TCGplayer sellers sold 250,000 Magic: The Gathering singles on August 26 alone after the Ban Announcement that day. The traffic on TCGplayer was double what it was on Black Friday with the heaviest wave of traffic occurring directly after the Ban Announcement was made public. Here’s the chart of the top-selling cards:
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Top 10 Cards Sold on TCGplayer following WOTC's announcement on 08/26/19 |
|
|
Product |
Avg. Price |
|
Stoneforge Mystic |
$65.66 |
|
Batterskull |
$24.40 |
|
Kolaghans Command |
$14.60 |
|
Fastbond |
$12.02 |
|
Sword of Sinew and Steel |
$8.81 |
|
Giver of Runes |
$6.42 |
|
Rampaging Ferocidon |
$0.81 |
|
Sword of Truth and Justice |
$11.11 |
|
Sword of Feast and Famine |
$52.92 |
|
Sword of Fire and Ice |
$72.47 |
The blockbuster sales and heavy traffic can be attributed to a couple of factors. The main driver of the record sales was the "surprise factor" of the unbanning of Stoneforge Mystic. While the banning of Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis was all but a done deal by Monday, the unbanning of Stoneforge Mystic apparently caught players off-guard and prompted them to buy quickly. Out of the ten cards listed as top sellers, seven of them could synergize with a Modern format version of the long-time Legacy format deck commonly referred to as "Stoneblade." Stoneforge Mystic, alongside the Swords and Batterskull, are the primary win-conditions for that particular deck. Players, speculators, and investors were trying to snap up as many possible components of the new Modern version as they could before the card prices spiked to astronomical levels.
The other driver of sales was a strategic promotion on TCGplayer's part, which ran a promotion linked to the ban announcement. Buyers could receive an 8% bonus on their purchases if any cards were banned on August 26th, and this incentive helped drive traffic and transactions. Recent TCGplayer investments in technology, teams, and infrastructure helped it handle the load, the company said. "…[T]hanks to our sellers who used TCGplayer’s tools to quickly respond to a volatile market, our affiliates who helped us connect with Magic players, and our technology team who made sure we could actually handle this amount of traffic," TCGplayer General Manager of Buyer Services John McDonald said.
ICv2 previously reported on the Ban Announcement that led to the shake-up in Magic: The Gathering single sales on TCGPlayer (see "Wizards of the Coast Updates 'Magic: The Gathering' Banned and Restricted Lists").
