Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne compares aftermarket prices and demand on two recent releases from top CCG publishers.

In case you happened to miss it, Modern Masters 2 from Wizards of the Coast released last Friday with much sound, fury and anticipation, especially compared to the release the previous week of the newest expansion for Yu-Gi-Oh!, Crossed Souls.

Crossed Souls has proven to be one of the weaker releases for Yu-Gi-Oh! in recent memory.  We went pretty light on orders and did not sell one single pack the day it came out.  Players have shown little interest in single cards from the set and we have easily sold more commons from other sets than we have from Crossed Souls.  Collectors have not sought the rarer cards from the set, at least not to the point where prices have gone up significantly.  In fact, checking a couple of card price websites shows no Crossed Souls cards increasing significantly in value while several, including "Clear Wing Syncro Dragon" and "Order of Zerfa," have dropped over 50% in value just in the past week.

However, the greatest, to my mind, indication of the weakness and lack of interest in Crossed Souls is the price of a booster display on the interwebs, which despite all of the problems associated with them, do a very good job of assessing the market value of a product.  A display of Crossed Souls has a retail value of $96 (24 packs at $4 per pack).  Usually, one can find booster displays at significant discounts to that as box flippers or stores that overbought seek to unload excess product.  However, you don’t usually find full displays selling at a 44% discount to retail value less than a week after release.  I easily found a number of sellers offering displays of Crossed Souls at prices ranging from $54 to $58 per display.  That's a huge price cut for less than a week after release and pretty close to cost on a display, meaning that these sellers don't want to hang on to booster displays as they see little chance of them increasing in value.

Of course, I really cannot compare pricing on Modern Masters 2 to that of Crossed Souls, since MM2, as I write this, just hit the shelves yesterday, but checking the pre-release pricing on displays on Modern Masters 2 shows an interesting trend of comparatively flat pricing.  We have not seen a "race to the bottom" on pricing of displays on MM2.  Manufacturer suggested list price for a booster box is $240 and prices currently are bouncing around from $222 to about $270, still within about 10% of MSRP, indicating that sellers don’t see the need to take a significant hit on profits in order to sell a booster box.  Of course, with cards like "Mox Opal" and "Noble Hierarch" in the set, most retailers would be able to make their money back on a display just by breaking open packs and selling singles.

Incidentally, while kudos go out to Wizards of the Coast for the new recyclable cardboard booster packs, they do present a problem for stores and customers.  The flaps on the packs are glued together and, as you can see in videos on the interwebs, a heat gun will loosen the glue so the pack can be opened, cards inside inspected, and resealed without any indication of tampering.  After learning this, we gave it a try and found we could open and reseal a pack in a little over a minute.  In order to avoid customer accusations of resealing, some stores of which I know are either (A) relying on their reputation of always treating customers properly, or (B) only selling sealed displays and drafting.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.