MTG Throne of Eldraine Post-Mortem, Remastered!
Throwback Thursday presents an article from September 3, 2019
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 this time this is two of those articles! I wrote an article in anticipation of the new pack format, Collector Boosters, followed by an actual set release post-mortem. I am adapting both of those into this same Remaster article. Since it’s 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!
The Throne of Eldraine prerelease came and went, and we found ourselves celebrating ~400 players worth of attendance while simultaneously bemoaning being over 100 players short of a sellout. The early release booster boxes sold well both on pre-orders and during the weekend, which salvaged much of the difference. A good time was had by many, and that's a win for sure.
My initial impression that this set would be a hit came with some reservations. I thought with no dual land cycle and no spicy reprints, many players might sit Eldraine out. Standard players would buy the singles they needed, and 60-card eternal formats would largely ignore the set. [We had yet to see Oko-mania.] There's something for Commander players in every set these days, because Hasbro likes money, so that was certainly going to be a selling vector. But sure enough, Eldraine has some innovative new card capabilities and pushed mechanics to play with, and players in general are enjoying the theme. Perhaps all the more because we already know it lasts only one set and not a full block. (Maybe we can finally revisit Kamigawa now that we know it isn't going to eat up a year of Standard for us to do so.) [Eyyyyy I called it! Kind of. Just over two years later we got Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, and with the pace of Magic releases bringing us new booster products almost monthly, that wasn’t exactly a risky bet.]
I am quite happy for the return of masterpieces, to the extent they did. At a nice low hit rate, regular booster packs serve up full-art foil Planeswalkers, gorgeous foil storybook cards, and assorted other goodies. The special collector boosters were known to be value faucets, but it was nice to know any pack on the shelf could offer a jackpot. [Eh, kinda. By 2024 standards, nothing in Throne was really a jackpot as we know it now. There was meaningful specialness at the time from opening showcase foils and borderless cards in regular boosters. We were in a decent spot at the time with ordinary/”draft” boosters in the center of the spectrum and collector boosters just above those. I think a lot of the Magic community is glad we’ve returned to that dynamic now with play boosters.] Players notice these things, even if they don't open them very often. I think this set's overwhelming extension into gimmick cards is a bit much, but I guess they figured they'd go big in order to learn whether they had to go home. Which is fair.
Here is where I incorporate the other article looking closer at collector boosters.
For the first time, there will be a "Collector Booster" offering with the new Magic: the Gathering expansion, Throne of Eldraine. The collector boosters will come in boxes of 12 packs, and those boxes are expensive as hell from distribution, let me tell you. MTG Design Director Mark Rosewater famously estimated a "$20-$25 store price" for the boosters and he needs to shut right up because that's barely over wholesale and players have assumed (justifiably, given MaRo's authority) that he is telling the truth and any store pricing to market is just greedy. For a normal booster product he would have been quoting a short-margin estimate. And this is no normal booster product. [As I’ll explain further down, that price range made a lot more sense once stores could order any amount of collector boosters, rather than being allocated them at a ratio of the store’s draft booster box spend as was the case for Throne and Theros.]
Market value on collector boosters is going to be more than $20-$25. We don't really know how much more yet. The TCGPlayer lowest offer as of right this moment is $36.98 shipped per collector booster, which seems like a reasonable guess. I expect $45-$50 and up to be the norm once the dumb stores undersell their tiny allocations of it and the limited supply in the wild exerts upward price pressure. That's right, supply is constrained severely on this. Ratios of booster boxes to collector booster boxes from distributors ranges from around 12:1 to 20:1 on the purchase, though I've heard of outliers in both directions. I'm not going to discuss the ratio I got, except to say distribution took good care of me. But even with that, and even with DSG's order of literal hundreds of booster boxes of Eldraine, my collector booster allocation is very small, and so is everyone else's. Remember these are twelve boosters per box, not 36, so it's even more limited than it sounds. [By the time we got to Ikoria or Core 2021, it was a little easier to see the rare-and-mythic hit count evening up with regular booster boxes despite there being only twelve packs in a collector booster box. But at the time we didn’t have a sense of the yield, even though we realized from the numbers that it would be stacked to some degree.]
