Today's boot blast was Ultimate Masters, the more-or-less final set in the Masters series, releasing December 7th at a staggering $14/pack MSRP and $330+/box price tag, with each box containing a superpremium topper foil card out of a random set of 40 possible.
The number crunch tells us the ten fetchlands will not be in the set, guaranteeing it won't be as successful as Modern Masters 2017. Beyond that, we're mostly in gambling territory. Nobody is quite sure how this product is going to work out.
Three hundred bucks a box, fourteen bucks a pack, somewhat less at mass market (thanks Obama) might just be well beyond the budget of gamers. The math is somewhat known on this. But this product is targeted at whales, so maybe that doesn't apply?
The box-toppers are a selection of roughly ten outstanding cards, twenty great cards, five really good cards, and five woofers. So the odds of a topper having value in any given box are good. It's basically an anti-jackpot. Roughly one-eighth of the time, you'll miss. That seems good for stores opening boxes for singles. Or players, for that matter.
Last year at this time, Iconic Masters came out and the greater Magic pundit culture dumped all over it. Here we are a year later and I sell as much of it as I can get at full margin. That's not as good as Modern Masters 2017, which by the aftermarket box costs about 150% of MSRP as of this writing, but it makes for decent business. Another local dealer broke open a pallet of Iconic Masters that he picked up off the distress wire, and I think I would have done the same if it had been offered to me. The singles value is there, never mind what Rudy Battistic wanted you all to think so he could buy in low.
Earlier this year, Masters 25 was promoted as "the Masters set you've all been waiting for." Unfortunately, we discovered what happens when the reprint base is tilted too far toward scarcity and not enough toward utility. Masters 25 sells very well for us today, but it joined its predecessor as a regular guest star on the Massdrop show throughout this summer. Over time, Masters 25 will be just as demanded as most of the Masters series. Card for card it lines up extremely well against, say, Modern Masters 2015 or Eternal Masters. But for now people haven't felt the urgency yet.
With Ultimate Masters, given the price increase, the contents, the Wal-Mart factor, everything, it's almost as if Hasbro is daring people not to buy it, knowing they will. "Here's the last Masters set. Buy it or don't." They know most Magic players are addicts, and it's never good money to bet that the crackhead is really gonna stay off the crack this time.
If I want 200 boxes of this, I'm looking at an invoice approaching forty thousand dollars at wholesale. That's more than I have ever spent in one shot, that I can remember offhand, on any single product or release in this business. If I buy only 60 or 70 boxes to hedge, how many sales am I missing? It's a hell of a gamble. If I do it right, I get to kill off a substantial amount of the store's remaining debt. If I do it wrong, the debt gets bigger. What's the right play?
I'll let you know when I figure it out.
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