According to the Hasbro fireside chat, everything is fine with Magic: The Gathering, and there is nothing to worry about at all, really…
Hasbro CEO, Chris Cocks, and President of Wizards of the Coast (WotC) and Digital Gaming, Cynthia Williams held a “fireside chat” recently to talk about the state of Magic the Gathering if there are any issues, and how the game will progress into the future.
This is an interesting look into how they view the company and what they really think about releases. There were also some very interesting insights into Magic 30th anniversary packs and what really happened with the pre-order.
Hasbro & WOTC Say Everything is Fine With Magic: The Gathering
Let’s start with the most interesting quote of the evening. Before we do, though, you can listen to the whole thing for yourself here.
In aggregate, there is no evidence that Magic is overprinted, and the sentiment that Magic needs to cut print runs to support prices is a misunderstanding of our business and our customers. If our prices for a print-to-demand product rise significantly soon after launch that simply means we are not adequately meeting customer demand and we are making millions of players unhappy at their lack of ability to acquire the cards that they want to play.
There has been a lot of feedback from players asking about overprinting, and Bank of America seemed to agree with the fans. When they did their deep dive into the company, they said overprinting and oversaturation are huge issues with the game.
This had a huge impact on their stock, but as you can read above, WoTC says everything is totally fine! While we’re not experts in the business of trading cards, BofA gave us this graph below to highlight the change in the release schedule.
From BofA Research
That sentence lines up pretty perfectly with a previous statement from Blake Rasmussen, Senior Communications Manager for Magic: The Gathering, who said they basically have no intention of slowing down but do hear people’s concerns. It seems like this chat was their way of saying, we hear you, but everything is perfectly fine!
They had some supply chain issues this year, which led to multiple big releases being put out on the same day (Warhammer 40k and Unfinity.)
Just something to think about. Now onto the Magic 30th anniversary issues.
Magic 30th Anniversay Blues
When we look at how we think about growing Magic over time, I don’t think it’s about rising prices on Magic cards or rising prices on Magic packs. At the end of the day, it’s about growing our player base and it’s about leaning into our segmentation strategy and adding products that our players want and that have a lot of play value and collector’s value.
Cocks said this, showing some serious insight into why they even did this recent collector’s pack. However, it gets much more interesting.
And sometimes we step back and listen to customer feedback like we did on our recent 30th Anniversary Edition, where we scaled back the expected supply to assure a great collector experience. Now that decision might not have been great for us in the short term finically, but it was definitely the right call for the long-term health of the brand, and it is good for our fans.
This was really all Williams had to say about the release over the whole call. Maybe the most interesting part is that this basically proves all the rumors on the internet about WoTC stopping the release early. As we said in a previous article, multiple markets “sold out” at exactly the same time and the sale just stopped out of nowhere.
This confirms that WOTC did this to keep the collector’s status on what cards did sell. Overall, it feels like WOTC and Hasbro think their strategy is going swimmingly and nothing is wrong!
What do you think about the Hasbro fireside chat for Magic The Gathering?
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About the Author: Travis Pasch
Travis Pasch
Job Title: Head Writer & Editor
Joined: 2019
Socials: @paschbass
Bio: Dark Eldar Dracon and Warhammer 40k hobbyist since the third edition in 1998. He also loves camping because you can only paint so much! He joined the Spikey Bits team in 2019 and has been the main daily writer since 2020.
Maybe one day, he’ll finish converting all his Ad Mech models and turn into a true tech enjoyer, complete with sad and happy robot noises!
