Ted Yee of T&N Games in Burnaby, British Columbia (Canada) shares his beef with the excessive and generally impractical packaging of many TCGs.
 
One of my biggest beefs with game companies, particularly ones who publish TCGs, is their excessive and generally impractical packaging of their product.
 
Yu-Gi-Oh! has been the biggest offender with their collector tins, as they use containers bigger than a booster box (which holds 24 packs) but only actually has 6 boosters.  Recently, Wizards of the Coast has joined the fray with their prerelease packs and now Modern Masters.
 
Stores who had any Prerelease packs leftover from Return to Ravnica, Gatecrash or Dragon's Maze were allowed to sell them after release day.  The problem is that the form they came in did not lend themselves to be either put on a hook or displayed on a shelf.  For Return to Ravnica and Gatecrash, you could barely even tell it was a Magic: The Gathering product based on the packaging.  Dragon's Maze was a little better but with its awkward shape and lack of a hanging hole in the packaging, displaying this is a bit of a nightmare.
 
Now we have Modern Masters with its awkward slopes.  You can't possibly stack these or make any kind of impressive-looking display.  The shipping case is 50% larger than those for normal boosters yet the boxes themselves contain 33% less packs.  The picture does not make it obvious but there's a 45-degree angle from the front to the back of the box.
 
I understand that you want to have cool graphics on your packaging to make your product stand out, but if you make it awkward to display, then it won't get put into a prominent place.  It will get put somewhere less inconvenient for the retailer.  Yu-Gi-Oh! tins could be 75% thinner and still serve the same purpose.  The vast majority of these tins are not used to store cards.  Most of them end up in the trash.  Modern Masters could have been an actual rectangular box.
 
The consumer doesn't want to throw more trash into the landfill.
 
The wholesaler doesn't want to pay to ship boxes full of nothing.
 
The retailer doesn't want to use precious display space for items of relatively low value but with a large or impractical footprint.

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