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 talks about his reactions to the new 'Buy It By the Brick' format for WizKids.

Wow, what a surfeit of riches this week with releases from both WizKids and Wizards of the Coast running money through the store's register.  We ran a midnight release for the Innistrad set for the first time in several years.  We expected 8, maybe 12 people to show up for the event and would up seating 28, making it our best pre-release of the weekend.  Friday night's Launch Party seated about 24 and ended with our best in-store sales day of the year (so far).  Both products have helped make this our best September ever.

However, most of this sales increase was due to Innistrad, not Superman.  I had several customers come in who purchased a brick from us during last few releases but opted to buy one or more bricks online this time.  Why?  Under the new program, the 'Buy It By the Brick' figure, the Superman Robot, comes packed as one of the brick figures.  In the past, customers have either A) bought a brick and sent in the UPC codes, certificate and receipt from the brick and waited 4-6 weeks to receive the figure or B) bought the brick in store and received the figure from the store at the time of purchase.

From what I understand, the company wasn't completely happy with either of these two methods.  Method one allowed the company to produce high quality figures for the program (the Joker figure for Arkham Asylum set amazed our customers with the detailing) but added an extra layer of difficultly to the redemption process and delayed the customer's receipt of the figure.  Method two meant the customer could get the figure right way and created goodwill towards the store since the store handed over the figure.  However, this meant WizKids had to produce a 'BIBTB' figure for every brick sold, whereas many fewer figures were needed under the previous program.  Since not all the boosters manufactured sold as bricks, this meant WizKids produced many more figures than the promotion needed and not at the level of quality the company liked for these figures.  We wound up with a number of 'BIBTB' figures left over from the last two sets.

Of course, this time we will not have any left over figures as one Superman Robot is included in every brick.  However, comparatively few of our sales are full bricks.  We break them open in order to sell single boosters to customers that want one.  Doing this reduces the Superman Robot from a promotional item that the customer received by buying a brick to a 1 in 10 chase figure, defeating the original purpose of the program, encouraging brick sales.

At a secondary level, the 'BIBTB' program encouraged brick purchases from brick and mortar stores, since, with the original program, the customer had to send in a receipt from a brick and mortar location (we actually had a couple of customers over the years ask us to print out receipts for them so they could redeem figures from bricks they had purchased online).  With the second version, they had to come into the store and buy the brick to get the figure.  Now, it makes it better for the customer, since no matter where they buy the brick, they get the figure.  Not so good for driving customers into the store.

No word, as of yet, what WizKids plans for the Hulk expansion set, as far as distributing the 'BIBTB' figure.  I'm hoping the company chooses to go back to one of the previous methods of distributing the figure. We certainly found that moved a lot more bricks.

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