I feel your pain bro. Had my own loss of close to $100k. It's a tough pill to swallow and move on. Keep up the great videos and the ship will stay on course.
Can’t wait to be home and support your shop! You don’t need to response to everyone. I hope people understand the hustle of being a business owner. Love these videos!!!
Love these videos open and gives you insight on how you your business has helped me with your info you have shared on this channel keep up the good work
Brother always always appreciate your videos. One of the most real and transparent RU-vidrs out there for any kind of genre. You know how to get yourself out of this kind of hole and I know you’ll be ok!
Love the real talk videos with the behind the scenes. Curious if you could do a video about a possible TCGPlayer union strike and what you would do as store owner during that time. Thanks!
I commend you for your transparency and how you explain the business as I don’t think many of us know or understand much (if any) of it. You’re just a real dude, with a real business, and you are providing us with an honest, no BS evaluation of how things have been going. I really hope things work out for you better than you anticipated and I hope you receive a lot of local and online support as you move forward. I live in Canada and purchase singles through eBay. What’s your seller ID?
I sell paints and models (mostly Warhammer), all I can say is thank you for your videos and keeping it real. Hobby business is not as easy (or sometimes as fun) as many people think.
love the channel. i would love to see more sorting machine clips. not everyone knows about them especially new viewers. the last vid you posted was so visceral. i could read your eyes. this was bad. this is bad. i'm not going to dump on Wizards, distributors or anyone else either. i love the physical card so this is channel i will watch. i love crackin and pack or two and drafting. i'm especially bad at drafting based on my win rate but it's still a good time to have. i wish you success and i will tune in to watch. is the A/C working?
I feel like what drew me to this channel wasn’t actually the loss-porn, but the fact you had a really good take on the market and I don’t generally get the financial analysis like that from store owners, as opposed to wholesalers like Rudy (I know he also has some stores). I’m interested to see how you get out of it. Good luck man
Basically at this point you have to presume that if Wizards is charging exorbitant prices, the point is to leave as many LGS holding the bag as possible. Because the initial inventory was snapped up, the loss and the bleeding in the distribution chain isn't their problem. They can still make investors happy with short term artificially juiced profits, and they'll keep up with the MBA graduate / Wall Street extraction behavior up until the point that the system collapses, and then turn around and go "Wha happun?"
Rudy, didn't like the price point based on his Patreons feedback. The toughest part is realizing there is only so much money Magic players have. Wizards decided that they were going to put out a medium priced set (Modern) and high priced set (Masters) with in a month and half for the second year in a row. Once LotR took off Commander Masters was doomed to be the Baldur's Gate of 2023. RNG guessed poorly, but he made it based on Double Masters 2022 Draft Boosters selling for $350 last year. The problem is you have to order too far in advance and you have to understand why a product was a success in order to know how to avoid it. For instance with DM2022 it was a rockstar because DM was short printed and the Draft Boxes were over $700 this time last year so everyone wanted that free tendies. The stores, distributors, Rudy's, and Wizards knew there was a lot of bank to be spread around on Timmy's (like me) paying 3 and half benjie's for an overprint product. People got burned as the singles dropped to nothing and when a beloved franchise came out before with the one ring card, it was over. People paying North of $450 for LotR CE when it was meant to be a $350 left like green left for the CM. Set is fine, it's got great cards in it, but it's overpriced at a time when the wallet's already emptied for a previous product.
i genuinly hopes it will get better for you, thanks for the inside informations point of view as a professionnal, on a big scale. This edition was a big red flag edition, although lots of people buy collector stuff and expensive things +3 x the normal price for the same content +reprints, and even the same illustration sometimes, it's very disapointing I don't even want one draft booster or one single of it. Hopefully, there will be more "healthy" editions, so you could get better, and slowly sell this commander edition over time (better than just stuck with it or lose money) Earn or learn, as you say, it's needed to take risks, sometimes you earn a lot, sometimes it dont' work, you hone your skills along the way, get better over time
Rudy is an Empire, he has capital and holdings in the top .10 percentile in the hobby. You sir are in real time giving the info about hard issues most people are unaware of. Rudy however has covered the exact issue you are experiencing but, alas if your working your ass off full time who has the time other than us observers. Hold Fast
Good video update Rob. Seriously honestly don't understand some of the comments (the negativity and the sense of moral superiority). Dude is trying to grow his business, and took an aggressive gamble. It's a call option that went up in flames, it happens. Learn and improve, iterate, that's the secret recipe in every industry. On a different note, thinking about getting one of those sorters as well to regain some sanity... will hit you up for some tips / do's / don'ts before taking the $20K plunge for that!
