboard with a picture, someone else might see a treasured memory, perhaps even the memory of a departed friend, or something that they can look upon as…like a picture…anytime they wish to recall a memory.

With that, perhaps it is my perception that the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts, thereby rendering most collectibles worthless, or nearly so, that is flawed. It’s certainly true that there is no physical object that I can think of that brings any level of happiness to me, or evokes an emotional response from me at all, but perhaps I would be the one better off if it did.

So, my cold appraisal of Magic: The Gathering cards is that they have a value to me reflective exclusively of what I think my profit margins might be. With that, I wouldn’t even know enough about them to start playing that game, probably wouldn’t be very good at it if I did and I also think there are much safer investments.

SOME KIND OF MAGIC

That brings us to Magic: The Gathering, specifically.

Of course, some people might be interested in what would lead me to write about collectible investing on a website devoted to gambling odds and probabilities. And, perhaps my justification is a little too loose, but if we define gambling:

GAMBLING: The practice or activity of betting : the practice of risking money or other stakes in a game or bet.

Then, I would consider any form of investment or trading as a gamble. There can be no doubt that all involve some amount of money being risked in the hopes of a greater, though uncertain, return. It’s certainly not the first time I have written articles about trading or investing, as we saw in this article when people were getting into Penny Stocks during the pandemic, or this one in which I saw a great opportunity in casino stocks, as a result of the same.

The stock market also wouldn’t be the only area in which we saw new players as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, or changes in market conditions:

BRANDON: One thing that might concern me as a local game store is a game such as Magic The Gathering Arena, now, I’ve never played Magic, paper or otherwise, but I did pull up a few videos of that game in action and—graphically and sound—it just kicks ass! Like, “This just looks like a fun game.”

So, there’s something of a balance, right? It might get people interested in Magic the Gathering who have never played before, but at the same time, if you just want to play the game and you don’t care about playing it in person–

PAUL: Or, you don’t even WANT to play it in person.

BRANDON: Yeah, you can get any card you want to with the Wildcards, right? Like, if you just want to play the digital version of the card and you don’t care that you don’t own it and, if the game comes down, you have nothing…but, then, if the value of the game on the whole tanks, then the cards are worthless anyway, so, in a sense, what’s the difference?

Overall, do you think a game such as Arena helps local game stores because it introduces people to the game and maybe they want to play the paper game, or do you think it hurts because it actually takes people out of the paper game?

PAUL: I’ve been concerned on both ends because Arena has been out a little while, but it was a saving grace during the Covid closures because we couldn’t have in-store play. Instead, they encouraged us to try to use methods such as Discord and other things to try to play Arena. It definitely helped keep people interacting with the product, the IP, and the store. That was good then.

I’ve also had a significant number of people that live within blocks of our store that are ONLY interested in Arena and are not at all interested in paper play, but I never knew that they were interested or enfranchised players.

I think that’s very interesting, though I don’t know if it’s very telling.

It’s a little bit of apples and oranges, but, in the end, I’m definitely reminded of a quote attributed to Stan Lee when he was asked about whether or not digital comics would ruin the physical market. He was quoted as saying, “Comics are like boobs, they look great on a computer, but I’d rather hold them.”

BRANDON: (Laughing uproariously) I think he might have been right. I mean, I know he was right about the boobs.

Looking at recent price movements, 2021 seemed like an all-time high for the game.

I don’t know if you’d agree or disagree with me on this, but I see it as a broader market transition from services to goods and also the United States Federal Government giving a bunch of people a ton of money that they didn’t have before.

Do you think that might have factored into the demand for Magic the Gathering, specifically, coming out of Covid?

PAUL: Yeah. Not just Magic, but I’d say almost everything when it came to collectibles. It was a really interesting experience because, whereas previously I thought certain collectible markets were on a decline or maybe even dying out, but then there was a financial injection into the market.

It seemed like people we thought weren’t interested at all, turned out to be interested.

The comic industry also saw a huge boom with that as well, which is now just starting to taper off.

BRANDON: What do you think, in terms of the Magic products specifically and injection of this money, do you think it’s across the board or the new purchases trended more towards new players purchasing, old players purchasing, collectors or sort of the investor class?

PAUL: I think that it might be more of the fifth option-which is, as I previously said, stores. The LGS’s, brick-and-mortars, which start carrying more of the product.

We saw a lot of stores, here in Pittsburgh, opening up that came out of that huge bubble for collectibles. I’m starting to see some of those that just popped up going back into their hidey-holes.

With that, we saw that the Covid-19 pandemic, and some of it being Government handouts and other parts of it being money that was just not being spent on other things (such as live entertainment) saw a renewed interest, or new interest, in both stock trading and in the collectibles markets.

Of course, with any new traders or investors coming into a game, whether that game be, literally, a game, or a metaphorical one…that’s going to create opportunities for people who have already been playing the game for a long time and have a better understanding of the rules and strategies.

Mistakes will be made. Some people will learn from those mistakes and become the new Pauls of the world, while others will, as Paul put it, go, “Back into their hidey-holes.”

LONG-TERM VALUE IN COLLECTIBLES

There are any number of factors that can create value in a specific type of collectible, or even more specifically, a particular product in that collectible. One aspect of the world of collectibles that interested me, or a theory, rather, was that collectibles attached to a single company, and their valuations, may be irrevocably tied to what a company is doing.

Of course, neither that thought or any thought concerning collectibles occurred to me until the backlash that almost couldn’t help but be noticed when Magic: The Gathering, a game that I have never played, announced their 30th Anniversary product and I somehow stumbled across this news.

Essentially, Magic: The Gathering 30th Anniversary would see consumers buy four proxy (read: effectively fake) packs of cards for $999, prior to any fees, taxes or shipping. These cards are also randomized in the packs, so consumers have no way of knowing what cards they will get. Of course, that randomization has always been a component of Magic, and also of sports cards, but here you have the company dictating a very high value to these effectively fake cards.

Or, more to the point, $16.65 for EACH little piece of cardboard with a picture on it.

I can’t think of very many actions that could potentially alienate so many consumers at once, or, at a minimum, put product perception at such great risk.

For one thing, it would seem that the vast majority of players could not afford these cards, even if they had wanted them. It would seem that collectors might have some interest in these cards, if your goal is just to have all things Magic and not hope to sell for later profit, but again, at a very prohibitive price point. In terms of Magic’s investor class (and, yes, that’s totally a real thing that top tier writers such as Cassie LaBelle write regular pieces on) this might not be a good product because it could be seen as breaking a concept known as the, “Reserved List.”

So, what is the, “Reserved List?”

In short, it is a list of cards that Wizards of the Coast, and, by extension, parent company Hasbro promised to NEVER print again to preserve their value on the secondary market.

Of course, this Reserved List is important because it acts as a guarantee to preserve one of the most important elements of high-dollar collectibles: rarity.

If you go to the store and buy a pack of Magic cards, then that pack will almost certainly include standard lands. Lands can be, “Tapped,” for mana, which takes place on every turn, (if you have a card in your hand that can be played for that amount and type of mana on your board) so naturally, standard lands are not a particularly rare card, especially not in new decks! Some of the original lands might have a little bit of value due to rarity, but lands themselves are the farthest thing from being rare.

Because lands are so common, at least in terms of rarity, they are functionally worthless from a resale standpoint. If you ever watch Magic Box opening videos, for example, you will usually see people flip through the lands and set them aside to get to the good stuff…any regular Magic player already has some ridiculous multiple more of standard lands than they will ever realistically use.

But, the oldest, rarest and most powerful cards can have value in the tens of thousands, or even more than a hundred thousand dollars, in market value. Can you imagine? The costs that went into producing those cards can’t possibly be meaningfully greater than those of any other card, but there you go.

With that, if the market were to suddenly be flooded with cards that are virtually indistinguishable from the originals, then that could cause a collapse in values on the secondary market. Fortunately, the Magic 30th cards are NOT, “Virtually indistinguishable,” but mass marketing proxy cards on a direct-to-consumer basis is, if nothing else, a toe closer to that line.

Understanding the concerns that just about everyone involved in the Magic community might have, with only the exception of a small subset of very wealthy pure collectors, the following discourse was had:

BRANDON: Yeah, it’s like, “We’re not trying to do this. We’re not trying to go direct-to-consumer.”

That’s coming from the same Hasbro that said they were going to keep the spirit of the reserved list…it’s coming from the same Hasbro who—

PAUL: Yeah, they’ve altered and tailored their wordings on some of those grand statements and guarantees.

BRANDON: Yeah! It almost seems like they are finding the loopholes for the things that they themselves have promised players and local game stores.

To me, when it comes to the things that you, yourself, as a company have said: When you’re finding loopholes to the things you’ve said, it’s not a bridge much further just to start outright lying, right?

I’m not saying they’re going to lie; I’m just saying it’s very difficult to believe, at this point, that it’s impossible for them to lie.

PAUL: Historically, Wizards has been very good about keeping their word, but it is rather recently that things have been getting blurred with a lot of that.

There’s been a lot of Chicken Little every time anything comes out, “Oh, they’re reprinting Birds of Paradise, they’re breaking the reserved list,” that doesn’t really break the Reserved List.

People have also brought up the upcoming set of Dominaria Remastered; they’re going to be reprinting the original artwork of Birds of Paradise (Magic Unlimited, December ‘93) with the retro border and it’s basically going to look a lot like the Magic 30th (Anniversary) ones they just put out, but with an actual Magic: The Gathering back rather than the special Magic 30th backs.

If it’s looking that close, then that’s getting closer to tipping over the edge.

BRANDON: Yeah, tipping over the edge. I think the biggest problem with that, especially for collectors and investors, you get so close to the collectible product with these new products that, almost by definition, it makes the collectible product less of a collectible item, right?

Like, you don’t see Chevrolet going back and making ‘72 Camaros.***

BRANDON NOTE: ***Highly sought after vehicle; I guessed right!!

PAUL: There are aftermarkets when it comes to those and people who sell aftermarket parts that are virtually identical to those Chevy parts, so you could almost in fact rebuild one just from aftermarket parts.

However, I think more of the analog with this is: When you look at other trading cards and things they’ve done to help increase interest and spice up the interest in their products—like TV and movie products—they’ve started including things like pieces of uniforms and stage worn props and stuff like that.

I don’t think Magic is every going to include pieces of cosplayers costumes…

(Brandon laughs hysterically)

…but, they’re definitely taking a look at some of that when it comes to innovating, changing and creating new rarities. They’re also trying to expand and get outside of the box of not being able to reproduce those things again.

With that, my estimation of Paul’s opinion is that the Reserved List should be perfectly safe, long-term. At the same time, Hasbro might also take note of the fact that there has been some pushback on this toeing closer to the line. Naturally, all of this could come as a shock to investors in the rarest of cards who might have thought that the company would take great care to protect their investments forever–such as to never come anywhere close to that line.

Of course, we’ll get more into being subject to the whims of a single company in just a bit, and we’ll also talk about some things that Hasbro has been doing quite right, at least, in Paul’s perception (it’s not like I would know!).

Before we do, however, let’s take a little dive into the disaster that was…

MAGIC’S 30TH ANNIVERSARY

It’s their party, and they will cry if they want to.

Actually, Hasbro seems to think it’s not even their party.

As mentioned, the price point of, effectively, $1,000 for four proxy packs was going to be well out of the reach of Magic players. Technically, pure players shouldn’t have much interest in Magic 30th cards anyway as they are illegal cards, at least, when it comes to formal play. Obviously, I could write, “The Meathook Massacre,” on a piece of paper and we can play on my front porch if you agree to accept that as a card.

However, these cards cannot be legally played in an official setting, which even Hasbro says:

BRANDON: In any way, do you think…and, this is speculative, this thing just released earlier this week as of the time of this interview (December, 2022)--could this have a negative effect on actual Black Lotus cards that were printed thirty years ago?

PAUL: It could. It could have a negative, or it could have a positive. One thing I can say for certain, in regards to our proxy policy here at the store, is that we don’t allow proxies in any tournament play whether it’s hanging out and playing cards or it’s for a full-on tournament. That’s because it tends to delegitimize the tournament for those who spent the money, looked for the cards and did the hard work to get that fancy Tabernacle, or whatever—then Joe Blow sits down and has a deck that’s entirely just slips of paper…

(Brandon laughs)

…and he says, “Mine works just as well as yours.”

There’s a lot of ‘feel bad’ with that, and that feel bad can translate to market change.

BRANDON: Yeah, and the value of it is just how rare of a card it is.

What the reserved list said is, “We are never making this again.”

When you mention that no proxies in play is a rule of the store, when someone comes in with a 30th Anniversary-backed Black Lotus, is that going to be a no-no, or is that going to be a playable card?

PAUL: That’s going to be a no-no.

And, while it is the concepts of collecting, trading and investing that got me interested in this subject, my biggest concerns are for players and the local game stores. Players and stores are the bases of the Magic: The Gathering ecosystem and, while the values of the cards as collectibles wouldn’t necessarily completely tank without players, it goes without saying that a robust interest in the game and healthy player base helps prop up those values.

The players have spent thirty years constructing new decks for Standard play, (the Standard format contains the 5-8 most recent sets, with the eldest four sets being removed when a ninth set is introduced) or Limited (players open a box of sixteen packs and pass them around each selecting cards to build a deck; due to the nature of Drafting, “Limited,” decks will generally not be as strong and require a deep understanding of all the cards in the game to play well) and that is the heart that pumps the blood to the rest of the body Magic.

In terms of long term investing, it is often those same players who want those sealed boxes, but not to store them, rather to open them and enjoy Drafting an older set with their friends anew.

Of course, these boxes and cards must come from somewhere, and for most of Magic’s lifecycle so far, that somewhere has been local game stores.

