You find a booster pack of the hot new set on the shelf at a retailer. It has a price tag of $9. Hamilton warns you it’s not a good idea, but you promptly trade him for those sweet 12 additional game cards, and reap your reward. You wade through the commons and uncommons, pretending in vain that you’re happy about the card draw spell, before you finally make it to the rare slot. And there it is.
The Collector’s Paradox
The vast majority of the time, this anecdote ends in disappointment. It turns out, if there are few very valuable cards in a set, then there are many low value cards. The hope of a ‘return’ is an extension of the ultimate collector’s paradox: I want my collectible to be cheap when I buy it and priceless when I sell it. These loot box booster packs that hint at a great thrill but offer mostly disappointment are excellent drivers of sales. They prey on greed as a motivator. But there is a road less travelled. Transparent scarcity and relatively low scarcity, increases the typical customer’s satisfaction when opening a small number of packs. This keeps a wider range of customers interested in the product, and allows your community to grow via trust, rather than selling out by capitalizing on a smaller range of customer’s greed. This is a longer, slower road, but if followed, works out better for everyone: publishers, stores, players, and collectors.
Greed Driven Sales
There is a pseudo rational reason why greed is a powerful sales motivator. In a very hyperbolic example, let us refer to a trading card set in which the average pack costs $5 and the average rare slot is valued at $2, and each pack has 1 rare slot. If outside that average, there is one chase hit that is valued at $350, and that chase hit appears in one out of every hundred booster packs, it rationally contributes $3.50 to the average value of a pack. This brings the average rare slot value up to $5.50, and a pack costs $5, so it is rational for a customer to buy the pack. Now consider this same set, except that chase card appears in one out of every four hundred boosters. The rare then contributes $0.88 to each booster pack, and brings the average rare slot value up to $2.88. Buying and opening these packs is now irrational, but I refer to it as pseudo rational because the average customer feels like the chase card is 1 out of 100, so they think that opening it is rational, but they are mistaken. This break in logic means that unless rarity is strictly fathomable, the incentives lead toward your customers making bad decisions. This drives short term sales, but also drives away long term customers, and projects that use this methodology will fail the trust test eventually (and most already have).
Trust Driven Sales
Trust driven sales results in fewer boxes and stronger brands, it achieves this end with transparent print runs and enough supply to satisfy demand. The hardest part of this whole adventure is that if there is not greed creating demand, there needs to be a quality product to create that demand. The game needs to be fun. Once the game is fun, though, and people want to play it, you can create a product with playable commons and collectible rares, to create value at every tier. Limited scarcity, or making your rarest cards relatively common, means fewer packs are opened chasing rare cards which means that fewer commons are created as a waste product. This allows your quality commons, like the card draw spell mentioned in the anecdote, to actually satisfy customers who are opening packs. By making the product available when the set is new, we satisfy the first half of the collector’s paradox and have made the cards cheap when the collector buys them. Now, we need to satisfy the second half. If customers are routinely satisfied when they open packs, you get to keep them as customers set after set. Then, if you can occasionally add a new customer, you get a growing player base. If the player base continues to grow, and the supply of old sets satisfied the old demand, then you get purchase pressure on old and out of print cards. By steadily growing the game, rather than trying to spike in popularity, you steadily reward early adopters by having their collections passively grow in value. As customers learn that their collections will passively grow in value, you begin to adopt the greed motivated customers, but you get to do so in a way that does not reduce the satisfaction that your players get when opening packs. Once collectors can trust that their cards will grow in value, you will get excitement, and it will become much easier to get new collectors to adopt this hobby.
How Mount Baker Games chooses Trust
Each expansion pack in Tyryn Sentinels, the first Manifold TCG set, includes 1-2 heroes, and 23 support cards. These are collated lists, not randomized ones. There are exactly 48 different decklists that you may open when you open a pack. Among the support cards, you will find 15 commons, 6 uncommons, and 2 rares. Each of the rares is exclusive to the expansion packs, and cannot be found in the Launch Box. Since there are 48 rares in the set (12 in each color), a customer who opens a complete case (4 boxes / 48 packs) will confidently get 2 of each hero, 2 of each rare, 6 of each uncommon, and 12 of each common. We predict that your average customer should open about 12 packs of each set, your invested players may open 48, and your whales should cap at opening 72 packs. These are all fathomable numbers. Mount Baker Games is looking to roll out to a small number of stores (160 across the United States and Canada) to ensure that those stores have enough product to properly support their players. Finally, Mount Baker Games values the collections of our players and hobby stores. We will reprint cards as necessary for the growth of the game, and we will seek not to erode the trust of collectors by reprinting cards too frequently. This nuanced position will be difficult to manage, but our buyers can rest assured that we understand the significance of getting this right, and you can trust that we will make all decisions with the end goal of sustained growth, rather than short term sales. We believe that our retailers are our best advertisers, and our most important asset, and we see LGS success as publisher success.
Get in now
We’ve stated that we intend to support early investors, and that we only intend to roll out to a limited number of stores. If you want be one of those stores, or if you want your LGS to be one of those stores, have them e-mail us at sales@mountbakergames.com to get started. We are dedicated to offering products with attractive margins, and easily fathomable print runs. We choose trust because tomorrow’s players are already watching today’s promises.
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