This is the seventh in a series of blog posts discussing the trading card game Magic The Gathering (hereafter shortened to just “Magic”) and its connections to the world of sales.
Back in September 2017, the Magic: The Gathering player base had high hopes for the November release of the next masters set, Masters 25. Just as Iconic Masters was themed around “iconic” cards, Masters 25 represented Wizards’ 25th anniversary, doing so by including reprints of cards from every previous set.
Only two cards in the set had been spoiled at this point: one of them being a $50 card and the other being a $100 card. These spoilers gave the community hope that Wizards of the Coast had actually gotten their act together and fixed the issues present in Iconic Masters. Players were confident that Wizards had seen the error of their ways and would not make the same mistakes again with this new masters set. Many Magic financial speculators bought into the hype, pre-ordering lots of boxes with the expectation that they would make a killing. (For more on the exciting world of market speculation in Magic, see my eighth post here.)
This turned out to be a poor financial decision on their part when the rest of the set was spoiled about a month later. Regrettably, the $50 card and the $100 card featured in the set were the outlier, not the norm. Just as Iconic Masters had done 6 months before, there were very few cards of value included that were worth the $10 MSRP per pack. This disastrous set release once again left many speculators high and dry, causing a great ruckus in the community.
With a second masters set selling for $150 a box (well below its MSRP of $240), will Wizards ever learn from its mistakes and realize that themed masters sets just don’t work? Only time will tell.
BoweryJE22