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 discusses a packaging issue, and the importance of an off-hand comment.

Two problems cropped up in this  week's gaming news, both annoying, but one more annoying to stores and customers and the second one  just annoying to the LGS (Local Game Store, for those who don't speak acronym well).  First, the one that bothers both of us: the Battle for Zendikar Gift Box from Wizards of the Coast.

If you happen to have one handy, take a look at it.  Nice and sturdy.  WOTC spent some extra design time on it to make certain of a sturdy design, even dropping the box from a height of several feet to make sure it could withstand a fall.  That's not the problem.  The problem is on the back, specifically on the back where the box lithograph shows a picture of the box contents.  You've got the box, empty but able to hold over 2000 cards, card dividers, stickers for customizing the dividers, an alternate art card, 5 booster packs of Battle for Zendikar and a stack of 20 basic lands.  There's the rub.  The top card of the stack of lands is a full art forest card.  However, the lands included in the box are not.  The only full art land cards included in the Gift Box are those that might come inside one of the booster packs.

However, the problem is that the stack of lands shown is topped with a full art card.  The Battle for Zendikar Fat Pack came with 80 full art land cards, a major reason they sold out so quickly and at such high prices.  Given both those factors, it is reasonable for the customer, and the store, to expect that the Gift Boxes come with 20 full art land cards.  After all, WOTC did put a disclaimer on the back of the box that the 2000+ cards shown in the Gift Box were there for "illustrative purpose only."  Certainly WOTC could have included a similar disclaimer about the lands, or even better, just used a picture of standard land cards instead.  Happily, our store and a number of others found out about it in time to warn customers but I know of a few stores that did not and told their customers that "Yes, they do have the full art lands," a perfectly reasonable assumption given the evidence.

A completely different situation took place during the recent Fantasy Flight Games' X-Wing World Championships Twitch commentary.  A pair of FFG employees, while discussing the play and responding to comments from fans, comment that the core game can be purchased pretty cheaply on Amazon.  Granted, it was only a 6 second comment but statements like that are a red flag to retailers and to FFG's credit, several other employees spoke to them about the comments soon after they were made.

Here's why comments like this bother brick and mortar stores so much, not just from FFG but from any manufacturer.  If you are a manufacturer with Organized Play as a component of your marketing plan, such as WOTC, Konami, FFG, Iello, etc., that Organized Play takes place in brick and mortar stores.  Last time I checked Amazon doesn’t run OP and Walmart and Target stopped doing it when Pokemon cratered during the 00s.  It is the brick and mortar specialty stores that put time and effort into building a strong OP program and to have manufacturers send customers to stores that don't support your OP model doesn't benefit either of us.  Oh, and FFG, get a retailer locater set up, would ya?

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.