MTG Adventures in the Forgotten Realms Post-Mortem, Remastered!
Throwback Thursday presents compiled notes from July 2021
Today we continue our look back at the Magic: the Gathering release post-mortem articles from The Backstage Pass! In some cases the hindsight on this stuff is fairly significant. In other cases, not so much. In other cases, it’s a howl of laughter. Please feel free to amuse yourself at my expense as you read this.
On the Backstage Pass, I stopped writing the rigidly formatted post-mortem articles around the time of the store move to Chandler in 2017. But for many sets, I still wrote debriefing articles on their prerelease/release and market outlook and so forth in much the same way the post-mortems had been set up. I decided here on LGSNI to repurpose those articles as post-mortem Remasters as well, so that I can extend the series all the way to the end of the Pass to where LGSNI took over.
Toward the very end of the Pass, I didn’t even have time to write debriefs about every new set! For articles like this one, I’m compiling notes from my store results, social media, impressions at the time, and the benefit of hindsight. So this is actually kind of a brand new article, disguised as a remaster for consistency’s sake. LGSNI started when Phyrexia All Will Be One was current, so that projects to be the final bridge point.
Normally, we do the original in normal text and my new annotations in italics. Since this article is entirely newly written, we’ll stick to normal text.
Here we go!
Oh man. July 2021. I try not to think about it. But to do any retrospective on Magic: the Gathering: Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms: The Product, I have to go off notes and materials contemporaneous to the time, and most of what I have was focused on something a bit more existential:
On June 19th, DSG’s power panel caught on fire. The power company, SRP, told us we’d be out of commission for months. Indeed, electricity wasn’t restored to Suite 7 until quite a while later.
We had been planning to move at end-of-lease in 2022 to smaller digs in the same plaza, because the pandemic shifted our thinking significantly and we decided that:
The large-store large-game-room model might be dead for a long time, possibly for good, and
Even if it wasn’t, we no longer wanted to run that model, so we needed to start creating options to shift to a more compact product focus.
Thanks to the groundwork we had already laid with the landlord to move over the course of the following 12 months or so, the landlord already had a tenant-in-waiting for Suite 7, the Orange Tommy Indian Grocery store. DSG vacating suite 7 was a ribbon-wrapped gift to the grocers, who were more than happy to start their construction ahead of time, so the landlord gave us a move offer with fantastic financials, one we could not possibly want to refuse. It helped him too: he had a bunch of salons toward that end of the building who were dragging their feet on lease renewal, and with DSG signed for suites 11 and 12, that gave him the leverage to get them all locked in on renewals also.
So the race was on to get ourselves moved and opened and the Forgotten Realms prerelease was not going to happen unless I had a suite with some seating and air conditioning and product mostly reloaded.
Suite 7 was uninhabitable, so I moved a whole bunch of inventory to my house, which was not even close to being big enough to store it, but it was the resource I had. Here is Snuffy the Store Kat standing guard over the goods.
Both suites 11 and 12 had no floor. There was scrap carpet and glue scattered over bare concrete, and in both cases we needed a complete treatment. Flooring contractors charged me, all-in, just short of $20,000 to tear out all the remnants and to put down the heavy ceramic tile that looks like hardwood. I never got ROI out of this investment since the store was sold in December 2023 and Dusty moved it to suites 1 and 2 on the other end. But for those 2.5 years of DSG, we had the greatest floor there ever was.
First we got suite 11 up and running as our back office and put a retail counter at the front, because our order volume on TCGplayer and eBay was still considerable during this time period, and Pokemon walk-in sales were still heavy. The contractors did all their stuff in suite 11 first, and then moved on to suite 12 for the more extensive work while we operated out of a 900sf closet with about 70sf of customer space:
But it worked. For all this agony and moving things back and forth and having the staff crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the back room and everything else, we got suite 12 open, approved by Wizards of the Coast, and fully operational in time for both Forgotten Realms and the much bigger Pokemon Evolving Skies that followed!
There it was, we made it, and just in the nick of time. I think the final opening of suite 12 to the public was around Tuesday or Wednesday of the prerelease week. A lot of players were surprised at the space reduction, which was good for 40 players at a time for the event, compared to suite 7’s unbounded capacity — we never even tested the limits of it, and the city had cleared us to go over 250 without even checking back with the fire marshal. With suite 12 at less than one-fifth of suite 7’s 6000+ square feet, we had gone from megastore back to cozy ultraboutique. The difference, of course, was that our sweetheart lease deal left us plenty of room to demolish the local competition on price, and people noticed.
