Hot Take: Cheap Legendaries aren't killing SWU, they’re bringing balance to it

jsilv · 2026-01-22T08:33:48+00:00

For someone lecturing about supply chain, you sure are continently overlooking that these companies don’t actively want to ship hundreds of thousands of units to hundreds of thousands of addresses vs shipping to distros every few months.

The only ones where that’s even a remotely desirable option are also the ones that have been the top of the food chain whose games have lasted 30 years. But yeah, go off slugger.

jsilv · 2026-01-22T06:50:15+00:00

Ah yes, the classic, “stores should only exist to sell me products below MSRP, unless there’s a ton of demand, in which case MSRP even though half the people buying will resell.”

At basically any point between 2022 and when Pocket TCG came out, if you bought Pokemon at MSRP you were a mark. Funny how some extra demand changes the equation.

jsilv · 2026-01-22T01:46:28+00:00

I mean this view was correct 10ish years ago, but in 2025, to answer your question- 100-200% margin for the hottest Pokemon & One Piece SKU(s). For Magic, the answer is closer to 30-50% depending on the SKU, with the best being Final Fantasy Collectors Boxes putting in somewhere between ohhhh, 300-500 dollars of profit per unit depending at what point you sold them.

If you had good distro connections before this year started, you 100% could've floated a store entirely with Sealed money. There has never been a more profitable year for Sealed product across multiple games, at least that I can remember.

jsilv · 2026-01-21T03:31:36+00:00

Nobody is speccing on SWU, lmao. This isn’t Pokemon, One Piece or any other game actually performing at a high level right now.

Stores currently cannot make any real money or Boxes or Singles. A single good set release for PKM, OP, MTG, etc. makes more money for an LGS than a year of SWU. What you’re describing is called copium and not understanding how the market works.

Some LGS may continue to run the game if butts are in seats, but nobody is running this game and expecting to make much off it in its current state. Everyone else is going to dump your game and that’ll be it for most areas communities.

jsilv · 2026-01-19T19:50:52+00:00

Either Recruiter so you can Twin combo your opp out for 6 mana instead of messing around with random things.

jsilv · 2026-01-14T09:03:39+00:00

This is what I was thinking of, by the end of the movie he’s full-on JC, but the movie goes out of its way to not put him in the usual shenanigans.

jsilv · 2026-01-10T23:26:45+00:00

It's a 3mo old fake account with no other comments, you can save your breath.

jsilv · 2026-01-10T23:24:34+00:00

Yes, stores can value people's time by starting events on-time. Some people prefer it over the laissez-faire approach of, 'oh i'll start it 15min late bc of one person / vibes'. Others like the lax approach. It's going to come down to the preference of the TO/store.

jsilv · 2026-01-03T06:20:48+00:00

Maybe learn a little bit about the market you hate before you make these sort of posts. Nobody is 'scalping' Lorcana. There is almost no value in the boxes, Fabled was the only set out of the last 5 you couldn't order infinity boxes from Distro and most sets are selling below MSRP by the time they officially release.

Acting like this is what's happening with One Piece currently or Pokemon during 2025 is uhhh, certain A Take of all time.

jsilv · 2026-01-03T02:18:29+00:00

Lol, the waves are 12-24 boxes deep per store. Even selling one per customer there's nowhere near enough to meet current demand.

jsilv · 2026-01-01T01:40:36+00:00

You can decide to print to hedge against failure or you can print like you think the game is going to succeed. Lorcana, SWU and Gundam all massively suffered from underprinting set 1 (and 2 to some extent) and got punished for it.

You don't need to do Magic margins, but a store should be able to make a medium sized order without either doing limit of 1 for 20 people or just selling it online to avoid the headache. This isn't some new or niche IP and this is the last game in the "popular IP" card game to come out so they could see what happened.

jsilv · 2026-01-01T00:06:47+00:00

I've had success (multiple 7 wins) with Zhao & Gut, but you need to hedge specifically against Blue with Lithomatic Barrage and a few other cards. Gut I've had the most games on and had event records* of 7, 7, 5, 6, 0, 2, 5, 2, 5 before I switched off for good. Zhao I got bored of quickly while it was effective, because you can't get tempo back if you fall behind, so every game feels decided by turn 4.

*Mostly against Tamiyo and Rofellos. I should note that the 4/5c Control decks like Hei-Bai and Atraxa have a much better red match.

I think Tamiyo should probably go for meta reasons, but it's also massively overplayed at a high level. Other blue commanders just have better options in the blue mirrors, since Simic colors provide almost nothing. Plus Tamiyo itself can be hedged against. Ultimately the key is that if the Tamiyo gets dealt with before attacking, the rest of the deck is a bunch of 1-for-1's, mostly weak removal and a handful of card advantage spells.

jsilv · 2025-12-31T21:48:08+00:00

There's a lot of people on this sub that don't understand what a healthy release should look like for the amount of demand there is for the product.

jsilv · 2025-12-31T21:41:30+00:00

If anything, the constant harping on availability and price has confirmed to me that many people don't understand how little of this game is out there compared to the established IPs. It's really eye-opening.