Local game stores create a fun, exciting and engaging atmosphere to engage with other players, as well as game store owners and employees, who provide vast amounts of experience in the games they also love.

Without the game stores and the players, Magic would have never been anything. What the Hell are they going to do in 1993? Have a mail order catalog to get people to play a game that they had never heard of? How would players even network with one another for games in such a model?

The 30th Anniversary is one hell of a milestone; it’s just a shame that so few got to participate in it of those who were directly responsible for it.

BRANDON: Right. While we’re on the subject of value, let’s talk about something that usually has no value whatsoever—proxy cards! Except, evidently, proxy cards DO have value because for Magic’s 30th Anniversary, they have decided to SLAP thirty years worth of Magic players in the face, in my opinion, and sell a four-pack of proxy cards, also breaking the spirit of the Reserved List in the process, for ONE. THOUSAND. DOLLARS.

Why would Hasbro do that? Paying $1,000 for four packs of cards is NOT what built Magic: The Gathering, for thirty years! This is not a way to celebrate. Most players cannot afford this.

PAUL: That’s true. In fact, I would be surprised if most players were able to do something like that.

Historically, it’s not entirely unique with them. In the past, they’ve released sets called, “Collectors Editions,” which were, in fact, full on prints of the entire run–it would be the entire set, not randomized, not in booster packs, and very much, “Here is a list of everything you’re getting.”

BRANDON: Right, right, right, so the consumer knows what they’re getting there.

PAUL: Exactly.

BRANDON: But, this is just four straight up packs of proxies. As I understand, they are not tournament legal.

PAUL: Same with the Collectors Editions; those were also not considered legal. They even had printed on them somewhere, “Not for tournament play.”

BRANDON: Right. I don’t know if these have that but, for anyone who did buy these 30th Anniversary four packs for $1,000, what are they hoping for? What is the value of these proxies other than they say, “30th Anniversary,” because even if you open it up and get a Black Lotus, it’s a Black Lotus that you can’t even use in a formal, legal game.

So, it’s not a Black Lotus, right? It’s a piece of cardboard that says, “Black Lotus,” on it.

PAUL: So, what’s the difference between getting that or getting something that was made on some sketchy website that’s selling fakes? You know, one of the big differences is this is from Wizards of the Coast, so it has a little bit of historical value in that this is officially recognized and published by Wizards of the Coast, and, potentially, if I were to see things like Legacy and Vintage being more tournament played—they might consider more official proxies, like this, as more legitimate for tournament play rather than a slip of paper that says, “Black Lotus,” on it and is put in a sleeve.

With that, I would be remiss not to admit that Paul pointed out a subset of the Collector market, which is to say those with $1,000 they really don’t need, who might have been interested in the Magic 30th product. Paul also identifies the potential for tournament rules to create future value for these proxies down the line, which is obviously something I wouldn’t have known about or thought of.

Of course, it would seem that Paul admits that many consumers could not afford the $1,000 price point, and even if they could, Magic 30th was being sold directly by Hasbro, so this product did not benefit local game stores anyway. It’s much more difficult to, “Flip,” something for a higher price than the price that the manufacturer themselves is charging, at least, that’s true until such time that the packs become difficult to get.

Of course, when we talk about the value of Magic cards, one fact that remains immutable is that they are relatively cheap to produce compared to what they are sold for. With that, Magic 30th might have done well, despite the fact that so many players seemed to conceptually hate it:

BRANDON: Yeah, and the whole big thing for the last month, or so, has been ripping Hasbro for this Magic 30th Anniversary. It’s like, “Crap, we’re not even talking about the new sets at all really, right now,” so I would say this Magic 30th Anniversary has been a negative for players…because you technically can’t even play them, a negative for local game stores, because you can’t even really sell them, and if you could, who’s coming in here and paying $1,000 cash…maybe you could flip it online, I don’t know…and investors because how to you valuate a product like this? So, who has actually benefited from Magic 30th Anniversary?

PAUL: (Laughs) Hasbro.

BRANDON: Have they, though?

PAUL: Well, you consider the amount of money they have to put into printing and marketing the product, so I would assume that there is no way, with the overhead cost of making and marketing the product, that they would end up recouping less than cost.

With that, it would seem that the product, in and of itself, is likely profitable even if it loses money long-term, and this is a big IF, if this drives enough people away from the game permanently.

Of course, Hasbro would not be the only entity to catch some heat as a result of the 30th Anniversary as Hasbro would reach out to other content creators, for other trading card games, to get them to market the 30th Anniversary product:

BRANDON: What has me interested in this particular topic is that I noticed Hasbro has been going behind the scenes to other content creators for other trading card games such as (Ruxin34, who I couldn’t think of at the moment) people who mainly play Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon, people who don’t play Magic much, if at all, and offering them thousands of dollars—

PAUL: And, sometimes even sports athletes, too.

BRANDON: Yeah, but content creators for other games to open Magic 30th specifically. That does not come off to me as a company that has a lot of faith that their product is going to have a 100% RoI, or better, when you’re going to people who literally don’t seem to have anything to do with your product and asking them to promote it. To me, that almost smells like desperation, what do you think?

PAUL: I can definitely see that point of view. From the corporate world and knowing how the corporate world works when it comes to product promotions, I can also see them wanting to chase…what Logan Paul did for Pokemon…I can see that they want that bad. That’s why they brought in celebrities like Post Malone, that’s why they tried to create their own celebrities by taking Youtube shows and making them official Wizards products.

They’re trying to chase what Logan Paul did for Pokemon because it was so organic and happened on its own. That was, quite honestly, a huge boon for Pokemon.

BRANDON: Yeah. It seems like, in terms of the specific product of Magic 30th Anniversary Edition, that didn’t exactly happen. Were you aware there was one (also Ruxin34), somewhat major content creator, Yu-Gi-Oh content creator, who actually promoted Magic 30th…and had to take the video down and apologize–

PAUL: –I’ve heard of this.

BRANDON: After catching backlash from the Magic community.

PAUL: I’ve heard of this and it’s something very unfortunate.

Since I have personally worked in the radio field, since I have personally worked in event promotions, I know what it’s like when you’re just doing your job and you’re just reading from the script—maybe something wasn’t worded right and, all of a sudden, you’ve got torches and pitchforks coming at you. That’s no fun at all.

Of course, one might think that the release of Magic 30th might cause the perceived value of the original cards that are being proxied to decrease, but Paul is of the opinion, and he would know better than I would, that the value could actually increase for the long-term investors:

BRANDON: Or, if it gets reprinted. Wink, wink, we will never break the spirit of the Reserved List, 30th Anniversary Edition.

Actually, that’s a great example. Do you see the value, potentially, of something like the old school Black Lotus, Mox Pearl, Mox Ruby, etc., is that going to go down as a result of these Wizard of the Coast sanctioned 30th Anniversary proxies hitting the market, or is there enough removal from it being an actual, official Magic card for it that the value of the older one should be preserved?

PAUL: Actually, I optimistically think that there’s a third option: This might actually increase the value of them.

BRANDON: REALLY!?

PAUL: Yes.

BRANDON: You know I’ve got to follow up on this. I don’t understand the logic behind that, but you would know better than I would, so that’s probably why the logic of that statement escapes me. Why would it cause the older cards to gain value?

PAUL: Because they’re going to become less liquid. They’re going to go up in value the less that people are actively trying to pursue them. Similar to, where it used to be, you would likely get a better percentage on a worse quality Reserved List card than getting a higher end one, such as mint condition, because you’re more quickly going to be able to sell and flip something in a lower condition because it’s a lower price point for entry.

While all of these things might be true, one thing that is inarguable is that this method of, ‘Celebrating,’ the 30th Anniversary is not the best method for either players or local game stores who are, without a doubt, the core reason why Magic: The Gathering has succeeded as a game, product line and worldwide cultural phenomenon for these last thirty years.

I promised that we will get into some things that Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast has been doing quite right, and I will keep that promise, but before we do, let’s look at other factors that can influence the market from the standpoint of an investor or, Magic equivalent of a short-term trader:

MARKET MOVERS AND THE PRESERVATION OF VALUE

As I’ve already mentioned, the core contributors to the overall success of Magic: The Gathering, are the players and the local game stores. Say what you want about card collection, which breeds investing in the collectibles, but there’s no life or vibrancy in a bunch of sealed boxes sitting in a safe in some guy’s bedroom, or basement. (winks at Rudy, Also, thanks for the help! I hope I do you justice! By the way, you’d be a hell of an economics professor!)

The point is that the players, ultimately, make the game. You can have interest in old products as much as you want, but players showing an interest in new products is what will eventually cause the new products to increase in long-term value.

A big part of maintaining that value is to not flood the market, however. One thing that you don’t want is to put players in a position where they don’t feel as though they can afford to, “Keep up with,” the product. When that happens, sure, you sell a greater number of products to a subset of those players, but you don’t know if it’s going to cover the losses incurred as a result of players giving up and dropping out of the game entirely.

For that reason, with Magic, you have an ecosystem that works together that even makes long-term investing in Magic: The Gathering possible. It’s true that investors have a place in that ecosystem, but I’m of the position that their place is the least important (ignoring crossover, in that investors are often also collectors and players) and that the people going into the local game stores and buying the newest boxes to play with are the most important part of the ecosystem.

Besides, we’ve already established that rarity is a key component in what makes increasing valuations even possible. It’s for that reason that basic lands compilations are often sold at a price of well under $1.00 per card. In order to have rarity, you have to have a product that comes out of the market and is kept, played, destroyed, damaged or lost.

In the world of economics, more broadly, this concept is known as, “The Scarcity Principle,” which is simply that prices will rise to meet a high demand when supply is low. There is also the question of liquidity, which is how easily a product can be turned into cash, if you are a seller, which is also largely dictated by demand.

Long-term investors in the rarest pieces generally aren’t going to care very much about liquidity. In order to have a market to present a product, the market has to be able to afford that product, and the rarest and highest valued items are often going to be out of the reach of most.

However, not all long-term investors deal exclusively, or perhaps not even at all, with individual items of extremely high rarity. Some long-term investors, in the Magic community, deal (at least in part, if not in the majority) in sealed product.

One important component in sealed product gaining value is that product has to be removed from the market. There are a few ways that sealed product can be permanently removed from the market, but the most common of those is the opening of the sealed product.

Most people opening sealed product are going to want to use that product for the purpose of playing the game. Most people who buy new Magic: The Gathering sets are using them to play the game, so when they open those sealed boxes, those sealed boxes (barring new prints for a re-release) have now been removed from the market. The Scarcity Principle, acting alone, would say that would cause the value of the product to increase provided there is sufficient demand.

When it comes to individual sealed boxes, the demand is going to ebb and flow. Not only is this a natural market occurrence, but some of that has to do with the fundamental aspects of how the game works. For example, when a set, “Drops out,” of the Standard format, that will tend to result in a short-term reduction in demand for that sealed product. Why? Well, because the people who ONLY play the Standard format have no use for that product anymore.

Of course, when an entire ecosystem of players, stores, collectors, traders and investors is all centered around the actions of a single company, that creates some level of risk. All parties involved have a stake in the company maintaining the delicate, and sometimes fragile, balance that is that ecosystem. A large component of maintaining that is to avoid flooding the market.

In recent years, Magic the Gathering has increased, “Product drops,” substantially. When you have a highly dependable and predictable product release schedule, any changes to that balance can send shockwaves throughout the system. The first change that we will address is the increased pace at which Hasbro is releasing Magic: The Gathering products:

BRANDON: On that note, it seems that, over those two decades, Magic the Gathering, as a card game, seemed to have a steady and predictable release schedule of about three sets per year, right? In terms of major box sets?

PAUL: Probably more like one per quarter, so four per year.

BRANDON: Even at four per year, you didn’t have stuff like Secret Lair (Hasbro selling directly to consumer) all of these different boosters, collectible sort of things…I’ve been researching for two weeks and I can’t even remember all of the different products.

PAUL: I think that, when they first started bringing things like Modern Masters, (the first Modern Masters set was released in June, 2013) the goal was to appeal to certain types of gamers rather than the entire community as a whole.

Of course, while some players have bemoaned the increasing types of products that have come out, Paul sees it as a good thing as he would continue:

That was a really smart idea because, while there was heavy enfranchisement with the product, people still liked to keep to their specific form. This found a way to appeal to people who would typically only pick up one out of every three or four sets because it’s not directed to their specific type of Magic–whether it be standard play, extended or legacy–and it’s found a way to keep everyone as involved as possible.

With that, Paul identifies a subset of the community that may have a desire for some of the products. It would hardly count as, “Flooding the market,” to come up with a product more highly detailed to a specific type of consumer. With that in mind, one must conclude that new products are not automatically a negative, or a detriment, to the ecosystem. New products can actually benefit the ecosystem quite a lot if they serve some sort of purpose and fulfill some sort of perceived need. We would continue:

BRANDON: Right. What I noticed was, right around the time Hasbro directly took over the (operations) of Wizards of the Coast and started navigating the coast Wizards was going to chart, starting around 2019-2020, or so—as you mention different sets for different types of players, I noticed there were five sets just for multiplayer released in both 2021 and 2022, so do you see these kinds of sets…it sounds like you see them as, if not an overall positive, that there’s a place for those kind of sets.

PAUL: Yes. If you consider Magic the Gathering, overall, as being its own product—let’s compare it to fruit juices—each of those is its own flavor, so maybe you like grape juice, but you don’t like orange juice; when they make a product that is specifically for grape juice drinkers, how excited are you?

With that, what we can conclude is that certain newer products may be designed to directly appeal to subsets of players, which should theoretically keep them more engaged in the game. On the other hand, certain things that Wizards of the Coast has been doing could also be seen as flooding the market:

BRANDON: That makes sense. When you hear…do you follow Alpha Investments Youtube?

