Magic: The Gathering – Duskmourn: House of Horror products took the top two slots on the TCGplayer Top 25 Sealed Products chart for September 2024 (see “September 2024“). This chart also reaffirmed some trends for the TCG market as 2024 begins to wrap up.
In general, the September chart shows an extension of the stability that has been happening the entirety of 2024 in the TCG market. Magic: The Gathering is the top dog for the ninth month in a row on the chart, with Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG, One Piece CG, Pokemon TCG, and Disney Lorcana nipping at its heels. Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG and One Piece CG are the big out-performers of the year, so far, with Pokemon TCG being sort of in the retailer “penalty box” in 2024 (see “More Top End TCG Jockeying“). Disney Lorcana is still finding its groove, now that the “new car smell” has started to fade from the product line post-first year of release.
Everything in the TCG world seems even-keeled at this point in 2024. The only real recent news that may have a significant impact on the general stability of the TCG market and future charts is the whole Commander Rules Committee drama that happened at the end of September (see “Commander Rules Committee Fires Itself“). The murmur on social media, from fans, retailers, and pillars of the Magic community, is that they are collectively concerned about WotC’s vision for the future of Commander/EDH after the in-house design team takes over run of the format.
The concern stems from the proposed bracketing of power levels of cards for Commander decks, which some early critics view as a sketchy concept even though it is in its infancy. Principal Designer Gavin Verhey and VP of Magic Design Aaron Forsythe introduced the concept on a special Twitch stream on October 1, 2024. The quick and dirty version of this concept is that WotC designers plan on ranking cards by power levels (thus far, levels one up to four), and thereby, ranking the power levels of decks by the cards in them. As an example, a Vampiric Tutor is apparently a power level four card, and by including it in a deck, the deck would also be a power level four deck, barring some inclusion of a deck theme that overrides that designation.
The primary criticism of the early proposal of power brackets is that it opens the door to confusion in Commander event play, as each bracket could contain a list of thousands of cards from 30 years of printing Magic, all of which players would have to know in order to construct their deck or check opponents’ decks to see if they are the right power level. This could make events tedious to run for both organizers and players as well as cause negative play experiences should players accidentally include the wrong power level card in their deck.
As far as how all this may impact the sales of Magic cards, Commander fans seem to already have some bad feelings left over from the CRC incident. Singles buyers have been mentioning an increase in Commander collections being offered to them over-the-counter from customers as a result of the bans as some have lost confidence in the format. WotC taking over the format and their preliminary proposal seems to somewhat exacerbate this negativity as a portion of Commander players don’t generally trust WotC (one of the reasons why Commander was a community-run format for so long), and it adds a level of uncertainty to the future of this very popular format.
Thus far, based on the September chart, sales have not been impacted, but many of the Duskmourn preorders happened prior to the CRC incident. Only time will tell.
Source: ICV2