The event seating space reduction ended up being a nothingburger all the way through late 2023, and even though Amazing Discoveries Chandler has a bit more seating now in suites 1 and 2, they have yet to test their limits on that either. Late 2021 had the second COVID surge hit Arizona and we closed the tables back up and put retail racks in their place. Sometime around Kamigawa was when the sun came back out and reopening the tables projected to be safe and prudent.
So with the doors open and the event on, the AFR product arrived, and it landed like a nuclear warhead. What a set this was.
I think in retrospect AFR will be seen as something akin to Legends: Even barely scratching the surface of the design space it opened up, it had an overwhelming flavor payload. Our first sense of that came when I was opening singles, and we saw the Dungeon Module showcase cards:
This stuff is absolute cocaine for any longtime D&D player who turned to Magic in the 1990s. It’s hard to articulate fully how much I love the Dungeon Module cards and how commonly I think my reaction to them is shared by other Gen-X gamers. Much like the way the “gold character cards” in Legends opened an entire new realm of Magic without actually doing much of anything else interesting, these AFR showcase cards took us an entire level forward about what a “showcase” or alternate-framed Magic card could really be, how evocative, how flavorful, how much it could resonate with the player, within the existing context of a game we loved.
The product lineup was awesome front-to-back, though in the early going it looked almost like it might not be. Let’s go down the list:
The first sign of it being all show and no go, however, was that the collector boosters were weirdly not big hits right out of the gate. We saw Amazon dumps at under wholesale within weeks; we saw retailers fire-selling master cases under cost; it was weird and uncanny. I get that stores were all-in on Evolving Skies and needed to gather every dime, but we didn’t see a meaningful AFR demand recovery until sometime in 2023, and even that kind of stalled out as the sealed market collapsed in the mid- to late-summer.
We can look in retrospect and say that the set was without essential cards across many formats. This is true and fair to say. The dragons were simplistic, the various other D&D components kind of meh. We didn’t know it at the time, but a lot of cheddar was being saved for Baldur’s Gate the following year. To this day the only big card in AFR is Old Gnawbone, which has “only” had two reprints since — once on The List, and another as an illustration showcase in a Secret Lair. Old Gnawbone and several of the few other cards of consequence on the roster, such as Xorn and Treasure Vault, are wrapped up in the treasure mechanic that dominated Commander at the time (and to some extent still does).
A quick look down the list of relevancies leaves us with a thin picklist, but one worth completing for Commander and Pioneer at least: Acererak, Lolth, the Deck of Many Things (so meta, it inspired MTG in the first place), Tiamat, Delina, the Circle of Dreams Druid, and Teleportation Circle. Maybe another dozen things in the $1.50-$2 range that you’ll get as a side-effect of buying collections. Woof, that’s sparse.
Draft booster boxes barely moved at first, but later sold out almost exclusively by the sealed box, as players started to realize they wanted to throw future booster draft experiences of “the first D&D set” into their closets. The switch that flipped on this was abrupt enough that I’m sure it came from some Youtuber or other that I am unaware of or wasn’t watching at the time. One day AFR draft boxes were deadwood, the next day every third player in the door wanted nothing but those. Thankfully, or not?, we had a pretty big stockpile of them ready to go.
The Commander decks were good sellers and continued to be, and they offered up a better rack of to-get singles than the main set, several of which added to the treasure mechanic overload of the time. Klauth, Prosper, Greater Good, Grim Hireling, Heroic Intervention, Maddening Hex, Reckless Endeavor, Robe of Stars, Wand of Orcus, Sword of Anger, Lightning Greaves, and Propaganda, and so on. All four Commander decks sold through at rates not too disparate from one another, and tellingly, distribution was sold out of them for long stretches, which is unusual for non-limited items from a Standard set release.
Set boosters and bundles were, eh, a thing, moving at about the midrange rate you’d expect of a mediocre Standard set, which AFR definitely aged into being despite its flavor excellence. You can still get every product from AFR on the secondary market without too much ado, and distributors even have a little bit of stock on hand in some cases. I think it’s correct for most stores to stock as much AFR as they can reasonably do without stretching. Despite the lack of high power, the set is going to have built-in demand for years to come, and you want to enable to sale to the walk-in customer who shows up hoping you’re deeper than their usual LGS, or their LGS back home for those who are traveling.
Thanks for joining me this fine July 4th, and next up we’ll take a look at Magic’s return to their best setting, Innistrad, with three sets that really failed to take advantage of that built-in cachet! Until then, see you!