I remember my fiance's Visa got denied and then I got fired from my job 2 weeks later. Roughest month of my life. She's' here with me in USA and my wife now and I've got a much better paying job. Wish you the best. Stay strong and keep at it.
What’s the program that you use for sorting and how do you automate the physical sorting of the stacks of cards? I’ve always wanted to do something like this for my personal collection, but I’ve just been stuck doing it manually.
I hope Hasbro learns from aftermath and premium set that people are not made of money we love the game but we will not keep paying these high prices for cards. I really feel bad for LGS I grew up having to travel 30 min to get to my local lgs and I hate how hasbro is treating them thus greed has to stop
Extremely hard spot to be financially tied where WotC forces reseller to speculate with their products. Lately in smaller markets like in EU 9/10 sets have been bad or mediocre that also gives bad feeling for reseller to sell stuff customers that is well known trash. 1/10 has been amazing. Yet everything must have been preordered months before you have any information. That's just wrong.
Now idk if you want your channel to become a pack opening channel or anything but I am surprised to see that if you had to open all the packs anyways you didn’t just open them for content or RU-vid shorts or anything. Again listening to your talk sounds like you want to do something else with this channel but just a idea !! Good luck to you I’ll be watching !!
This is shows me to never invest heavy into just one game especially Magic. Not with Wizards screwing over stores. Meanwhile the Yugioh market is still booming like crazy for stores.
Yugioh is literally the least profitable card game. Reprints and power creep literally kill values other than max rarity meta staples. Also the collector market pretty much is nonexistent
@@rng-gamez I'm working with a lot of hindsight bias so take this comment with a grain of salt. But it really sounds like you projected a three-fold increase in total demand for a product that you admitted you knew nothing about other than it's name. Was it FOMO on lost sales that caused you to take this course of action? Do you think your past experience of strong/exponential growth in your home goods business might have led you to overshoot your projections? I am not trying to hate on you, in fact, I find your videos to be just incredibly informative. But if you're running automation with a retail storefront and have nearly saturated capacity of a variety of other sales channels (multiple TCGPlayer service lines, eBay, etc.), the only way to see that kind of growth would have to be some revolutionary product or innovation or new sales channel. Let's assume Hasbro/WotC actually has some future release that fit the bill. I think they've made it clear with their past actions that they will do whatever it takes to cut LGSs out of that revenue stream, so it's probably going to be a Secret Lair - Eldraine Mythic Edition type of release. It's getting really hard not to think that Hasbro has LGS-owners all pegged as bag-holders
I think a lot of people thought Commander Masters will be like Double Master. It was priced and has only 4 packs in the collector box like Double Masters.
Am pretty much done with magic. Close to 50k at the hight of my collecting. Was and still have lots of reserve list cards and a couple grand of sealed new boxes. Since magic 30th I have not spent any money aside from a black friday to pick up 40- 80 dollar set draft and a jumpstart boxes. Seemed like a waste to me and intrest rates make having cash more attractive
3 x the price probably should’ve translated to a third or less of your usual order volume, knowing it would price out a large chunk of the populace in the hobby. sorry for the rough goings though ㅠㅠ hope things movie and sell quickly in the singles department 🙏
This is not a bragging or complaining videos, its more of a hey guys this is a down time and this is why it happen, dont let it happen to you. use this as a resource for your own business
no matter how amazing this set is or could've been and even if everyone wanted to buy it, wotc just priced a lot of players out because some of us can't afford it and some of us just aren't willing to spend that much on a booster box
The set is awesome, the price is just a little bit too high. I managed to snag some cbbs for ~$160 each, which I thought was decent but slightly too high. I would definitely buy more at about $15 lower, assuming these prices stabilize. $190-200 is not going to break even unless you do really, really, really well. I have no idea how places can sell these for $300 (my local LGS). WOTC and distributors need to stop with the greed. The LGS should never have to take a haircut and they shouldn't feel like they have to squeeze their customers for every penny.