PAUL: Ah, yes, Rudy.

BRANDON: Yeah, and it seems like his take on it is a little different from yours because it seems like he’s saying, “There’s just way too much product, Wizards is flooding the market,” but he still sees the value in sealed boxes, right?

It seems like Wizards is releasing more product than every single consumer can buy; Alpha Investments seems to take a negative view of that, but you seem to see it as a positive because, so far, it doesn’t seem to be hurting sealed boxes. Is that an accurate representation?

PAUL: Yes and no. Yes, in the fact that I can see this (different products for different types of Magic consumers) as being a positive thing, but no in that there’s a certain tipping point where it does become flooded into the market and it’s like, “I don’t even know what flavor of juice I like anymore!”

We can be seeing that right around the corner here. It seems that, everytime we have a new product release launch, we’re simultaneously reminding people, “Hey, by the way, I know we’re at the release for Brothers War, but make sure to get those preorders in for Jump Start—that’s going to be right around the corner.”

BRANDON: Yeah, so as soon as one thing is actually for sale, you’re immediately marketing the next product.

PAUL: Exactly.

With that, while individual opinions may differ, it would seem that there is still something of a desirable level of overall product that should not be exceeded, but at the same time, new products to market can be fine as long as they are fulfilling a legitimate need that some players have.

That’s actually another area where local game stores are integral to the ecosystem. These are the guys who are down on the ground talking to players, playing the games with them, who would have an understanding of what their individual visitors want and, perhaps crucially, how much of it they want before it becomes too much, too fast.

BRANDON: But, for something that, ostensibly, started out as a collectible, at least for some people…I guess the hierarchy goes: Most Important: Players, Second Most Important: Collectors, Third Most Important: Investors.

But, do you think there are a certain subset of Magic participants throwing their hands up in the air and saying, “How the hell am I going to collect everything!?”

PAUL: I see a lot of them like that. I see a lot of individual Magic players like that, saying, “I’m so enfranchised with the game; I love everything about it, but they’re firing out things faster than I can keep up with them. I can’t even read the spoilers before the next set is out!”***

One statement that Wizards made that made the hairs stand up on Rudy’s neck (Alpha Investments) was that players weren’t necessarily meant to buy every single product. Of course, one might understand why that would be a head-scratcher for the collector class of Magic enthusiasts, (after all, that is the goal, right?), but Paul saw a different problem with the statement:

BRANDON: So, as we were going over the outline for the talking points--I had slid in Hasbro saying that the consumers are not necessarily meant to buy every product. That particular topic seemed to get a lot of interest from you, so I think I’m just going to let you take that from here.

PAUL: In the market as it is, when people hear businesses talk about their product, people imagine, “When I buy something, I am buying it directly from them,” even if you’re picking it up from an LGS, even if you’re picking it up from Amazon or big box stores.

Really, the distribution and how all of this works, especially if it’s going through distribution and not direct to consumer, is the consumer is NOT the intended target; the stores are, the LGS’.

It’s those people who are directly giving them the money and saying, “I want this many boxes.”

It’s the local stores, LGS’s, who are taking the big risk on these things. So, by (Wizards/Hasbro) telling the end consumers, “Well, you’re not meant to pick up everything,” they’re not talking directly to the people who are buying from them.

If they are talking directly to the people directly buying from them, such as myself and other stores, then, if we are not picking up every product they are producing, then how are we a Magic: The Gathering store?

BRANDON: Right.

PAUL: So, by saying that, it’s really complicating things. They’re telling our customers NOT to pick up everything, but we (DO) have to pick up everything.

BRANDON: Yeah, and I think the key words you used there are, “Your customers.”

Like, you are the customer of your distributors. The distributors are the customers of Hasbro. The people who physically walk into this, and any number of local game stores around the country—those are your customers.

I mean, it’s for you to suggest what your customers should buy, right?

PAUL: Yeah, make suggestions, let them know what each product is for.

It’s like with these mantras that some of these Magic The Gathering Youtubers tend to get on, things like, “Buy singles, don’t buy packs.” If everyone listened to them and did just that, then there wouldn’t be any singles (to buy) because stores aren’t going to rip open brand new sealed product hoping to 100% sell singles as not 100% of the singles are going to sell.

That would also create an artificial inflation in those singles, so that becomes not the cheapest way to build your decks or collect your cards.

This is interesting in that it also touches on the discussion of individual cards v. sealed product, but that’s something that we will dive into later.

The point of this is that the local game stores are the entities that know what their specific customers want, which is something Hasbro would not know directly. Hasbro can, and should, talk to the local game stores to see how well products are being received, and almost certainly gleans some of this information from sales data, but it is the local game stores who work with Magic players, as individuals, and can tailor product selections to best suit what it is they want out of the game.

In other words, by going through a local game store or a VERY trusted online source, not some mass company that lists product with a generic and unhelpful description, players can get the most value for their dollar when it comes to what they want out of the game.

And, I can’t emphasize this enough, but players are the most important part of the ecosystem.

Of course, this flooding of the market would result in something of a bubble in 2021. In terms of card and set valuations (generally) and definitely Hasbro’s stock, we seem to be seeing something of a decline, but it might be a positive sign for the long-term health of the game:

BRANDON: Yeah, I think that the prices online have shown that too. I brought up Unfinity before which basically released and immediately tanked.

Even ignoring Unfinity, it seems lots of Magic products, even ones that are slightly more dated…I was looking at Kaldheim Booster Box cases, which I understand is six Booster Boxes in one case: Earlier this year, one of those sold for $1,250 for a case, at least that was the market value according to TCG player, now they’re sub-$850 and some are being sold for less than that?***

***NOTE—This question isn’t exactly accurate. Being unfamiliar with Magic before this project, I mistook a Kaldheim Booster Box case with a Kaldheim COLLECTOR Booster Box Case (I think Paul might have been too polite to correct me) which this site has ranging from a high of nearly $1200 to a sub $1,000 low.

Is the bubble popping, deflating, or when we look at the past thirty years, as opposed to two years, maybe this is just a return to normalcy. What do you think?

PAUL: I think a lot of people would say it’s a return to normalcy. I would actually argue for the insane version and say, “No, this is the beginning of a new inflation for that.” That’s because, with a lot of these sealed products, there’s a tipping point where, after something has aged so long, people care less about the playability and they want to reminisce opening those packs from that time, or reminisce playing a draft from an older set.

There’s a significant decrease that comes in the market when there’s a lot of product being put into it. Kaldheim is at a point where it’s actually going to start going up, in my opinion, because there are a lot fewer people who are greedily trying to get it all up, get it all up, get it all up…and the less that something like that is moving, it’s going to increase the price.

BRANDON: That makes sense, and when it comes to sealed boxes, one thing that will always be true is: Every time someone opens a sealed box—

PAUL (Smiling, dare I suggest gleefully): There’s one less sealed box.

BRANDON: There’s one less sealed box.

It seems that the Magic product and valuation cycle is one that, for a good product, seems to be fairly predictable. With that product, there was high demand and high product movement, which created liquidity, but there were also a ton of individual sellers competing for that demand. Those are actually two competing forces as competition drives the price down, but high demand drives it up. There’s also going to be an element of sellers who see the pop and want to try to boost the prices, so to an extent, they will perhaps buy more of products that they already have hoping to obtain a meaningful percentage of the product available for that item to sell for higher prices down the line.

That’s why, the less it moves, the more the price will increase over time, which is a core component of Magic investing. Eventually, the future seller reaches the point where there will be some demand for the product that exceeds the available supply on the market, which will cause the Scarcity Principle to come right back into play.

After all, in the most extreme case, if there was only ONE high demand product available, and you were the one selling it, well, that’s just an auction!

WHAT ABOUT THE LOCAL GAME STORES?

Another somewhat recent development is Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast circumventing the Local Game Stores and selling Magic: The Gathering, products direct to consumers, such as the 30th Anniversary set, but sometimes also other stuff that the consumers actually want.

Remember, this is a game that could never have existed, at least not at the level it presently does, without local game stores. Also, the local game stores are places where those interested in Magic: The Gathering can gather, chat, exchange ideas and learn more about the game. Local game stores host tournaments and, at least GOOD local game stores, will be staffed by people who know a ton about the product to help their customers get the best value for their dollars.

With that, it’s very important to ensure that local game stores remain integral to the Magic ecosystem, or the game will begin to stagnate. Local game stores do what faceless websites and generic product descriptions cannot. They bring life to the cards and to the game.

BRANDON: Okay, so one thing I noticed that they are doing now is a product concept called, “Secret Lair,” which I understand is Hasbro/Wizards selling packs or sets directly to the consumer. What is your take on that?

PAUL: It’s very interesting in that they’ve said in the past that they have no interest in selling directly to the consumer, especially anything that’s a new product. That was a big, big thing when we first started seeing brand new cards going direct to consumer without going through a retailer.

BRANDON: Right, so, I don’t want you to speak personally on this one—but, do you think it’s possible that some local game stores feel a bit disenfranchised with Wizards of the Coast going back on what they said they weren’t going to do and then doing it?

It cuts off the distributor, it cuts off the local game store—the local game store made Magic throughout these last three decades—where were they (Magic) before Amazon? Where were they before you could (easily) sell things online? It’s almost like a knife in the back.

It almost has to feel like GameStop (NOTE: I…could have picked a better company) feels when Nintendo’s releasing video games that you can download directly from the Switch. Like, “What about us? You’d have been NOTHING without us!”

PAUL: It definitely started out as a product where a consumer had to come into a local game shop and pick it up. In the beginning, big box stores didn’t want anything to do with Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh, any of these games; they found even Dungeons and Dragons to be too risky for a lot of these places to carry. So, they didn’t even bother carrying it.

But, who did? The local independent card shops. We started out as being the backbone for a lot of this, but, even in the modern age with direct-to-consumer, Amazon and things like that, I still believe it’s an industry that, if everything went direct-to-consumer, the industry would start dying off significantly.

If in-store play came to a complete end, then there would be a lot fewer people getting into the game.

Ironically, local game stores become even more important when you have a player base that is being overwhelmed with different types of products. Despite my research, even if I wanted to get into Magic, after two weeks of studying the market four hours per day, I wouldn’t even know where to start!:

BRANDON: Now, it’s like, you get online and you’re maybe interested in the game, looking at all of these different (products) like, “What the hell am I supposed to buy? There are 45 different sets released this year! What do you even play Standard with?”

Isn’t this confusing for potential new players?

PAUL: I see that for a lot of customers that come in. Once again, they need a lot of guidance from us to figure out what product they need to get.

There’s something that you can’t get from Amazon, no matter what any description says—even when Wizards tried implementing grade levels that they had associated with different products, where, based upon your experience, would this be considered a beginner level product or an expert level product—even with those types of labels, you still need an experienced person behind the counter that’s going to guide them.

That’s especially true when there are so many different products all at once.

In fact, even with kitchen table gamers that come in and want to get into specific things, they don’t always know what to get without me to explain what different packs they should get, whether it be set boosters, Jump Start boosters, draft boosters, collector boosters…

In addition to direct to consumer via Secret Lair, Hasbro has also directly sold some products on Amazon, which seems like a strange thing to do. It’s enough to make one wonder if they are trying to eventually cut out local game stores, or if they are just selling off excess product. I asked about these sales, referred to by some as, “Product dumps,” and whether or not this is a sign of things to come:

BRANDON: What confuses me about the Amazon prices is—if the rumors I’ve seen are true—and I wasn’t able to dig into it as much as I would have liked to, but some of these sales from Wizards direct to consumer have been lower than the local game stores were getting these sets for, right?

PAUL: Yes. In fact, from what I found out, sometimes when they do these, air quotes, “Product dumps,” sometimes the prices they initially put them in for are less than even what the distributors, who buy directly from Wizards, are paying. If that’s the case, then it’s surprising.

However, I don’t know their specific arrangement with Amazon. Do they give the product to Amazon and Amazon assigns the price, or are (Wizards) assigning the prices?

Either way, that’s probably the closest we’ll get to an MSRP as it relates to products now since they have abolished the MSRP with Magic.

BRANDON: Right. As you mentioned before, you can’t buy experience from Amazon; you can’t buy somebody who loves the game, such as yourself, participated in the game from the very beginning, played competitively in the 90’s before it was huge…nobody is going to go to Amazon and get the experience of how to properly play and appreciate the game that you can provide.

The question that leads me to is: Is this something of a market test for Hasbro eventually trying to transition to an ALL direct-to-consumer model and, if so, would it be a huge mistake for them to do that?

PAUL: Personally, I think that would be a great mistake if they did do that. They’ve officially said they are not trying to go to a complete direct-to-consumer model; however, some of the moves…if they were, those are the moves they’d be making.

As you can read in the full interview, (because the specific topic changed) Paul would later go on to say that Hasbro, historically, has been really good about keeping its word. Evidently, I would come to learn that Hasbro also did a lot to support local game stores during the Covid-19 pandemic:

BRANDON: It seems like, as mad as players and collectors have been about Magic 30th Anniversary…at the end of the day, those people DON’T have to buy that specific product, but from my perspective…that alone is not so much a problem.

But, if you look at 30th Anniversary, you look at Secret Lairs, you look at Amazon, “Product Dumps,” it seems like if there is anyone taking a knife in the back—it’s local game stores. It seems like Magic already got the quid, now they don’t want to keep you guys so much in the pro quo.

PAUL: It can be seen that way, but I have also seen them do things like, during Covid, in order to help stores recoup from suddenly having to close down, we ended up getting special product releases that weren’t scheduled to be out. They gave those to us, if not at a significant discount, they even gave us some of them for free, so we could host events and make a decent profit on certain things.

For example, they released the Mystery Booster Convention Edition to stores so they could try to make a decent profit. It was a limited amount, but it was still a significant gift to the LGS community.

