Return to Ravnica is being spoiled (so cook it before the expiration date! Rim shot!), and it’s looking fantastic. I mean, I’m supposed to be objective and journalistic and all that sort of thing, but I’m not. I want to get as much of this set as is possible, and that’s going to be true for the rest of the block as well. Multicolored sets normally have a ton of casual value down the road and therefore become pretty hard to find after a couple years; picking up stuff now is much better than later on that front.

But with the high demand for this set, there’s a worry that the price of boxes, packs, and singles will skyrocket. Since I started writing this article, boxes have gone up some at major sites. That’s worrisome if it’s a part of a broader thing—how do I acquire the product if it’s more expensive than ever? Thankfully, there’s no indication it’s anything other than supply and demand.

Most of my work as a lawyer has been in antitrust law, particularly class actions on behalf of indirect purchasers (i.e. you, the individual consumer. Direct purchasers are Wal-Mart or your local game store). I’ve been reading years’ worth of business documents over several companies to gather evidence that corporations conspired to fix prices. While I’m not supposed to divulge specific details about anything I’ve looked at, suffice it to say that I know what a price-fixing conspiracy looks like on the ground floor and what ingredients you need to make one. (And no, marjoram isn’t one of them. For once, you don’t need a spice rack to understand my column.)

Although Magic has some potential for some stores to try to fix prices, it can’t sustain it enough to pull it off. My intent with this article is partially to give you some of the warning signs for if anything starts seeming funky, but it’s mostly to give you the confidence to buy whatever you want without becoming suspicious that CoolStuffInc or anywhere else is giving you a raw deal. Don’t believe rumors, and don’t trust the complaints; Magic has a healthy market, and you should buy from it. Here’s why.

What Makes a Good Price-Fixing Conspiracy

To say there’s a secret conspiracy afoot implies a lot of high-level activity. Having read about those activities full-time, here’s what could turn those rumors into facts.

A fungible good – That just means the product is interchangeable and reproducible—non-unique. Before you open a booster pack, it’s just a collection of ten commons, three uncommons, a basic land, and a rare or mythic. There’s no reason to pick the booster on the left of the display instead of the one on the right. For our purposes, a booster is fungible.

Copies of a single card are also fungible. If you preorder a play set of Dreadbores (a good idea, by the way) but CoolStuffInc runs out of them for all their preorders, they could fill your order by buying those Dreadbores elsewhere—maybe from StarCityGames, maybe from a Florida game store, or maybe a pro they happen to know who’s opened several boxes and doesn’t want Dreadbores. The point is that each Dreadbore is interchangeable; you can’t ascertain by looking at or playing with them who opened them or how many miles are on them before they were shipped to you.

Fungibility is crucial to conspiracies for two reasons. First, order filling gives companies a legitimate reason to contact each other. CoolStuffInc and StarCityGames are in competition, but if they need to fill each other’s orders, that’s perfectly acceptable by itself. But if companies want to conspire, the reason to contact can become a front, an excuse to contact. It means they know each other’s prices very well and can disguise, “Hey! We agreed that Dreadbore is this price,” as, “Hey! Here are those Dreadbores you ordered. Wink.”

Second, fungibility makes price your primary consideration when you buy the thing. CoolStuffInc has a loyalty program and focuses on excellent customer service. From a business angle, that’s in part because it can’t sell to you based on the lines, “We have more unique Dreadbores!” or, “Our Dreadbores kill planeswalkers deader!” Those are the signs that Dreadbores are interchangeable and that you’re basing your decisions on price more than anything else. Fungibility isn’t bad or good; it just is. But it can give rise to price fixing with other considerations. And they are . . . 

A way to get together and fix prices – In the stuff I worked on, this was sometimes meetings at each other’s businesses that they’d say were for other reasons. A lot of the time, it’s meetings in each other’s hotel rooms at trade shows. What you’d be looking for in Magic is if the decision makers came together after GenCon or PAX for an evil dinner replete with cackling. That or an e-mail chain or meeting notes, but the cackling evil dinner’s way more interesting. (Now, this might have marjoram.)

Smoke and mirrors as to why the price went up – This mostly applies if the first step in the distribution chain—Wizards to whomever—has a contract that says prices won’t be raised in a given time frame without an external factor forcing it. In conspiracies, the manufacturer will send out letters saying the cost of their materials increased, so they had to raise prices (this comes with a fake apology as well). If stores were conspiring together, you’d start hearing moaning from all of them about the increased cost of shipping or electricity or marjoram or whatever. Sometimes it’s true, but sometimes it’s just a front for conspiracies.

So, to put this in a step-by-step guide to fixing prices:

• Have a fungible good for which price is what the buyer usually buys on.
• Have only a few companies control the entire market (or close to it).
• Give those companies an easy way to communicate with each other, especially if there’s an otherwise innocent way to start talking, like a convention or a Grand Prix.
• Get them all to agree to raise prices at the same time.
• Get all the companies to issue phony but plausible-sounding reasons for the price increase to bamboozle the public.

If running a price-fixing conspiracy is like running a deck, it’s closer to a seven-card casual combo than, say, Swans of Bryn Argoll with Seismic Assault. There are a lot of moving parts and only a few circumstances in which they can work.

