Collectors want their cards cheap when they buy them, and expensive when they sell them. Retailers want high margins on their collectibles, but don’t want any issues restocking their games. Trading card games are too expensive, but cheap games don’t sufficiently support play spaces.
These forces are constantly at odds with each other. Relatively subtle changes in print runs or wholesale price create dramatic shifts in user experience. My name is Brad, I am a hobby store owner by profession, and I have lived through and studied these ups and downs because my livelihood depended on it. Manifold TCG was designed to try to compromise between all of these forces, and create a product that properly incentivizes all of these actors to get involved.
Lets start with the real magic. Manifold TCG is small. Our team is made up of two plurality owners who both hold down day jobs. We have no venture capital behind us. Our first print run of Tyryn Sentinels Unlimited Edition is only 2,000 launch boxes. This makes us fragile, but it is also our greatest strength. If the game is growing, everyone involved is winning. The smaller we are, the longer we can grow.
Supporting Retailers
Mount Baker Games is not selling this game directly to players. We want our buyers to have a place to play, and that means we need to support retail spaces. We support our retailers by offering keystone margins on a simple run of products that offer clear onboarding opportunities for new players.
The Launch Box is a massive brick of value, containing 80 dice, four fully functional preconstructed decks, and a ‘New Player Experience’ optimized for teaching the game. Enfranchised players will each want their own for the deckbuilding staples, collectors will each want their own for the exclusive heroes and support cards, and an uncertain group of friends who just want to try the game can reasonably split one box between four players.
Expansion Packs look expensive, with an MSRP of $9.00 USD, but they come with 23-24 cards, and include 2 Rare support cards. We like to compare them to opening two Magic: the Gathering Play Boosters. I get into this in more detail in The Small TCG Problem, but each expansion pack functions as a half deck, so a customer can purchase two packs, shuffle them together, and have a brand new deck. So these products should be easy to guide customers through, even if you’re only a gently informed seller.
For the truly informed sellers, everything about supporting collectors applies to you as well.
Supporting Players
Buying cards for a TCG can get expensive. At $9 a pack, it costs you $4.50 per rare slot. A deck has 45 support cards, is it going to cost you ($4.50 x 45 =) $202.50 to build a deck? I suppose time will tell, but we certainly don’t think so. We have used a couple avenues to keep deck costs down for you.
First, rares aren’t everything. Many card games suggest this, but we’re pretty sure we mean it. If you look at our tournament coverage on Youtube, you’ll find decks full of commons and uncommons. In Season 1 of our Promotional League, among the most played cards in each color, only Docide Thug is rare.
Second, the Launch Box is loaded. Players need to open a Launch Box in order to get the dice required for gameplay, so we made sure that box is full of excellent cards so that players want the cards rather than feeling like they need the dice. You get 180 support cards in this box, and 20 heroic cards, including 60 (20 playsets) of Launch Box exclusive supports and 16 Launch Box exclusive heroic cards.
Finally, the rares are not that rare. Tyryn Sentinels has 48 rares that appear in expansion packs, and there are 2 rares per pack. If you open 1 box, you get 24 rares. We speculate that the average player will need to acquire the Launch Box, and one Expansion Pack box of each set. At MSRP, that will cost $394 a year. That sounds like a lot, but it’s only $33 a month as a subscription to be invested and caught up in the evolving Manifold landscape. And at the end, you still have those cards in your collection!
Supporting Collectors
As the group with the most paradoxical objective, supporting collectors is a difficult task. You want your cards cheap when you buy them, and rare when you sell them. Magic and Pokémon have exploited their collectors by hiding very rare variant treatment cards either in boxes otherwise filled with trash, or in special $400 booster boxes, if you can even find them at that price. None of this actually supports the collector though. At best it supports the retailer, while in practice it supports the scalpers. Luckily, we have two tools to really support collectors.
This is a Trading Card Game. I grew up in the 90s, the last time we had a collectible craze like the one we are currently going through. In that time, I learned one adage that has served me well into my adulthood. ‘anything sold to you as a collectible is not collectible’. This game is small, that is our super power. On release, and for the first year, cards should be affordable. We will continue to print cards to satisfy demand, so that players can get cards. However, demand will grow. If we have two thousand players in 2025, and sixteen thousand in 2028, then if our old sets satisfied old demand, we did not print enough to satisfy new demand. Acquire your rares and hold them. As long as the game continues to grow, those cards will continue to accumulate value. There will be a competitive rotation, so there will be a dropoff in demand (after approximately two years), but that is a good thing. Once a card leaves our flagship format, we don’t need to print more to support players, which means those cards can continue to appreciate into vintage Manifold cardboard.
The second tool is limited print run promos. While we will print Expansion Boxes for as long as the set is legal in our flagship format, our promotional cards are all designed with a specific print run in mind. Currently there are two runs of promos that exist, Promotional Series and Community Rewards.
Promotional Series cards are distributed by Mount Baker Games at sponsored events. If you play in our tournaments or participate in our activities at conventions, you can get Promotional Series cards. Promotional Series 1 are foil heroes, and we printed only 50 of each.
Community Rewards promos are given to our retailers to help them support their space and communities. Community Rewards 1 are variant extended art treatments of 8 popular commons and uncommons from Tyryn Sentinels. It has a print run of 2,000 of each card. Retailers have great latitude in how they are allowed to distribute these promos, so your best bet is to cozy up to a retailer, and buy enough packs from them that they want to cut you into the sweet limited cards.
Wrapping up
All of this combines to mean we’re focusing on support retailers, so that retailers can focus on supporting players. By growing the game, and increasing the number of players, we increase demand for cards, which ultimately helps collectors, hopefully without incentivizing scalping.
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