They’ve given other gifts to the LGS community that would seem to run against a move to direct to consumer. If they were 100% doing that, then they wouldn’t be doing this.

With that, it would also seem that Hasbro did what it could to help local game stores during the Covid-19 pandemic, which was a threat to most physical retailers’ operating as a going concern, especially independent businesses.

Individual Cards v. Sealed Boxes

When it comes to investing or trading in Magic: The Gathering, the two largest market segments are dealing in sealed boxes and dealing in individual cards.

As was touched on above, sealed boxes will tend to slowly gain value, over time, as they become more rare and more sealed boxes leave the market. As I said, if you are the only one selling something that there is a high demand for, then that’s just an auction and you can get whatever amount the biggest buyer is willing to pay.

Nobody knows what’s in a sealed box until it’s open, so you might have a single card in there that pays for well more than the cost of the box. On the other hand, you might not even end up with any cards that are perceived as having value.

For that reason, sealed boxes tend to be the safest investment as they gain value over time and it is largely the prospect of what cards might be in there that generates interest, or often, people just want to play a Draft with an old set. Hey, I guess it’s tough to put a price on nostalgia. My price for nostalgia is $0.00, but most people put more value on it than that.

Let’s talk about sealed boxes first:

BRANDON: Speaking of growth, there’s a lot of collection that goes on with sealed boxes and individual cards, so I imagine the inventory I’m looking at on your shelves is not everything that you own; do you invest in any individual cards, getting cards graded or long-term holding of sealed boxes looking to sell for big profits in the future?

PAUL: Yes. Older sealed boxes, definitely. Personally, I don’t get into getting cards graded, you can increase the value of the item itself, but the liquidity drops significantly between something that is non-graded and graded and it becomes a lot harder to sell. It’s sometimes tough to find someone who wants it already graded; there are a significant number of people out there who want to pick up something ungraded to (get it graded), so let them make that decision. That’s my opinion.

BRANDON: Not only that, but part of the sealed product, by definition, is, “You don’t know what’s in there,” right?

PAUL: Exactly; it’s the randomization. It’s the, “Oooohhh, it might be this, it might be that, there might be multiples.”

I remember the first Booster Box I ever bought: Full sealed booster box was from Stronghold (March, 1998) and going, “Ooohhh, I hope I get that Sliver Queen, or, what if I get two Sliver Queens?” There’s a possibility that I could even get as many as four.

BRANDON NOTE: The next question is presented slightly out of order and did not follow the previous answer. The reason for this is literary and, once again, the full transcript of the interview (which you should have read first as it is the best part of this article!) is just before the conclusion.

BRANDON: Right. There’s any amount of potential in the sealed box.

When you get right down to it, it seems like you're hunting for a handful of cards when you crack open a box. So, fundamentally, on average, cracking open a sealed box is NOT profitable, right? Or everyone would be doing it.

You’re not going to find the card that pays for the box, right?

PAUL: That depends on multiple things. A common term people in the industry like to use is, ‘EV,’ or, “Equivalent Value.”

BRANDON: We have that in gambling, except it means, “Expected value.”

PAUL: You’re going through and trying to mentally ask, “What do I need to go through this and make a profit?”

Sometimes, with some sets, there is a higher equivalent value for the cards than there are for the sealed boxes. That’s especially true when you’re trying to keep to an MSRP.

However, when getting rid of the MSRP that allows some room to play with that. Sometimes, places will take something that’s a four dollar pack and start charging more for it, even if it’s not an older, out-of-print product.

Individual cards, on the other hand, can be a bit more of a risky endeavor as value can be detracted from them with proxy cards. One defense of proxy cards is that they are used for, “Kitchen table play,” (read: casual) as cards that are otherwise prohibitively expensive, but unfortunately, some proxy cards are so close to the real thing as to make the perpetration of fraud possible, and also, to make it a less safe marketplace for the unwary:

BRANDON: Sure. Actually, wasn’t there a really big proxy site (Card Conjurer)---at least as they would have it, was making proxy cards just for kitchen table play? Just you and your buddy getting together, and—

PAUL: Yeah, they’re always trying to rationalize things that way, but they’ll leave it to the end consumer, with a little bit of a wink, that maybe these will pass as real.

BRANDON: Right, so, is it fair to say that you’re, in general, against proxy sites?

PAUL: I’m very much against proxy sites, not just for reasons that I’ve already established, but, believe it or not, there are some very nefarious people out there that will seek out these life-like proxies and try to pass them off and take advantage of younger, less experienced players, who might not even know that these fake cards exist.

BRANDON: Is that something you feel like the market should decide, or would you say that you support Hasbro in what appears to be a recent effort to get these proxy sites shut down?

PAUL: I would support them in it because it’s their intellectual property that they need to protect. If they allow other people to print these, even if they are printing them in a significantly different manner, it’s still allowing other people to print their cards.

BRANDON: Right. Now, would you have a different opinion about proxies—you mentioned the sort of surreptitious wink to people buying proxies–-what if, on the back, it said clearly, “This is a proxy,” would you have a problem with that and them using the defense of kitchen table play?

PAUL: As far as the secondary market and trading goes, it’s slightly less of a problem, but it would be far less of a problem if it was significantly different both back and front. Sometimes, we’ve seen things where people say, “Man, I really like XYZ show, I wish I could incorporate that with my love of Magic,” so sometimes they will get an artist to make an alter of an existing card that incorporates…say…maybe they like My Little Pony, which is another Hasbro product, and they want them to draw My Little Pony all over their cards, that’s fine.

Paul and I would continue along this line, and he would do this article, and me, the outstanding benefit of giving a real world example:

BRANDON: (Hypothetically) So, if I were to do a kitchen table upside down Black Lotus that looks nothing like the Magic Black Lotus and fine print, “This is a proxy card for recreational purposes only,” and the back of the card, “This is a proxy card for recreational purposes only.”

I’m not using the Magic seal, trademark, like everyone knows what the card is for the purpose of kitchen table play, but I’m not using any copyright…but that’s not what’s happening?

PAUL: That’s not what’s happening, and the endangerment, in my opinion, I always try to look out for new players coming into the game because they especially might have the most love for the game. I’m always worried for them when it comes to trades, acquisitions, even just playing someone else, that, “Oh, man, I can’t believe you were lucky enough to get one of those. I wish I had one!”

“Oh, well, I’ll trade it to you for that card of yours, which is worth half of this one.” (WINK)

BRANDON: Right. And, of course, some of these new players aren’t necessarily going to be…I don’t want to say they’re not smart…let’s say they’re not experienced enough with the game to say, “Wait, why are you trading me, something worth double the value of what you’re getting from me? You’re doing this out of the kindness of your heart, are you?”

Probably not so much, right?

PAUL: It actually wasn’t that long ago I had someone who was a friend of mine who came to me and said, “Hey, I was down at XYZ place and picked up some more of this card I was looking for in trades.”

What he didn’t know, because he was just getting back into the game and when he first played, they didn’t even have foils—but this specific card that he just traded for, he traded cards of value, was, in fact, a fake, which I was able to pinpoint right from the get go.

But, I was able to pinpoint that because it was the artwork and version of a card that was only printed in foil, but it was a non-foil version of it.

BRANDON (SHOCKED): WOW! That also sounds like, how would anyone ever know, if you’re not involved in the Magic world, how would anyone know off the top of their head that this only came in foil?

If you’re deep into the Magic world, that’s like, a rookie mistake, right?

PAUL: Oh yeah. It comes down to things like, you might not know about different fake tests, the bend test, certain artwork, such as looking for a specific misprint that happened across the entire print line that might not be in some of the fakes.

That’s another area where local game stores are important as good operators, such as Paul, are only going to deal in the genuine article when it comes to Magic cards. When it comes to online websites, well, I guess there are some people who would like to go back and live in the Wild West, and if that describes you, then maybe that’s for you.

Always remember this: If a deal seems too good to be true, then it probably is.

However, even above-board deals might not be everything they seem. Two things that surprised me (which will be presented together though they occurred separately in the interview) were that getting cards graded is not always going to result in a positive AND getting autographed cards (by the artist) is not necessarily going to increase value:

BRANDON: Speaking of growth, there’s a lot of collection that goes on with sealed boxes and individual cards, so I imagine the inventory I’m looking at on your shelves is not everything that you own; do you invest in any individual cards, getting cards graded or long-term holding of sealed boxes looking to sell for big profits in the future?

PAUL: Yes. Older sealed boxes, definitely. Personally, I don’t get into getting cards graded, you can increase the value of the item itself, but the liquidity drops significantly between something that is non-graded and graded and it becomes a lot harder to sell. It’s sometimes tough to find someone who wants it already graded; there are a significant number of people out there who want to pick up something ungraded to (get it graded), so let them make that decision. That’s my opinion.

BRANDON: It sounds like the very act of getting a card graded can be a risk, too, because—not only do you have to pay (for the grading), but you send something in thinking it’s going to come back an eight and it comes back a five…it’s got a scuffed up corner you didn’t notice, “Oh, man, this card was played a lot more than I thought it was!”

PAUL: Even down to the printing alignment; that can also be a factor. There’s also the factor of you’re doing an investment with the grading company because, when you’re sending in something to a grading company, the name of that company is also going to be permanently attached to that card. If something happens with that company, even ten or fifteen years down the line, that stigma is going to be attached to that card now.

BRANDON: Hasn’t Magic also done the same thing over the years with the illustrators of the card sometimes doing signature versions? I don’t know if they’re serialized, but that seems like a pretty big collectible item there with the artist of the card signing it, right?

PAUL: That’s something that has been debated upon for probably the last decade or two—does it actually add value, does it detract value, is it now considered to be a damaged version of the card because it’s been written on? Even if it’s by someone who has a legit tie to that card, it’s been heavily debated across stores. And, if so, if it adds or detracts a measurable amount to it, how much?

With that, it would seem to me that a long-term investor would have to know a lot more about the product in order to profitably deal in individual cards. As we saw, there are components (autographs, grading) that I would have assumed would always cause a card to gain value, but in the wrong circumstances, your investment can actually lose value as a result.

A recent development that might be a boon to individual card investors is that of serialized cards, which is an excellent concept that has also been seen in the world of collecting sports cards. Magic is recently dappling in the idea, so I got Paul’s take on those:

BRANDON: In terms of serialized cards, which I think a lot of other TCG’s have already done, certainly sports cards have done it in the past.

PAUL: Sports cards have definitely done it. In fact, as an autograph collector, I’ve seen a lot of numbered serialized autographs where, at a certain signing, he only signed 500 and numbered them, “1 of 500,” “2 of 500…”

BRANDON: Oh, wow! He must have got a pretty good cut from Topps or Fleer or Donruss, whoever it was, right?

PAUL: Oh yeah. Those always command a premium. Because, once again, it’s harder to fake that.

With that, it would appear to me that serialized cards might seem to fall somewhere between other cards and sealed boxes in the hierarchy of, “Safe,” investments.

INFLUENCERS WHO ACTUALLY…INFLUENCE SOMETHING!?

In the ever evolving world of technology, one concept that has made itself apparent is that of, “Social Media Influencers,” who, in my limited experience, are mostly people who try to pump free products and services out of companies in exchange for favorable reviews.

Of course, some of the materials we see about influencers, ironically enough, on social media might lend one the impression that influencing can never be a legitimate enterprise. While that’s not strictly true, if I made videos that were meant to review products, and I wanted to garner revenues from those videos, then I would rather refer to myself as a, “Reviewer,” as opposed to an, “Influencer,” just to avoid the negative connotation with the latter term.

Of course, when I review promotions that online casinos are offering, or write part of casino websites reviews having to do with payouts and assign grades, I’m not trying to influence anyone to do anything. I’m trying to objectively appraise the bonuses, or payout terms, so people can come to their own decisions as to what online casinos might be good for them to check out.

So, unlike the social media reviewers who offer a review in exchange for free product, I consider myself a little bit more legitimate than all of that. If a casino offered me free casino credits in exchange for a good review, not only would I refuse, but they would have dramatically increased the probability of receiving a bad review from me—though I would keep the offer, and my refusal, private.

That’s not to say that reviewers should NEVER receive free products or services. If companies want to seek out reviewers and offer product as an incentive, that’s fine, but that’s usually not what’s going on in the videos to make fun of so-called, “Influencers.” Usually, they go the business (often a restaurant) demanding free product in exchange for the social media review…which they as much as imply will be favorable if they are given the product at no cost.

For that reason, it’s important to separate legitimate review channels from shills, so do your research. That said, there are legitimate review channels and they have an interesting place in the world of collectible card games in that they actually influence behavior. As I found out from Paul:

BRANDON: Doesn’t that make it harder for sealed boxes, new sets as they come out, the fact that your margins have dropped–doesn’t that make it harder to crack sealed boxes? Not only not knowing what’s in an individual box, are you going to find the cards to pay for the box, but not even knowing if ANY of the cards are going to pop yet.

It seems like the old margins would allow you to crack open boxes, show people cards, create interest in the product, but if your margins go down, does it become tougher to take the potential loss that may come from opening a box?

PAUL: As technology evolves, as entertainment and marketing evolve, there have been a lot of recent changes in the past ten years to the collectibles and TCG market. There are a lot of Youtubers out there who are giving product reviews, sometimes well before the product comes out, they’ll get a copy of the product ahead of time. Sometimes, before the release, they’ll say, “It stinks! Don’t get it!”

Well, geez, I just dumped seven grand into this thing, you know?

BRANDON: Yeah, though it does sound like, when we talk to people talking to your customers, unlike Hasbro, it sounds like it could be pretty helpful to you.

PAUL: It can be helpful, or it can be hurtful. It’s a double-edged sword. When things are good and reviewers are giving things glowing reviews and encouraging people—that’s wonderful. When they give negative reviews, especially before the set even has a chance to launch, man, does that hurt!

