It appears that WOTC will no longer have an MSRP for Magic products as per this recent announcement titled No More MSRP
I feel this is somewhat troublesome for the consumer (i.e. Everyone who actually plays the game) because we no longer have a metric to measure against to determine if what we're buying is a good deal or not. For example, my LGS sells standard boosters for about $100-$110-ish (tax muddles things a bit). A competing LGS charges $120-$130-ish. Without an MSRP, both stores are free to raise, and lower of course, prices. So the real question I have is, without any sort of metric, how can consumers ensure we get fair prices? Amazon? eBay?
But I digress, before formulating an opinion, I wanted to learn more about what the MSRP really means, specifically the history of how it came about. So the first Google hit brought me to a Wikipedia article about it. It had some information, notably the controversy around it but not enough to satisfy my curiosity. Further searches turn up very little other than automobile MSRP.
So there it is. Without an MSRP, my LGS may or may not adjust the prices of boxes and singles. By extension, this could influence singles but not in any way I predict without a reference price point.
How would this affect LGSes? Would this push more players to buy online?
My understanding, albeit limited, is that this won't change much domestically and has more to do with international prices as tariffs and things like Brexit are making it difficult for those stores overseas to match prices to the MSRP. More of an optics change than anything.
My thinking is that it's probably meant to mask a price increase. Currently, WOTC sells to distributors, who sell to game stores and other end-retailers, who sell to us. Many stores use the "double-double" technique - the distributor sells to the store for double what they pay WOTC, and then the store sells to use double what they pay to the distributor. If WOTC raises prices to the distributors but no longer has an MSRP, then distributors raise prices to game stores, and game stores can either raise prices or watch their profit margins shrink even further. If players complain, the stores say "Our costs are going up!" and WOTC says "Stores are free to charge whatever they want - we aren't telling them what to charge." The distributor never says a word and most players ignore that they exist.
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I think that this could go poorly, especially for people outside the US who need to adjust their currency. maybe I'm just more worried than I should be and am used to Canadians already paying more but I guess we'll see
Does seem worrisome. Now we wait and see what actually happens. Could be something bad, could be something good, could even be nothing of note at all changes.
Honestly, I'm a bit worried about new specialty products.
When a new non-standard set comes out, for example, it can be pretty hard to share in advance whether it will be a premium set a la Masters (AKA higher price point)... which creates an opening for either players or sellers to misjudge the expected price with preorders. In fact, the removal of MSRP's may keep sellers from offering preorders too far in advance (unless Wizards is making the prices of these products known to sellers when the MSRP is normally revealed... no real clue how that has worked).
Realistically, though, I expect that we'll have a few more threads popping up (here or elsewhere) where store owners (or even distributors) may leak the prices that they are paying to obtain specific products so that players will have a better idea of what to expect. While this information probably won't be the most reliable, a network of online price-checking and price-sharing will probably give (enfranchised) players a decent starting point. It'll just take a bit more work.
You will always have a "MSRP" in some form or another.
A product will have a much lower MSRP in this terms, as a "estimated value" number of the content.
For premium expensive product stores usually charge more than the WotC MSRP anyway, so its completely meaningless.
Almost all the preconstructed decks like Planeswalker Decks are worth way less than the MSRP they ask for.
----
If at all, the MSRP is more of problem for a store that has no idea what their product is supposed to be worth, so they just go with the MSRP and then wonder that nobody buys the product , and some expensive premium product gets sold out instantly.
Like for any product in the digital age, if you want to know what a product is worth, you have to accumulate prices of the product across the board and then simply buy from a source you want, cheapest or not.
If WotC wants to sell more and more product on their own, they make stores competitors instead of distributors (which they are working on to sell from a website of their own in big numbers, which makes them a serious threat to any stores that might simply not be able to match their prices and absolutely not undercut them).
So simply removing MSRP does absolutely nothing, as it was meaningless to begin with.
