I think a lot of that can be bought and still be less than a stupid collectors box.
I would assume you could straight-up buy a switch for the price of a collector's box once it settles - Rudy seems to think it might go over $400 per, even if it's unsustainable. Nevertheless I personally fucking love those things, because so many retarded whales crack them and it results in a ton of supply for cheap, nifty little cards.
I did, back in the thread that was featured. I forget its name though and can't be assed to find it - so
here, just click on the 'All' feature. Or use your stock-price-tracker of choice: AB InBev has been sliding down steadily since 2016. The fiasco slightly dampened their stock price in modern memory, but the nadir of this current slump isn't even as low as it was in 2020. Which, yes, that slump is because bars and restaurants were closed - but people were still buying the stuff privately, and alcohol consumption on the whole over the pandemic did spike in that year. And if you check within the last month, the stock's already creeping right back up. You can look at Nike's and Keurig's stocks and see much the same. Keurig's is a little odd because it has a massive slump from a merger, but around when the 'boycott' of it it hit, it didn't do anything.
And even then, what AB InBev did pissed off the prime demographic who drinks budweiser. What Wizards is doing here is pissing off one small sect of people who have sworn, up and down, that they're gonna quit the game since they keep printing KWEENZ like Samut but are still, apparently, here. Forgive me if I don't think the fifth time's the charm.
I don't think they got much love from aftermath either. After 30th and now these others, are we sure sales are continuing to skyrocket?
Aftermath was a funny little flop (though the price on singles will probably spike due to low opening), the pinkertons got them hate, the 30th got them hate - none of it really matters. I know only from talking to my local shop-owner guy and watching stuff from Rudy and so on about the market. Of course, Rudy wants to pump things - but he's not so much hyping a specific product when he says the market in general is burning hot. I know the local place basically sold out of set boosters for MoM in a week.
I see a bunch of people getting into the game, who spend a little here and there thanks to the ease-of-access that is casual commander. The doom and gloom shit is just cope, even if the company is genuinely doing a lot of retarded shit and nevertheless idiot-savanting its way to stability. The set's going to release fine, going to be a big hit, a bunch of people are going to spend entirely too much on it - the normal state of things. Blackagorn will get laughed at and alter artists will make a pretty penny offering to brighten him up.
Things may seem like they're going up because of the whales and speculators but that just means the fall when the bubble pops is going to be so much worse. (I feel for the shops around here. We've already had like... 4 or 5 in this sizeable city close this year.)
Yes and no. For Wizards, the only issue is if they overprint a shitton of product and then have to destroy it and eat the losses. If we recall the guy finding cards burned up in a landfill, that's probably happened to some degree. But if you remember, some of those cards were LOTR stuff - and rumors have come down the pipeline about reduced print supplies for things like MoM or Aftermath. If wizards increases the volume of different products, but lowers the supplies of those products, it has a steady meal ticket.
As to shops closing, that's way more because we've gone from 0->5% interest rate in the last few years as a means to curb inflation. The heightened interest rates make getting favorable business loans far more difficult, and the effect they have on those loans is immediate while their effect on lowering inflation takes some time. Meaning the stupid cards still cost a lot for the store to hold onto, the increased cost of boosters being passed onto customers will dampen sales, customers generally trying to spend less dampens sales, and short-term business loans which can mollify a lot of those concerns are in and of themselves more expensive. It's not a good time to be in any small business, really.
he can sacrifice himself to give the board indestructible and create a non-legendary copy of himself an infinite number of times with
Ratadrabik out (so long as you put the ring bearer trigger on him turning him legendary again)
Oh, yeah, I guess it does work. I thought the ring-bearer targeted, but since it does say 'choose,' you'll have the copy of Boromir around by the time that resolves. I still don't see it creeping up to more than a dollar, at least in that prime-time month right after release.
another thing you're forgetting is that wotc doesn't want you to buy last year's cards for a buck, that's last year's money. they want you to buy the shiny new thing at full price, and then again next later this year.
Oh, yeah, WOTC wants that - and I leave that up to the consoomers. Every now and then I'll buy one of the precon commander decks if the value's OK enough, mostly because the new set came with planechase shit and those cards individually are like $3. But otherwise, I'll just grab singles in absurdly large batches while only spending 30-50 or so, with a luxury buy here and there. I held on Dark Confidant for years and years and he finally went down to around $13, so that was an easy snap.
another thing is that WOTC probably still riding high on that covid spike which distorted everything, outside of that the simple quantity of shit they put out also effects the bottom line, but that doesn't mean it's good or a long-term strategy, especially with a recession/maybe depression coming up and people simply burn out
If the rumors of them seriously cutting print runs are true, I think that marks a shift away from their stupid overconfidence. But it was absolutely the case that for all of 2022, they were expecting windfall after windfall because they didn't want to believe that people would be retarded enough to, during a pandemic, spend their Trump and Biden bucks on cardboard. Naturally it was a miscalculation - half of the population was fine financially during the pandemic, and nevertheless was given a bunch of money to spend on whatever. So when Wizards just assumed that printing like 7x the product would mean 7x the result, I think summer of 2022 fell below their bloated expectations.
Though with the rumored price-point of Commander Masters, I have to wonder if they aren't aiming to both reduce product supply but also jack up the individual prices to try to make up shortfalls, which seems like it'd be a bad idea. But then, I dunno, maybe there is more milk to be extracted from the whales.