Beneficial or not, it seems that there is a robust market for the reviewers themselves, so I would expect the most successful ones to keep doing what they’re doing. I just hope that they disclaim, if they open a box that isn’t particularly strong, that it might not be indicative of the quality of the entire product line and they may have just ended up with an unfavorable box.

Either way, the concept of online video reviews is certainly younger than the game of Magic: The Gathering, so it will be interesting to see how future developments in that regard will impact the game in terms of playing, collecting, trading and investing.

And, as promised, the full interview:

THE FULL INTERVIEW (WHICH I HOPE YOU READ FIRST ANYWAY)

BRANDON: Alright, this is Brandon here with Paul; he is the owner of Geekadrome, in the Brookline borough/neighborhood of Pittsburgh and we’re here to discuss Magic: The Gathering in terms of the game and investing. Let’s get started, Paul, do you, yourself, play Magic: The Gathering, and, if so, how long have you been a player?

PAUL: Yes. I actually got into playing Magic: The Gathering around Unlimited (released December, 1993) back in the beginning days of Magic; I think it was probably around ‘93, so it’s been a minute.

BRANDON: And, have you ever played competitively? I know competitive has been a pretty big scene over the decades.

PAUL: Yeah, I have played competitively, but I’d have to say that was a different world ago. That was before the huge pro tours, back when worlds were still relatively new (the first Magic: The Gathering World Championship was held in August of 1994) and when these events were still being run directly by Wizards of the Coast.

BRANDON: So, no million dollar prize pools, I take it?

PAUL: No, at best, I think I had an article written about me on Duelist. (The Duelist was a magazine published directly by Wizards of the Coast and ran from late 1993 to September of 1999)

BRANDON: And, as far as the trading card game/collectible card game industry, how long have you…I mean, you’re presently the owner of Geekadrome, but take me through the development starting with first working in, then owning, a local game and comic store.

PAUL: That’s actually a good story: I was going through schooling, going to college, and then 9/11 happened and it significantly changed the world. Coming out of college and going into the work environment, not a lot of people were looking to take a risk (in hiring) no matter how hungry or aggressive a young person might be.

I started finding a lot of frustration with that and decided: If no one is going to give me an opportunity, then I am going to MAKE an opportunity.

I’ve had numerous family members that have started their own businesses, and one thing that I have taken away from them is to get into something that you enjoy in (a field) where you have a lot of knowledge, because then you already have half a foot in the door.

BRANDON: That makes a lot of sense, and as you’ve already mentioned, you were already in the tournament scene when it was run by WotC, so you were jumping into something you knew a lot about in terms of Magic, but were there other collectible card games at the time, or did you have a lot of history with comic books? As I look around this store, it looks like you collect and trade in just about everything!

PAUL: Yeah, just about. I did a lot of comic stuff when I was younger; it has progressed from just going through the five and dime stores and various antique stores…finding some small amount of older comics they had, buying them, and flipping them at a local comic book store which happened to carry Magic: The Gathering in its fledgling years.

In fact, back in those days, it was comic book stores that happened to carry games, and now it’s gone to a point where Magic: The Gathering, or other trading card games, are the primary, sometimes sole, product.

BRANDON: That’s definitely a heck of a development pattern: to go from—”Oh, hey come check out our collectible comic books, we’ve got comics that are 20, 30 years old,” to, “Hey, we’re a store and we just sell Magic…and maybe some Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon, but we’re built around Magic.”

PAUL: Especially in a thirty-year timespan to have a business like that develop; it’s certainly a growth industry.

BRANDON: Speaking of growth, there’s a lot of collection that goes on with sealed boxes and individual cards, so I imagine the inventory I’m looking at on your shelves is not everything that you own; do you invest in any individual cards, getting cards graded or long-term holding of sealed boxes looking to sell for big profits in the future?

PAUL: Yes. Older sealed boxes, definitely. Personally, I don’t get into getting cards graded, you can increase the value of the item itself, but the liquidity drops significantly between something that is non-graded and graded and it becomes a lot harder to sell. It’s sometimes tough to find someone who wants it already graded; there are a significant number of people out there who want to pick up something ungraded to (get it graded), so let them make that decision. That’s my opinion.

BRANDON: It sounds like the very act of getting a card graded can be a risk, too, because—not only do you have to pay (for the grading), but you send something in thinking it’s going to come back an eight and it comes back a five…it’s got a scuffed up corner you didn’t notice, “Oh, man, this card was played a lot more than I thought it was!”

PAUL: Even down to the printing alignment; that can also be a factor. There’s also the factor of you’re doing an investment with the grading company because, when you’re sending in something to a grading company, the name of that company is also going to be permanently attached to that card. If something happens with that company, even ten or fifteen years down the line, that stigma is going to be attached to that card now.

BRANDON: That makes sense. Bringing it back more broadly to Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast as a company, as I understand it, Magic the Gathering started in 1993—basically, one guy kicked off the whole thing. By 1998, a deal was arranged by which Hasbro would acquire the company that had become Wizards of the Coast. That deal was finalized in 1999, but it seems that Hasbro itself, sort of, was just an umbrella for Wizards of the Coast and they stayed pretty hands off for the better part of two decades.

PAUL: That’s correct. They just sort of let them go with it; they had the rationale of, “Nothing is broken, so why try to fix it?”

BRANDON: On that note, it seems that, over those two decades, Magic the Gathering, as a card game, seemed to have a steady and predictable release schedule of about three sets per year, right? In terms of major box sets?

PAUL: Probably more like one per quarter, so four per year.

BRANDON: Even at four per year, you didn’t have stuff like Secret Lair (Hasbro selling directly to consumer) all of these different boosters, collectible sort of things…I’ve been researching for two weeks and I can’t even remember all of the different products.

PAUL: I think that, when they first started bringing things like Modern Masters, (the first Modern Masters set was released in June, 2013) the goal was to appeal to certain types of gamers rather than the entire community as a whole.

That was a really smart idea because, while there was heavy enfranchisement with the product, people still liked to keep to their specific form. This found a way to appeal to people who would typically only pick up one out of every three or four sets because it’s not directed to their specific type of Magic–whether it be standard play, extended or legacy–and it’s found a way to keep everyone as involved as possible.

BRANDON: Right. What I noticed was, right around the time Hasbro directly took over the (operations) of Wizards of the Coast and started navigating the coast Wizards was going to chart, starting around 2019-2020, or so—as you mention different sets for different types of players, I noticed there were five sets just for multiplayer released in both 2021 and 2022, so do you see these kinds of sets…it sounds like you see them as, if not an overall positive, that there’s a place for those kind of sets.

PAUL: Yes. If you consider Magic the Gathering, overall, as being its own product—let’s compare it to fruit juices—each of those is its own flavor, so maybe you like grape juice, but you don’t like orange juice; when they make a product that is specifically for grape juice drinkers, how excited are you?

BRANDON: That makes sense. When you hear…do you follow Alpha Investments Youtube?

PAUL: Ah, yes, Rudy.

BRANDON: Yeah, and it seems like his take on it is a little different from yours because it seems like he’s saying, “There’s just way too much product, Wizards is flooding the market,” but he still sees the value in sealed boxes, right?

It seems like Wizards is releasing more product than every single consumer can buy; Alpha Investments seems to take a negative view of that, but you seem to see it as a positive because, so far, it doesn’t seem to be hurting sealed boxes. Is that an accurate representation?

PAUL: Yes and no. Yes, in the fact that I can see this (different products for different types of Magic consumers) as being a positive thing, but no in that there’s a certain tipping point where it does become flooded into the market and it’s like, “I don’t even know what flavor of juice I like anymore!”

We can be seeing that right around the corner here. It seems that, everytime we have a new product release launch, we’re simultaneously reminding people, “Hey, by the way, I know we’re at the release for Brothers War, but make sure to get those preorders in for Jump Start—that’s going to be right around the corner.”

BRANDON: Yeah, so as soon as one thing is actually for sale, you’re immediately marketing the next product.

PAUL: Exactly.

BRANDON: I mean, if you’re jewelry, if you’re Kay Jewelers, sure; that’s probably fine.***

PAUL: Especially in February for them.

BRANDON: (Laughs) Right!?

BRANDON’S NOTE: ***Paul picked up where I was going and I didn’t end up finishing my thought the way I wanted to. What I was going to say is that Kay Jewelers is selling to a particular occasion, such as a holiday, birthday or engagement, so this is the sort of product where you’re always pushing the new thing because not everyone is expected to buy from every single sale. The implication with Magic: The Gathering, in my estimation, is that the paradigm was that everyone was supposed to buy everything.

BRANDON: But, for something that, ostensibly, started out as a collectible, at least for some people…I guess the hierarchy goes: Most Important: Players, Second Most Important: Collectors, Third Most Important: Investors.

But, do you think there are a certain subset of Magic participants throwing their hands up in the air and saying, “How the hell am I going to collect everything!?”

PAUL: I see a lot of them like that. I see a lot of individual Magic players like that, saying, “I’m so enfranchised with the game; I love everything about it, but they’re firing out things faster than I can keep up with them. I can’t even read the spoilers before the next set is out!”***

BRANDON’S NOTE: ***The rest of this statement was interrupted by a phone call, but the gist of it was that some Magic consumers don’t even feel like they have time to get excited about the next product before the next product is already out.

BRANDON: Okay, so one thing I noticed that they are doing now is a product concept called, “Secret Lair,” which I understand is Hasbro/Wizards selling packs or sets directly to the consumer. What is your take on that?

PAUL: It’s very interesting in that they’ve said in the past that they have no interest in selling directly to the consumer, especially anything that’s a new product. That was a big, big thing when we first started seeing brand new cards going direct to consumer without going through a retailer.

BRANDON: Right, so, I don’t want you to speak personally on this one—but, do you think it’s possible that some local game stores feel a bit disenfranchised with Wizards of the Coast going back on what they said they weren’t going to do and then doing it?

It cuts off the distributor, it cuts off the local game store—the local game store made Magic throughout these last three decades—where were they (Magic) before Amazon? Where were they before you could (easily) sell things online? It’s almost like a knife in the back.

It almost has to feel like GameStop (NOTE: I…could have picked a better company) feels when Nintendo’s releasing video games that you can download directly from the Switch. Like, “What about us? You’d have been NOTHING without us!”

PAUL: It definitely started out as a product where a consumer had to come into a local game shop and pick it up. In the beginning, big box stores didn’t want anything to do with Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh, any of these games; they found even Dungeons and Dragons to be too risky for a lot of these places to carry. So, they didn’t even bother carrying it.

But, who did? The local independent card shops. We started out as being the backbone for a lot of this, but, even in the modern age with direct-to-consumer, Amazon and things like that, I still believe it’s an industry that, if everything went direct-to-consumer, the industry would start dying off significantly.

If in-store play came to a complete end, then there would be a lot fewer people getting into the game.

BRANDON: That’s another interesting thing about these specific sets that we’ve been talking about. It almost feels like in 2005, if you were wanting to get into Standard (Magic format) play, but you’d never played Magic before, “Okay, here are these…what…four sets that I have to buy and all were released this year, or within the last calendar year, right?”

PAUL: Mmmhmm.

BRANDON: Now, it’s like, you get online and you’re maybe interested in the game, looking at all of these different (products) like, “What the hell am I supposed to buy? There are 45 different sets released this year! What do you even play Standard with?”

Isn’t this confusing for potential new players?

PAUL: I see that for a lot of customers that come in. Once again, they need a lot of guidance from us to figure out what product they need to get.

There’s something that you can’t get from Amazon, no matter what any description says—even when Wizards tried implementing grade levels that they had associated with different products, where, based upon your experience, would this be considered a beginner level product or an expert level product—even with those types of labels, you still need an experienced person behind the counter that’s going to guide them.

That’s especially true when there are so many different products all at once.

In fact, even with kitchen table gamers that come in and want to get into specific things, they don’t always know what to get without me to explain what different packs they should get, whether it be set boosters, Jump Start boosters, draft boosters, collector boosters…

BRANDON: It’s interesting that you mention Amazon because, as Rudy from Alpha Investments like to call, “Product dumps,” is it not the case that Hasbro itself has been selling directly on Amazon, and, what are these sales? Are these products that not all of the local game stores bought? Is it back inventory where (they say), “Let’s just get rid of it for whatever price we can because the LGS’ aren’t stocking the way they used to?”

How are these product dumps coming about?

PAUL: That’s a good question. Unfortunately, I don’t know as much about Wizards of the Coast and their production methods, per se. I would imagine that, because we do pre-orders and they get those ahead of time, they would base their printing off of that combined with historical data from each set.

However, if they are printing a certain number and they’re not all selling through the preorders and then—and this is in air quotes “Dumping”---on Amazon or EBay, or something like that, it’s unbeknownst to me. It could be that, or it could be an unprecedented lower amount of sales.

BRANDON: What confuses me about the Amazon prices is—if the rumors I’ve seen are true—and I wasn’t able to dig into it as much as I would have liked to, but some of these sales from Wizards direct to consumer have been lower than the local game stores were getting these sets for, right?

PAUL: Yes. In fact, from what I found out, sometimes when they do these, air quotes, “Product dumps,” sometimes the prices they initially put them in for are less than even what the distributors, who buy directly from Wizards, are paying. If that’s the case, then it’s surprising.

However, I don’t know their specific arrangement with Amazon. Do they give the product to Amazon and Amazon assigns the price, or are (Wizards) assigning the prices?

Either way, that’s probably the closest we’ll get to an MSRP as it relates to products now since they have abolished the MSRP with Magic.