The MSRP of products has always been controversial. On their standard products MSRP was way over what anyone was willing to pay. A box's MRSP is $144 but I've never paid more than $90. While their specialty products have had low MSRPs that no one would ever be able to actually buy the product at, such as FTV being $35 but you could usually find it at $60+. Then when they try to raise MSRP to what the market demands such as with their Masters sets everyone complains again. Add in the fact that Wizards has actually been raising their price for years without raising MSRP, forcing stores or distributors to eat the cost and you can see that simply not stating their MSRP will probably have little to no effect.
The actual fear here is that by no longer mentioning prices publicly they could be shifty about charging different distributors different prices. The main fear currently is Amazon forcing through some kind of contract to buy significantly more product at significantly lower prices, which would allow them to undersell most other online sellers killing them.
While their specialty products have had low MSRPs that no one would ever be able to actually buy the product at, such as FTV being $35 but you could usually find it at $60+.
The MSRP on those kinds of products isn't really meant to be followed, though. Both Wizards and LGSes know that specialty releases like FTV are just meant as giveaways to stores, barring some of the really godawful FTV releases they've had.
The main fear currently is Amazon forcing through some kind of contract to buy significantly more product at significantly lower prices, which would allow them to undersell most other online sellers killing them.
It'd be funny if this was a result of Amazon's 2016 acquisition of Curse, LLC (the company that owns this site, among others) by way of its Twitch ownership. The fact that Curse was unceremoniously dumped on Wikia, Inc should tell you how that one wound up going, but the corporate process is always slow and that'd make for a hilarious delayed effect.
Or it could just be Amazon being the Walmart of the digital world (abuse the supply chain to keep costs low while pretending that you're doing good for consumers) and trying to set things up in a marketplace they probably don't understand very well. Either or.
If WotC wants to sell more and more product on their own, they make stores competitors instead of distributors (which they are working on to sell from a website of their own in big numbers, which makes them a serious threat to any stores that might simply not be able to match their prices and absolutely not undercut them).
So simply removing MSRP does absolutely nothing, as it was meaningless to begin with.
Yup...If they can sell direct-to-consumer they can set the price more competitively for example 89 USD plus shipping [maximizing profits by cutting out the middle/little guys]. However, on the rumored MtG HASBRO site, I'll be surprised if single boxes would be shipped or if you need to order a minimum 2 boxes or case just so there is no separate packaging costs incurred other than slapping on a label. That may be the sole reason why they keep the distributor model so people who just want to buy a single box, bundle, or decks can through their LGS.
The loss of MSRP is more of a problem with supplemental sets I think. For example if we never knew the MSRP for UMA, the market would have been all over the place initially before a consensus on the price was reached. Interestingly, the preorder price was about the same as other Master sets if you assume the box topper on average was worth $50. Now they are about 400 from the starting 280ish in December.
This will put pressure on the LGS to keep prices real low for sealed product if WotC is maintaining a "low" price point thus setting an arbitrary MSRP which can change depending on success of a product. What would be intriguing is if WotC would raise Standard box prices while in rotation because of chase/lottery cards or if it will remain static and subtly influence secondary market values to be lower while it's still being printed? I think players have been quite clear that competitive Standard can get quite expensive. Either way, WotC would potentially make more money because typical online buyers may prefer to get factory direct boxes because of a discount or something. I know I would buy from them if the box was $5 less than my preferred online retailer.
This is catastrophic for latin america. The only reason stores don't hike prices is the local consumer protection authorities take MSRP seriously. No MSPR means we're looking at $200 booster boxes and $60 Commander decks because there's absolutely no competition from big box or franchise stores and importing is off the table because WotC prohibits american stores selling sealed product to LatAm and Amazon shipments float around the $30-40 mark.
I'm wondering what will places like Target and Walmart do.
Raise prices.
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Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
couple of things people aren't including in their thought process when they panic about this announcement and assume the worst:
1) production costs, intrinsic value, MSRP and secondary market
WotC doesn't (in its own words) 'acknowledge' the secondary market. This poses a problem, because by setting an MSRP for all their products, they are inherently acknowledging that one pack of 15 cards is worth more than another on the secondary market, despite them having the same inherent value (cards are cards. There's literally no difference between a Future Sight 'goyf and a force of savagery in terms of rarity or supply, so the difference in perceived market value comes down to whether or not people play with the card and want to purchase it AKA the secondary market. Thus the issue).