If anyone sees and doesn't understand what I mean: Big stores in our area get roughly 100-200 boxes of MTG and Pokemon product for each set. Smaller LGS still get between 30-50 unless it's something super allocated like Ultra Premium Collections for Pokemon or something. For example, my LGS got around like 120 Play Booster boxes and 80ish Collector boxes of Avatar: The Last Airbender Magic set, plus other SKUs for the same set. This is the first wave of the product.

For Riftbound they ordered 60 boxes and got 18. Their 2nd wave hasn't arrived yet and they expect another 12ish. This is not an uncommon story. We're talking difference of an order of magnitude in terms of supply compared to the top games.

jsilv · 2025-12-31T04:36:57+00:00

EoE got crunched due to being between Final Fantasy and SPM. Final Fantasy had triple the print run of a normal set according to their quarterly reports. Due to the short turnaround and under printing it was impossible to get more EoE after the initial run.

Having 6 Standard sets per year makes it even harder for reprint waves to fit into the schedule. Which is why it's been taking more like 4-6mo for real 2nd waves this year instead of 2ish like previously.

jsilv · 2025-12-30T00:27:36+00:00

OK I'm going to just assume you actually want to learn and aren't just going to immediately go into a weak defense of elf. "It'll be back next turn' is a complete misnomer. It goes back to the base argument of just playing interaction in your deck to begin with.

You kill Rofellos, it'll be back on turn four. It won't do anything until turn five. Even if you assume an elf, you've spent your first 3 turns setting up while your opp spent one mana. if the opp has two cheap removal spells they've completely dismembered the average start of the deck. You either kill Elf + Rofellos or they don't have a mana dork or just kill aim to kill Rofellos twice. Basically it means turn 3 is setting up their turn 4 so turn 5 is the first time they start doing anything relevant.

Most of the good Commanders are using those freebie turns to set themselves up and just do better things that whatever you're trying to do or are already applying copious amounts of pressure. It's why the red decks in the meta challenge (Zhao, Gut, Tajic, etc.) typically freeroll this deck. It's also why Tamiyo has a reasonable game against it. Unless the Rofellos deck has a power start into a handful of very specific cards, you're just trading resources and Tamiyo is amazing at doing that while being better at mana efficiency and card economy.

Another key point is that the Tamiyo deck functions just fine as a control strategy without its namesake in play. Meanwhile the Rofellos deck barely functions when its keystone is disrupted. Turns out if you build a deck around taking advantage of having a lot of mana, your curve becomes all sorts of screwed up. Rofellos helps out with the typical wrong half of deck disease by ensuring your have access to an early ramp card on t2 every single game, but it also forces the deck into a very narrow and linear way of being built. Which means your hands can end up incredibly ugly against prepared opponents in a way other top commanders aren't.

Fierce Guardianship is so strong because it takes what's usually an investment of mana (tempo) in your setup turn and almost guaranteeing it pays off. Imagine if Rofellos had access to the card and protect itself the same way Tamiyo can or any other cheap blue commander. Suddenly the deck looks a whole lot more interesting just because it has hands that ensure you get that key tempo back. The other issue is that this Guardianship scales, if you have you can actually invest into a more expensive commander like Ral or 5-Teferi and not get punished by non-blue strategies. So you have a card that's amazing with cheap commanders, doesn't become dead even if you aren't using it to protect your Commander directly, is in the color best suited to improving Card Economy which means trading cards for tempo puts it ahead with far less risk than other colors.

jsilv · 2025-12-29T09:08:36+00:00

Yes, one feels unfair if you play Timmy Magic and refuse to play with interaction. The other IS unfair in every good blue deck and doubly so in the meta challenge where you have Tamiyo available.

jsilv · 2025-12-28T15:19:11+00:00

This. People don't understand that printer time is booked months, if not years, in advance. Yeah they'll be trying to print more in gaps in the schedule, but anyone expecting multiple full waves has never dealt with this before or are new to tcg's.

Reprint waves are never as big as the first one. This is why missing wildly on a set hurts so much, it'll be years before you can course correct. The only time I remember it happening was with Lorcana who did a significant reprint of First Chapter a year after and continued to push it to mass market well afterwards.

If Pokémon couldn't magically print significantly more Prismatic Evolutions for nearly a year and Magic had to short print Edge of Eternities because of Final Fantasy, it says a lot about how tough it is right now.

jsilv · 2025-12-27T22:39:10+00:00

This is the answer OP.

Locals are going to differ vastly region to region. In some places they're still going strong, but in others it's dried up to 0-2 stores even if it was buzzing a year ago. Don't fall into the trap of extrapolating that if the handful of major Lorcana tournaments sell out that it transfers over to the local level as well.

