My rationale for Wizards' move was that they are finally positioned so that they can leverage the mass market and don't need to depend on flighty, unreliable independents to grow and nurture the Magic: the Gathering brand.
Then, the other shoe dropped. Wizards announced that the premium version of Guilds of Ravnica booster boxes, the Mythic Edition, would be exclusive to the Hasbro online store, and independents were shut out. I discussed this in an article as well.
I didn't see this as the apocalyptic end of our sector like some did, and we still had early release booster boxes to benefit from, but make no mistake, this was a big miss for us. The optics of the exclusivity, given the easily foreseeable demand for masterpiece planeswalkers that were included only in the Mythic Edition boxes, were significant.
Right after that, yet another shoe dropped. Wizards decided to tell us they were selling direct to the public on Amazon's, Walmart's, and Target's e-commerce channels, and moreover, that they would not honor their own MSRP. I discussed this in, yep, an article here on The Backstage Pass.
Wizards did some spin control, particularly via Mark Rosewater's weblog, insisting that the direct sales via Amazon were to help Magic reach audiences that were not served by independent stores. That wasn't the part that was troublesome, and they know better. Nobody minds direct sales to consumers by publishers, when the publisher honors its own MSRP. Games Workshop, Fantasy Flight, Nintendo, Microsoft, and others already figured this out. The problem was that booster boxes straight from the source opened at ~$94 on Amazon, a crushing discount from the putative MSRP of $143.64. We've seen some regression to the mean since then, with boxes approaching $98 as of this writing, but it still leaves Magic as now being the worst-margin product in the comic and hobby game trade.
[Dukes of Hazzard narrator voice] By now you probably think them Coast Boys had gotten into just about as much trouble as they could manage. But nope, you'd be wrong about that. Turns out they was just gittin' started. [/narrator]
Sure enough, another shoe was in the queue. The end of the most common form of WPN store participation in the Magic Pro Tour qualification system, announced during garbage time last Friday.
The big blowout is that Preliminary Pro-Tour Qualifiers are going to cease. You might think I am writing this article to complain about that. I am not. PPTQs are, in my view, a failed experiment. In regions with competitive store counts like this one, they basically eliminated Saturdays from the event calendar to a degree. Before PPTQs, back in the halcyon days of 2013, DSG used to attract fifty players to its Saturday nooner Standard event. Now, when it's not our turn at the PPTQ wheel, we push our weekly double-stakes Standard to 6pm so that people who don't make top 8 at the PPTQ ten miles away can still make it, and we usually fire. Usually. It will be nice to come back to a landscape where Saturdays do as well as Fridays in terms of event traction and associated sales activity.
It also became something of a feelbad for players to win a PPTQ, sometimes against a reasonable player count -- stores like DSG as well as Phoenix-area mainstays like Play or Draw and Manawerx routinely drew 70 to 80 players or more -- only to find out that all they won was a chance to drive to the Regional PTQ in San Diego and hope not to get a bad draw in a single-round playoff where the top four finally, at last, qualified for the Pro Tour. I still see it as ridiculous that Phoenix never got a single Regional PTQ. I contacted Wizards and offered to host one for free, just for the prestige. For whatever reason, we didn't meet their needs or plans.
That is where I worry the most about reducing qualification opportunities to single giant open qualifiers once per season or so in major cities. I have no fear that my store is up to snuff -- we literally have the largest store in Arizona and can seat the most players, and one of our owners is already a level 2 judge. What I fear is that for reasons arbitrary or unknown, we simply won't be selected for it, and won't know why we weren't selected. That's how it was before PPTQs. We had, at the time, the newest, nicest, cleanest, most comfortable store in town, and we got to sit there like chumps and watch PTQs take place in rented rooms with no air conditioning, hosted by competitors. Not even making that up. It happened. And I can't fault that store for taking the event, it would have been foolish of them not to. Because money.
And if I can't be sure of an opportunity to participate, with DSG's huge structural advantages, how can any large-scale store be confident that they will have a shot? Will it be an old-boys club like the PTQs of old? That's not how Wizards typically operates anymore -- as a progressive company in a progressive community, Wizards has been on the forefront of pushing greater inclusion in all things, and it's encouraging that they've been in the business of opening doors, not closing them. But with the Shoevalanche cited above, it's easy to envision Hasbro not giving a damn and Wizards being forced to do things the cheapest and easiest possible way... and you know what's cheap and easy? Relegating things to the old-boys club.
The alternative route being offered are invitational events that will be smaller and easier to qualify through for those who meet some threshold. And for those events, our size and scale don't make any difference. There are cozy ultraboutiques in town that look fantastic but really don't run deep into competitive Magic, and they may end up getting the call for this stuff because of the optics. Do I spend a bunch of resources making my store prettier, in an attempt to cover our bases on this? I try to make the store look a little better every day, but it's a hell of a lot more expensive to renovate 6400 square feet than 2400 square feet. With an unknown and unknowable ROI, it's hard to make a business case that I should spend deeply into this sooner rather than later.
I've hinted before here, and discussed at length with other retailers in our private groups, that events and organized play have become something of a liability anyway, and maybe it's just as well that we're rendering all this to chance. I firmly believe that some amount of organized play is essential to a store in our industry, because it adds significant value to games that have constructible-deck and constructible-army mechanics. Even before you get past Magic and Warhammer, there's real traction there. As an industry we're still groping and grasping at the reality that we have to find ways to monetize organized play sustainably, while not handing a blank check to the clubhouse down the street that uses cut corners to subsidize grinder play. That is an entire unsolved equation inextricably tied to the economics of the products involved.
But with all these shoes dropping every which way from Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro, publisher of the biggest product in our industry and my biggest single revenue line, it's clear that the safe haven is going to be a shelter constructed of other, less turbulent revenue lines.
How many stores will even have the option to make such a lateral shift?
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