Comic Shop Talk Diversifying How Magic the Gathering, or any TCG, Can Help Your Business
[Music] welcome back to uh comic shop talk on the tales from the flip side Channel we're talking today about magic the Gathering yeah it's not Comics we talked about diversification plenty of times it's going to be about running a comic shop and how to make profit on other items that come through your store you'll find when you open your comic shop that people are going to bring you all kinds of Collectibles when we first opened I had 10 or 15 kids that would come almost every day and like oh can we play Magic in the store and I was like what is that so I got my lesson in what magic was and saw that there was a big Community where I opened up and so I started buying magic boxes and then I became I went directly to my distributor and then through the distributor we're going to show you all the different distributors in the country that carry magic and that you can sign up to be a magic uh retail store and that's how you get in you don't go to the website and sign up you actually go to your distributor and sign up to be a magic dealer and then to run events and then there's another page to set up to run the events because you can sell Magic and not run events so that's quite possible also you won't get a product right away on release but you will be able to buy product so this is a lot of the magic prod product here we have sealed stuff they have pre-built decks they have packs and they come out every two to three months the last two years they've kind of been beating us to death a little bit too often you kind of really have to learn how to gauge what you're buying I I always sell out but it's still a very large purchase and can be I've seen stores go out of business by over over buying uh trading card games right so the great thing about this is that when you build a community we have a big play space and we run tournaments you can buy their bulk cards and we have a huge Library uh Library yes that's how we say it about a million and a half cards of Commons and uncommons for people building decks so that what that does is it creates your store as a destination and people come from a long distance to get cards that they couldn't get otherwise yes they can buy them online but when they're building an entire deck sometimes they like to go through the cards they want a different art than they could get online or they also like to come and mill in the community and then also we have 50 000 rare cards on the kiosk which we've talked about several times from TCG player we have a kiosk and it has all of our trading card games on it and then we keep all the cards here in the glass case that are in The Meta there's different card games we can put up a screenshot or something of the different formats and what they are rather than explain them all but there is several the formats Legacy Modern Vintage Pioneer Commander standard we don't have a lot of community for standard right now we basically are commander and modern so that's what we have the meta in the glass case so people can see the cards that they readily need building decks that are for those formats once we became a dealer we started running tournaments and they'd call it Friday Night Magic so every Friday night we run a particular format for that Friday night in the back of the store we have tables and that's where they play they each pay five dollars a piece and they get that back in credit so the top four will get a certain amount and then the next four basically down to the top eight of course first place gets the most money it's just like any other thing and they don't get it in cash so it's not gambling they get it in trade we make a very little bit of money on it because I mean we're not giving cash back but we are going to give the exact value back in trade so it's not like when you trade in a card and they're only going to get 50 for it this they're getting the full amount so if they won thirty dollars they can buy anything that's thirty dollars so that just adds like means we're moving product through tournaments it's not an extra money now some people have worked out where they're actually making money on the tournaments we don't have that type of community I also think that that's not not great because it is a community business and you can sour people if they don't win like five dollars is cheap enough if you know it's entertainment right so five dollars to play for four to six hours with all your buddies and meeting new people five dollars is kind of worth it right and then whether you win or you lose it's okay but when you start charging 10 15 20 it's still enjoyment but is the value there if you're going to lose every time you come out there's always winners and losers in competition and Magic is a basically I want to say basically but it's pretty close to pay to win you can buy the most expensive best deck a really good player can beat you with a lesser deck but for the most part you'll you'll win a lot with a really great deck which is good for us so if people are buying um the most expensive decks we're selling more expensive cards higher profit margin so how do you get into this well I'm going to show you so this is how you sign up to be a retail store for Magic the Gathering you go to wpn.wizards.com en for English slash distributors this will list all the Distributors if you don't currently have any of these Distributors you'll have to sign up for one of them it's a great list of also people that carry stuff you may want to carry in your store so it's a good idea if you have something