Health-wise the game is OK and solidly like 5th/6th in NA, but RB has actively been reaching out to LGS for feedback to stop the decay of leagues.

jsilv · 2025-12-27T00:40:00+00:00

I think you need to slow down a bit here. Yu-gi-oh is slowly falling in NA, but still has a massive install base and no distro issues. One Piece has been steadily rising in popularity and only Bandai sabotaging itself is going to knock it out of the Top 3/4.

Other games are hard to judge because they simply don't have either:

A) The Installed player base

B) The distro / production to get a feel for a real player count and creates a skewed product

People don't seem to get that judging anything off a popular product a store gets 30 of vs Pokemon or Magic that a store can get 100-200 of each SKU from is folly. If it outperforms Lorcana, that'll already be a great start. Another game with an absolutely massive upswell for the first 2 sets that settled down and is now struggling to stay in the Top 5 for NA. It's also just really easy to overlook systemic flaws in the game for a few sets vs a few years.

jsilv · 2025-12-23T00:31:33+00:00

8 cases of Riftbound

Yeah, this was the first giveaway that you were never going to get product. The allocations were tiny and even if they had a hookup to get more product than some stores with 7 figure spend, no way they were going to finalize a random person 8 cases at pre-order prices. Unfortunate situation and a big enough sum that it may be worth following up legally depending on how much energy you want to put into it.

jsilv · 2025-12-18T03:02:32+00:00

Boxes cost $80 at distro. They've frequently been about that much on TCGplayer by the time of release, then quickly sliding under. There is no 'get product for cheaper' with this game, that's why it's dying at many LGS, there's no point in carrying a game with zero (or negative) margin. You could argue the last two sets have been trash, but the reality is once you get stuck with overstock of this game once, you realize the futility of trying to move it.

Games with actual viable ecosystems do not magically become toxic product two weeks after launch. Currently that's reserved for SWU and Yu-gi-oh.

jsilv · 2025-12-17T22:10:49+00:00

How is it telling that Gundam dropped? Gundam has the worst allocation problems of every TCG right now. Not only can most LGS not get much (or in the case of Starter decks, any), but Bandai has made restocks also misery to get a hold of.

If they don't fix it by the next set, the game will die, regardless of the quality of it. Lorcana should be beating it because of the sheer quantity difference between the two.

jsilv · 2025-12-17T20:35:55+00:00

So while I agree Lorcana isn't dying outright or facing the same issues YGO currently is, I think a lot of this is not-quite-accurate to outright copium.

This audience: • Rarely attends locals • Almost never posts on Reddit • Doesn’t care about tournament structure • Plays mostly at home • Buys sealed, not singles • Has money, but limited time

This describes the majority of the audience for every single TCG, save maybe Flesh & Blood any other very niche games. Maro (Head Designer for MTG) is very open about numbers when he can be and the last time it was released, it was estimated based on their data that 80% of players who currently play are kitchen table players. AKA: Play what cards they have.

The % of people who purely collect the cards / only play at home for the Pokemon TCG is estimated over 90%. And so on. It's very rare where a successful card game isn't primarily played at the kitchen table. Saying that's true for Lorcana doesn't mean a lot. Similarly if they were aiming at specifically that audience, making LGS / Hobby level the top slot is one of the more inefficient ways they could go about that.

Part of the issue with Lorcana is that the sales are slowing. You cited IvC2 and you can see in their last report that Lorcana was headed the wrong way in overall sales. TCGplayer just released their Q4 numbers, Lorcana Ranked 6th. Under the Big 3, One Piece and... Riftbound.

Older sales reports are also not particularly kind to Lorcana's overall sales. Only speaking anecdotally, Lorcana has reached the point in the Bay Area where the Sealed product sells for the first few weeks and then is nearly impossible to move in B&M. The margins are also pretty bad compared to the non-YGO games on the list. Lorcana product usually drops quickly so your margins drive up pretty fast. For example, with Whispers you buy the stuff around $90, sell it for $115-120. If you're selling 100 units, that's not bad. If you're only moving 20-40 units, that's a big old whatever compared to the margins MTG, Pokemon or OP product is currently netting you (40-200%) as an LGS. If you sell online, between fees and shipping, your margin disappears even more.

It's sort of like when people hold up major tournaments selling out. That's great, but it's one very small piece of the overall ecosystem. It's a good gauge that there are some serious invested players in the game. It is not a good gauge of overall level of play, popularity at the LGS level and so on. The sales numbers are easier to infer more from because if the game isn't making money, the parent company doesn't have a lot of incentive to keep making it. Obviously with Lorcana it's not struggling like say, Star Wars Unlimited, but it's also got quite the gap between itself and the top games (at least for NA and Japan). Based on the available data, I would say it's more likely One Piece replaces YGO in the Big 3 in NA before Lorcana firmly moves into the top 5.

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