Old Man Yells at Cloud: Tabletop Edition - You Can Thank Scalpers for the State of Magic the Gathering
- Eric Halliday
- Nov 29
- 5 min read
When Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast a few years back we all knew it was a bad scene. I was on the Dungeons and Dragons side of things and I saw the effects first hand. D&D Beyond, which I used to run most of my campaigns, suddenly became a realm of nickle and diming trying to drain as much money as possible from people.
For example, you used to be able to see a specific class or monster you wanted to add to your campaign and a simple $1 transaction a piece would add them to your account. But Hasbro took over and was like, "Or you could spend $60 and get that thing you wanted plus bog down your account with a ton of shit you'll never use."
I ran a D&D after school class at my kid's school and it became almost impossible for us because the new things we wanted to try suddenly left our budget. Luckily, there's a million other games out there that can be played and I always believed in "voting with your wallet."
But then they came for Magic the Gathering thanks to that Secret Lair stuff no one likes and I felt really bad.
See, "voting with your wallet" is a really powerful tool in most cases. It can show a movie studio they made a bad choice, it can make game developers go back to the drawing boards (one day NBA2K players will learn this), it can do a lot of things. But it doesn't work with things like Magic the Gathering. Why? Scalpers.
Let's rewind a moment.
tape rewind giberish noise here
What is Secret Lair?
Secret Lair is a hellish thing added to Magic the Gathering akin to the "Disney Vault". Secret Lair creates a unique deck of Magic cards, often involving a property with nothing to do with Magic like Furby, Playstation, or the recent Monster Hunters deck, and you can only buy the cards for a limited time.
When you see articles for releases from Secret Lair the majority of the comment section comes from people who play Magic the Gathering about how they just don't wan to play anymore. People asking "who asked for this". People desperately wanted Magic to focus on its own established lore instead of having all their cards replaced with characters from Doctor Who, Final Fantasy, The Last Airbender, or, again, fucking Furby.
But most of Wizards of the Coast's focus with Magic the Gathering is to scoop up as many IPs as possible and make cards out of them despite the fact that they are almost universally hated.
Which brings us back to the topic at hand.
So why don't they vote with their wallets?
This is easy. Scalpers.
See, Hasbro knows that because of the existence of Secret Lair there is an artificial scarcity that scalpers just love. So even if they came out with the most unasked for bullshit like Secret Lair x Magic the Gathering cards based off cast members of The View past and present it will sell out instantly.
Scalpers buy these sets almost immediately completely draining all inventory and the people that vote with their wallets usually end up having to deal with scalpers anyways. If a scalper can't sell it at their stupid raised prices, they'll eventually sell it at cost. At this point they've already sold a couple to other scalpers and collectors so even if they sell half at cost, they still made a profit enough to do it all again until they've bought a set that delivers a big pay day with fans of a particular franchise getting it for the silliness of it.
So even now, when Secret Lair is making public statements saying they'll "do better" because of how terrible the Monster Hunter cards were, with their clearly drawn over to fix the anatomy AI art and their typos, they're not working on making it better, they're just finding the next IP to milk and it will be a hit for them because voting with your wallet means fuck all when scalpers exist.
A couple of months from now, Wizards of the Coast and Secret Lair are going to announce the next "drop" is going to be a line of Magic cards featuring the fucking Paw Patrol or some shit, and every scalper out there is going to detach from their mother's teet, say "sayonara" to their girlfriend/body pillow, throw on their outdoor pajama pants and crocs, and go drain a Target of all of them.
I don't even buy Magic the Gathering cards, I don't, theoretically, have a dog in this hunt, but as someone who's family got together regularly to play Pokemon cards only to have the joy come to a complete stop when we realized the stores were forever empty because of the forever alone crowd, I feel for y'all. For real.
There needs to be rules in place, for sure, where companies limit how much a person can snag at once. Especially Target. Target lets people abuse their stores and employees for that easy pay day. But as long as those pay days come, they will guarantee nothing to no one.
That's why we need to stop scalpers. This is where we CAN vote with our wallets. If you see something that came out within the last two years sold out and you try to buy it online and see it only from scalpers, don't buy it. I promise you that you don't need it.
And I'm going to go one step further, if you're not playing professionally...and I'm gonna look over my shoulder when saying this...there's nothing wrong with counterfeits. I've seen this at the Pokemon Club at my kid's school. A lot of the kids parents, because it's so fucking impossible to get cards anymore, realized that you can find templates of cards online where you just upload the high quality image of 9 cards, insert a piece of card stock in a double sided printer, and then print the 9 cards.
Like, it might seem immoral but if my kid was asking me for the new Mega Charizard X EX to fill out their decks and I found out that this card that came out VERY recently only sells for like $500+ I might be finding an image and printing it. Heck, I may have already found that image:
On the fence? Sit down and hear me out.
Listen, I'm anti-piracy as FUCK, I get it. But card companies made their money already so the only people you're hurting are scalpers and I can't recommend that enough.
These fools are buying the cards you need to play your game (or that prevent your company from focusing on good cards) and letting them sit in boxes, never to actually be used in a game. The card companies don't care because, honestly, they made their bank and share holders are thrilled so as far as they're concerned if they're happy that means everyone's happy because Hasbro has no windows and therefore cannot look outside.
So when it comes down to this, if you really need that card, print it. It's like my grandpa used to say, and it's a wise adage I still use to this day, "fuck 'em".
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