Delays, caricatures, and the perpetual hype cycle.

It’s been just over a month since my first article.  In case you have been in a coma since then, all hell has broken loose. A few days after I posted the article, I put up a combo play booster box/2 collector booster on the website and presold over $100k worth of product in 70 minutes.  After such a ridiculous showing, it only took about 3 weeks for things to completely sour on Spider-Man.  Peter Parker is no Sephiroth it seems.

I didn’t really express my own opinion on the set last time and kept my analysis mostly to the recent change in collector box supply and demand.  I think, regardless of the long-term value of the set, we can agree that Spider-Man is one of the worst received sets in modern Magic history.  And to some, it will always remain worthless. I would recommend keeping an open mind, however, as I can think of two sets that were equally as reviled as this one on release that have since proven themselves to be very strong sets that will be looked upon fondly as they age: Commander Masters and Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate.

The Magic community has an issue with painting a caricature of sets on release. Hyped releases are often far overhyped, with retracing prices very common when the initial hype dies down and singles prices typically tanking after release only to slowly trend up over time. Both Double Masters sets, Time Spiral Remastered, the first Commander Legends, Dominaria Remastered, and at least 4-5 recentish standard sets and their collector boxes. There have only been a few recent sets that seemed to buck this trend, one of them astonishingly being Foundations collector boxes which were released with a bit of fanfare but somehow surged and never came back down. The other is the god-emperor himself, Final Fantasy, though you could argue that it has retraced slightly after a much longer hype cycle.  With the announcement of the Chocobo bundle, however, there is going to be yet another surge of demand for their favorite Final Fantasy characters on new pieces of cardboard.

On the other hand, sets that release with basically no support behind them whatsoever like March of the Machine: Aftermath, Assassin’s Creed, Unfinity, and Murders at Karlov Manor were actually all fantastic to open for singles early on because, despite the boxes sitting on the shelf and typically requiring stores to take a loss on them, they were sets that had perfectly fine cards in them that for whatever reason didn’t excite people enough to open boxes, but were useful for play nevertheless.  We opened so many Unfinity draft boxes that one of my employees has threatened to murder me if he finds another one on the shelf. I can’t tell if he’s joking and I don’t care to find out.

Spider-Man still has a lot of good things going for it. It has a lot of new cards, hard to open reprints, several chase cards including one that currently has multiple $20,000+ buylists on it, and allocations for it were still less than they were for Final Fantasy. But in the end, I think the damage has been done and it will take years for there to be any real fondness for the set, if ever.

Many of you will probably ask at this point "Jimmy, what the hell are you talking about?"  If I have a point, it's this: things are seldom as bad or as good as they seem.  They're almost certainly somewhere in the middle.  True for Spider-Man, any other magic set, and often in life as well.

Meanwhile, for Vegas Singles, a problem has unfolded where the grand majority of our shipment of sealed product has been heavily delayed from one of our sources. That, combined with the already icy cold release, has made a large number of people cancel their preorders with us. And I can’t really blame them! We are doing everything we can to fulfill the orders we have, but it might take a week or two to get all of them out at this point.

After Final Fantasy broke every record and Spider-Man being a (spectacular) failure, the stage is set for Avatar. I think things are pretty equally split between the two camps of “Avatar is sweet!” and “LIFE IS PAIN.”  I am strictly in the former camp, being a fan of the original series myself and the set itself looking much much more fleshed out than Spider-Man was, as well as being a much better fit for the Magic setting than New York City is. We’ve received early word on allocations and they look to be almost identical to the last few sets, so if there are any concerns about more or less supply, I think it won’t really be a factor.

Our new store is hopefully going to have its grand opening on October 24th, which gives us a good amount of time to run sales for Avatar, but I’ve still put some preorders up on our website.  A lot of people have expressed how excited they are, and I hope it lives up to the hype, but I’m going to bring down some of the prices on our Avatar preorders to be in line for what I expect things to be closer to release.  As of this writing, collector boxes are $749 ($850+ on tcgplayer) and play boxes are $179 ($220+ on tcgplayer). Anyone who’s placed orders so far can take advantage of our policy to award store credit equal to the difference in what you paid and our lowest preorder price, so don’t worry about it if you already paid for your preorder with us or are worried about prices going down over the next few months.

It’s worth pointing out that we had a tremendous number of glimpses into the future dumped on us at MagicCon Atlanta, and ignoring all of the Secret Lair nonsense that you may love or hate, I think the new Lorwyn Eclipsed set looks to be something people can get really excited about.  A classic magic set reimagined with some absolutely incredible looking art and well executed card design is just what the game needs about now.

Lastly, some of you might be interested in learning that we got our Riftbound (League of Legends TCG) allocation the other day.  We are going to be the proud owner of 12 booster boxes, so I look forward to that release being an absolute disaster in every way imaginable.

As always, let me know if you have any questions about anything TCG finance related. Feel free to reach out to me at jimmy@vegas.singles.  I hope to see a bunch of you at the grand opening of Vegas Singles Trading Cards next month in Henderson, Nevada!