A thousand dollars "saved"

This weekend is the pre-release for the latest Magic: The Gathering set, The Hobbit. Being the Tolkien fan that I claim to be, I was pretty hyped for this set when it was announced. I even budgeted out some money for spending on this set, $1000 dollars to be exact - with the ability to spend more if needed. My original plan was to get two collector boxes (which I were assuming would be between $350 - $400 a box on release) and two regular boxes (assuming $150/box on release). Thanks to Magic's seemingly ceaseless growth in popularity, the market has become filled with scalpers and speculators and those prices I was assuming were quite off.

The cheapest collector box I've seen in town (and online) is $600. The cheapest play boxes I've heard of are $180. Nearly all other product has been marked up 10-50% over MSRP. Also, due to a multi-billion dollar company (Hasbro, owners of WorC, the makers of Magic) being unable to figure out logistics, play boxes in a lot of areas, including Anchorage, have been delayed. Regardless, I'm not paying these prices for sealed product.

For starters, this set isn't that great. I want it for the Tolkien connection, but if you take that away from most these cards, they're pretty generic Magic cards that are in no way ground breaking. Most the singles in this set won't likely hold enough value to justify the cost of a box. (Unless of course the speculators sit on their sealed product and create a false scarcity for the singles, which isn't out of the realm of possibility these days).

Also, it's a small set, so buying a single play box will still result in lots of duplicates. I'm also seeing posts online from people that bought a box that had multiple duplicates of the same rare cards, which means collation at the factory when placing cards into packs was absolutely horrible. Which makes sense since quality control has been turning into a bigger and bigger issue for Hasbro over the past couple years (but hey, at least the shareholders are happy).

Lastly, for everything but the collector boxes and bundles, there will be another print run. Meaning prices are very likely to come down for play boxes and scene boxes. 

So instead of the $1000+ I would've likely spent on new Magic product this weekend, I'm going to be spending $40; $40 I already spent a month ago to register for a pre-release tournament happening tonight. Maybe if the LGS has bundles available at a decent price I'll buy one of those, but I'm doubtful they'll have any available and even if they do, they'll be well over MSRP. 

And now that $1000 can be put towards something else. Or nickel and dimed away as I usually do. 

Song of the Day