This is more acute when talking about reprints, where WotC has taken the line of 'desirable reprints' being a valuable commodity, with higher MSRPs despite, again, there being no significant difference between a regular booster product and something like a Masters set (the foil being literally the only factor accounting for the much higher MSRP, outside of the secondary market. Not good!).
leading me to 2) reprints
we see that valuable reprints have been a dissonant, problematic part of WotC's use of MSRP on their products. They have been bound into a cycle of half-recognising the secondary market by making their liliana-goyf-chalice-blood moon-mana crypt sets more expensive for pretty grey-area reasons (and potentially opens them up to some sort of legal issue?) By removing MSRP they are suddenly liberated from this issue, meaning more and regular reprints for older sets could be something practical and even likely, instead of a pipe-dream.
This is a great change, in this regard. They've gone on record in the last six months several times indicating clearly that more frequent & better reprints is something they are looking hard at, and will be coming into play this year.
and 3) gambling laws
This isn't a problem in my country, but in some US states WotC has come up against issues here, with inflexible gambling legislation that doesn't really account for games like MTG. When your pricing structure arbitrarily denotes some cards as being more expensive than others, I've seen people mention that this starts to get tricky in the eyes of some states in terms of 'lottery'-like products and gambling. I'm not going to claim which parts of the law are problematic, but i've heard this idea expressed many times over the years and with enough consistency that i'm inclined to believe it to be the case.
4) global markets
their explanation was brief and a little flat, but regardless of whether you think this is a tinfoil underhanded way to screw people over, WotC is correct. MSRP doesn't work globally and is genuinely a problematic practice for an international property like MTG. It makes a lot of sense for them to back away from this practice, for this reason alone, but the above reasons are also tangentially decent reasons for doing so.
and really (not anyone here specifically but I keep seeing this), the "WotC is trying to hurt the players" rhetoric just needs to go away, because it's childish conspiratorial nonsense. They make products they love, for people that love them. Their care and enthusiasm is clear from the products they produce, and it's unfair and idiotic to assume mistakes and misjudged policies are some clandestine 'hurt the players' sort of deal. Is WotC perfect? no, their communication lately has sucked. Do they hate us and want to kill the game? please....
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"We believe the elimination of MSRP will simply help us communicate better to our players and the places where those players shop."
Not sure what WOTC is thinking but it isn't a desire to make things easier for us to understand. Less information rarely is a good thing, like driving with no depth perception.
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"We believe the elimination of MSRP will simply help us communicate better to our players and the places where those players shop."
Not sure what WOTC is thinking but it isn't a desire to make things easier for us to understand. Less information rarely is a good thing, like driving with no depth perception.
if the US and parts of Europe were the only places in the whole world, sure.
but there's other places.
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This isn't a problem in my country, but in some US states WotC has come up against issues here, with inflexible gambling legislation that doesn't really account for games like MTG.
Hot take: Magic cards shouldn't be excluded from gambling legislation. Drop some money, get a pack whose contents can have wildly varying values with some extremely expensive "jackpot" cards. Sounds like gambling to me, especially because unlike pure collectibles such as trading cards, Magic cards' monetary value tends to correlate strongly with in-game advantage.
After thinking about this for a while, I think this all has to do with the deals that WotC seems to be making with Amazon, Target and WalMart. They removed the ability for local game stores to buy directly from WotC but, at the same time, signed deals to sell directly to Amazon. The elimination of MSRP allows WotC to sell product to different companies for different prices (or at least more cover to do so), and gives retailers/distributors the freedom to charge whatever they want for the product. This also aligns with Amazon's big push to eliminate the "list price" from their site and instead just offer the price that Amazon is selling the item for.
Having said that, I doubt the prices of packs or boosters for normal sets will change for US customers. The interesting bit will be to see what retailers do with Masters sets, Commander Decks and other niche/premium products. They will have the freedom to charge what they want - so that could mean higher or lower prices.
