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 looks at the problems getting product for The Hobbit prerelease and mourns the passing of Paul Burdick/Michael Mirth.
Wizards of the Coast is still having supply chain problems with their Magic: The Gathering releases. For The Hobbit, the company got Bundles to stores on time for prerelease weekend (at least as far as I have heard), but is having problems shipping Play Boosters. One of our distributors got our store all of The Hobbit materials we ordered on time except for the prize support Play Booster boxes for the prerelease, while another did not receive its shipment of Play Boosters in time for the prerelease.
Distributors advised stores to use the Play Boosters received for prize support or if no Play Boosters had arrived, to give players IOUs to redeem for their winnings when the store received its shipment. Given the number of players showing up for prerelease events at larger stores, I can see this becoming quite a headache for the stores.
Not getting all of the product to WPN stores has been an ongoing problem for WotC for several releases. Why this has become a problem after years of on-time delivery of Magic products has never been explained by WotC. I do wonder if it is due to the competition from all of the trading card games hitting the shelves this year as well as Wizards competing against itself by ramping up the number of releases per year and the amount of product demanded by the market.
Be that as it may, our The Hobbit prereleases followed the pattern established by our previous Universes Beyond prereleases: great turnout on Friday for the first event then a drastic drop off for subsequent events over the weekend. Meanwhile, our in-universe events like Secrets of Strixhaven draw strong numbers for every tournament.
I was sorry to learn this weekend of the passing of Paul Burdick (aka Michael Mirth). I first met Paul back in the 1990s when he ran Spellbinder Games, and in later years at Gen Con and the GAMA Trade Show, where he served as the organization’s sales and exhibitions manager for one year (while developing the Michael Mirth persona as a professional magician, with over 500 performances at Hollywood’s Magic Castle), and professional speaker, with several presentations at the GAMA Trade Show over the years.
The last time I saw him in person was at one of the GAMA events in Las Vegas, when he sat down and talked shop and promotion with a small group of retailers for over an hour. Although he kept in touch with a number of people in the industry, he closed Spellbinders years ago, save for a store on Amazon, to focus on his magic career though he still found time to appear at various industry events, even donning the garb of the Sorcerer Supreme on occasion. He had been in poor health for the last few years, diagnosed with cancer back in 2019, but continued to perform, appearing at various events and receiving positive reviews as recently as December of 2025. He finally lost the battle with cancer this past weekend. Godspeed, Paul/Michael, the world is a better place because you were in it.
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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
