The Whole Buffalo: Increasing card availability in SA

‘use the whole buffalo’

To ‘use the whole buffalo’ is a saying about using resources efficiently and not letting anything go to waste. It’s based on an observation about Native Americans which is that they would, well, use every part of each buffalo they hunted. Even the icky bits. American settlers took a different approach; there were millions upon millions of buffalo, so why shouldn’t they just eat the bits that they like? The end result is that there aren’t any buffalo left in America .

The lesson there is that if you want to keep eating steak, you need to find a use for intestines. Here in South Africa, we could stand to treat boosters the same way. We pay a lot more for boosters than Americans do, so we have to use a lot more of their contents before their value matches their price.

Channelfireball.com retails booster boxes at $100. Here the price point is more like R2600 or around $175 at the current exchange rate, although that could easily change by this afternoon. If the cost of wheat went up by 75% you wouldn’t expect the price of bread to stay the same. Our single card values are tied to international prices, however; a mismatch bound to tighten profit margins for our stores and put constraints on supply.

Shadows over Innistrad

Let’s take a look at the most recent set, Shadows Over Innistrad. Using Starcitygames.com pricing we can determine that the expected value of all rares and mythic rares in a box of SOI, including those from the double-faced card (DFC) slot, is $163. I can’t lay claim to originality in this analysis; SaffronOlive did the same thing over on MTGGoldfish.com, albeit ending up with a much lower value as a result of using prices from completed E-Bay sales. Locally we tend to adhere to SCG pricing, however, so that’s what I used for my analysis.

Of the $163 total, $30 comes from bulk cards (rares at $2 and below and mythics at $4 and below). Those values are a little bit arbitrary but in general, a rare that is being played a fair amount will be valued over $2 at this stage of its life-cycle, while a mythic just needs to not be terrible to start out at $5. The chase cards, rares above $2 and mythics above $4 contribute $133.

Foils also help out, adding $5 to $10 to the value of the box. Commons and uncommon add a little bit more, leaving us with a total expected value more or less in line with retail price. Assuming a modest mark-up involved in that retail price, our online sellers are looking at decidedly slim margins on a box unless they manage to sell the majority of its contents.

The Problem

Every part of the buffalo indeed. The reason this poses a problem is that demand for bulk cards is easily met, resulting in a situation where there’s still aggressive demand for chase cards but stores can’t make a profit by opening more boxes. The situation gets worse quickly as a set’s time on shelves stretches. Similar analysis for Oath of the Gatewatch reveals a total Expected Value of $98 from mythics and rares, with $76 from chase cards and $22 from bulk.

What this tells us is that an online seller in SA can’t make a profit just from chase cards; they rely on selling bulk cards for their profit. They’re also on a clock; once a set has been on the shelves for a few months it becomes impossible to turn a profit on it.

The result that we would expect for our online marketplace is that standard playable cards will sell out rapidly without much prospect of fresh supply later on. Buyouts certainly don’t help, although the numbers indicate that there would be a bottleneck with or without them.

The Evidence

It’s surprisingly easy to corroborate this premise, thanks to the existence of an excellent site, planeswalk.co.za, which aggregates stock and pricing from local online stores, making it quick and easy to get a picture of card availability.

Jim Davis’s winning decklist from the weekend’s SCG Open in Baltimore has eighteen rares across the mainboard and sideboard. Of these, thirteen are completely sold out across four sites listed on planeswalk.co.za. Of the other five rare cards from Jim’s list, four are sold out at three sites and in stock at only one. Only two cards are available in a full playset, with Fortified Village having exactly four copies available. For those interested, the one widely available card is Invocation of Saint Traft, of which Jim played a single copy in his sideboard and which he later said he would cut from the list going forward.

Bant Company by Jim Davis

SCG Standard Open Baltimore, 1st Place

If a South African player takes a shine to that deck and decides to buy the cards online, he or she would currently only be able to get 5 of the 44 rares in the deck. And, like the exchange rate, that number could easily change by this afternoon.

By contrast, bulk rares are already available in great abundance. I looked at cheap Shadows Over Innistrad rares on planeswalk.co.za at a few different price points to get an idea of where local stores are right now in terms of moving those bulk rares. The price points are the SCG prices and I just averaged the first three cards on the list at each price point...

• $0.50 rares: 38 copies available on average;
• $1.00 rares: 26 copies available;
• $1.50 rares: 17 copies available;
• $2.00 rares: 14 copies available;
• $3.00 rares: 10 copies available.

The state of affairs as of this morning is therefore as follows: Our stores are already getting stuck with bulk rares, so they cannot restock competitive Standard cards without risking a loss on each additional box they open. Fringe playables at the $3 price point are also starting to slow down in sales, which really starts to shave those margins and make it an increasingly risky prospect to crack more packs.