This will definitely help with market penetration in foreign markets, so it will help grow the game in places outside of the US/Canada/Europe.
and 3) gambling laws
This isn't a problem in my country, but in some US states WotC has come up against issues here, with inflexible gambling legislation that doesn't really account for games like MTG. When your pricing structure arbitrarily denotes some cards as being more expensive than others, I've seen people mention that this starts to get tricky in the eyes of some states in terms of 'lottery'-like products and gambling. I'm not going to claim which parts of the law are problematic, but i've heard this idea expressed many times over the years and with enough consistency that i'm inclined to believe it to be the case.
Even without MSRP, WotC is still selling Masters set booster boxes to Amazon/Target/WalMart/Distributors for more than they would for a normal set. So they do not really have any cover from gambling laws. Merely that they have less control over what the end point consumer pays for the product.
Take away MSRP from car sales stickers and see what happens.
Anyone expecting prices to go down has another thing coming. At best, MSRP memory will keep prices near the current mark. Expect prices to climb.
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Playing since 1994: Currently MAGS (HomeBrew),Standard & Pauper (Pioneer and Modern are degenerate trash formats)
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
"We believe the elimination of MSRP will simply help us communicate better to our players and the places where those players shop."
Not sure what WOTC is thinking but it isn't a desire to make things easier for us to understand. Less information rarely is a good thing, like driving with no depth perception.
if the US and parts of Europe were the only places in the whole world, sure.
but there's other places.
Tell me, where did I say anything about the US or EU? No where? Why yes, that is correct. Because it affects all consumers regardless of geographic location.
Removing the MSRP might have some short term benefits as you have mentioned, but I doubt it is for us the consumer. Most actions taken by a company are for the company and the stock holders, even if it hurts the consumer. And taking the MSRP away hurts all consumers because it leaves us more open to price gouging and scalpers.
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Never forget whose grace and favor led to your success and always give your thanks, otherwise you might be doomed to loose it.
Exactly. The issue here isn't retailers selling below MSRP when the problem is retailers now being able to sell above what used to be the MSRP since there's no longer any retailer suggestions for price control. For some people, a Local Game Store is their only source of Magic products where this situation screws them over with prices they can't afford.
I doubt this will have any bearing on the Singles Market as much as it does with Sealed Product where the MSRP actually does matter. How much of an impact does MSRP really have on Magic products distributed worldwide? Was it really that much of an issue for foreign countries to distribute these Magic products with a set MSRP when it was never really a problem in the first place?
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
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I feel this is somewhat troublesome for the consumer (i.e. Everyone who actually plays the game) because we no longer have a metric to measure against to determine if what we're buying is a good deal or not. For example, my LGS sells standard boosters for about $100-$110-ish (tax muddles things a bit). A competing LGS charges $120-$130-ish. Without an MSRP, both stores are free to raise, and lower of course, prices. So the real question I have is, without any sort of metric, how can consumers ensure we get fair prices? Amazon? eBay?
But I digress, before formulating an opinion, I wanted to learn more about what the MSRP really means, specifically the history of how it came about. So the first Google hit brought me to a Wikipedia article about it. It had some information, notably the controversy around it but not enough to satisfy my curiosity. Further searches turn up very little other than automobile MSRP.
So there it is. Without an MSRP, my LGS may or may not adjust the prices of boxes and singles. By extension, this could influence singles but not in any way I predict without a reference price point.
How would this affect LGSes? Would this push more players to buy online?
What say you?
Art is life itself.
I'm wondering what will places like Target and Walmart do.
They give bad msrb on products and you guys are worried?
When a new non-standard set comes out, for example, it can be pretty hard to share in advance whether it will be a premium set a la Masters (AKA higher price point)... which creates an opening for either players or sellers to misjudge the expected price with preorders. In fact, the removal of MSRP's may keep sellers from offering preorders too far in advance (unless Wizards is making the prices of these products known to sellers when the MSRP is normally revealed... no real clue how that has worked).