BRANDON: Right. As you mentioned before, you can’t buy experience from Amazon; you can’t buy somebody who loves the game, such as yourself, participated in the game from the very beginning, played competitively in the 90’s before it was huge…nobody is going to go to Amazon and get the experience of how to properly play and appreciate the game that you can provide.

The question that leads me to is: Is this something of a market test for Hasbro eventually trying to transition to an ALL direct-to-consumer model and, if so, would it be a huge mistake for them to do that?

PAUL: Personally, I think that would be a great mistake if they did do that. They’ve officially said they are not trying to go to a complete direct-to-consumer model; however, some of the moves…if they were, those are the moves they’d be making.

BRANDON: Yeah, it’s like, “We’re not trying to do this. We’re not trying to go direct-to-consumer.”

That’s coming from the same Hasbro that said they were going to keep the spirit of the reserved list…it’s coming from the same Hasbro who—

PAUL: Yeah, they’ve altered and tailored their wordings on some of those grand statements and guarantees.

BRANDON: Yeah! It almost seems like they are finding the loopholes for the things that they themselves have promised players and local game stores.

To me, when it comes to the things that you, yourself, as a company have said: When you’re finding loopholes to the things you’ve said, it’s not a bridge much further just to start outright lying, right?

I’m not saying they’re going to lie; I’m just saying it’s very difficult to believe, at this point, that it’s impossible for them to lie.

PAUL: Historically, Wizards has been very good about keeping their word, but it is rather recently that things have been getting blurred with a lot of that.

There’s been a lot of Chicken Little every time anything comes out, “Oh, they’re reprinting Birds of Paradise, they’re breaking the reserved list,” that doesn’t really break the Reserved List.

People have also brought up the upcoming set of Dominaria Remastered; they’re going to be reprinting the original artwork of Birds of Paradise (Magic Unlimited, December ‘93) with the retro border and it’s basically going to look a lot like the Magic 30th (Anniversary) ones they just put out, but with an actual Magic: The Gathering back rather than the special Magic 30th backs.

If it’s looking that close, then that’s getting closer to tipping over the edge.

BRANDON: Yeah, tipping over the edge. I think the biggest problem with that, especially for collectors and investors, you get so close to the collectible product with these new products that, almost by definition, it makes the collectible product less of a collectible item, right?

Like, you don’t see Chevrolet going back and making ‘72 Camaros.***

BRANDON NOTE: ***Highly sought after vehicle; I guessed right!!

PAUL: There are aftermarkets when it comes to those and people who sell aftermarket parts that are virtually identical to those Chevy parts, so you could almost in fact rebuild one just from aftermarket parts.

However, I think more of the analog with this is: When you look at other trading cards and things they’ve done to help increase interest and spice up the interest in their products—like TV and movie products—they’ve started including things like pieces of uniforms and stage worn props and stuff like that.

I don’t think Magic is every going to include pieces of cosplayers costumes…

(Brandon laughs hysterically)

…but, they’re definitely taking a look at some of that when it comes to innovating, changing and creating new rarities. They’re also trying to expand and get outside of the box of not being able to reproduce those things again.

BRANDON: (MAKES A BAD JOKE THAT WILL BE OMITTED)

So, as we were going over the outline for the talking points--I had slid in Hasbro saying that the consumers are not necessarily meant to buy every product. That particular topic seemed to get a lot of interest from you, so I think I’m just going to let you take that from here.

PAUL: In the market as it is, when people hear businesses talk about their product, people imagine, “When I buy something, I am buying it directly from them,” even if you’re picking it up from an LGS, even if you’re picking it up from Amazon or big box stores.

Really, the distribution and how all of this works, especially if it’s going through distribution and not direct to consumer, is the consumer is NOT the intended target; the stores are, the LGS’.

It’s those people who are directly giving them the money and saying, “I want this many boxes.”

It’s the local stores, LGS’s, who are taking the big risk on these things. So, by (Wizards/Hasbro) telling the end consumers, “Well, you’re not meant to pick up everything,” they’re not talking directly to the people who are buying from them.

If they are talking directly to the people directly buying from them, such as myself and other stores, then, if we are not picking up every product they are producing, then how are we a Magic: The Gathering store?

BRANDON: Right.

PAUL: So, by saying that, it’s really complicating things. They’re telling our customers NOT to pick up everything, but we (DO) have to pick up everything.

BRANDON: Yeah, and I think the key words you used there are, “Your customers.”

Like, you are the customer of your distributors. The distributors are the customers of Hasbro. The people who physically walk into this, and any number of local game stores around the country—those are your customers.

I mean, it’s for you to suggest what your customers should buy, right?

PAUL: Yeah, make suggestions, let them know what each product is for.

It’s like with these mantras that some of these Magic The Gathering Youtubers tend to get on, things like, “Buy singles, don’t buy packs.” If everyone listened to them and did just that, then there wouldn’t be any singles (to buy) because stores aren’t going to rip open brand new sealed product hoping to 100% sell singles as not 100% of the singles are going to sell.

That would also create an artificial inflation in those singles, so that becomes not the cheapest way to build your decks or collect your cards.

BRANDON: Not only that, but part of the sealed product, by definition, is, “You don’t know what’s in there,” right?

PAUL: Exactly; it’s the randomization. It’s the, “Oooohhh, it might be this, it might be that, there might be multiples.”

I remember the first Booster Box I ever bought: Full sealed booster box was from Stronghold (March, 1998) and going, “Ooohhh, I hope I get that Sliver Queen, or, what if I get two Sliver Queens?” There’s a possibility that I could even get as many as four.

BRANDON: Right. There’s any amount of potential in the sealed box.

When you get right down to it, it seems like you're hunting for a handful of cards when you crack open a box. So, fundamentally, on average, cracking open a sealed box is NOT profitable, right? Or everyone would be doing it.

You’re not going to find the card that pays for the box, right?

PAUL: That depends on multiple things. A common term people in the industry like to use is, ‘EV,’ or, “Equivalent Value.”

BRANDON: We have that in gambling, except it means, “Expected value.”

PAUL: You’re going through and trying to mentally ask, “What do I need to go through this and make a profit?”

Sometimes, with some sets, there is a higher equivalent value for the cards than there are for the sealed boxes. That’s especially true when you’re trying to keep to an MSRP.

However, when getting rid of the MSRP that allows some room to play with that. Sometimes, places will take something that’s a four dollar pack and start charging more for it, even if it’s not an older, out-of-print product.

BRANDON: Right. While we’re on the subject of value, let’s talk about something that usually has no value whatsoever—proxy cards! Except, evidently, proxy cards DO have value because for Magic’s 30th Anniversary, they have decided to SLAP thirty years worth of Magic players in the face, in my opinion, and sell a four-pack of proxy cards, also breaking the spirit of the Reserved List in the process, for ONE. THOUSAND. DOLLARS.

Why would Hasbro do that? Paying $1,000 for four packs of cards is NOT what built Magic: The Gathering, for thirty years! This is not a way to celebrate. Most players cannot afford this.

PAUL: That’s true. In fact, I would be surprised if most players were able to do something like that.

Historically, it’s not entirely unique with them. In the past, they’ve released sets called, “Collectors Editions,” which were, in fact, full on prints of the entire run–it would be the entire set, not randomized, not in booster packs, and very much, “Here is a list of everything you’re getting.”

BRANDON: Right, right, right, so the consumer knows what they’re getting there.

PAUL: Exactly.

BRANDON: But, this is just four straight up packs of proxies. As I understand, they are not tournament legal.

PAUL: Same with the Collectors Editions; those were also not considered legal. They even had printed on them somewhere, “Not for tournament play.”

BRANDON: Right. I don’t know if these have that but, for anyone who did buy these 30th Anniversary four packs for $1,000, what are they hoping for? What is the value of these proxies other than they say, “30th Anniversary,” because even if you open it up and get a Black Lotus, it’s a Black Lotus that you can’t even use in a formal, legal game.

So, it’s not a Black Lotus, right? It’s a piece of cardboard that says, “Black Lotus,” on it.

PAUL: So, what’s the difference between getting that or getting something that was made on some sketchy website that’s selling fakes? You know, one of the big differences is this is from Wizards of the Coast, so it has a little bit of historical value in that this is officially recognized and published by Wizards of the Coast, and, potentially, if I were to see things like Legacy and Vintage being more tournament played—they might consider more official proxies, like this, as more legitimate for tournament play rather than a slip of paper that says, “Black Lotus,” on it and is put in a sleeve.

BRANDON: In any way, do you think…and, this is speculative, this thing just released earlier this week as of the time of this interview (December, 2022)--could this have a negative effect on actual Black Lotus cards that were printed thirty years ago?

PAUL: It could. It could have a negative, or it could have a positive. One thing I can say for certain, in regards to our proxy policy here at the store, is that we don’t allow proxies in any tournament play whether it’s hanging out and playing cards or it’s for a full-on tournament. That’s because it tends to delegitimize the tournament for those who spent the money, looked for the cards and did the hard work to get that fancy Tabernacle, or whatever—then Joe Blow sits down and has a deck that’s entirely just slips of paper…

(Brandon laughs)

…and he says, “Mine works just as well as yours.”

There’s a lot of ‘feel bad’ with that, and that feel bad can translate to market change.

BRANDON: Yeah, and the value of it is just how rare of a card it is.

What the reserved list said is, “We are never making this again.”

When you mention that no proxies in play is a rule of the store, when someone comes in with a 30th Anniversary-backed Black Lotus, is that going to be a no-no, or is that going to be a playable card?

PAUL: That’s going to be a no-no.

BRANDON: Very nice. You love to see it.

Is this what Hasbro’s thinking: All these other websites are making all of these proxy cards, shit, we’ll just make our own?

PAUL: Yeah. I mean, they’ve had some issues. They’ve done a lot of hunting down and trying to fight some of these illegitimate printers that are taking low-res(olution) versions of their cards and trying to print them off and sell them in sketchy back-alley websites.

I’m sure they saw, “Hey, some of these guys are making significant amounts of money off of this.”

BRANDON: Sure. Actually, wasn’t there a really big proxy site (Card Conjurer)---at least as they would have it, was making proxy cards just for kitchen table play? Just you and your buddy getting together, and—

PAUL: Yeah, they’re always trying to rationalize things that way, but they’ll leave it to the end consumer, with a little bit of a wink, that maybe these will pass as real.

BRANDON: Right, so, is it fair to say that you’re, in general, against proxy sites?

PAUL: I’m very much against proxy sites, not just for reasons that I’ve already established, but, believe it or not, there are some very nefarious people out there that will seek out these life-like proxies and try to pass them off and take advantage of younger, less experienced players, who might not even know that these fake cards exist.

BRANDON: Is that something you feel like the market should decide, or would you say that you support Hasbro in what appears to be a recent effort to get these proxy sites shut down?

PAUL: I would support them in it because it’s their intellectual property that they need to protect. If they allow other people to print these, even if they are printing them in a significantly different manner, it’s still allowing other people to print their cards.

BRANDON: Right. Now, would you have a different opinion about proxies—you mentioned the sort of surreptitious wink to people buying proxies–-what if, on the back, it said clearly, “This is a proxy,” would you have a problem with that and them using the defense of kitchen table play?

PAUL: As far as the secondary market and trading goes, it’s slightly less of a problem, but it would be far less of a problem if it was significantly different both back and front. Sometimes, we’ve seen things where people say, “Man, I really like XYZ show, I wish I could incorporate that with my love of Magic,” so sometimes they will get an artist to make an alter of an existing card that incorporates…say…maybe they like My Little Pony, which is another Hasbro product, and they want them to draw My Little Pony all over their cards, that’s fine.

BRANDON: (Hypothetically) So, if I were to do a kitchen table upside down Black Lotus that looks nothing like the Magic Black Lotus and fine print, “This is a proxy card for recreational purposes only,” and the back of the card, “This is a proxy card for recreational purposes only.”

I’m not using the Magic seal, trademark, like everyone knows what the card is for the purpose of kitchen table play, but I’m not using any copyright…but that’s not what’s happening?

PAUL: That’s not what’s happening, and the endangerment, in my opinion, I always try to look out for new players coming into the game because they especially might have the most love for the game. I’m always worried for them when it comes to trades, acquisitions, even just playing someone else, that, “Oh, man, I can’t believe you were lucky enough to get one of those. I wish I had one!”

“Oh, well, I’ll trade it to you for that card of yours, which is worth half of this one.” (WINK)

BRANDON: Right. And, of course, some of these new players aren’t necessarily going to be…I don’t want to say they’re not smart…let’s say they’re not experienced enough with the game to say, “Wait, why are you trading me, something worth double the value of what you’re getting from me? You’re doing this out of the kindness of your heart, are you?”

Probably not so much, right?

PAUL: It actually wasn’t that long ago I had someone who was a friend of mine who came to me and said, “Hey, I was down at XYZ place and picked up some more of this card I was looking for in trades.”

What he didn’t know, because he was just getting back into the game and when he first played, they didn’t even have foils—but this specific card that he just traded for, he traded cards of value, was, in fact, a fake, which I was able to pinpoint right from the get go.

But, I was able to pinpoint that because it was the artwork and version of a card that was only printed in foil, but it was a non-foil version of it.

BRANDON (SHOCKED): WOW! That also sounds like, how would anyone ever know, if you’re not involved in the Magic world, how would anyone know off the top of their head that this only came in foil?

If you’re deep into the Magic world, that’s like, a rookie mistake, right?

PAUL: Oh yeah. It comes down to things like, you might not know about different fake tests, the bend test, certain artwork, such as looking for a specific misprint that happened across the entire print line that might not be in some of the fakes.

BRANDON: Right. One thing that we have seen is other ways to play Magic the Gathering besides paper. Magic the Gathering Online (MTGO) has been around for a very long time and LOOKS like it has been around for a very long time—

PAUL: Yeah, their graphical interface is definitely a bit dated. In fact, it reminds me of things that I used back in the 90’s just to practice or even keep digital track of my own collection.

