MTG War of the Spark Post-Mortem, Remastered!
Throwback Thursday presents an article from April 23, 2019
I almost got a perfect five-year anniversary for this article, with the original going up just a couple of days too soon to have the dates match.
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; rather than skipping to the next direct reference for Throne of Eldraine, I am adapting an article from the War of the Spark prerelease week and expanding it to be the post-mortem for that very Planeswalkerriffic set.
As always, original in normal text and my new annotations in italics.
Here we go with “Hedonic Adaptation for Retailers”!
It's almost prerelease time again for Magic: the Gathering, and we've had no meaningful releases since January's Ravnica Allegiance. No Masters set in March, no Duel Decks: Fblthp vs Tahngarth, no Conspiracy 3: Tokyo Drift. [To this day I contend that Fblthp vs Tahngarth and Conspiracy 3: Tokyo Drift would have been hits.] Just a wave of Challenger Decks a couple of weekends ago that contained neither Teferi nor Nexus of Fate and thus was received coolly in the market, and will serve mainly as a solid entry point for new and returning players. This is in contrast to 2018's Challenger Decks, which sold out in short order as all four proved highly playable and contained the rib cage of a competitive deck.
Now, we had a decent release slate for Warhammer this spring, and day-and-date new releases are largely irrelevant to the used video game business, so DSG has been chugging right along, but we really enjoy the heroin blast of revenue that accompanies any good Magic release, and importantly, it's great regardless of how successful or mediocre that Magic release actually is. I don't just mean in set quality, but in actual gross. Great or lousy, the release boost feels the same.
[I’ll parse this out in greater detail for War of the Spark further down, because it was an enormous hit.]
This is a function of a psychological principle called hedonic adaptation, or the hedonic treadmill. Briefly put, even though tremendously positive or negative events can have a huge effect on our happiness in the short term, humans rubberband back over time to a baseline level of daily happiness pretty much no matter what happens to them. The term "treadmill" comes in as the analogue because we keep moving forward with our lives but our happiness stays in the same place.
Where it comes to Magic, never mind that releases like Core 2019, Hour of Devastation, and Oath of the Gatewatch were far worse in real sales than Modern Masters 2017, Kaladesh, Dominaria, and Guilds of Ravnica. We were cruising along with an ordinary level of happiness going into each of those releases, then they hit and it was a bunch of money so I was very happy, and then the cooldown is usually still pretty great, but eventually the honeymoon is over and we have a blah weekend or two, reducing my happiness below par, after which we're back at cruising altitude and I was contentedly happy again. Despite sometimes considerable differences in how each of those products performed out of the gate, the hedonic effect was identical. [It probably doesn’t surprise you to hear me say it, but after enough years all the Magic product kind of runs together in the memory stream. When I am writing about it, I tend to have to sit down and really dig through my past articles, saved screenshots, and other contemporary evidence to remember more accurately all the impressions from that time period.]
Another good way to appreciate the hedonic effect independently of any given product is to look at very old sales figures, if your business has been around for at least four or five years or longer. The first month DSG was open in 2012, we grossed something like $6k in-store and $17k online and we were happy to be off to the races. Today, that is a below-average week and you would find me grousing around my workstation, ready to spit nails. As it is, I think even that performance level is way below our ceiling, a consequence of the "lost year" that ran roughly from summer 2017 to summer 2018 when we spent our resources dealing with the store move rather than growing our reach, inventory, and market share. Numbers that would have had me beaming in 2012 are a catastrophic failure in 2019. However, I am roughly equally as happy now when we hit sales targets for a week as I was in 2012, or 2014, or 2016. [By the time we hit our final year of work in 2023, a sub-$90k month was a disappointment. The year 2021 was really ridiculous, putting us into six figures most months, often comfortably. Go crypto mania, I guess.]
So what? Well, now that you understand that you're going to rubberband back to your baseline level of happiness regardless of what happens, you can apply a life hack so that you benefit from this psychological effect.
When discussing personal finance, hedonic adaptation is usually addressed in terms of encouraging people not to eat expensive dinners out or drink pricey wines and liquors, because those are two of the least enduring stimuli of happiness. Surely it's nice to have a celebratory dinner once in a great while, but if you get used to doing it fairly often, each one doesn't make you nearly as happy anymore, and sort of like a drug addict, you're there spending money to do a thing that makes you the same amount of happy as you used to be doing nothing. Other examples of this include daily Starbucks visits, frequent vacation travel, and sports season tickets. Yeah, even a sports nut like me recognizes that season tickets, in most cases, are not a sensible expenditure. In fact, due to the extremely gradual nature of their usage pattern, the incremental happiness delta is discouragingly likely to be zero. [Bleak, huh? I hope I didn’t ruin sporting events for you. There is no experience quite like being in the front row to see an NFL touchdown scored right in front of your eyes. I was lucky to get to do that because my friend RJ had years-tenured season tickets at the time. But now that I’ve had that, I don’t feel the compulsion to attend the entire season’s worth of games. The real unhealthy one is Starbucks (or the coffee chain of your choice). Their coffees are the most sugary, high-calorie, unhealthy drinks you can find, and for a king’s ransom in price. You’re better off splurging on the snobbiest coffee beans you can find a roaster for, and making them on your own home press. Independent coffee shops are similarly worth the visit, they’ll serve you an actual decent drink.]
