MTG Theros Beyond Death Post-Mortem, Remastered!
Throwback Thursday presents an article from January 31, 2020
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. This is one of those articles.
In fact I’m going to repeat last week’s Remaster by combining two of those articles! I wrote a brief Theros post-mortem, and then two weeks later I got to write about Grand Prix Magicfest Phoenix, one enormous event right before Pandemic Times came in and changed our world. I am adapting both of those into this same Remaster article. Since it is once again free to read, all you have to do is divide by zero and you’ll see that this article has Infinite Value!
As always, original in normal text and my new annotations in italics.
Here we go!
So, I, uh, promised an article about the MTG Theros Beyond Death (TBD) release cycle for this week. Tuesday came and went silently. I was even halfway done with it, I had started fleshing out my notes while the prerelease was still underway. But then something pretty awesome happened: Business went off on its super combo.
Let's recap in brief:
We sold the TBD prerelease to within one prerelease pack of an event sellout. [This was a bigger deal than we realized at the time, as our next three years of WPN metrics were frozen at the level of our glorious TBD near-sellout! I wish I had been more aggressive about pushing volume after that!]
The prerelease scored the highest-revenue weekend in store history, beating the former champion, the Modern Masters 2017 release weekend. [To put into perspective how the pandemic-era crypto boom affected Magic and Pokemon, the TBD prerelease Friday finished as the 35th-highest-revenue day in DSG history. This was a record and then we beat that record thirty-four times.]
Then the Theros release weekend finished in the top five in store history, resulting in...
...the highest ten-day span of earnings ever for DSG, for any reason. But that's not even all! [Obliterated at least thrice during the Modern Horizons II opening week and the Lord of the Rings opening week, as well as Silver Tempest opening week. Possibly more times, this is deeper data crawling than I’ve done so far.]
Dungeons & Dragons showed up, with the highest dice sales in a month in store history.
Pokemon showed up, with the most successful prerelease since we took them in-house and stopped using a third-party organizer back in 2018. [Oh wow, did this ever change in the years that followed…]
Buys showed up, with more cash out the door for Magic cards and video games in a month than ever before in, yep, store history. And,
Not to bury the lede, but after months of process that I can't discuss, we finally cleared all the hurdles for direct distribution of brand-new video games and systems. Our first batches of the current games and systems have already shown up and sales are well above expectations. That inventory will grow organically. Our first day-and-date new releases will arrive starting in late February and early March, due to the pre-order lead time, and will include Dreams (PS4), Final Fantasy VII Remake (PS4), Doom Eternal (PS4 and XB1), Animal Crossing New Horizons (Switch), and of course, Ori and the Will of the Wisps (XB1), for which we're hosting a release party on March 11th. [This was the very definition of “in the nick of time.” I had a scant few weeks to get loaded on console inventory and then we got absolutely cleaned out in March and April, even with market pricing. Obviously we would all have planned things differently if we knew then what we know now about 2020, but if I had just been the slightest bit more diligent about pushing through this process, I could have greatly accelerated DSG’s process of making inroads in the video game market and cultivating/developing that local clientele.]
That was, in essence, my January, which I may as well tack on to the list above, is now the highest-earning month in store history, with the rest of today still to go. [Finishing as our 29th-highest-earning month. We were only in business for 46 more months. So only 17 of the remaining months didn’t beat January 2020, and January 2020 was a record-breaker at the time! This is all truly mind-blowing. The year 2021 in particular was insane.] Under the circumstances, I hope you will all forgive me both the tardiness of this post and the navel-gazing. If I was ever going to gaze at a navel, this one right now seems like a good option.
And the busy hasn't ended yet.
I am happy beyond all reason to be hosting a release event for Ori and the Will of the Wisps. I know I've gushed about Ori and the Blind Forest many times here on this weblog, and I apologize to anyone who is tired of it. Metroidvania platformers aren't for everyone, not even when they're combined with a musical score worthy of John Williams and a story worthy of Pixar. [The pandemic scuttled the Ori release event. And I can never have it back. That sucked.]