BRANDON: That’s what I felt like. I watched a video and said, “This would probably function on a Windows 93 Operating System.”

PAUL: I think I have seen people do that.

BRANDON: And, here’s me thinking I’m being sardonic.

PAUL: No. I’m fairly certain I’ve seen people bring in an actual laptop with Windows 93 on it and play it.

BRANDON: One thing that might concern me as a local game store is a game such as Magic The Gathering Arena, now, I’ve never played Magic, paper or otherwise, but I did pull up a few videos of that game in action and—graphically and sound—it just kicks ass! Like, “This just looks like a fun game.”

So, there’s something of a balance, right? It might get people interested in Magic the Gathering who have never played before, but at the same time, if you just want to play the game and you don’t care about playing it in person–

PAUL: Or, you don’t even WANT to play it in person.

BRANDON: Yeah, you can get any card you want to with the Wildcards, right? Like, if you just want to play the digital version of the card and you don’t care that you don’t own it and, if the game comes down, you have nothing…but, then, if the value of the game on the whole tanks, then the cards are worthless anyway, so, in a sense, what’s the difference?

Overall, do you think a game such as Arena helps local game stores because it introduces people to the game and maybe they want to play the paper game, or do you think it hurts because it actually takes people out of the paper game?

PAUL: I’ve been concerned on both ends because Arena has been out a little while, but it was a saving grace during the Covid closures because we couldn’t have in-store play. Instead, they encouraged us to try to use methods such as Discord and other things to try to play Arena. It definitely helped keep people interacting with the product, the IP, and the store. That was good then.

I’ve also had a significant number of people that live within blocks of our store that are ONLY interested in Arena and are not at all interested in paper play, but I never knew that they were interested or enfranchised players.

I think that’s very interesting, though I don’t know if it’s very telling.

It’s a little bit of apples and oranges, but, in the end, I’m definitely reminded of a quote attributed to Stan Lee when he was asked about whether or not digital comics would ruin the physical market. He was quoted as saying, “Comics are like boobs, they look great on a computer, but I’d rather hold them.”

BRANDON: (Laughing uproariously) I think he might have been right. I mean, I know he was right about the boobs.

Looking at recent price movements, 2021 seemed like an all-time high for the game.

I don’t know if you’d agree or disagree with me on this, but I see it as a broader market transition from services to goods and also the United States Federal Government giving a bunch of people a ton of money that they didn’t have before.

Do you think that might have factored into the demand for Magic the Gathering, specifically, coming out of Covid?

PAUL: Yeah. Not just Magic, but I’d say almost everything when it came to collectibles. It was a really interesting experience because, whereas previously I thought certain collectible markets were on a decline or maybe even dying out, but then there was a financial injection into the market.

It seemed like people we thought weren’t interested at all, turned out to be interested.

The comic industry also saw a huge boom with that as well, which is now just starting to taper off.

BRANDON: What do you think, in terms of the Magic products specifically and injection of this money, do you think it’s across the board or the new purchases trended more towards new players purchasing, old players purchasing, collectors or sort of the investor class?

PAUL: I think that it might be more of the fifth option-which is, as I previously said, stores. The LGS’s, brick-and-mortars, which start carrying more of the product.

We saw a lot of stores, here in Pittsburgh, opening up that came out of that huge bubble for collectibles. I’m starting to see some of those that just popped up going back into their hidey-holes.

BRANDON: Right. I can see that and I think a lot of that has to do with (the fact that) some of the new products and some of the products released in recent years, or months, from Magic the Gathering, haven’t done particularly well. A lot of them have. But, when you look at a set such as Unfinity, and I believe I looked at booster boxes specifically, it is currently being sold on websites such as TCG player for less than the manufacturer’s suggested price?

PAUL: Well, they don’t have an MSRP for Magic products anymore; they got rid of that a few years ago. Instead, there’s sort of an unofficial accepted agreement as to what the MSRP was for a lot of stores before then and we’re trying to assume it would continue throughout after being adjusted for inflation.

That’s especially as they decreased our discounts when it came to buying boxes. That increased our costs which caused the prices to go up a little bit, but for the most part, the stores have stuck to what the price schedules have been before or what the open market is accepting on those prices.

BRANDON: Right. It sounds like, for the most part, the local game stores…as if Hasbro doing Secret Lair, “Amazon Dumps,” and other direct to consumer sales isn’t bad enough, but it sounds like local game stores, in order to continue to satisfy their customers, have taken these decreases to the cut you get off of product and taken it on the nose to sell it for the same price.

PAUL: Yeah, that’s not inaccurate. In fact, it’s a known part of business that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose; sometimes you just break even. Sometimes, that’s just what happens with these Magic sets: You invest into it and sometimes you make money, sometimes you don’t.

Sometimes, you have a particular stinker of a set that comes out and you end up having to sell it at cost, or God forbid, you end up having to sell under. If that ends up happening, you have to find some way to pivot.

BRANDON: Doesn’t that make it harder for sealed boxes, new sets as they come out, the fact that your margins have dropped–doesn’t that make it harder to crack sealed boxes? Not only not knowing what’s in an individual box, are you going to find the cards to pay for the box, but not even knowing if ANY of the cards are going to pop yet.

It seems like the old margins would allow you to crack open boxes, show people cards, create interest in the product, but if your margins go down, does it become tougher to take the potential loss that may come from opening a box?

PAUL: As technology evolves, as entertainment and marketing evolve, there have been a lot of recent changes in the past ten years to the collectibles and TCG market. There are a lot of Youtubers out there who are giving product reviews, sometimes well before the product comes out, they’ll get a copy of the product ahead of time. Sometimes, before the release, they’ll say, “It stinks! Don’t get it!”

Well, geez, I just dumped seven grand into this thing, you know?

BRANDON: Yeah, though it does sound like, when we talk to people talking to your customers, unlike Hasbro, it sounds like it could be pretty helpful to you.

PAUL: It can be helpful, or it can be hurtful. It’s a double-edged sword. When things are good and reviewers are giving things glowing reviews and encouraging people—that’s wonderful. When they give negative reviews, especially before the set even has a chance to launch, man, does that hurt!

BRANDON: Yeah, and the whole big thing for the last month, or so, has been ripping Hasbro for this Magic 30th Anniversary. It’s like, “Crap, we’re not even talking about the new sets at all really, right now,” so I would say this Magic 30th Anniversary has been a negative for players…because you technically can’t even play them, a negative for local game stores, because you can’t even really sell them, and if you could, who’s coming in here and paying $1,000 cash…maybe you could flip it online, I don’t know…and investors because how to you valuate a product like this? So, who has actually benefited from Magic 30th Anniversary?

PAUL: (Laughs) Hasbro.

BRANDON: Have they, though?

PAUL: Well, you consider the amount of money they have to put into printing and marketing the product, so I would assume that there is no way, with the overhead cost of making and marketing the product, that they would end up recouping less than cost.

BRANDON: What has me interested in this particular topic is that I noticed Hasbro has been going behind the scenes to other content creators for other trading card games such as (Ruxin34, who I couldn’t think of at the moment) people who mainly play Yu-Gi-Oh or Pokemon, people who don’t play Magic much, if at all, and offering them thousands of dollars—

PAUL: And, sometimes even sports athletes, too.

BRANDON: Yeah, but content creators for other games to open Magic 30th specifically. That does not come off to me as a company that has a lot of faith that their product is going to have a 100% RoI, or better, when you’re going to people who literally don’t seem to have anything to do with your product and asking them to promote it. To me, that almost smells like desperation, what do you think?

PAUL: I can definitely see that point of view. From the corporate world and knowing how the corporate world works when it comes to product promotions, I can also see them wanting to chase…what Logan Paul did for Pokemon…I can see that they want that bad. That’s why they brought in celebrities like Post Malone, that’s why they tried to create their own celebrities by taking Youtube shows and making them official Wizards products.

They’re trying to chase what Logan Paul did for Pokemon because it was so organic and happened on its own. That was, quite honestly, a huge boon for Pokemon.

BRANDON: Yeah. It seems like, in terms of the specific product of Magic 30th Anniversary Edition, that didn’t exactly happen. Were you aware there was one (also Ruxin34), somewhat major content creator, Yu-Gi-Oh content creator, who actually promoted Magic 30th…and had to take the video down and apologize–

PAUL: –I’ve heard of this.

BRANDON: After catching backlash from the Magic community.

PAUL: I’ve heard of this and it’s something very unfortunate.

Since I have personally worked in the radio field, since I have personally worked in event promotions, I know what it’s like when you’re just doing your job and you’re just reading from the script—maybe something wasn’t worded right and, all of a sudden, you’ve got torches and pitchforks coming at you. That’s no fun at all.

BRANDON: Yeah, and if it’s someone who just doesn’t know Magic that well–it seems like Hasbro would just be taking advantage of that person to not…

…I mean, yeah, to a certain extent, maybe that guy should have done his research to see how widely despised this product is.

PAUL: For any independent promoter, I’d say as a bit of advice: Always do your homework. Always do your research. When you think that homework is done, do it again.

BRANDON: Yeah, measure twice, cut once.

PAUL: Measure three times.

BRANDON: Hell, let’s make it four. Four proxy packs for $1,000, four measures for $1,000.

Let’s flip the topic to new Magic the Gathering products that do seem to be well-received, such as serialized cards. It seems, to me, that serialized cards—when we look at the hierarchy of the base Magic consumer being a player, then collector, then investor…it seems this is something that can be a boon for both collectors and investors as long as we don’t turn around one day and see two different physical cards that are both, “#5 of 500,” right?

PAUL: Yeah. It’s also something else we talked about, illegitimate companies making fake cards, and if they try to make fake serialized cards they might even be passable, might look close enough without too much scrutiny, it’s going to put a brighter light on those people who are making the passable fakes. The ones who, in my opinion, are really endangering the IP of the industry and are probably more dangerous than overprinting.

BRANDON: Right. Definitely. Because, if you just want to get a blank piece of cardboard and a pen and write, “Mox Ruby,” on it, and what Mox Ruby does, that doesn’t hurt a collector; that doesn’t hurt an investor. It doesn’t hurt anybody.

PAUL: That doesn’t hurt the secondary market. It’s not going to have someone try to pass it off to someone else as being the real thing. It’s not going to disenfranchise other players when someone has something like that.

Now, if you take that into a tournament and it’s treated the same way as an actual Mox Ruby, (Brandon: That’s bad news) that’s bad news.

BRANDON: In terms of serialized cards, which I think a lot of other TCG’s have already done, certainly sports cards have done it in the past.

PAUL: Sports cards have definitely done it. In fact, as an autograph collector, I’ve seen a lot of numbered serialized autographs where, at a certain signing, he only signed 500 and numbered them, “1 of 500,” “2 of 500…”

BRANDON: Oh, wow! He must have got a pretty good cut from Topps or Fleer or Donruss, whoever it was, right?

PAUL: Oh yeah. Those always command a premium. Because, once again, it’s harder to fake that.

BRANDON: Hasn’t Magic also done the same thing over the years with the illustrators of the card sometimes doing signature versions? I don’t know if they’re serialized, but that seems like a pretty big collectible item there with the artist of the card signing it, right?

PAUL: That’s something that has been debated upon for probably the last decade or two—does it actually add value, does it detract value, is it now considered to be a damaged version of the card because it’s been written on? Even if it’s by someone who has a legit tie to that card, it’s been heavily debated across stores. And, if so, if it adds or detracts a measurable amount to it, how much?

BRANDON: WOW! I’d never have thought of a detraction. I don’t play Magic, but if I did, if the guy or gal who actually did the art for the card wanted to sign my card—-take the value to zero, I don’t care, I’ve got the artist who did the art that I must think is amazing signing it. I’ll take the John Hancock; I don’t need the money.

It looks like the Magic the Gathering release schedule for Standard sets isn’t going to change as they’ve announced five new sets for 2023, which is obviously more than quarterly.

In your opinion, have they found, ‘Just right,’ or is this a little bit too much for Standard sets to be released?

PAUL: It’s a little bit much. If that was something that included supplemental products, then it might be about right, but I think we both know it’s not going to. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same amount of supplemental product be put through in addition to Standard product.

BRANDON: Yeah. I mean, that’s been the trend since…looking at dates and valuations, that seems to be the general trend ever since Hasbro took over Wizards of the Coast in terms of operations rather than, “Hey, we’re your umbrella company, but you guys do your own thing.”

For the longest time, it looks to me like Wizards of the Coast was just a money printer.

You’ve got this steady, predictable release schedule, people love the product, they’re loyal to it…and then you do things like pumping up the release (schedule), doing direct to consumer…

Other than Hasbro, who is Hasbro NOT actively pissing off these last few years?

PAUL: It also brings up the question: What about their other IP’s, things that they own, and how are those other companies under the Hasbro umbrella feeling about this? Because, it’s going to be a real thing to see ten years down the line if after so long of letting Wizards of the Coast do as they do, why are they pressuring them to make everything seem so much more profitable?

Are they trying to bank up and build towards something else where they’re trying to push another one of their products? Is there going to be a third My Little Pony wave? Is there going to be a third Transformers bust? Are they going to bring back Metal Transformers? Who knows?

Is this something that is going to lean into one of their other properties, or are they looking to potentially sell it?

BRANDON: Right. Speaking of, the market doesn’t seem to like what Hasbro’s doing recently. I’m sure you’ve looked at the stock trends for Hasbro. To say the least, this calendar year, Hasbro has…not been following the broader market.

As a matter of fact, Hasbro might look a little more like Bitcoin than it does the broader market in the last year.

PAUL: They’ve done a lot of patting themselves on the back, saying they’ve been listening to their end consumers—those being the individual people who are buying Magic products, or action figures through their action figure lines, and listening to what they want.

