Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro’s remarkable ability to use excess packaging on their primary gaming product – Magic: The Gathering – has gotten truly ridiculous in the last couple of years, and every new product just seems to get worse. My favorite until recently was this “premium deck” of foiled Slivers – take a look at it and then realize that, given the contents within that clamshell, one could fit in four copies of all contents in the volume taken up by that plastic case. Maybe five.
But apparently the Sliver deck wasn’t wasteful enough, because now there’s this:
![](/images/magicfoil1.jpg)
This is the “premium all-foil” special edition Shards of Alara booster pack. Looks innocuous, but this is the thing: it contains one booster pack of cards. For those unfamiliar with the concept, here is a picture of a nerd (or possibly a hipster being ironic) holding up a booster pack next to his head.
And where is the actual booster pack (which, needless to say, comes wrapped in its own booster pack wrap within the larger amount of packaging)? Why, here it is!
![](/images/magicfoil2.jpg)
Imagine how much less space just shipping a boxful of the booster packs would take. And in turn, less energy and cost.
However, I understand that Wizards has its smartest people over in the creative department, where they come up with amazing new worlds that all happen to have goblins and merfolk and elves.1 So, really, can you blame them for putting all this extraneous crap on one lousy booster pack? Of course you can’t.
- Their latest one is “world with goblins and merfolk and elves where there are giant floating rocks, and the giant floating rocks are magical.“ [↩]
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“Their latest one is “world with goblins and merfolk and elves where there are giant floating rocks”
Wait… isn’t that what’s Serra’s Plane was? Back in the Urza’s Cycle?
It’s not a marketing thing, it’s an anti-theft thing. Booster packs, being small, are easily, um…boosted. 🙂 The larger the package, the harder it is to conceal it.
This is also true of male prostitutes.
What John Seavey said. This is what happens when your cards get sold at Wal*Mart.
There’s a bit of marketing in there in that they made it a funky shape to make it stand out from the other single booster packs of cards sealed into plastic tombs that hang from pegs, but the amount of material is about the same as what I see on the card rack at any Big Box Chain store – in fact this one seems to be entirely made of cardboard with no plastic at all, which makes it somewhat less wasteful (or at least more recyclable) than the typical sarcophagus that the Big Box stores seem to want to hang from their pegs.
The MSRP for those premium foil packs are also $8.99 apiece. The extra packaging cost is pretty obviously being passed down to the consumer. It’s designed for a couple of things:
– Be Eye Catching (size)
– Be weighty (false impression of value)
– Try to justify spending for higher price (all foil cards!, again with the false impression of value)
It’s just their method of trying to move excess product at a premium price.
–Rawr
So…
http://www.majorspoilers.com/archives/31620.htm/
I really really wanted to see your name in that article…
You know, this things been Gathering for nearly 20 years now. Isn’t it about time they started doing whatever it is they’ve been Gathering for?
Or are they suffering from mana burn?
But they apparently just got rid of mana burn! So who knows, man.
Been a lot of years since I’ve played, but… no more mana burn? Why?
Because one too many ten-year-olds poked out their friend’s eye when they were informed that they got mana burn for forgetting to untap their lands, only those lands were totally untapped, Mark just bumped them with his feet when he went to get a coke.
I am constantly reminded how very glad I am that I never succumbed to Crack, the Gathering. It was a huge money sink when it started, and it’s only gotten worse.
Its not that bad a money sink if you don’t chase rare cards. After tournaments at one of the local game shops I’d wander the floor and just pick up dozens of common and uncommon cards that the kids would toss to the floor since they weren’t rare enough. I haven’t bought a booster pack in YEARS and I’ve got cards from all kinds of later sets…
Having worked at a gaming store, I can totally confirm that the size of this package is solely intended to be a theft deterrent. Booster packs piled neatly in a box works fine on a counter vigilantly watched by a cashier, better yet under glass or on a rack behind the cash wrap. For the big box stores that want to hang it on a rack and forget about it? They need something a little less perfectly pocket sized.
Cause the way kids are with Magic, there are kids I saw that would never in a million years steal a candy bar, but would rip off a pack of magic in a new york minute. The pewter Warhammer Minis on cards are almost as bad.
I believe the man holding up those cards is Robert Florence: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2esVjqYEbk
They got rid of mana burn in 10th edition rules. In 15 years of playing I have taken mana burn maybe twice. From a minimalist game design standpoint, the idea of keeping mana burn, a rule which comes into effect only rarely and is usually used only to abuse certain cards (say, a card that activates only if you have less health than the opponent) just didn’t make sense.
BlackBloc: They didn’t get rid of mana burn in 10th Edition. They got rid of it in “Magic 2010.” Which is abbreviated as “M10” on the cards (and was released in 2009, just like car model years, which are also fucking obnoxious that way). But it’s the 11th core set. Nice job, WOTC.
My understanding is that they got rid of mana burn because it was cramping their ability to implement certain cards.
For example: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=46724
They made this card “you control target player’s next turn”, only to find that the smart players would just tap all of their opponent’s lands and pass the turn instead of what wizards intended when they created the card in the first place.
Whoops – meant to link Sorin, there.
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=195403
Mindslaver has a caveat about no mana burn.
guyincorporated: actually, the ‘no mana burn’ caveat is in the rules for controlling another player’s turn, and not just on Mindslaver. Blackbloc’s got it: they got rid of mana burn because it rarely, if ever, actually mattered.