Sure, Grandpa, Let's Get You Back to Bed
When I first started having some success at tournament Magic, one of the top decks of the then current Standard format required a playset of
When I peaked at competitive Magic, my main deck contained twelve rares, with another three in the sideboard. (My finals opponent, literally the person who'd won the most money at Magic tournaments up to that point, brought a grand total of seven rares to the table.) The first time I was on the coverage team for a Standard Pro Tour, the champion already used twelve mythics and 21 rares. By my third such Pro Tour, the numbers had increased to fifteen mythics and 37 rares. Today's Standard decks often run well in excess of 40 rares.
So when observers observe that booster pack prices have remained stable for ages, they're both 100% correct but also looking at just one side of an equation. On one side there's the price of a pack, on the other is how far that pack will get you. The cost to participate at any given level of Magic fluctuated considerably over the years but only knew one direction overall. The line goes up.
What They Sell
In a literalist sense, Wizards are selling the contents of a pack. But in a very real sense, they are selling not just stuff outside of the pack but specifically what is not in the pack.
The first claim is easy to substantiate. Everything you buy grants you increased access to some part of the other Magic multiverse. Not the storyline version but the real-world ecosystem of Magic. If you have cards to play with, you can have fun with your friends. If you have three packs, you can draft. If you have cards for trade, you can build your collection. If you have a legal deck, you can enter a tournament. If you have a good deck, you can enter the winners' bracket. If you have a very good deck, you can make the Top 8, win the tournament, qualify for another more prestigious tournament, et cetera. If you have a blinged-out deck or an impressive trade binder, you'll earn the admiration of your fellow collectors. If you have a Commander deck that's a lot of fun, you'll be the life of the party, presumably. If you can lend someone cards or a spare deck, they'll be grateful. And so on.
Every Magic purchase carries with it the implicit promise of utility within the game's subculture, a community that people have built mostly with and sometimes against Wizards. It's this community that imbues the cardboard with value; without it it'd be worthless. The system runs on money and ownership, yes, but also on human connections, personal and interpersonal enjoyment, status, knowledge—all currencies variously convertible into one another and sometimes convertible back into money. At its most meta, the cards you once bought and the experience thus gained translate into thoughts that others may want you to share. Deep in this economy's tertiary sector, you get an article like this, which no longer requires any Magic cards at all but still pays a bit of money, which in turn buys time for the author to spend merely thinking about Magic.
What justifies the price of a pack is not so much the material you gain but the related immaterial gain. Not least, your purchase props up a system that allows Wizards and members of the retail chain to invest in the future of Magic, whether that means designing and developing new sets, organizing tournaments, or creating and maintaining spaces, offline and online, for players to exchange ideas, stories, cards.
The Appeal of Artificial Scarcity
Why is Magic far more popular today than twenty years ago when it should be accessible to far fewer people? Weirdly, becoming less affordable may not have been a stumbling block en route to success but a stepping stone.
A younger relative of mine is fascinated with big numbers. When asked whether he'd rather buy something for, say, ten euros or the exact same thing for five euros, he always takes a moment to consider. Then he invariably picks the larger number, except sometimes he suggests a number even higher. It's a common trait even in full-grown humans to treasure possessions more the harder they are to acquire.
It's a weakness easy to exploit, but in the case of collectibles it's not mere fallacy. The cost of sealed boxes can't ever fully decouple from the resale value of the singles they contain. If the singles' value were too low, no one would open boxes, leading to a dwindling supply of singles on the market, meaning their prices would pick up again. If the singles in the average box fetched prices much higher than what a box costs, everybody would open boxes, leading to an increased supply, resulting in falling prices. That's not yet accounting for the fact that the market forces of supply and demand govern the cost of boxes too, at least to a degree—to a very high degree for out-of-print sets.
Every unassailable truth boils down to tautology, so here's a candidate: Whenever Magic cards become more expensive, they also become more valuable. Later this year, Wizards will try to make them more valuable by raising prices. In the past, they achieved the same when they relegated more tournament staples to higher rarities, printed more rares and mythics per set, effectively putting fewer of the top cards into their packs.
So, to answer the question what justifies the price of a pack, we need to enlist the help of a paradox: It's what's in the pack; more so it's the external ecosystem that comes with it; most of all, though, it's what is likely to be absent from the pack. It's the chance to hit the jackpot and open something supervaluable, but for this chance to exist at all, it has to be small.
Aside
Speaking of ecosystem: If you want Magic to become more expensive, slapping a higher price tag on a booster pack is at least friendlier to the environment than the alternative. Making the desirable cards rarer, thus forcing people to open more packs to get them, leaves more undesirable chaff to throw out. It literally wastes more natural resources to create more waste. Poor trees who grew up to become
The Player's Perspective
If you don't want to spend time managing your collection, your portfolio, but just want material to play with, cards becoming more expensive is a bad thing and them becoming more valuable is useless, and I hate it. I wish cards were cheap, not prized collectors' items. Then again, Cardmarket pays most of my bills nowadays, so maybe I shouldn't.
I wish the way to grow Magic revenue weren't to sell the game at a higher price point but to make it more affordable and sell it to more people instead. Alas, this assumes that a more accessible hobby will have more people choosing to access it. So far the reverse seems to be true. That's part human folly, part just the nature of the collectible business.
