Box Breaking, or Breaking Point? Andre Segarra January 17, 2025 The Spirit Squad What’s good, Spirit Squad! All of us Magic: the Gathering players know there’s too much product available right now. Or, at least we think we know that, despite what the sales numbers say. Lord of the Rings this, Doctor Who that, Magic: the Gathering Foundations why. While today’s purpose isn’t to discuss that exact point, I’ll offer my opinion on it. It’s not too much. It’s just too much for you, the tournament player who decides to try keeping up. If that describes you, then it makes sense that you’re overwhelmed. But it’s also important to remember that you take up much less than 1% of the total people who buy Magic: the Gathering cards. The 99% of the player base who actually spends a ton of money on sealed Magic: the Gathering product is eating good right now. The hyper-casual fans of franchises like Assassin’s Creed and the adorable vibes of Bloomburrow are buying cards in droves, to the point where it’s occasionally hard to find boxes to buy! (The 1-of-1 copy of The One Ring caused product shortages for months!) …and that leads us to today’s topic. What happens when a product is so popular you can’t find any? We’ve seen this happen before, with popular sets like Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth. We also saw issues with the first set of Disney’s Lorcana, where players and casual collectors couldn’t find cards for as long as six months! But this is just the baseline expectation with Pokémon. Anyone who collects Pokémon cards knows that the mad rush to buy boxes when a set releases is a very real thing. The myth you’ve probably heard about people finding out when “truck day” is for local Walmart and Target stores… that isn’t a myth. Finding sealed Pokémon packs, especially from sets that have expensive “chase” cards, is such a struggle that people have gone so far as to stalk their local stores to find out the minute delivery trucks arrive. There have even been physical fistfights in places like McDonald’s over customers not receiving promotional cards. As the kids say, it’s the trenches. (The special illustration of Pikachu Ex is $640 CDN!!!) OK, so cards are hard to find. Why are we talking about this? I don’t even play Pokémon. The Prismatic Evolutions set is about to drop on January 17th, later this week as of the time of this writing. To illustrate just how dire the issues with card scarcity and scalping are: Some local gaming stores won’t be even entertaining the idea of selling Prismatic Evolutions. Retro Gaming Kent in Washington straight-up said they’re “keeping the safety of the staff and store” in mind when making this decision. Product is already being scalped at an unreal rate. The Pokémon equivalent to Magic’s previous “Fat Packs” or today’s Bundles are called Elite Trainer Boxes. Pokémon players call them ETB’s, but we already use that for “Enters the Battlefield” so I won’t be doing that to y’all. Anyway, the MSRP on those is $60 USD. You get 11 boosters, two cute lil’ Eevee promo cards, and some Eevee-themed sleeves. These boxes have a TCGplayer Market rate of $150 USD right now! I was actually in Toronto at the most recent Pokémon Regional Championship, and my friend was happy to buy Japanese packs of Prismatic Evolutions at $16 apiece. You can’t even play Japanese cards in tournaments on this side of the world. When pre-orders for the March 2025 set, Journey Together, went online earlier this month scalpers went so hard that the Pokémon Center website crashed within minutes. There have even been reports of people listing the cards on eBay, even though this violates their “you can’t list things until 40 days before you can ship them” policy. The reason we’re actually talking about all of these things, though, is that some Magic: the Gathering set drops have been slowly but surely trending towards this behavior. Secret Lair releases like the Hatsune Miku have been bought up and scalped to the point where the Snapcaster Mage from that set is $1,500 CDN! As mentioned above, even some regular sets like Throne of Eldraine and Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty have seen some of the same scarcity issues. We at least have “regular” boosters that are different from the Collector boosters that contain all of the coolest cards, but it’s a scary world out there right now for people just trying to play games. This isn’t a trend I’d like to see Magic adopt, but some of the signs are already here. I won’t say anything crazy like the sky is falling or to sell your collection (PLEASE don’t take anything I say as financial advice, I don’t even keep a robust collection of my own!), but I am saying to keep your eyes peeled. For anyone who’s collecting Pokémon cards in the near future, stay safe! I’ll see y’all on the next one. Leave a Reply Cancel ReplyYour email address will not be published.CommentName Email Website Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Δ