Sometimes, people don’t see it as them listening enough; sometimes, people think they are listening too hard, but in the end, there are going to be big changes with the product. That’s something we can take to the bank.

BRANDON: Right. Speaking of changes to the product, given this market backlash, Magic the Gathering has probably had the Standard and supplemental release schedule for 2023 in place for a long time, so…

On the other hand, how hard would it be for them to say, “You know what? We’re going to go ahead and release one fewer Standard set in 2023 and make that the first set of 2024?”

Is that something they can do right now, or is it logistically impossible, even if they wanted to slow down the release schedule?

PAUL: I would say it’s probably possible. However, it might be uncomfortable with the resounding gasp that they would hear from the end market.

Especially if they dropped down to only three releases per year; it would be a gasp heard around the world.

BRANDON: Right. It would be a gasp heard around the world and, let’s face it, the market overreacts to everything…and it would probably overreact to that and Hasbro’s stock would overreact…in a downward fashion…

But, it gets you to the point where you have to ask, “Who do they care about more: The people who, for thirty years, have invested in the Magic the Gathering product, or the people who are investing in Hasbro stock?”

PAUL: That’s a good question. That’s a really good question.

Everyone wants to fight to be #1. Whether it’s attention from the company, whether you’re a customer or stock investor, you want to be considered their #1 priority.

I think they want to make everyone feel like the #1 priority. And, if you’ve grown up in a big family, every parent says, “Hey, you’re my favorite,” but you know you’re not.

BRANDON: Hey, they have a saying for that in the trades, “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

Also, if you try to please everybody, you’ll end up pleasing nobody.

At a certain point, I think Hasbro is going to have to ask themselves, “Do we want to put our loyal Magic players of the last thirty years first, or do we want to put investors and quick profits first?” Right now, I feel like they’re making the wrong decision on that as 30th Anniversary would illustrate with four proxy packs for a thousand dollars.

Do you think that, at some point, they’ll get a wake-up slap in the face and focus on a more player-oriented release schedule and player-oriented products rather than try to satisfy stock investors?

PAUL: That’s a good question. It’s hard to really say based off their communications and reactions to stores, markets and end users. It’s like, hey, why are you pushing online play and direct sales plays if you care about the LGS’s, why is this, if that?

It seems like they’re working multiple avenues, and in a way, that’s very tough to read.

BRANDON: It seems like, as mad as players and collectors have been about Magic 30th Anniversary…at the end of the day, those people DON’T have to buy that specific product, but from my perspective…that alone is not so much a problem.

But, if you look at 30th Anniversary, you look at Secret Lairs, you look at Amazon, “Product Dumps,” it seems like if there is anyone taking a knife in the back—it’s local game stores. It seems like Magic already got the quid, now they don’t want to keep you guys so much in the pro quo.

PAUL: It can be seen that way, but I have also seen them do things like, during Covid, in order to help stores recoup from suddenly having to close down, we ended up getting special product releases that weren’t scheduled to be out. They gave those to us, if not at a significant discount, they even gave us some of them for free, so we could host events and make a decent profit on certain things.

For example, they released the Mystery Booster Convention Edition to stores so they could try to make a decent profit. It was a limited amount, but it was still a significant gift to the LGS community.

They’ve given other gifts to the LGS community that would seem to run against a move to direct to consumer. If they were 100% doing that, then they wouldn’t be doing this.

BRANDON: So, when we look at additional releases of not just supplemental products and direct to consumer, but also of Standard sets, from people you’ve talked to…so don’t answer for yourself, and with other games such as Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Flesh and Blood, Metazoo, et cetera, do you find that, in light of the events of the last two years, that some LGS’s are reducing actual in-store inventory in Magic the Gathering?

PAUL: Especially some of the new ones that popped up during the post-Covid bubble. I would say many of those are likely to be cutting down on their supply because they were riding high on when the bubble was huge. I wouldn’t say the bubble has quite popped, but it’s definitely deflated significantly.

BRANDON: Yeah, I think that the prices online have shown that too. I brought up Unfinity before which basically released and immediately tanked.

Even ignoring Unfinity, it seems lots of Magic products, even ones that are slightly more dated…I was looking at Kaldheim Booster Box cases, which I understand is six Booster Boxes in one case: Earlier this year, one of those sold for $1,250 for a case, at least that was the market value according to TCG player, now they’re sub-$850 and some are being sold for less than that?***

***NOTE—This question isn’t exactly accurate. Being unfamiliar with Magic before this project, I mistook a Kaldheim Booster Box case with a Kaldheim COLLECTOR Booster Box Case (I think Paul might have been too polite to correct me) which this site has ranging from a high of nearly $1200 to a sub $1,000 low.

Is the bubble popping, deflating, or when we look at the past thirty years, as opposed to two years, maybe this is just a return to normalcy. What do you think?

PAUL: I think a lot of people would say it’s a return to normalcy. I would actually argue for the insane version and say, “No, this is the beginning of a new inflation for that.” That’s because, with a lot of these sealed products, there’s a tipping point where, after something has aged so long, people care less about the playability and they want to reminisce opening those packs from that time, or reminisce playing a draft from an older set.

There’s a significant decrease that comes in the market when there’s a lot of product being put into it. Kaldheim is at a point where it’s actually going to start going up, in my opinion, because there are a lot fewer people who are greedily trying to get it all up, get it all up, get it all up…and the less that something like that is moving, it’s going to increase the price.

BRANDON: That makes sense, and when it comes to sealed boxes, one thing that will always be true is: Every time someone opens a sealed box—

PAUL (Smiling): There’s one less sealed box.

BRANDON: There’s one less sealed box.

That automatically increases the rarity, we would think, increases the value.

It was interesting that you mentioned opening the sealed boxes of these past sets, when people do that, you mentioned people are sometimes playing Drafts…pass them around and play and hey, “If we hit a card that pays for this thing, all the better, but we probably won’t.”

Do you think there’s any market…are we just waiting for people to play Drafts, or do you think people are buying sealed boxes from people who are holding sealed boxes that they themselves are going to hold and hope for the value to pop?

PAUL: Well, I think that’s a natural step that’s just a component of the market, where some people hold onto it as an asset and wait for it to grow. The other end, what I think may be more in the future, is the entertainment aspect.

In the future, people will be tuning into Youtube and Twitch streams, and other streaming venues, to watch celebrity players, people who are famous players, rip open an older box and go through and casually talk about what things they remember playing when it was new. Even though it’s fifteen years old, they will see it as a value.

BRANDON: If you were a new player getting into collecting Magic cards at this time, if you wanted to both play and collect—sealed boxes seem to be the most stable in terms of (market) value increase, but individual cards are maybe where you hit home runs—

PAUL: –Yes.

BRANDON: But, if you have a card that maybe you’re holding and it becomes worth a lot and somehow it’s made illegal (in the game), now you have a worthless card–

PAUL: Or, if it gets reprinted…

BRANDON: Or, if it gets reprinted. Wink, wink, we will never break the spirit of the Reserved List, 30th Anniversary Edition.

Actually, that’s a great example. Do you see the value, potentially, of something like the old school Black Lotus, Mox Pearl, Mox Ruby, etc., is that going to go down as a result of these Wizard of the Coast sanctioned 30th Anniversary proxies hitting the market, or is there enough removal from it being an actual, official Magic card for it that the value of the older one should be preserved?

PAUL: Actually, I optimistically think that there’s a third option: This might actually increase the value of them.

BRANDON: REALLY!?

PAUL: Yes.

BRANDON: You know I’ve got to follow up on this. I don’t understand the logic behind that, but you would know better than I would, so that’s probably why the logic of that statement escapes me. Why would it cause the older cards to gain value?

PAUL: Because they’re going to become less liquid. They’re going to go up in value the less that people are actively trying to pursue them. Similar to, where it used to be, you would likely get a better percentage on a worse quality Reserved List card than getting a higher end one, such as mint condition, because you’re more quickly going to be able to sell and flip something in a lower condition because it’s a lower price point for entry.

BRANDON: Yeah, that’s true. That’s actually a good point that I hadn’t considered. If there aren’t too, too, too many people out there looking to spend $1,000 for a four pack of proxies, then there probably aren’t too many people that can presently afford to buy one card for a hundred thousand dollars.

PAUL: Yes, however, those that can and specifically want that black border Black Lotus that is legitimate, they are willing to pay a premium for that and not deal with the people who are selling the gold borders.

BRANDON: Right. We talk about the spirit of the Reserved List, which is something that still exists—do you think there is any possible world where Hasbro just says, “F it. Here is a brand new black border Black Lotus. You can find it in the seventh Standard box set released in 2024 in March, or something.” (NOTE: There will almost certainly NOT be seven Standard sets in 2024, and definitely not by March—this was a hyperbolic statement)

PAUL: This reminds me of a discussion I had not to long ago with someone: In what way could they functionally, and without too much of an uproar, still reprint some of those reserved list cards, such as the original Dual Lands. What if they tweaked it just enough…let’s say they are the same cards, but they are Snow lands, so they also have the snow functionality.

Or, if there is something changed to it, such as functionally the same exact cards, but it has an additional addendum like, “If this card becomes the target of a spell, you have to sacrifice it.”

It’s still functionally the same card, but unique enough…

BRANDON: (NOTE: Not being a Magic player, Brandon is a little lost at this point.) In terms of collectors and Magic the Gathering investors, you almost have to be—and I think this is where Hasbro’s playing with fire—because as a collector/investor, you almost have to assign the worth to Magic the Gathering cards.

You have a certain ecosystem that has to maintain a certain balance in order for that to work. Honestly, not having ever played Magic, if someone came up to me and showed me a Black Lotus card…okay, this is a piece of cardboard with a picture and says Black Lotus on it.

Again, I mean you guys no offense; I just don’t play the game.

If the person asked how much the card was worth, I’d be like, “I don’t know, twenty-five cents?”

Isn’t the biggest problem with these high release schedules, potentially upsetting players, investors and collectors—nobody except Hasbro likes (the concept of) Magic 30th…if they decide there is no real value in this ecosystem anymore, if Hasbro were to somehow piss the players off THAT much…the cards just become worthless, right?

PAUL: That’s a good question. That’s a good question. If the playing fanbase drops below the collecting fanbase, is there still a sustainable fanbase? That’s a really good question because, initially when it came to trading cards, not trading card games, back when it was just artwork on a three inch by four inch playing card—there was still a market to it. There was still collectability.

But, public tastes and trends have changed because it becomes less liquid and there are fewer people looking for it. There are fewer people still looking for cards from the old G.I. Joe cartoon series, but they still exist.

BRANDON: Another thing that’s interesting to me, as you mention tastes and trends, I think that’s why so many of the players see Magic 30th Anniversary as a slap in the face because we live in a very short-term trend oriented world.

You have a TikTok that catches fire for about ten minutes, gets a hundred thousand million views (hyperbole) and then a week later you can ask, “Hey, what was the name of the person who did that TikTok?” Nobody knows.

PAUL: Nobody knows.

BRANDON: We have a political uproar over something: A week later it’s forgotten about, nobody cares.

Players have caused this collectible card game, they’ve created an entire legitimate community around a game that they love, they have caused it to sustain for THIRTY YEARS…if you’re Hasbro, you’re Wizards of the Coast, why are you not doing the safest thing possible to guarantee that you preserve value for another thirty years?

Why would you ever risk alienating, not just all of the players, why would you ever risk alienating a single player with your actions (as Hasbro) in exchange for a quick buck?

PAUL: That’s a good question. I couldn’t personally answer that because I’m not Wizards of the Coast, and unfortunately, I haven’t been in the situation where I could afford doing something like that. Situationally, depending on what kind of long game might be played, they might be hedging bets and going, “Well, we can make more in the long run if we can cash in in the short run to fund the long run.”

BRANDON: That makes sense. I guess if there are any plans like, “We’ve got this big thing we’re going to drop in 2024, 2025,” I suppose it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for them to tell us what it is now.

PAUL: True.

BRANDON: With the recent developments with this 30th Anniversary…I believe it was announced a couple months ago and the market reacted horribly to the concept of four packs of proxy cards for $1,000…do you see other trading card games, collectible card games, and I know Yu-Gi-Oh is an example of one that was already doing extremely well, but do you think there are any startups or ones that haven’t been around that long—based on what you sell and what you’re hearing—gaining sales compared to Magic the Gathering?

PAUL: Flesh and Blood had a really interesting past few years where it became a collector’s paradise and now it’s started becoming more of a player’s game. Similarly, Metazoo has become very much a fun (inaudible) with that. One of the things that I think might be the deciding factor is the people collecting it just to collect it—not for playability or trying to hold it as an investment, but people collecting because they enjoy the artwork. That might be the deciding factor in what becomes the fourth (Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon) big trading card game.

CONCLUSION

Once again, I want to give all the thanks in the world to Paul, from Geekadrome, which can be found for either in-store or mail purchases at:

Geekadrome: Games and Comics

534 Brookline Boulevard

Pittsburgh, PA 15226

Online: Geekadrome

And, on Facebook.

Without Paul’s participation, this article wouldn’t be 5% of what we ended up with. It would have been nothing more than an opinion piece on a subject that caught my interest, and despite two solid weeks of researching four hours per day, this article wouldn’t have been nearly as well informed as it ended up being.

Because of Paul’s participation, much like a Magic: The Gathering card that has value to a particular player, or is attached to a memory, I can look back at this article years from now and be really proud of our work.

While this may not have changed the opinion of collectibles that I shared with everyone in the beginning of the article–a risky endeavor in which any value is only that which has been agreed upon between buyer and seller and includes factors difficult to account for, this work has helped me truly appreciate the love and dedication that so many people around the world have for this game.

Written by: Mission146