But note. So far. Clearly there's a breaking point. You can milk a cow for so long but slaughter it only once. There is a risk of a crash. If people aren't willing to pay enough for the singles in a box and no one opens boxes and the supply of singles dwindles and single prices still don't recover, then the market price of boxes will drop, possibly below what retailers paid for them, at which point businesses lose money, some fail, and the whole thing comes crashing down, because, after all, it is a house of cards. It happened before when supply of Fallen Empires far outstripped demand.
I doubt the upcoming price hike will struggle to meet adequate demand. I rather expect it to prove another great financial success. But it's a warning Wizards do well to heed.
Here's another one:
Proxy Wars
My first experience with proxies came in testing for tournaments. Someone at the store would still be missing a few cards for a deck but wanted to try it out first before buying in. Or they'd own just one playset of a card which belonged in two decks we wanted to playtest against each other. Or someone got an idea for new tech, halfway through the evening, but the card in question was at home. So people would announce that card X now represented card Y. Or you'd see a scrap of paper inserted into a sleeve with the name of the missing card scribbled on it, sometimes with its cost and/or text as well. Increasingly often you'd find some worthless common, sleeved face down, acting as a placeholder for whatever was written on its back. (A second life to the poor trees who'd grown up to become
Eventually our playtesting sessions moved on to the exclusive use of such proxies, mainly for the expedience. Instead of carrying a bunch of decks and dealing with sleeves, we only needed a stack of expendable cards, a permanent marker, and the knowledge what each of the proxied cards did—but that was true for foreign-language cards, textless promos, and those with errata anyway. Decks were built and rebuilt at the stroke of a pen. Sometimes 60 such cards represented upward of five different decks, all listed neatly one card name below the other, at least in theory. In reality things did get messy at times, especially once you used abbreviations, left a space blank to represent a monocolored deck's basic land, or crossed out one card name and squeezed another into its place, and then you'd wonder what
It never occurred to us that we could just leave it at that. Our proxies were always just means to an end, of finding the right deck to buy, build, bring to the next tournament. But without that goal, if we had been playing for nothing else than the fun of it within our own group, we never would have had to invest meaningful money into cards at all.
Counterfeit Terrorism
My first experience with a counterfeit came at a tournament. A few tables over, someone called into question the legitimacy of a card, an
Counterfeit cards that might be mistaken for the genuine article suck. They can cause real damage, it is illegal to sell them, and it is another kind of illegal to use them in any sanctioned event. Wizards—and Cardmarket too, for that matter—will crack down on counterfeits whenever they show up within the company's sphere of influence.
The Case for Tournaments
This sphere of influence, however, does not extend into people's homes. If all you do is play at the kitchen table, or living it up at the living room table, and you only invite likeminded, trusted friends, there's no practical way to stop you from doing anything. For one thing, it is certainly not illegal to play "Mental Magic" with your cards, a variant that assumes the existence of a shared
Magic cards serve a dual purpose within the community: as game pieces and a kind of fiat currency. In either respect, what underpins their value is nothing more, really, than the trust among the population that they'll perform their function. In the latter case, you trust that you'll be able to find someone who will accept it as quasi-legal tender—payment for goods and services, or in exchange for actually legal tender, money. Its gameplay value hinges on acceptance too, even if we rarely stop to consider the fact—or the alternatives. If you own a real, Wizards-issued copy of The Great Henge, you can trust that everybody will accept it to do what The Great Henge does. Your friends at home may accept your Arboretum Elemental to do the same, but another playgroup may not, and don't even think about passing the Elemental off as a Henge at a tournament!
Both aspects are inextricably linked. It is hard to imagine a world where The Great Henge keeps its great price while everyone agrees to use Arboretum Elementals instead. That's why Wizards cannot ever allow Magic to retreat fully from shared public spaces into secluded private ones. Because they hold no power there.
What the company creates, first of and above all, is a design, an idea, and that's notoriously hard to keep restricted. If they want to tie a specific design to a specific piece of cardboard that only they produce, as opposed to a different piece of cardboard, and if they want to keep this particular design artificially scarce, package it with lots of other designs, and sell the package at whatever price people are willing to accept, then they also need to ensure that only this specific piece of cardboard is widely accepted to represent this specific design. It's almost another tautology, and it's particularly germane amid rising prices.
Mind, it remains unclear how much investment in shared public spaces is necessary to maintain the status quo, or what form this investment has to take. But it does seem obvious to me that tournaments, specifically because of their requirement to bring a legal deck and their potential for material gain, play a special role here.
For this argument to carry weight, you don't even need that many players to care for competitive Magic. You just need enough of them to care, and you need some, really any, point of contact between those who do and those who don't. Think of an ancient civilization, a society cut off from the rest of the world, living in a remote place where gold is plentiful and thus not considered valuable. As soon as they meet the first Spanish explorers and realize that these strangers are crazy about gold and will trade away anything to get it, the whole local economy starts to shift. Gold instantly becomes expensive, suddenly a focus of commerce where previously it wasn't. Now imagine a theoretical group of savages who for the past 25 years have only engaged in ten-people, free-for-all multiplayer Magic among themselves, a society where no one needs but everyone owns
If someone is willing to buy
That is an experiment I'd rather not see conducted. And for now, it looks like I won't.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, not of Cardmarket.