Realistically, though, I expect that we'll have a few more threads popping up (here or elsewhere) where store owners (or even distributors) may leak the prices that they are paying to obtain specific products so that players will have a better idea of what to expect. While this information probably won't be the most reliable, a network of online price-checking and price-sharing will probably give (enfranchised) players a decent starting point. It'll just take a bit more work.
A product will have a much lower MSRP in this terms, as a "estimated value" number of the content.
For premium expensive product stores usually charge more than the WotC MSRP anyway, so its completely meaningless.
Almost all the preconstructed decks like Planeswalker Decks are worth way less than the MSRP they ask for.
----
If at all, the MSRP is more of problem for a store that has no idea what their product is supposed to be worth, so they just go with the MSRP and then wonder that nobody buys the product , and some expensive premium product gets sold out instantly.
Like for any product in the digital age, if you want to know what a product is worth, you have to accumulate prices of the product across the board and then simply buy from a source you want, cheapest or not.
If WotC wants to sell more and more product on their own, they make stores competitors instead of distributors (which they are working on to sell from a website of their own in big numbers, which makes them a serious threat to any stores that might simply not be able to match their prices and absolutely not undercut them).
So simply removing MSRP does absolutely nothing, as it was meaningless to begin with.
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The actual fear here is that by no longer mentioning prices publicly they could be shifty about charging different distributors different prices. The main fear currently is Amazon forcing through some kind of contract to buy significantly more product at significantly lower prices, which would allow them to undersell most other online sellers killing them.
The MSRP on those kinds of products isn't really meant to be followed, though. Both Wizards and LGSes know that specialty releases like FTV are just meant as giveaways to stores, barring some of the really godawful FTV releases they've had.
It'd be funny if this was a result of Amazon's 2016 acquisition of Curse, LLC (the company that owns this site, among others) by way of its Twitch ownership. The fact that Curse was unceremoniously dumped on Wikia, Inc should tell you how that one wound up going, but the corporate process is always slow and that'd make for a hilarious delayed effect.
Or it could just be Amazon being the Walmart of the digital world (abuse the supply chain to keep costs low while pretending that you're doing good for consumers) and trying to set things up in a marketplace they probably don't understand very well. Either or.
Yup...If they can sell direct-to-consumer they can set the price more competitively for example 89 USD plus shipping [maximizing profits by cutting out the middle/little guys]. However, on the rumored MtG HASBRO site, I'll be surprised if single boxes would be shipped or if you need to order a minimum 2 boxes or case just so there is no separate packaging costs incurred other than slapping on a label. That may be the sole reason why they keep the distributor model so people who just want to buy a single box, bundle, or decks can through their LGS.
The loss of MSRP is more of a problem with supplemental sets I think. For example if we never knew the MSRP for UMA, the market would have been all over the place initially before a consensus on the price was reached. Interestingly, the preorder price was about the same as other Master sets if you assume the box topper on average was worth $50. Now they are about 400 from the starting 280ish in December.
This will put pressure on the LGS to keep prices real low for sealed product if WotC is maintaining a "low" price point thus setting an arbitrary MSRP which can change depending on success of a product. What would be intriguing is if WotC would raise Standard box prices while in rotation because of chase/lottery cards or if it will remain static and subtly influence secondary market values to be lower while it's still being printed? I think players have been quite clear that competitive Standard can get quite expensive. Either way, WotC would potentially make more money because typical online buyers may prefer to get factory direct boxes because of a discount or something. I know I would buy from them if the box was $5 less than my preferred online retailer.
Raise prices.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
1) production costs, intrinsic value, MSRP and secondary market
WotC doesn't (in its own words) 'acknowledge' the secondary market. This poses a problem, because by setting an MSRP for all their products, they are inherently acknowledging that one pack of 15 cards is worth more than another on the secondary market, despite them having the same inherent value (cards are cards. There's literally no difference between a Future Sight 'goyf and a force of savagery in terms of rarity or supply, so the difference in perceived market value comes down to whether or not people play with the card and want to purchase it AKA the secondary market. Thus the issue).