near your area to sign up with one of these Distributors so here's the list Alliance Diamond Alliance you know is a subsidiary of diamond we have GTS multiple locations for GTS so something can be close to you they even have they're the only one in Hawaii you have almost all of them have a spot in New York Magazine exchange we use because they seem to have stuff later than other companies then peach tree I'm sorry I always call it Peachtree it's Peach State or PhD I have a lot of throughout the country they have a lot of locations we use Southern Hobbies it's a one-day ship from New Yorkers but they also have them across the country so you just go to one of these they have links you can then go go to their website contact them and and let them know that you'd like to sign up to be a seller of magic and they'll work out what you have to do you know you're gonna have to have your tax ID you're going to have to have if you have Corporation information you're going to need that a lot of them want like an electric bill in the name of the business you know different things different companies ask for different items you might they might want to see your credit if you want you want to get credit I don't run on credit I I think credit's the fastest thing to put you out of business after that's done you go through to whoever you want to try I suggest to sign up to as many Distributors as possible it doesn't cost you anything to be part of these distributors you might go on that site and they might have something you want or the one distributor one for the one that you're preferenced to the one you like the best may not have what you want and you go to the other one and they'll still have it in stock now how to pull to apply for wpn that's running the tournaments so that's at wpn.wizards.com en slash News slash how Dash apply Dash wpn hopefully we can somehow put these in the in the comments below if you have any questions about how to do any of this stuff you know you can just put the message in there I'm always watching to see if we have any comments and you can just put it right in the comments any questions so it goes through when you go to this webpage it goes through the whole process the application process the owner ownership verification process a video walkthrough like a lot of these places are doing that now we we just signed up for to do lorcana which is the new Disney game coming out which if you're interested in doing something like that I would get on it immediately uh you're probably either out of time or running out of time very quickly but so you have to have a video walkthrough of your store your outside signage um your play Space your bathroom you know they're going to want to to make sure that you have um facilities for people with disabilities so there's there's a lot it they if you want to be a premium store there's a lot more even a lot more to do they want to see you know your furniture your walls your glass cases all your fixtures that it's safe and clean then they have a wpn orientation program it goes through it's a very good website one page it's a pretty lengthy page but just the one page to go through the orientation requirements and depending on where you're at any missing requirements and to learn more there's articles resources and then uh if you're ready to apply it has a join us I'm just going to click that right here and it'll bring you right to the application process click where you're from hey we got some people uh watching from Brazil you can you have Brazil Europe or actually it's all of South America not just Brazil but I I do see a lot of Brazil people watching some of these shows uh Australia I know I have in Australia you are out there and then of course I'm in North America so I would hit North America and then it goes through uh your wpn overview metrics and allocations this is really important because when you first start out you're not going to be able to get as much as somebody who has a a big community that supports them strong and you know if I have a wpn event and I have 80 people at it and I can only get 60 pre-release kits then it's difficult for me to give what I need to my community so what they do is as you run events as you keep you know consistently breaking the number they'll enlarge your allocation because they want to satisfy the customers in that area yeah support resources which is really good the different programs they have how to get promotional materials and the policies to be able to continue to run your events so just under metrics and allocations they have questions which are clickable about the the metrics and allocations that the metric side the allocation sides how our promo cards allocated uh how our product allocations determined how can I update my preferred distributor that's all the different ways uh you know all the different things you're going to need to know if you're doing this it seems like it's very complicated it's not listen I run I have a second job and I have had a lot of Partners uh Through The Years helping out with a lot of these things but it real once you get it up and running it's a little bit of pain pain getting into up getting up and running but once you are in up and running very smooth very smooth and you can go back and these things are updated and you can find out different information all the time you can just go back and then you can see that they have the different programs they have about pre-release and then other programs like what is a store Championship what is a launch party uh what is buy a box uh what is a commander party so there's a