On November 12th, TCGPlayer announced that they were now the “preferred online marketplace” of Wizards of the Coast, and the world kept on turning as if nothing at all had happened. The news went virtually un-reported. If you search for it online, the coverage results include Magic Untapped, Tech Raptor, Draftsim, ICv2, MTGSalvation (did you know that site is still around? who remembers rancored elf?), and Venture Beat.
Now, those are all decent enough content sites but this was essentially an expanded partnership between eBay (current market cap $37B) and Hasbro (current market cap $11.4B). Where was the coverage on IGN? Game Informer? Wired? Sure it’s not really video game territory but this was earth-shaking news, wasn’t it?
You might be wondering right now if we here at HotC covered the news, and the answer is no, we did not. The reason we did not is because my immediate reaction was about 2500 words that was mostly laced with expletives and “hot takes” and I needed (3 weeks apparently) to cool off and write a more reasonable analysis.
And here we are.
Has anything changed since the merger? Not really. EBay stock is down about $5 a share and Hasbro stock is up about $2 a share since the partnership. Reddit is still full of posts about messed up TCGPlayer direct orders. It will be interesting to see if this announcement gets any mention in upcoming earnings reports by either company. I expect for EBay this is nothing but for Wizards it will likely make the news (since Magic is now their only cash cow).
Practically speaking the partnership is likely too new to have affected the LGS experience. Wizards and TCGPlayer claim this will help people support WPN Stores. That’s an interesting perspective. Not all stores are WPN stores. My own local shop is a small locally owned knitting store that also dabbles in war-gaming and carries Magic as well. They organize a weekly Commander night at a local veterans hall. They’ll never be a WPN store and they’ll never sell singles but they’re the only store I have any intention of supporting.
If WPN Stores are the theoretical winner in all this, are non-WPN stores the loser? Maybe, maybe not. It probably depends on whether or not they’re selling singles. Are the large singles sellers without a WPN front the big losers? Maybe. The margins on selling singles are incredibly thin these days. Thanks to booster fun, Cube, and Commander (all to varying degrees) most retailers can’t just carry a fat stack of the most popular cards and rake in the dough on the convention floor.
If you’re like me, you probably go from vendor to vendor at MagicCon searching specifically for the one Island or Forest, you know, with that specific art and the special foil treatment from that one Doctor Who Commander Deck that’s never going to ever get printed again so you can get Kieran Yanner to sign it before the end of the weekend.
Just me?
But still, odds are you now spend more time thinking about which specific version of Sol Ring, or Command Tower, or your Commander, that you want to run. And not everyone is going to have it. New hotness? Sure, back in Vegas everyone had surge foil Final Fantasy character cards. But that hype dies quick and no one can vend that large a backlog.
So yes, if this takes sales away from those vendors, they’ll be losers in this deal.
Will Card Kingdom be a loser in this deal? Maybe, maybe not. They’re a major competitor to TCGPlayer and in full disclosure they were the primary sponsor of this site for many years (along with many other fantastic content creators) and we still partner with Card Kingdom for referral sales (we had one talk maybe 10 years ago about partnering with TCGPlayer but the margins were too small at the time).
Card Kingdom has Mox Boarding House and their customer service reputation to rest on. TCGPlayer has its union busting tactics. I think the comparison here is very interesting because it certainly challenges the “Go Woke, Go Broke” philosophy. From an independent perspective, TCGPlayer ships faster than CK ever will, and has an inventory of cards that CK will never dream of matching. But CK stakes its business on its reputation and in a world where companies seem to be racing to the bottom to sell their employees out to ChatGPT, consumers can still vote with their dollars and many of them vote for Card Kingdom.
So no, I don’t think Card Kingdom will be a loser in this deal.
I think the biggest loser in this deal will be retailers who are not only not WPN stores, but are also not located in North America. If you go into TCGPlayer and change your shipping location from the United States to another Magic hot bed like Brazil, or Germany, or Japan, you’ll quickly see several hundred results turn into a half-dozen.
European players still have CardMarket and Hareruya, to name a few, but why wouldn’t Wizards partner with more regional online distributors? This continues a growing trend of Wizards’ focus on the US market almost exclusively (almost being the cool stuff the Japan market occasionally gets). This is strongly evidenced by the placement of MagicFest conventions which have mostly been domestic.
But, in the end, it’s likely that this news may mean absolutely nothing. If retail hobby businesses end up collapsing it isn’t going to be because they couldn’t get WPN status and ship enough singles on TCGPlayer. The economy is already in shambles, and game stores have been under threat for a long time. Covid helped prop a lot of hobbies up but that bubble is deflating, and the US Economy looks to be entering a steep decline soon (if you don’t believe me just check out the fact that the government decided not to publish a jobs report last month).
So maybe my expletive-laced rant was unjustified, and this is really a nothing announcement, because neither company’s consumers really give a shit. Magic players are either gonna buy singles from TCGPlayer or they’re not. I think everyone knows exactly what they’re getting at this point. At the end of the day TCGPlayer and Wizards may end up being the biggest losers here if more consumers decide to vote against this merger with their wallets by picking smaller vendors like Card Kingdom, CoolStuff Inc., Troll and Toad, Face to Face Games, 9 to 5 Magic, honestly the list goes on.
Check your local LGS, especially if its a WPN store. Do they even care?