This is more acute when talking about reprints, where WotC has taken the line of 'desirable reprints' being a valuable commodity, with higher MSRPs despite, again, there being no significant difference between a regular booster product and something like a Masters set (the foil being literally the only factor accounting for the much higher MSRP, outside of the secondary market. Not good!).
leading me to 2) reprints
we see that valuable reprints have been a dissonant, problematic part of WotC's use of MSRP on their products. They have been bound into a cycle of half-recognising the secondary market by making their liliana-goyf-chalice-blood moon-mana crypt sets more expensive for pretty grey-area reasons (and potentially opens them up to some sort of legal issue?) By removing MSRP they are suddenly liberated from this issue, meaning more and regular reprints for older sets could be something practical and even likely, instead of a pipe-dream.
This is a great change, in this regard. They've gone on record in the last six months several times indicating clearly that more frequent & better reprints is something they are looking hard at, and will be coming into play this year.
and 3) gambling laws
This isn't a problem in my country, but in some US states WotC has come up against issues here, with inflexible gambling legislation that doesn't really account for games like MTG. When your pricing structure arbitrarily denotes some cards as being more expensive than others, I've seen people mention that this starts to get tricky in the eyes of some states in terms of 'lottery'-like products and gambling. I'm not going to claim which parts of the law are problematic, but i've heard this idea expressed many times over the years and with enough consistency that i'm inclined to believe it to be the case.
4) global markets
their explanation was brief and a little flat, but regardless of whether you think this is a tinfoil underhanded way to screw people over, WotC is correct. MSRP doesn't work globally and is genuinely a problematic practice for an international property like MTG. It makes a lot of sense for them to back away from this practice, for this reason alone, but the above reasons are also tangentially decent reasons for doing so.
and really (not anyone here specifically but I keep seeing this), the "WotC is trying to hurt the players" rhetoric just needs to go away, because it's childish conspiratorial nonsense. They make products they love, for people that love them. Their care and enthusiasm is clear from the products they produce, and it's unfair and idiotic to assume mistakes and misjudged policies are some clandestine 'hurt the players' sort of deal. Is WotC perfect? no, their communication lately has sucked. Do they hate us and want to kill the game? please....
Not sure what WOTC is thinking but it isn't a desire to make things easier for us to understand. Less information rarely is a good thing, like driving with no depth perception.
if the US and parts of Europe were the only places in the whole world, sure.
but there's other places.
Hot take: Magic cards shouldn't be excluded from gambling legislation. Drop some money, get a pack whose contents can have wildly varying values with some extremely expensive "jackpot" cards. Sounds like gambling to me, especially because unlike pure collectibles such as trading cards, Magic cards' monetary value tends to correlate strongly with in-game advantage.
Having said that, I doubt the prices of packs or boosters for normal sets will change for US customers. The interesting bit will be to see what retailers do with Masters sets, Commander Decks and other niche/premium products. They will have the freedom to charge what they want - so that could mean higher or lower prices.
This will definitely help with market penetration in foreign markets, so it will help grow the game in places outside of the US/Canada/Europe.
Even without MSRP, WotC is still selling Masters set booster boxes to Amazon/Target/WalMart/Distributors for more than they would for a normal set. So they do not really have any cover from gambling laws. Merely that they have less control over what the end point consumer pays for the product.
Anyone expecting prices to go down has another thing coming. At best, MSRP memory will keep prices near the current mark. Expect prices to climb.
STOP using "dude/bro" as a pejorative or insult. Grow up.
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Benjamin Franklin: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Martin Luther King Jr.: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Tell me, where did I say anything about the US or EU? No where? Why yes, that is correct. Because it affects all consumers regardless of geographic location.
Removing the MSRP might have some short term benefits as you have mentioned, but I doubt it is for us the consumer. Most actions taken by a company are for the company and the stock holders, even if it hurts the consumer. And taking the MSRP away hurts all consumers because it leaves us more open to price gouging and scalpers.
I doubt this will have any bearing on the Singles Market as much as it does with Sealed Product where the MSRP actually does matter. How much of an impact does MSRP really have on Magic products distributed worldwide? Was it really that much of an issue for foreign countries to distribute these Magic products with a set MSRP when it was never really a problem in the first place?
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta