With the announcement of the introduction of card parallels
in Magic sets, I do wonder if anyone overseeing the Magic line at
Hasbro/ WOTC remembers the 1990s? https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/49954/wotc-adds-card-parallels-magic-the-gathering
During that decade, multiple covers, plastic crystals and lenticular covers paved
the way for the comic crash of the late 1990s as The
Hollywood Reporter points out Happily those days have not returned, though
both Dynamite and Valiant are making valiant efforts to bring them back.
Similarly as
Slate points out, during the same period, sports cards evolved from a humble
hobby pursued primarily by boys to something touted by no less than the Wall
Street Journal as an “inflation hedge”. Companies such as Upper Deck and
DonRuss introduced autograph cards, swatch cards and other chase cards further
driving speculation boom, leading to the eventual collapse of the market and
cards that sold for hundreds of dollars now worth a fraction of that.
Similarly, I fear that WOTC/Hasbro has glommed onto the “ collectible”
aspect of the collectable card game aspect while downplaying the “game” aspect
of it. The introduction of Set Boosters and Collector Boosters do little to
enhance gameplay, but instead target the collector market and, while collecting
has always been part and parcel of the Magic universe, it was subsidiary
to gameplay: “How will this card improve
my deck?” While early sets of Magic did, on occasion, include multiple
tyles of the same card, the various season illustrations on Urza’s Tower for
example, they were few and far between, with most players happy to have 4 to
put into their deck, without worrying about getting all the variants. From what
I can tell, WOTC’s current marketing plan, with
the introduction of Alchemy focuses
on moving actual play online, as I have had a number of customers comment,
while promoting the collectible aspect of the game with a number of variants of
each card available with each release. Set boosters and Collector boosters are
specifically designed for this market, which, according to WOTC is large enough
to drive demand for the two additional varieties of card sets within
the past two years to what is essentially a segment of the Magic
target market. Add in, by my count, 45 Secret Lair releases in the past
year and the Magic market has seen a lot of product flooding into the
market within a short period of time.
Unlike the sports cards and comic book boom and bust of the
1990s, most of the revenues from the Magic boom funnel into one company
so flooding the market with Magic product primarily benefits WOTC/Hasbro. Given Hasbro’s current
market capitalization of $13.6 billion, according to
CNN Business, any implosion of the Magic
market would have serious repercussions to the company, especially since much
of its current growth has come from the Wizards division, but would not drive
the company into bankruptcy, as were a number of 1990’s era sports card and
comic publishers after the implosion of their respective markets. Maybe WOTC
has done the analysis as to how much Magic product the market can absorb
and has determined the company can safely ramp up its number of releases
without oversaturating the market. I hope so.
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