lot of different programs that they have that you can use to entice more Community to come to your store you know if you're just running standard you're missing out on the commander community and they are separate some guys play all the formats but most people find a format that they're very comfortable with and they play that I'm actually thinking about starting a kitchen table program where I mean there's a lot of guys that get together at somebody's house and play and then you know sometimes that's difficult because you know something's going on at the house you usually go to or um that one guy who usually is the host can't play this week but all the other guys want to play and basically it's we have that it's called free play but I want to give something to them for coming down and hanging out at the shop so I'm trying to figure out either some kind of Mystery Pack or something to give out but always be thinking about how to do your own programs and your own promotions now the overview is gives you general information and joining the wpn it you can go back to what is required to join the wpn and if you're online or a retail only if you're eligible or not you can ask that question you can't it's it's the play like it probably goes into you you know if you create a play space and then you know that you could probably run them but if you're solely online you have no place to play so you wouldn't be running events so and it answers all the questions that you would have it's a really good website there's a lot of complaints about Wizards the coast right now about how they are raising the prices of product and the the print numbers and the and so on and so forth and the manufactured scarcity there's a lot of things there's always drama and collectibles in every single collectible there's some type of drama but as far as how the company runs their website and how they join and how they they reach Distributors uh I'm very very happy with them and I support them pretty strongly this is pretty much everything is right on this website again the district to find out your Distributors it's wpn.wizards.com en sorry en slash distributors and then the wpn [Music] to how to join is wpn.wizards.com en slash News slash how Dash apply Dash wpn and uh go ahead start some tournaments get the community at your shop make some money see how simple it is to sign up it's it's really easy and you can get started like in less than a couple of weeks we've talked about this before and it's about the profit margins in Magic the Gathering the profit margins can be tremendous so unsealed and we've shown the sealed the sealed items is around 30 percent and you know what I say thirty percent not really thirty percent that's we're buying at a thirty percent margin which means that uh it's about a eight to twelve percent margin now sometimes sealed product can go insane the Lord of the Rings uh the one ring that everybody was looking for the sealed product kept going up until the ring was found and then it it came back so we probably did 20 to 30 percent margin true margin on that sealed product uh when it went up but mostly the steel product is for the constant regular sales um and to draw people into the store as well as the tournaments that is all the draw so that you can sell the singles the profit margin in the singles can be astronomical we have a card here that we bought for four two hundred dollars back in the day Library of Alexandria that card we bought for 200 like I said and it is now 2200.
And I wouldn't take I don't think I'd take 2500 because at its peak it was eight grand so it does go they do go up and down when Cards start coming on the market when the price really blows up a lot of Cards start getting sold that have been in collections and you don't know how many there are until the price goes crazy and then they all start flooding out which brought the price down but still two grand so you know that's somewhere around ten thousand percent profit from what we bought it for but something I would rather hold on to than try to sell and to reinvest that money I'm not going to be finding too many of those at 200.
but so that's like uh that's like money in the bank you know unless the market completely crashes that's you know Collectibles if you're in the Collectibles game you're at risk anyway right all this is risk it all can go to zero tomorrow and you know I can get a crying tell out that's about it uh it's riskier than the stock market but the but it can be a lot better than stock market just checked any of these Collectibles what they were at five years ago and what they are now they all pop they outpace the stock market insanely it's something like a four or five hundred percent uh over the stock market the when I talk about buying collections I don't buy single cards one of the exceptions is magic so we will buy single cards that are in The Meta at our 40 percent because we know we'll sell it within that week a lot of other items if people are trying to sell stuff that's outside the meta which there is a lot of stuff in Magic that's outside the meta that is just a collectible then I won't buy singles I I want to buy the collection even if there are you know if they want to sell just the meta out of the collection I don't like the cherry pick if you're going to sell the collection anyway I'll buy the whole thing we buy Commons at a dollar per thousand we now are running a special where we're doing two dollars and fifty cents uh a thousand and we're giving five dollars in trade per thousand um just because we want to grow our stock again it is starting to