From the point of view of a retailer, knowing you're going to rubberband back to the same level of happiness can be a key psychological advantage. I definitely failed to apprehend this concept during my time running businesses in the 1990s; every tremor in the force had me riding the rollercoaster even though the stakes at the time were far lower. Now, I am able to handle vastly larger risks and larger responsibilities and stay on a fairly even keel. It's not just about keeping daily detachment, though. It's a helpful insulator against buying into the hype on new products that might not be as awesome landed as they seemed when they were pitched to you, or to the excited customer asking if you're going to bring it in. It similarly insulates against being stuck in a depressive cycle after things like burglaries, unpleasant employee separations, and the discovery of theft. It's not realistic to avoid frustration and short-term unhappiness when something negative like that happens, but the first few times it does, there's a bleak feeling of futility that's tough to shake off. Once you know, not think but really know, that you'll be back in the game soon, it becomes easier to soldier on and resolve the problem and get back to normal operations, which makes that normalcy and resumption of regular happiness something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. [Keep this paragraph in mind next time your store gets burglarized or vandalized, etc. It’s one of the most discouraging things that happens and the mental struggle is very real and valid. In that time and place you don’t want to be told that you’ll survive and carry on. No amount of cheerleading is going to erase the very real costs of mitigation, let alone lifting your mindset back up. Often what you want most is for everyone to just f**k off for a bit and let you mentally process the pain. The helpful takeaway here is to know that your long-term happiness level isn’t going to be obliterated by this. You’re going to have a so-so weekend of business without any real problems and all by itself that’s going to encourage you. Then you’ll find the next little victory, and the next, and so on.]
Most of all, from understanding the hedonic treadmill in business, I found that the small moments outside the business cause a heightened sense of enjoyment that persists. See, anyone running their own small business is under a significant amount of everyday stress. This stress weighs on even when we're at home or even on "vacation," though there's rarely a chance for true mental detachment from operations. Running a business really is, in many ways, a 24/7/365 profession. But hacking that hedonic effect compartmentalizes the emotional push that the business has on our personal lives. It's not that we don't have that stress or even that we stop thinking about the biz; hell, I'm writing this blog article at 11pm with my kids long since gone to bed and the store closed. But now that my psychological reactions to anything happening in the business are behind an emotional deflector shield of sorts, I can enjoy friends time that's carefree and family time that's exquisite. [Well, family time was its own struggle in 2019, as my marriage was in decline by then and would end a year later as the spark went out. But that’s life sometimes. I have since remarried and I am incredibly happy in my home life. I wish the same positive outcome for all of you who are struggling now.]
I guess it's kind of like when you have a job working for someone else, with the obvious caveat that I'm not going to lose my only source of survival income if I happen to say the wrong thing on a day that the boss is in a bad mood. Maybe that boss needs to learn a little hedonic adaptation. [Zing!]
[And now a bit more on War of the Spark. Everything below is new commentary even though I’m going to leave the italics off after this bracketed header.]
The prerelease for War of the Spark had us sell out the entire joint, and that’s saying something when we had approaching 600 allocated prerelease kits and enough seating to accommodate very large flights. The faction packs from Guilds and Allegiance were gone; though WAR took place in Ravnica story-wise, it was not a “guilds set” like every Ravnica set up to that point was, and every Ravnica-placed product other than portions of Magic Origins. Prerelease kits were a promo foil and six boosters, and that was it. Highly efficient.
Wizards put a little bit of marketing budget behind WAR, including some animated shorts, movie posters, a bunch of things to play up the parallels between the Marvel Endgame sequence that was playing out in theaters at the time. On balance I would have to say it all worked. We had a lot of players come in, and the set played well even in limited environments despite the high complexity level that a huge roster of planeswalkers caused. There are those who say the planeswalker card type ruined Magic, and they’re not totally wrong, but in that time and place, we were diametrically far away from feeling that sentiment.
Distribution solicited stores for a Japanese-language product option without us knowing in advance what it was. Alternate-language boxes had been dropped from the release itineraries a year or two before this and we really never saw them without specifically looking at import options, so when this came around, I assumed something consequential was happening, and I ordered a dozen cases on spec and got cut to half that. It was still awesome. The anime alt-art planeswalkers were a ridiculous hit and to this day the foil Liliana is a value heavyweight. I sold through the boxes at a premium very easily, my whales/angels charged in deep. A weird market aftereffect was that the non-hits from those Japanese War of the Spark boxes were well and truly worthless. We sifted sand on them for a while trying to make something out of them, but aside from it being a cheap-ish source of gets like Finale of Devastation, we almost could have thrown away the entire contents of the boxes minus the jackpots. Even as bulk the cards were of little note.
I think this was around the time we started to truly internalize that the releases were too many to digest. GRN and RNA landed and their impact on formats was cohesive and understandable. WAR and onward landed and the only time we noticed format impact was when cards like Oko brought the entire game to a halt. Then we had the Titans, and then the pandemic, and tracking what was going on became problematic at that point. This was also shortly before the initial Secret Lair offering, if memory serves. Wizards getting into singles was a step most of us in the business thought we were safe from ever seeing. Guess not.
So what can we apply to current planning based on what we learned from War of the Spark? Magic seems so different now it’s tough to get a cogent overlay. One thing would be to watch for unexpected foreign-language box add-ons, and assume they might be relevant — except for Ikoria one year later, they basically weren’t. So scratch that. And I am struggling to think of another thing. Do we truly have a smash hit Magic booster release from a mere five years ago that has nothing whatsoever to offer us in terms of actionable learned experience? How weird is that?? Maybe in the end, that right there is in fact the lesson. Some products, Magic or otherwise, just behave as expected. Sometimes a rose is just a rose, and a thing is exactly what it appears to be, if you’ll permit me to get all Bukowski toward you for a moment here.
May we be so fortunate as to have a litany of unremarkable, highly profitable product releases as our business lives move onward.