Why Magic Can’t Sustain a Price-Fixing Conspiracy

Looking at how Magic is bought and sold, there are many safeguards against the powers that be spanking your wallet. Even if you don’t like prices rising due to supply and demand, you can at least know that’s the cause. Here are the major defenses:

Wizards doesn't sell singles – You probably never thought about how this benefits you—I didn’t until writing this—but it does. Reason? It splits the Magic market up. And the more that market is segmented, the harder it is to coordinate it.

It also means you’re an indirect purchaser of boxes and packs but are closer to a direct purchaser on singles. If CoolStuffInc opens up boxes to sell you singles, you’re not buying from Wizards at that point. So if you order, for example, a booster box of Return to Ravnica and preorder some shock lands at the same time, you’re at a different spot in the distribution chain for each. You’re sort of like two people at once—which makes it much, much harder to come up with fake reasons for price increases.

Many different types of stores sell Magic – Major online retailers steer a lot of business to themselves by having developed websites that generate hype, buzz, and so on. This article is on one of those sites. And while I’ve never heard from anyone who operates the business—my interactions are entirely with the editors—GatheringMagic.com steers prospective business to CoolStuffInc because that’s a huge part of its raison d'etre.

But the fact that sites like this one generate the lion’s share of Magic talk doesn’t mean that they control the market similarly. Wal-Mart and Target have no interaction with StarCityGames or CoolStuffInc, but it’s obvious they move a ton of Magic product. Local stores are often individually owned, but it’s obvious that they collectively move a ton of product as well. If you’re talking about the singles market, you take out the mass retailers but you add eBay. Any way you slice it, there’s no one section of the market that could dictate its actions. If online retailers make Return to Ravnica fat packs $50 while Wal-Mart still sells them for $40, Wal-Mart wins. A diverse market is natural and automatic protection against prices growing out of control. Wal-Mart, CoolStuffInc, and that hobby shop on the corner aren’t going to come together to talk about anything, never mind raising prices.

Wizards is too visible with its indirect purchasers – You want to know one reason high gas prices are really, really frustrating? Because you don’t have anyone in particular to complain to. Is it the gas station’s fault? Your government’s fault (wherever you’re reading this from and whatever that means)? OPEC’s fault? There are so many points you’re not involved in that complaints have more vitriol than efficacy.

Now, what would change if the next time you filled up your car, someone from OPEC asked you how you were enjoying that gas? And what if OPEC sent a ton of people out just to ask that question? That’s not going to happen for several reasons, and one of those is that their job becomes a lot harder if they become a complaint desk.

A ton of people who make Magic have public e-mail addresses. You can go to a Grand Prix and find a Wizards employee, and that person will hear your complaint out even if he or she can’t fix it. As I live about fifteen miles from the Wizards complex (it’s just past the Ikea store), I could be obstinate in the lobby or leave Post-It notes on employees’ cars if I really wanted to get a point across.

There are many clear ways to communicate with Wizards even though they aren’t actually selling anything to you. They make a product for you, but they don’t sell it to you. You’re not their customer. They could choose to ignore you. But they listen anyway. And listening to you on random things makes it harder to hide should they want to be shady. Wizards employees could be faking their accessibility and sending R&D members to major public events to cover up something massive, but it’s very unlikely.

When Wizards isn't announcing a price hike, it's incredibly difficult for stores to make up excuses – Nobody has to sell Magic at MSRP. But Wizards mentioning MSRP to the public (see, e.g., here) not only gives you a vague expectation of price, but also lets you compare prices across years to see if Wizards is changing things too much. More importantly, it’s part of a large data set tracking prices across Magic’s history. Sites already exist to let you compare card prices across several stores; if that doesn’t exist for packs and boxes, it wouldn’t be hard to put together. The market’s prices are out in the open and so easily trackable that a sudden questionable rise in prices would be caught on camera, so to speak.

And what explanations could there be? If the stores say Wizards prices went up, you know how to ask Wizards about that, and Wizards would have to corroborate for the story to work. If the stores say the problem is shipping costs, it’s relatively easy to compare fuel and postage prices to call them on it. There are few market-wide explanations available for a price hike, and the cost of materials—a frequent excuse in these types of conspiracies—is available only to Wizards and not to the stores. There isn’t a whole lot left for stores to claim as a front for a conspiracy.

Conclusion

The market for Magic can’t sustain a conspiracy. Even if a few stores came together, there are too many other places to find the product for it to matter. I know it’s frustrating when everybody is like you and wants to preorder all the cool stuff out of Return to Ravnica, and I know it’s frustrating when Supply // Demand (speaking of Ravnica block!) let some stores raise prices. I don’t like it myself. But from where I’m typing, it’s all very clearly the free market in action. Because there’s so much competition, prices of boxes and singles can go up only as far as the market allows.

Players and writers can drive hype enough to affect prices temporarily, but they’re not bigger than the effects of competition. I suppose that if hype drives prices up, those prices in turn drive hype about conspiracy and bad faith. But there’s no good factual link to say that card sellers could conspire against you. So don’t panic or worry or any of those other five-letter words. (On that principle, you shouldn’t write, bathe, or work with herbs, such as marjoram). Buy what you want when it makes sense to buy it. And since it’s a product as awesome as Return to Ravnica, you probably should buy a lot of it.

Those are my two cents. It would have been one cent, but the cost of brain matter has gone up, so I was forced to raise prices.