shrink a little bit and we want to expand it again it also gives us you know something to dig through and find some hidden gems in collections now along with being able to sell the magic and to be able to sell the singles and the sealed we also have a lot of supplies that go with magic so this gives you a lot of extra skus supplies are usually if you're doing it right you're making a 50 profit on supplies everybody pretty much keeps it at the at the same rate this is just under 50 so like this is when you're getting low at like your low end option this is a low end box for a commander deck and we sell that for five dollars probably costs us around three not fifty percent uh but it's the low end option so you don't want to run it at 6.99 or something like that now you have the higher end option are like these Boulder and Trays so this allows you to hold your dice which that also gives you an option to sell a lot of dice and it also allows you to handle your cards it's a lot nicer finish it's a lot better look for the whole thing and this is 25 this is probably not quite fifty percent but closer to fifty percent than the low option and then again so then they put their better cards you know just like your Pokemon buyers and your Yu-Gi-Oh buyers they get these albums uh cardfolios they got a lot of different names for them this is zipfolio from Ultimate guard this is a 45 option we're just below 50 on this zipper folder really nice 24 pocket what they call it they have an invention called xenoskin which is a really nice fabric it's uh probably a some type of nylon and then you have like a plastic cover this is from Iron Guard which is uh diamonds subsidiary company that you can buy through your comic distributor and we sell these at ten dollars so this only has 20 Pockets that says 24 Pockets they're all sewn in sleeves so you don't have that metal bar we recommend we really recommend these for your collectors that so you don't damage your cards but you have a lot of Supply options and like like we're talking about the regular cards you know 2 8 to 12 percent on the sealed your supplies which they're going to buy just about as much of are going to be in the near 50 percent profit margin sometimes you can get them on deal when they're closing them out because they're changing the model or they're changing something about it they're doing a closeout and you could make 60 to 75 percent if you're buying right you always got to be watching those Closeouts because these don't spoil right um they didn't they're not going to make some Innovation that are going to make these obsolete so if they're changing the model and they're dumping their old models pick them up get as many as you can that you can afford they'll sell over time and it'll keep you from having to buy a lot more there's also sleeves and there are a multitude of sleeves there's low end sleeves that start at about seven dollars a pack of hundred and we go all the way up to about 14 there are we only carry the ones up to about 14 there are ones out there that are ridiculous now we also have lots of dice they use the dice as counters we buy chesix but there are a lot of dice options out there when people aren't rolling them and they're using them as counters you know really you can pick up anybody's dice um chestix is not it's considered a supply but it's not quite uh 50 I don't even think it makes forty percent margin it's probably in the mid 30 range uh to 30 to 40 dollar uh 30 to 40 percent range but um yeah the dice is also a good game so this gives you fills up your store gives you a lot of other thing to sell and you can really build a big Community now when you have a community I don't think I've actually gone into this is that having people in your store is a shot at a sale right so when we have the magic people here and let's you know we used to get 60 people on a Friday night and it was insane back then after coveted and all and it's starting to come back but it's still a under 20 right so it's about 12 to 18 people come and hang out and play Magic but still not only is there an option a possibility of selling them a magic card there's an option there's a possibility to sell them a comic there is Magic Comics out there I don't have a lot of crossover into comics from my magic users my magic players magic users uh but they do also buy role-playing games which I also carry but every time you have somebody in the store you have a possibility of a sale if you're running events you're going to have people in your store and you're it's going to help to sell items so they do collect other things like pops is great for every kind of person so they have Pokemon they have Pokemon pops they have a lot of Television that like the magic Community might be interested and they also like a lot of those guys like anime and Batman and they don't want to read the comics but they will buy a pop uh there's also uh video games and pretty much everybody in the in our community in a comic book community in the toy community and in the magic community and Pokemon Community Love video games and they may not be buying the 350 video game but they're buying that five dollar and ten dollar so when I say that it's great just to go into magic and have a space that it's really magic is very profitable we do very well with it not everybody does it could just be a lost leader for you it brings the community into your store and it allows you to have a chance at selling them something else which you might have a higher margin in so this is our episode on Magic keep reading comics and whatever you do open a comic store