And the collector boosters are a one-shot print run. Which means it will be out of print immediately and subject to market demand immediately. It also means thousands of collectors will buy collector booster boxes to throw in their closets for years to come, further shrinking the circulating supply and exerting even more upward price pressure. I'm not just imagining this, it's very easy to look at how the market has behaved with other highly demanded, limited-print products and assume this one will work similarly in many respects. Ultimate Masters and Commander's Arsenal, for example. [As sets progressed and collector booster quantities started converging with supposed market appetite, it ended up working out somewhat more like Double Masters 2022: One print run, yes, but a gargantuan one.]
If collector boosters had been an unlimited print run, MaRo's $20-$25 number might have made more sense, though based on our cost, I expect most long-run stores would have opened at $29.99 and probably done something like 4-for-$100-tax-included as their special splurge bundle deal. [And this ended up being essentially right on target. Once collector booster print runs got big enough to saturate, $19.99-$24.99 became the shelf norm for pricing. Any time a set’s collector boosters were particularly well received, it sold through and packs would move up to $29.99 and climb organically from there. For badly received sets where Wizards did an awful enough Amazon dump, look out below. Streets of New Capenna collector boxes got down to $99, making packs putatively worth $8.33 each. Sweet Jesus that’s bad. All the more unfortunate given how great the theming and design of New Capenna actually was.]
By the way, what booster pack could possibly be worth that much? Well, the wholesale price is so high it's tough to say if it really will be worth it, but the menu certainly promises a lot. Each collector booster contains:
1 rare or mythic rare with extended art;
1 foil rare or mythic rare or special-frame card;
9 foil commons/uncommons;
3 special-frame cards such as showcases or borderless planeswalkers;
1 ancillary card that ordinarily appears in non-booster product; and
1 foil token.
That's... that's a pretty impressive yield even at a high price range. It's a riff on those neat all-foil Alara block boosters that came in big art blisters. [Note that Wizards started modestly on this, in hindsight, and kept adding more hits to collector boosters as they went. It’s clear they always intended for the yield to be richer, but that’s a dial that only turns well in one direction. They had to start thin and turn up the flavor, because starting stacked and trying to tone it down would have been a disaster for sales.]
Moreover, this product configuration is ideal for what stores would want to break for singles, except we don't dare break many (or possibly any) of these for singles because we're barely going to have enough to serve the sealed-pack demand we expect to see from our players, and selling players what they want is a tremendously high priority for me. So as always we'll have thousands upon thousands of bulk commons from regular boosters, which are now being given the moniker "draft boosters," as we open cases of them to fill our release day stock, and we mostly leave the collector boosters alone. [Over time we were able to get enough collector boosters to do deep breaks for singles on those, generally to everyone’s benefit.]
Honestly, I hope the collector boosters are such a huge hit that Wizards just makes them unlimited prints. [And the monkey’s paw curled.] I don't care that the price will go down. People see me talking about a high price and assume I'm out to push them for as much money as I can get. That's not the case. I make money just fine doing business normally day in and day out. I want people to be able to get the pieces to play their game. I am perfectly happy to do that by means of a maximally accessible market. [See also Lorcana after the initial crunch.] Unfortunately, the market in reality is full of limited prints and out-of-prints and both genuine and artificial scarcity and I have to use tools, including price, to manage the provision of those wares to my clientele.
"BUt bAhR Wut if UR wrONg & CoLLectOR bOoStErS R chEEp fOr a LOng tIMe???" Then who cares? I'll have too much stock and I will need to either be willing to sit on it for longer, or follow the market price downward to join the herd. [Shockingly, I followed the market price downward to join the herd.] I do this all the time to items where the market price drops. It's just not noticed as much, because if market price is going down, usually that means the card or product is not in demand, which means nobody is asking for it, which means nobody is observing that we're reducing the price on it. Read your Frederic Bastiat already, people. Educate yourselves. Sometimes the most impactful economic effects are unseen. [This is still true. A fundamental reality of hot and scarce new product is that all the attention is on that, so stores get complaints, review bombs, and other pushback accusing them of being gOuGeRs and charging dOuBLe WhAt eVeRyThiNG’s wORtH. It’s absolute dishonesty and pure gaslighting. The person complaining just wants things for less than the going market rate. Simple as. They think the laws of supply and demand should affect everybody else except them, because they are special. And later on when things settle and stores lower prices, crickets. Nobody is seeking that stuff, so nobody notices.]
I'm pretty sure I'm not wrong about this, though. You might say I'm betting my livelihood on the soundness of my judgment. That's not arrogance or conceit, it's confidence in what I've learned with years of experience.
