What Magic Boosters Taught Me About My Own Bad Math

I track cost per unit for a living, that’s a real, if unglamorous, chunk of what inventory work actually means, so you’d think I’d have caught onto the Magic booster problem faster than I did.

For a couple years there I was buying boosters pretty regularly, a pack here, a pack there, never in one big obvious binge, which I think is exactly why it took me so long to notice the total. That’s the trick of it, the individual purchase always looks small and defensible in the moment, four dollars, five dollars, whatever, and it’s only once you stop and actually add up a couple years of those small defensible purchases that the number stops looking small at all. I finally did that math on a slow Sunday, pulled up an old spreadsheet I use for tracking my collecting spend generally, and went back through as many receipts as I could reconstruct. The number was bad. Genuinely embarrassing, worse than I’d guessed even accounting for the fact that I knew it’d be bad.

What actually got me was thinking about it the way I think about product at the warehouse. If a shipment came in and I was tracking that much value tied up in inventory that mostly just sat there, unopened, unused, most of it never even making it into a deck I actually played, I’d flag that as a serious problem, not a hobby. Boosters are designed so you never really know what you’re getting for your money until after you’ve already paid it, which is a business model I understand professionally and apparently still fell for personally, which is its own kind of embarrassing.

The actual break happened almost by accident. A friend introduced me to Summoner Wars around the same time I was doing that math, a game where you buy a faction once and that’s it, the whole deck is fixed, no chase rares, no randomized packs, just a complete thing you own outright the moment you pay for it. Something about having both experiences close together, the bad booster math on one hand and a fixed-price complete product on the other, made the contrast impossible to ignore. I haven’t bought a booster pack since, not out of some dramatic willpower moment, just because once you’ve actually seen the number written down it’s hard to unsee it.

I still think collectible card games can be genuinely well designed, I’m not trying to talk anyone out of the format entirely. I just needed to catch myself doing with my own money exactly the kind of untracked, poorly-costed accumulation I’d flag in a heartbeat if I saw it happening on a shelf at work. Funny how much easier it is to see a problem in someone else’s inventory than in your own closet.