Thoughts about the current Magic market and also Spider-Man.

Welcome.  This is the first installment of me rambling about new sets and the decisions I make about them.

TCGs are completely insane right now, and Magic is no different as it comes down (or goes even higher?) off the ridiculous Final Fantasy hype that propelled it into the mainstream briefly and brought a ton of new attention to the collectible aspect of the game.  Things had been percolating for a year, and putting Sephiroth on a magic card seems like it was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Ever since collector booster boxes debuted in 2019 for Throne of Eldraine, it has never been particularly difficult to get ahold of them for just over wholesale cost, with a couple exceptions (looking at you, CMR).  Collector boxes were basically always breakeven when selling them on marketplaces online because they were incredibly plentiful.  I remember cracking 300 Wilds of Eldraine collector boxes for release.  Then, of course, it took years for the singles in those boxes to recover from the incredibly supply that was available.

Wizards of the Coast decided to turn the hose off and sometime around Lord of the Rings Special Edition, allocations crashed into the dirt.  We started being able to get 30 boxes instead of 300, and the prices quickly started to trend up.  In a weird coincidence, the older sets that were printed into the ground also started drying up around this time.  The market was also doing pretty well, and the hype of rising prices seemed to raise all boats until Final Fantasy released and all hell broke loose.  Now it seems like the truck is in runaway, and it feels like nothing is going to stop it.  Ominous!  I'm sure that's never happened before!

Well anyway, this rant is supposed to be about Spider Hyphen Man.  I believe in being (almost) completely transparent about supply and pricing.  Here are the allocations we got. For context: You can ask for as much as you want, but the distributors allocate product to stores based on how much they have spent on the product line recently.  I have spent about a quarter million dollars in the last six months on Magic products from this distributor and this is what they gave me.



All in all, not too bad.  About $27k worth of product at wholesale and all of the products are preselling for astronomically more.  Good work if you can get it.

If that sounds like I'm making a mint, keep in mind that I have 5 employees currently, and that number will double when we open our new location in the next month or two.  Currently I'm paying about $30,000 in overhead on salaries and rent per month.  If I sold every product above at current market price, I'd cover about a month and a half worth of costs.  Which is pretty solid!  But it's not going to make us rich.  And the grand majority of stores have much lower allocations than we do.

Some of you readers are probably customers of mine already in some of the sales we've done, and I am super appreciative of you taking a chance with us.  It's very difficult to come up with a plan for Spider-Man (or any future release, to be honest) that doesn't make one side of the transaction feeling like they got taken advantage of.  The goal is to give people access to a decent enough price that they're happy and feel like they got the hook up without also letting people take advantage of my attempt to make people happy and simply turn around and resell it.  (The dreaded scalpers! Boo! Hiss!)

Because of the needs of our in-store customers, we are likely not selling Collector Boosters online.  We simply don't have enough and we have much more ability to offer promotions as incentive in the store than we do online (trade-ins, limits on packs per transaction, etc).  However, I have put up a good number of Play booster box cases that I have gotten from my own allocation and a partner store I work with.  Those can be found here.

If you're still reading, thank you!  I hope that my rants will give you a little bit of insight into the issues that a store owner deals with and also help you understand that even though the market is going crazy, it creates a lot of hard decisions.  There are endless people who want product and only so much to go around.  The goal is to thread the needle of making sure loyal customers get taken care of without throwing away the opportunity we spend years preparing for by buying all of the bad products that no one will buy.

I am always happy to discuss anything market related in our discord. Thanks to everyone so far who's made our growing community feel really special.