This poses something of a problem because with the current stock availability it is impossible to build a competitive Standard deck by buying singles online.

The Tradeoff

This leaves individual trading as the only recourse for any player currently seeking to build a deck without paying hefty customs and shipping on an international order. For some this is all well and good; there are those who actively enjoy the process of negotiating trades and meeting up for exchanges of cards or cash. Others do not. For them, the prospect of getting on the trading group to get hold of a few cards is at best a tolerable irritation.

The prospect of chasing down 40-odd rares for a deck is something else entirely. Some people simply lack the time or inclination for that quantity of hassle. Magic is a hobby; people are literally paying money to have fun. Make the process frustrating or difficult and they will find something else to do. If I had to spend hours wandering around trading for popcorn and tickets in order to watch a movie, you’d never see me in a cinema.

Let’s not forget that there are others who are quite justified in feeling intimidated at the prospect of using the trading group to acquire a deck. Face it, this is South Africa. If a daughter of mine told me she was going out to exchange goods with strange men she found on the internet I would not let her leave with her pepper spray and tazer.

I’m not claiming that new players or minorities are locked out of trading as a means of building decks, just that it’s desirable for there to be a range of options. For most people, trading around instead of buying online is merely inconvenient. Inconvenience is a deterrent, however, and from a large sample of people some percentage will inevitably be deterred. Someone sitting on the fence about starting competitive Magic will be decidedly susceptible to being discouraged, so convenient card availability will always be a pivotal factor in the growth of the player base.

It is presumably just a small subset of players that are lost this way but have no doubt that small details can be the difference between growth and stagnation. Anyone with a vested interest in the growth of the SA player base therefore has a reason to want card availability to improve.

The recent wilting of turnout at Standard events can’t be solely attributed to this phenomenon; not when recent iterations of Standard have featured decks valued in excess of $1,000. That’s a factor beyond our control, of course, so we have to look at things that stand to be improved on a local level. This brings us back to the analogy of the buffalo; what can we do with those intestines?

Some Solutions

Now, it’s important here to clarify here who I am referring to. The phrases “we need” or “the community needs” are internet synonyms for “I want” so it’s important to avoid vagueness. The tweaks I’m suggesting are applicable to store owners and tournament organisers interested in long-term player-base growth. Some particularly community-minded players may also be inclined to take note.

The first approach to using the whole buffalo is to diversify formats. At the very least this offers players an alternative to formats that are constrained by card availability. This has already happened to some extent with Modern taking over as the country’s most popular format. This goes some way toward addressing the problem; Modern has a vast card pool and a dizzying array of playable decks, so it’s a format less likely to run into a bottleneck .

Format diversification can do more than just offer alternatives, however. It can bring out cards that would otherwise never see the inside of a sleeve, adding to the value extracted from each booster. There are some positive signs in this area already, with Roland Richartz pioneering Peasant tournaments at Top Deck. Meanwhile, Exalted Games, among others, has made Tiny Leaders a regular part of their tournament program. If fringe formats like these really take off we can expect Standard to grow with them as the extra boosters opened yield up more of those scarce Standard staples.

The second approach toward using the whole buffalo is to look for ways to add value to the experience of opening a booster. Peeling open a pack and flicking your way to the rare is fun for a little while, but it doesn’t compare to the experience of drafting. Pushing draft as a format promises to get more cards into circulation. Collectors of full sets and foils also add value to packs by scooping up cards regardless of playability.

Boosters themselves aren’t the only place where value can be added. Any improvement to the game’s play experience brings value into the system too. Coverage is one approach to this, using the tournament to create entertainment and also enrich the tournament experience for players. This area is a potential goldmine of ways to grow the game and make your store stand out at the same time. Top Deck has a cappuccino machine, for example. That’s added value right there.

The third approach to using the whole buffalo is to foster casual play. Kitchen-table players see cards differently to the competitive crowd. They don’t necessarily care about the winning lists from the weekend’s tournaments, so in their hands certain cards have more value.

These are things that SA Magic needs more than most other countries do. The disparity in booster prices means that we simply don’t have the same supply/demand curve you see in America. It makes sense for our tournament scene to look a little different too. We can’t expect to see the same growth as them if we just do the same things they do; for real growth we need to structure things a little differently. With our boosters costing 75% more than theirs, we won’t have the same incentives for cracking them unless we manage to extract a lot more value out of them.

Building a following for fringe formats doesn’t pay off quickly. It takes time and effort. Improving tournament experience takes creativity and experimentation. Casual players aren’t the cash cows the way competitive players are, so focusing on them seems a thankless proposition for a store.

None of these things have the same immediate effect as throwing some extra prize support into a popular format but for a store owner looking for long-term growth, they will eventually be richly rewarding. In the context of SA Magic’s limited resources, they may even be necessary.