Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne talks about the prerelease of the Magic: The Gathering – Star Trek set and Wizard of the Coast product delays.
Based on prerelease numbers I am hearing from other stores, it looks as if a lot of players are choosing to skip Star Trek. Our store is seeing numbers for our prerelease events comparable to those for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles set earlier this year, which were pretty abysmal. As with other Universes Beyond sets, sales have been great, nearly triple what we have seen for the past few in-universe sets.
Sales would have been even higher if we had received our orders of Bundles and Commander decks but according to emails from Wizards of the Coast, stores will not receive their ordered Scene Boxes and Commander Decks until after the prerelease date. Commander Decks may arrive after the official hobby store release date, but that will depend on your distributor (one distributor got us our Commander Decks in time for prerelease but we are still waiting on or decks from another distributor), and Scene Boxes and Beam Me Up Bundles will arrive after the scheduled hobby game store release date.
Unfortunately, as far as skipping the set, given that WotC has made all of the Universes Beyond sets Standard format legal and given that Standard is the format that they want to promote and given that WotC releases as many Universes Beyond sets in a year as it does in-universe sets, it is hard for Standard players to skip a set. Commander players? Sure, they can wait a month or so to buy the cards they want for their deck but Standard players will probably need them. They may not “need” the Collector Boosters, but they will need cards from the set.
Not only did stores see a delay in over half of the Star Trek Universes Beyond SKUs, but they were also informed that the Dungeons & Dragons World of Warcraft Gameplay Expansion books, which were scheduled for release November 3, 2026, may not arrive in time for release on that date. This also proved true as the books arrived at varying times between the release date and November 6, 2026 with the World of Warcraft Map Packs, DM Screen and promotional figure still to arrive.
Those are two major product releases scheduled for release within days of each other with both suffering significant delays. Unlike Realty Fracture, I have not heard of any stores not receiving their prerelease materials on time, but this has become an ongoing problem with Magic: The Gathering releases and now it is creeping over into the D&D line.
Someone in management at Wizards needs to:
Look at the company’s release schedule. This has not really been a problem in the past as D&D and Magic: The Gathering releases have almost never fallen this close to one another and it should not happen again. This is not like another company choosing to release a major product at the same time WotC releases one, this is WotC choosing to release two major products within the same window of time.
Seriously examine logistics. Getting Magic product to stores on time has become a major problem for WotC. For decades the company reliably got its products to stores on time. Stores could rely on products from WotC to arrive according to a schedule released a year in advance. Not anymore. The company has a supply chain problem and someone needs to examine it.
Comments? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Source: ICv2
