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 looks at the Collector booster promotion tied to the sales of Duskmourn: House of Horror booster boxes.

For all the complaints stores level against Wizards of the Coast’s marketing decisions (see “Future of AI at Wizards of the Coast” and also, “Well, That Was Quick”), the company is the best in the industry at providing promotional support for stores.  As an example, consider this past weekend’s Duskmourn: House of Horror prerelease.

Not only did stores receive their normal complement of promotional cards for various events during the Duskmourn season, plus a free box of Duskmourn Play Boosters for each non-growth box of prerelease kits the store bought, WotC also gave stores a free box of Duskmourn Collector Boosters to use as sales incentives to encourage purchases of full boxes of Play and Collector Boosters.  Granted, it is to WotC’s financial benefit to get stores to move as many booster boxes as possible and, with the price of a booster box of Magic increasing over the past few years and a correlating race to the bottom in online prices of booster boxes, stores not able to price match the deeply discounted online pricing for booster boxes have done the next best thing and trimmed their purchases of Magic booster boxes significantly.

Our store has gone from preorders of 12 to 18 booster boxes to preorders of 0 for the last few sets, simply because we have lots of overhead and maintain the walk-in storefront, along with its requirements for ADA and customer safety, which an online shop does not. Amenities such as table space, physical inventory and customer demonstrations of products come with a cost that online operations do not have to factor into their pricing.  If a $17 (roughly) investment by WotC in a single Collector booster pack gives incentive to a customer to purchase a hundred dollar, more or less, box of Magic boosters, that is a pretty good rate of return for the company.

In addition, a lot of sealed card product released recently, if it does not sell out immediately, tends not to hold its value long term.  WotC recently announced it would sell cases of Commander Decks for Fallout through Costco. While mass market stores have sold Magic and other TCG products for decades, this is the first time I remember a warehouse store offering the product in caselots.  I would hazard this means an overstock of Fallout Commander Decks at WotC and not much movement of the product after the initial rush, especially given the current prices of individual Commander Decks online.

When a store retails a deck new for less than my cost for it months after release, that indicates a glut of product in the market.  Hence, circling back to my original point, it is to WotC’s benefit to help stores move as much of their sealed product as possible, since that is where WotC and Hasbro make their money, and WotC is the best company out there doing so. Will this help turn around booster box sales?  Well, it did here. No preorders, but we sold more booster boxes this prerelease weekend than for Murders at Karlov Manor, Outlaws of Thunder Junction, Modern Horizons 3 and Bloomburrow combined.

Comments?  Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.

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.