You know who doesn't have years of experience? A lot of game stores that I see already underselling Throne of Eldraine, both the main set, the collector boosters, and the prerelease.
I don't think I have to talk much about the prerelease, it's a literally not-outsourceable experience that should command a premium and stores that chronically undersell it tend to fail and close.
The pre-order boxes that are available at the prerelease for Eldraine include a collector booster this time, while supplies last. The supply we've been allocated is slightly over half of the number of early booster boxes we have to sell, which means not everyone can even take advantage of the promotion. DSG gets well over 100 booster boxes for the early release, and we were allocated only enough collector boosters for the early release to pair with fewer than 100 of those boxes. That's not a very large allocation.
A store that's only getting 48 or 60 booster boxes allocated for early sale is going to have, what, two or three dozen collector boosters to pair for the promotion? According to Wizards, they could have as few as 12, or one display full. And yet they undersell that, because that lets them take players' money now, and make excuses later when early release day comes and many pre-order customers don't get the collector boosters. I'm sure they will tap-dance a promise to make good with a collector booster and maybe an extra couple of packs a week later at release, and some players will be OK with this, while others will remain angry. As a player, I'd be offended if a store took my pre-order money up front, knowing they weren't going to have enough collector boosters to cover the early release orders. I would feel misled, deceived, lied to (by omission). I guess we'll all see how things shake out in a month or so. Players are smart, they usually figure out when they've been had. [I may have overcredited many players on that one, and that’s a shame. There’s definitely a market split where the saner players are out there expecting the best and no excuses, and Pareto-sorting toward the stores that make the grade, and the rest just go wherever because they’ll play in a mud puddle as long as they get to hang out and be degenerates. I guess it’s just the magic of capitalism providing a market solution to all cohorts. In any event, for goodness’ sake people, even if you’re one of those who prefer the scruffier stores, at least hold them to the standard of keeping their own promises? Seriously. If one of them goes bad, you don’t have to keep it on life support on your own. Another will be along soon enough.]
For DSG, we're not going to take a single pre-order that can't be paired to a collector booster until those have sold out, and there will be full disclosure at that time. I suspect the non-paired boxes (that still do get the buy-a-box foil card) will mostly sell during prerelease weekend. To me this is basic integrity, and I see most reputable stores setting things up similarly, including many competitors. Most of us know Throne of Eldraine is going to be a firecracker hit of a product, and we are perfectly content to make great sales on it in a straightforward manner.
And now back to release impressions.
We sold out of the early booster boxes paired to the collector pack at $139 on the day before the prerelease, and then as I planned all along, I made the booster box price with just the Kenrith buy-a-box foil (along with the rest of the new Standard's booster boxes) $99+tax for the weekend. Sales activity was heavy. We didn't quite run out, so a few lucky customers on October 4th will get the bonus card with their box purchase. I'm not enthusiastic in a general sense about $99 booster boxes when that's not even close to a sustainable markup, but we're in a position where we can do this for a while and maybe exert significant pressure on the local market. Each of the $99 boxes are available to me in essentially infinite quantities from my combination of distributors, DSG cleared the last of its bank loans back during the summer and thus has pretty good cash flow these days, and I hear all kinds of grapevine chatter about one store or another getting close to a lease exit option and possibly bowing out, leaving players scrambling for a new waterin' hole, and potentially looking our way. If Eldraine is in short supply on release, I'll have to adjust the box price to market for a bit, and then I can go back to $99 when it's more abundant.
[This became a pretty normal operational approach for a while. By late 2019, with no pandemic on the horizon in any direction I can promise you that, DSG was at altitude and doing numbers as the Valley’s largest game store both physically and probably economically. Our moving loans were paid off. Only two competitors had meaningful singles inventories that were beyond what we could feature (Amazing Discoveries and Play or Draw) and on any given day we typically had them beat on crucial singles that had just come in with buys, until those sold through and we resumed churning our somewhat-smaller-hoard-than-theirs. Notably, however, we had a video game hoard by then as well, and neither of them was in that category. But in any case, I should emphasize that selling $99 draft boxes in quantity, off wholesale pricing just under $80 at the time, worked wonderfully. Had there been a supply constraint, this would have been a bad plan. Had we been in a remote location or running a cozy ultraboutique, bad plan. But with DSG as the Costco of Phoenix metro LGSes, it worked great, and performed like commodity items at the actual Costco perform.]
Speaking of other local stores, I didn't expect so many local competitors to be underselling the box+collector-pack-bundle as aggressively as they did. But whatever, ours all sold, so apparently my guarantee that anyone who bought in on that deal would absolutely, positively, no question about it, get the collector pack, was appealing to consumers. One other store tried to one-up us by also guaranteeing the pack at a lower price, but then they ran out and in fact their guarantee was not a guarantee. I heard this from players who had been on the receiving end of the scenario. It would have been nice for them to call out that store on social media, but nope, that store gambled that they would only grumble verbally and accept being screwed, and that store somehow gambled successfully. It's disappointing but here we are. [See note several paragraphs above.]
For those stores that didn't guarantee anything, I think they have undervalued certainty. For the player with a full-time job and perhaps a family, they don't want "bonus treat included only while supplies last," they don't want to line up for four hours to save $25, they don't want maybe kinda coulda woulda hem haw. They want the thing, no excuses. Here is money and now you will please provide the thing. The end.
That's one example of a long play I've been working on, of steering the store's cone of influence toward a narrower range of things, so that we can more often "have everything" and then craft an offering that is increasingly "no excuses." I think "no excuses" plays stronger than resorting to gimmicks, even if consumers aren't as conscious of it when they choose. Price will always matter to some extent, but price is either inert or impotent if you don't have the goods, which is still the gold standard. So I'm most engaged these days in products where DSG is already strong and presents scale beyond what most competitors can approach, or where DSG's range of resources is enough to put us there. An example of the latter would be the Final Fantasy TCG. We hosted a huge tournament for Square Enix, and we had the budget to boost our stock of demanded boosters for the event and afterward, and after buying up a few collections and breaking some packs, we have become one of the larger and best-stocked sellers of FFTCG singles on TCGPlayer. [That was fun while it lasted. FFTCG had high production value and a strong IP, and was being self-published by the rightsholder, so we didn’t have to worry about a license ending. The game remains in print with new releases to this day, but it’s a small shadow of its market reach from 2017-2019. I am 100% in favor of the game returning to prominence, if it can.]
In terms of what to cut in the narrowing effort, nothing is on the chopping block at the moment. I know I wrote recently that I'm looking kinda sideways at Dungeons & Dragons, the problems of which are bimodal and overlapping: Hasbro refuses to do anything to mitigate Amazon dumping sourcebooks at near or below distributor cost, and there exists a significent cohort of the player population that wouldn't spend a dime in a game store if their lives depended on it, whether from poverty or having bought from Amazon already or whatever reason. This wouldn't be as bad except that a table full of D&D players takes up a lot of square feet of floor whether it's an engaged group that shops the store, or an unengaged group that doesn't. One day I'll have upgraded the game room enough to gate it for pay in a "no excuses" fashion, and then we'll let the tale of the tape decide what happens to D&D. In the meanwhile, the release schedule isn't too taxing for the line, so I'm at liberty to leave things alone for now and see what happens. But if I had to cut a category today, it would be RPGs. [This state of affairs for D&D remains true for the most part today. Wizards finally added D&D to Magic’s program of getting releases a week before mass market for WPN member stores, which helps a lot. A few sales are available to us before Amazon obliterates the value of every sourcebook. Mostly D&D players have gotten so price-resistant and brought so much pushback against incentive-based mitigations that the correct store approach to in-store play now is unambiguously “high access fees, the end.” There it is. The players will never support the store in any way they aren’t exactingly required to, so get your store paid up front and then let them enjoy their dungeon-crawling sessions. No sympathy toward the players on this one. Y’all did it to yourselves.]
This is the "between week" so while you're reading this, the DSG staff will be opening Throne of Eldraine boosters (and Brawl decks) for singles and setting up for what we hope will be an enjoyable weekend. I've got the kids for the next two weeks mostly to myself because Steph is on an adventure to Scotland, so there's a fair to decent chance I will take next week off from writing, or else put up a quick blurb about something. Meanwhile, enjoy the story and live happily ever after! [Even in 2019 when the marriage was basically sliding to its ending, I held down the fort so my ex could go and do special things. If my life had gone badly afterward, I might be bitter about it, but it didn’t, so I just can’t bring myself to seethe. Instead all it makes me think about is the next time I get to go out of town with Hannah, and how happy I am every day that I have her in my life. We live and we learn.]