Fast forward two weeks into the follow-up article:
Over the weekend, Arizona hosted its first (and likely only, at least for a long time, statistically speaking) Magic: the Gathering Pro/Players' Tour event. This was coupled with a major event type we've actually gotten a solid number of lately, a Grand Prix, the totality of which event is now called MagicFest but everyone still just calls it "the GP." But the big draw was that this MF/GP had concurrency with the first ever PT Americas tournament, and all eyes were directed this way to see how things would play out. [So this ended up completely not mattering because major tournaments ceased to exist for literally years. What a strange and surreal time period to be reflecting back on.]
And I missed it. I spent the whole weekend working at the store, except for the part where I attended a cousin's wedding. Plus spot coverage on the kids while Steph's crowded career social life did its usual thing. The entire week was kind of a mess, really. I was lucky that the stars aligned well enough on Wednesday that I could spend the day with a couple of friends-peers, including a trip up to the award-winning Game On in Prescott, Arizona's first WPN Premium store, for some workshopping. [Those get-togethers mixed with store tours were great.]
Fortunately, I had my peoples at the Grand Prix, live and in person both to compete and to vend. But honestly? I had no intention of playing, and I had more than enough work to do at the store, and unfortunately both I and the staff got a lot done because so few customers were there to "interrupt" us. To be clear, we would have welcomed a few more interruptions. I'm actually relatively happy with the staff performance because the per-ticket total was above average. Fewer humans arrived, but those who did arrive generally shopped productively. There might be some value to learn from this, along the lines of staff having more time to engage with each visitor, but we kinda need the higher revenue that most weekends earn, so I'm not going to navel-gaze too deeply at this. [See earlier above when I was indeed navel-gazing. Sounds like I was undecided on optimal navel usage at the time. Clearly a skill issue.]
At the GP itself, it sounds like the Arizona player contingent performed well, and I'm glad to hear that. A lot of those guys put in the hours and deserve to earn some success. And the event was held on a spectacular early spring weekend, perfect for visitors to get a great impression of our beautiful desert resort town. We had a cold snap the couple of days before the event, and we got hit with rain the day after, but from February 6th through 9th inclusive, it was sunny and clear with 70-degree highs. Can't ask for much more than that. Maybe Wizards will return to Phoenix sooner rather than later. […comma, I said, for posterity on Freezing Cold Takes.]
Theros continues to sell super hot, except the collector boosters, which I figure I'm not moving too many of because the desperation stores are fire-selling them for a nickel over cost and the mass market is racing them to the bottom as they automatically do. I'm not in a hurry; I can wait it out. Pokemon Sword & Shield greatly underperformed my hopes for release week, but we know Pokemon doesn't tend to "burst" sell like Magic does. It's more of a slow burn, roughly two boxes every day, one pack-by-pack and one box sale. At this rate I won't have to restock it for the foreseeable, but it would have been nicer for it to take off and sell out early. And after recently adding new video games and systems, the two big winners are weeb games and the Nintendo Switch, both of which are seeing fast sell-through even as I keep ordering more. [Wow. Just wow. So, for perspective, a few months later Pokemon product sold out every week, sometimes even every day, no matter how many boxes or cases I could lay hands on. It went from a trickle to a torrent.]
I have a market recommendation for stores that are boardgame-focused. Do with this as you will, at your own risk, I am not responsible if it doesn't pan out. As of today the situation in China has gone from uncertain to downright worrisome. Coupled with the ordinary product flow interruption from Chinese New Year, I think we're going to see substantial stock outages in distribution starting in the near future and persisting until some unknown later date. If board games pay the bills at your store, go heavy on stock right now to the extent that your budget allows. Buy what's there, and don't leave it for a second order. You don't want to be sitting thin when the pantry runs dry. Thankfully, products like Magic, Pokemon TCG, and Warhammer are not made in China and shouldn't be affected. [I TRIED TO WARN EVERYONE… I SWEAR TO YOU ALL I TRIED! But yeah who could ever have forecast how badly it escalated. Next year, spring 2025, is going to be the five-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic. I expect some media attention to it. That’s when I plan to remaster the Backstage Pass’s COVID-era articles. Meanwhile if we get to the end of the Magic release remasters, there still are a trove worth of articles on deck for the wax & polish treatment here on LGS Net Income. Have a great weekend, folks!]
Don't forget to buy something cool for your significant other for Valentine's Day!