Looking at how WotC is deliberately tanking the MTG market by rereleasing old card sets removing a lot of their collectability and value + getting rid of the MTG Judge program, it seems like WotC has made the call to kill the paper card market.  I could be completely mistaken but that's my opinion.   A lot of hobby shops seems to be card distributorships with board games with rpg's as a very niche market.  So anyone here manage a hobby shop, just curious how much of your stores sales at MTG merchandise?  I'm just getting a bit nervous on hobby shops shutting down.  I've heard rumors of shops tanking hard lately.

Not a shop owner, but I've been looking into it for a while. All the Magic-related LGSes in my area shut down during COVID or before, with the game stores still around focusing on some other specialty as their bread and butter. There's a retro-console store, an anime figurine store, and a board game and minis store. Most stores do carry Magic or have Magic-related events, but I'd say the support for Magic in my area is...poor. The retro-console store is probably my favorite, and has a display case with one box of booster packs which are close to rotating out and about 20 singles which I don't think have ever moved since I started going there. It's clear that Magic is not making LGSes money these days, with a lot of the people still collecting buying cards from Ebay or Amazon, undercutting the LGSes.

So...pick up additional hobbies.

That said, my area is kinda the boonies. Those four game stores comprise almost a 1 hour driving radius in all directions.

I think there's certainly interest in TCGs from hobby shop owners, but you need to make a better business argument for them to adopt them. Magic, as it turns out, has systematically chosen to put LGSes at risk. They have to spend years building relationships with distributors, but have to price compete with Amazon, which gets a lower price with zero relationship-building. They have to guess demand for the cards blind. They have to hold onto a lot of the card liquidity in the market because players aren't trading...they're buying and flipping, and of course whatever money players do make from "MTG Finance" is probably at the expense of the LGS because they match-make most card trades. Most game store owners are now wise to this and they only support Magic barely enough to get butts in the seats.

Everything about the TCG business model needs to be taken back to the foundation.

I had a chat with the owner of my FLGS a little while back and he said that pre-COVID he'd get around 150 players for a pre-release tournament. Now he's lucky if 20 people show up.

He says that during COVID lots of people started playing online via MtG: Arena... and they haven't returned to buy physical cards or play in physical events. It's just so much easier and convenient to play online.

Just from listening to what other people say about their stores in the area, they typically thrive on the most popular stuff, MTG, Pokemon, and warhammer 40k.   Anything else they provide is usually because they want to provide other stuff but it isn't enough to keep the business open.

As a side note, MTG at one point nearly killed the RPG industry. This was one of the reasons for the huge problems for RPG publishers in the 90s (though many brought it on themselves, there was also a general shift towards more card games). I've been holding a grudge against MTG and WotC ever since  😄

The late 20's son of a buddy was a highly competitive ranked player, who played constantly pre-COVID. He no longer plays quite as much, and 2/3s of his playing is online now. He has discontinued buying cards as well.

A 50-something friend, who has been an avid collector since the beginning, stopped buying cards with the last round of controversy on reprints. He still buys some and plays, but his interest has dropped dramatically, and he also plays online maybe half the time he does play.

Quote from: GamerforHire on October 16, 2023, 10:13:51 AM
The late 20's son of a buddy was a highly competitive ranked player, who played constantly pre-COVID. He no longer plays quite as much, and 2/3s of his playing is online now. He has discontinued buying cards as well.

A 50-something friend, who has been an avid collector since the beginning, stopped buying cards with the last round of controversy on reprints. He still buys some and plays, but his interest has dropped dramatically, and he also plays online maybe half the time he does play.

So the deliberate destruction of the card market to grow digital sales.  Great.

Quote from: Trond on October 16, 2023, 09:31:29 AM
As a side note, MTG at one point nearly killed the RPG industry. This was one of the reasons for the huge problems for RPG publishers in the 90s (though many brought it on themselves, there was also a general shift towards more card games). I've been holding a grudge against MTG and WotC ever since  😄

I wasn't in the RPG and tabletop game scene during the 90s, but I was under the impression that the big shakeup in the RPG scene was TSR going bankrupt and being bought by Wizards, so the RPG market suffered from bad leadership until the OGL. While I stick to my opinion that most RPGs of this time period are obsolete, the 90s saw 3 editions of Call of C'thulu, 3 editions of Traveller, 2 editions of Shadowrun, and pretty much all of White Wolf's relevant work. I can see an argument that the D20 market was unhealthy, but I was under the impression that this was because TSR was threatening to sue a lot of people before they went bankrupt. Regardless, the non-D20 RPG market looks to me like it was going just fine.

I was also under the impression that we wouldn't have anywhere near as many LGSes without Magic. LGSes are no longer making enough money from Magic to support it like they used to, but once upon a time it was the bread and butter of LGS income. As much as I think Magic especially is a deeply flawed game and that WotC is led by a bunch of Kool-Aid guzzling lemmings, I find it hard to imagine running an LGS without some kind of a card game as a mainstay revenue stream.

Quote from: Fheredin on October 16, 2023, 12:01:35 PM

Quote from: Trond on October 16, 2023, 09:31:29 AM
As a side note, MTG at one point nearly killed the RPG industry. This was one of the reasons for the huge problems for RPG publishers in the 90s (though many brought it on themselves, there was also a general shift towards more card games). I've been holding a grudge against MTG and WotC ever since  😄

I wasn't in the RPG and tabletop game scene during the 90s, but I was under the impression that the big shakeup in the RPG scene was TSR going bankrupt and being bought by Wizards, so the RPG market suffered from bad leadership until the OGL. While I stick to my opinion that most RPGs of this time period are obsolete, the 90s saw 3 editions of Call of C'thulu, 3 editions of Traveller, 2 editions of Shadowrun, and pretty much all of White Wolf's relevant work. I can see an argument that the D20 market was unhealthy, but I was under the impression that this was because TSR was threatening to sue a lot of people before they went bankrupt. Regardless, the non-D20 RPG market looks to me like it was going just fine.

I was also under the impression that we wouldn't have anywhere near as many LGSes without Magic. LGSes are no longer making enough money from Magic to support it like they used to, but once upon a time it was the bread and butter of LGS income. As much as I think Magic especially is a deeply flawed game and that WotC is led by a bunch of Kool-Aid guzzling lemmings, I find it hard to imagine running an LGS without some kind of a card game as a mainstay revenue stream.

TSR didn't cause the collapse of gaming in the 1990s.  TSR suffered a collapse because they stopped innovating new rules.  TSR milked the existing ruleset for about 20 years with 1E being equivalent to 2E.  TSR implemented heavy censorship of content.  And White Wolf came out with Vampire the Masquerade which injected LARPing with RPG, which was new and people switched away from D&D.  New ideas, led to new markets while D&D had its water flow cut off by internal censorship and poor leadership.

If you want to see the modern equivalent of it, see WotC today and how they are censoring Magic and D&D content, poor management (rereleasing old magic cards to stop the collectibility) and going fully to digital expecting that will lead to more sales.  I for one now have to deal with asshats who expect Matt Mercer and just saw a posting in my area for a player who just got done playing Baldur's Gate 3 and is now interested in D&D.  DM's have only so much of their time to give to their hobby and trying to write like a multimillion dollar voice actor led firm and now an entire video game company is not on my plate.  I have like 3-5 hours a week if that to prepare and create maps.

I for one predict WotC will have killed off MTG and D&D as profitable brands by 2028-2030.  Those brands are going full Disney.  Never go full Disney.

WOTC is doing whatever they can to chop off the FLGS that has been promoting their products for years, off at the knees as fast as possible because these stores manage to squeeze a tiny bit of profit for themselves and WOTC wants that tiny bit too.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on October 16, 2023, 03:02:54 PM
WOTC is doing whatever they can to chop off the FLGS that has been promoting their products for years, off at the knees as fast as possible because these stores manage to squeeze a tiny bit of profit for themselves and WOTC wants that tiny bit too.

This is precisely why I think that WotC is loading the deck against themselves for disruption.

I mentioned on the Shaman thread I was working on a MTG competitor. The basic idea is to let LGSes print cards on demand via Staples or Office Depot and send a revenue split upstream. This does forfeit card consistency from one LGS to another and means that you will always have some proxy piracy problems. But that is, in fact, a good trade, because the LGSes desperately need less risk exposure and this business model exposes them to...zero. They don't have to pay a dime until they make a sale. The business model sells itself, especially in a context where WotC is intentionally stabbing LGSes in the back to make quarterlies.

Quote from: Fheredin on October 16, 2023, 12:01:35 PM

Quote from: Trond on October 16, 2023, 09:31:29 AM
As a side note, MTG at one point nearly killed the RPG industry. This was one of the reasons for the huge problems for RPG publishers in the 90s (though many brought it on themselves, there was also a general shift towards more card games). I've been holding a grudge against MTG and WotC ever since  😄

I wasn't in the RPG and tabletop game scene during the 90s, but I was under the impression that the big shakeup in the RPG scene was TSR going bankrupt and being bought by Wizards, so the RPG market suffered from bad leadership until the OGL. ....

Why do you think TSR were losing money? I remember that at the time, a lot of people pointed to a shift among gamers to MtG and similar card games as the reason. ICE also tried to get on the card bandwagon, only to not be able to sell as much as they hoped, and they went bust too.

Quote from: Trond on October 16, 2023, 05:15:59 PM
Why do you think TSR were losing money? I remember that at the time, a lot of people pointed to a shift among gamers to MtG and similar card games as the reason. ICE also tried to get on the card bandwagon, only to not be able to sell as much as they hoped, and they went bust too.

As a freelancer who was burned by the ICE bankruptcy I can tell you that isn't what busted ICE. I was a litigant in the bankruptcy proceeding and saw all their financials. It was because the Saul Zaentz company demanded ridiculous royalties from the Middle Earth line because the New Line Cinema Lord of the Rings movies were getting made and they thought they could demand that. Middle Earth was ICE's bread & butter.

Quote from: Exploderwizard on October 16, 2023, 03:02:54 PM
WOTC is doing whatever they can to chop off the FLGS that has been promoting their products for years, off at the knees as fast as possible because these stores manage to squeeze a tiny bit of profit for themselves and WOTC wants that tiny bit too.

It is FLGS that run the local tournaments, and foster the local gaming communities that buy WotC products. Games without community are dead. So WotC screwing FLGS for every little penny is killing their business.

Quote from: Thor's Nads on October 16, 2023, 05:25:57 PM


It is FLGS that run the local tournaments, and foster the local gaming communities that buy WotC products. Games without community are dead. So WotC screwing FLGS for every little penny is killing their business.

If WOTC is betting their entire farm on digital then their communities will be online. They no longer think that they need physical gathering places for communities. When you have suits who use terms such as under-monetization and have likely never played an rpg in their lives making the decisions for a gaming company you end up with shit like this. If these idiots knew anything about the actual TTRPG community then they would know that VTT play is what you settle for when you can't get or are unable to attend, a face to face group. So they are making their primary market focus, the second tier "good enough" option of the whole hobby.